Robbie's Wife by Russell Hill

Author:Russell Hill [Hill, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857687654
Publisher: Random House Inc Clients
Published: 2011-05-10T12:00:00+00:00

27.

I spent that night in the same B&B. It was another restless night and the next morning Mrs. Salt, the proprietor, asked me, as she set the plate of fried eggs and bacon in front of me, “Are you all right, love? You look peaked.” She pronounced it “peek-ed,” the same way my aunt pronounced it when I was a child.

I packed my bag and sat in the car again, looking at the map, but I didn’t drive off to London. I went back to the cafe where Maggie and I had lunch and I had a cup of tea and a biscuit. I was becoming English, I thought, and remembered Maggie’s words the first afternoon I had come down into her kitchen about tea and the English.

The counter man, when he re-filled my cup, commented on the weather. “Sheeting down rain, isn’t it? Never seen so much rain this time of year. Must be those rockets they send up into space. Disturbs the sky, don’t you know?”

I nodded, went back to my table at the window. A man opened his car door, ducked out into the rain, locking his car, coming toward the cafe with his head down only to veer off at the last second. Pigeons huddled on the ledge of the building opposite and a neon sign reflected dully on the wet asphalt.

A blind woman appeared at the right of the window holding on to a brown seeing eye dog. The dog was wet and patient and the woman was wrapped in a plastic raincoat with a hood that came halfway across her face.

At the edge of the window on the stone steps just out of the rain sat a seedy looking man, unshaven, wearing a greasy jacket. He was smoking a cigarette and he watched the blind woman’s dog pass disinterestedly. The dog paid no attention to him.

She could be half a world away, I thought. It was an abstract idea. Distance doesn’t matter when someone is out of sight. I remembered reading someplace that the Navajo had no future tense in their language. Or maybe it was some other people. It didn’t matter. They couldn’t say something like I’ll see you tomorrow or There’s a woman over that hill and if we go over the ridge we will see her. Everything for them was either in the present or the past. Either it was happening at that moment or it had happened. Far-off places were unthinkable. How much easier that would be, I thought.

I realized I had not moved in a long time. It had been a day of long empty pauses. The morning had slipped past me and I could not remember any of it. I sipped my tea. It was lukewarm and bitter.

I remembered climbing the stone steps to a crumbling ruin one summer in Italy. It seemed like it had happened in another life. It had been a hot day and it was cool next to the stone wall. The light off the sea was blinding and Corsica was only a dim blot in the distance.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.