The Carousel by Rosamunde Pilcher

Author:Rosamunde Pilcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter 6

WE TALKED THAT EVENING, Phoebe and I, far into the night. We indulged in memories, recalling the days when Chips was alive. We went even further back, to Northumberland, to Windyedge, where Phoebe had spent her childhood, running wild and riding her shaggy pony along the margins of those cold and northern beaches. We spoke of my father, and the contentment he had found with his new wife, and she remembered expeditions when they were all children together, to Dunstanbrugh and Bambrugh, and midwinter meets, with the pink coats of the huntsmen bright as berries in the frosty air and the foxhounds streaming across the snow-streaked fields.

We talked about Paris, where she had been a student, and the little house in the Dordogne she and Chips had bought one affluent year and to which she still returned for annual painting trips.

We talked about Marcus Bernstein, my job, my little flat in Islington.

“Next time I come to London, I shall come and stay with you,” she promised.

“I haven’t got a spare room.”

“Then I shall sleep on the floor.”

She told me about the new Society of Arts that had just been formed in Porthkerris and of which she was a founding member. She described for me the house of an old and famous potter, who had returned to Porthkerris to spend his final years in the warren of narrow streets where he had been born eighty years before, the son of a fisherman.

We talked about Lewis Falcon.

But we did not speak of Daniel. As though we had made some secret agreement, neither Phoebe nor I mentioned his name.

* * *

Past midnight she went at last to bed. I followed her up the stairs to draw her curtains and turn down the quilt and help her off with her more awkward clothes. I took a hot-water bottle downstairs and filled it from the boiling kettle and finally left her, warm in her huge and downy bed, reading her book.

We said good night, but I did not go to bed. My mind was seething, as alert and restless as if I had pumped myself with some enormously stimulating drug. I could not face lying in the darkness, waiting for sleep that I knew would not come. So I returned to the kitchen and made a mug of coffee and took it back to the fireside. The flames had died to a bed of grey ash, so I threw on more logs and watched them kindle and flare, and then curled myself up into Chips’s old armchair. Its battered depths were comforting, and I thought about him and longed for his presence. I did not want him dead; I wanted him alive, here, in this room with me. We had always been very close, and now I needed him. I needed his counsel.

Like the very best sort of father. I thought of Chips, his pipe in his mouth, listening as the young Daniel told him about Annabelle Tolliver and the baby. Annabelle, with her dark hair and her cat face and her grey eyes and her secret smile.

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