The Eye of the Beholder by Margie Orford

Author:Margie Orford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

TWENTY

The sky had been a tender blue the afternoon Yves drove Cora to his cabin. The city soon fell away and then the last straggle of suburbs was behind them. As they drove north, Cora’s gaze expanded to meet the vast landscape through which the road they were on unrolled – a black ribbon of tar in the snow that stretched from horizon to horizon.

‘It has an echo of Eden to it – a landscape so big that you can see all the way to where the earth meets the sky and not see a building,’ said Cora. ‘I can breathe here.’

‘Could you live here?’ asked Yves.

‘I could,’ said Cora. She would, if he asked her. She would move. He had filled her world so completely that all she could imagine now was inhabiting his. ‘Shall I be DJ?’

‘As long as you’re happy to choose between country and western.’

Cora searched through the CDs scattered across the dashboard – amongst them Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton. She chose Patsy Cline. ‘Crazy’. Her grief-sized voice filled the car and they sang along with her. Crazy for loving you.

‘Tell me now,’ Cora interrupted the song. ‘This secret thing you have promised me for so long.’ She had considered so many things. Beads of worry that she had turned over this way, that way – a wife not actually divorced, an illness, another woman closer to home, cancer. All the normal things.

‘Wait till we go up into the woods. You’ll love it there.’ Yves had his hand on Cora’s knee, pushing up the skirt to find the strip of naked skin at the top of her stockings. It was not possible then for her to imagine that his promised confession, for which Yves had made her wait so that he could tell her in person, could be anything other than a delight – a dangerous one, perhaps – but still a delight. So she put all her suspicions aside and trusted him and watched the wilderness open up.

Yves turned off the highway and into the forest at dusk. The road narrowed to a track, until the trees were brushing their dark green fingers on the car. Yves took the bends fast. The headlights glanced off the trees and the snow gleamed. They turned a corner and there, through a gap in the trees, was the dark water of the lake. They had reached the end of the road.

Yves stopped and got out to open the gate. He drove up the steep track to the little house in the clearing in the woods. ‘Wait here,’ he said and disappeared around the house.

The cabin was crisp Snow White colours – a black roof, red clapboard, white window frames. Yves reappeared inside it a few minutes later and she watched him light tea candles and place them on the windowsills, each one a bead of light holding the falling night at bay. Cora was charmed. He came back to fetch her.

‘Welcome,’ he said as he ushered her inside.

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.