The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser

Author:Michelle de Kretser [KRETSER, MICHELLE DE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780316028189
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2007-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

The postcard showed the Promenade des Anglais. Bellissima, We are dying of envy. Here it is foul, the mistral all day and no one simpatico. Next week we sail for New York. Carlo kisses your ravishing hands, and so do I. Your loving Giulia. Maud propped it against the Bakelite salt cellar while lunching on curried ash plantain. She had it by heart before she realized it carried no forwarding address.

Christmas brought a little loaf of envelopes, bland sentiments, cautious expressions of goodwill, a sheaf of impenetrable free verse from the poet. Sir Alban’s card, robins and a wreath of holly, bore a handwritten addendum to its Compliments of the Season: Took in a rather delightful Sapphic show yesterday. One of the girls long and brown, like you. Poor old Mulligatawny had to be put down in August. P.S. Charlotte died last spring. The stockbroker sent two blunt lines asking her not to write. It causes awkwardness at home.

These communiqués barely registered with Maud. By then she was covering forty pages a day, epistles she rolled up and slipped into mildewing shoes or tucked behind a cushion and forgot. Her style grew daily wilder, more fabulous. Even a mildly attentive reader would have diagnosed a dislocation. In a country where night arrived with the haste of a curtain lowered on a flop, she insisted on twilight. While a monsoonal wind ripped a limb from the mango tree, she could write with no sense of incongruity of spice-laden breezes.

In the intervals between letters, she would rise from the dining table to drift in and out of rooms where no one had breathed for years. The absurd topography of the house had always eluded her. There was a step between two corridors that served no purpose except to make her stumble. She spent a morning in search of a room she remembered, a pleasant bay with a fern-filled alcove where Claudia had played the piano. Dust stirred and settled. Thwarted, Maud slammed the door on a mournful little cubicle at the end of a passage. Midstride she halted, retraced her steps. The Lindahl had stood there, under the window that memory had embellished with leaves and curved air.

Cockroaches, glossy as dates, fled from her slippers. She saw no one. Yet a presence walked with her. She stepped aside, to allow it space. It wished her no ill, but she felt the stir of its longing. What are ghosts but things we cannot bear to remember? Sometimes, on entering a room she was certain something had altered, a chair angled differently, a drawer pulled open. In the doorway of a shuttered room, one hand on the jamb, she knew that this scene had already occurred.

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.