Chapters (40)
- Cover
- About the Author
- PENGUIN BOOKS
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- THE BEGINNING
She pulled other letters out at random. I didn’t want to leave … I’ve never felt like this before … I don’t care what other people think … Your smell’s on my clothes … She felt the girlish, trusting phrases enter her like soft explosions; sparks of memory illuminating her darkness. I can’t go through that again … Ah yes, a memory she’d pushed down deep and only now did it poke up through the layers of the past: in the flush of their love and Adrian, addled drunk, kissing someone else at a party, shoving her up against the fence at the end of the garden, his hand on her breast and her dress riding up to her thigh. She remembered the sensation of agony, a red-hot poker against her skin. After, he’d wept and said he was a drunken idiot, a gross fool, he didn’t deserve her. He’d never do it again; that’s what he’d said and she had believed him.
Irene picked up another letter. Only two weeks now. About to go away together, biking in Italy. She closed her eyes for a moment. She heard him laugh, or was that the stream, clear and clean and full of frank delight. She saw him turn his face towards her on the pillow, in that room overlooking the gorge, and tell her she was lovely. My lovely love. She said the words out loud.
The letters stopped when they started to live together, so they contained no bickery complaints about toenails in the shower, specks of toothpaste on the bathroom mirror, whose-turn-is-it, whose-fault-is-it, no-not-tonight, what’s-happened-to-you, what’s-happened-to-us, this-isn’t-what-I-expected. They were just about hope.
When she had finished with them, Irene felt stunned, as if she’d run a long distance uphill. She turned off the car light and stared out at the night sky – except now, she saw, there was grey on its eastern horizon. She eased herself out of the car and let the breeze that had sprung up stroke her face. She walked across the mossy verge onto the crackling floor of the wood and there, near the dark rushing water, she sat on a fallen trunk, her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. She listened to the wind sweeping in small waves through the branches overhead, as if the tide was turning, dark waters in the sky. The panic had all gone, and in its place was a weary kind of peace. Adrian had left her and now she had to let him go. Take him back and let him go. Her love.