The Red House

Начало книги

Cooling towers and sewage farms. Finstock, Charlbury, Ascott-under-Wychwood. Seventy miles per hour, the train unzips the fields. Two gun-grey lines beside the river’s meander. Flashes of sun on the hammered metal. Something of steam about it, even now. Hogwarts and Adlestrop. The night mail crossing the border. Cheyenne sweeping down from the ridge. Delta blues from the boxcar. Somewhere, those secret points that might just switch and send you curving into a world of uniformed porters and great-aunts and summers at the lake.

Angela leant against the cold window, hypnotised by the power lines as they sagged and were scooped up by the next gantry, over and over and over. Polytunnels like silver mattresses, indecipherable swirls of graffiti on a brick siding. She’d buried her mother six weeks ago. A bearded man in a suit with shiny elbows playing ‘Danny Boy’ on Northumbrian pipes. Everything out of kilter, the bandage on the vicar’s hand, that woman chasing her windblown hat between the headstones, the dog that belonged to no one. She thought her mother had left the world a long way back, the weekly visits mostly for Angela’s own benefit. Boiled mutton, Classic FM and a commode in flesh-coloured plastic. Her death should have been a relief. Then the first spade of earth hit the coffin, a bubble rose in her chest and she realised her mother had been…what? a cornerstone? a breakwater?

Читать дальше →