Keeping the World Away by Margaret Forster

Author:Margaret Forster
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781446443477
Publisher: Random House

II

SHE CHOSE TO walk, though her paintings would have fitted into the basket on the front of her bicycle. It was a long way, all of three miles, but walking calmed her. She wanted to arrive relaxed and betray no signs of the agitation she felt. Because of course it was wicked, what she proposed to do, and most likely she wouldn’t be able to carry it off.

The pottery was at the top of a hill, up a track similar to their own leading from the road. Above it, to the west, loomed the tall ruined engine house of the Polgooth mine, which always made her shiver. She had to skirt the little town of St Austell to get to the pottery and the bag weighed heavier on the pavements than it seemed to on the grassy paths. But once she was clear of the town, she enjoyed the walk and took her time over it, sorting out in her head as she went along what she was going to say. Conrad Jenkinson was kind. If he suspected a lie, he would not accuse her outright. He would smile, and look at her searchingly, and she would have to be bold and hold his gaze. Alan thought Conrad (whom he had never actually met) liked her a little too much by the sound of it, and was, because of this ‘liking’ (said with sarcastic emphasis), a little too kind. But she had to believe he was wrong. Alan even suspected that Conrad had not sold her paintings at all but had bought them himself, to be ‘kind’ and make her grateful. She hated him when he suggested this, and said so, and then he had apologised and said he was just jealous.

The Jenkinsons, she knew, had been away. The last time she’d called, the girl who helped Mrs Jenkinson told her that they had gone to France and she didn’t know when they would be back. She was keeping an eye on the place for them. But that had been some weeks ago and Stella was sure they must have returned by now. As she approached the pottery, she wondered what on earth the Jenkinsons had gone to France for, and how they’d managed to go at all.

*

Conrad had not wanted to go to France but Ginny, his wife, longed to go and look at the house she’d suddenly inherited. She’d been there once, when she was five or six, she thought, and had only vague memories of the house being near a much bigger building, a château with a tower and a round turret on the top which convinced her that the Sleeping Beauty must be inside. She had no idea, though, of its precise location. Conrad got a map out and they eventually found it, on the northern coast of Brittany, some kilometres from Lamballe. Ginny wanted to go and look at it immediately and they talked, wild talk, of leaving Cornwall and going to live there permanently.

Getting

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