The Long Room by Francesca Kay

Author:Francesca Kay [Francesca Kay]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780571322534
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2015-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Sunday

When he woke on Sunday morning to find that snow had already covered roofs and levelled roads and pavements, Stephen, foreseeing problems on the Great West Road, had again been in two minds about going to the Institute. But, looking out of his mother’s kitchen window at the little scrap of garden made beautiful by whiteness, untouched but for the tracery of a bird’s claw prints, he came to his decision. This is no time for drifting. You might dream of walking into that pure whiteness, lying down, drawing the coverlet of snow above your head and letting go, but you know you will not do it. Soon the prowling cats will come, and the hungry foxes, for the hunt goes on, and the unbold and the vacillators, they will be the losers. The empty page on which the dove has written now awaits the fox.

‘You must need your head examined,’ his mother said, when he told her what he was going to do. Coralie has an imprecise idea of her son’s occupation. Her impression is that he works on defence policies and strategies, which comes to much the same as responsibility for the nuclear deterrent. This being obviously a secret matter, she knows better than to ask for details. She was a FANY, don’t forget: there were things she heard during the war that she will go to her grave without revealing. Careless talk costs lives, as they used to say. And Stephen’s father – well, what he was doing in Berlin with the Engineers was so clandestine that he used to joke he’d have to kill her if she overheard him sleep-talk. He didn’t sleep-talk as a matter of fact. He didn’t even snore. A quiet sleeper, Spencer; he would lie there on his back beside her, like a fallen pine-log, his eyelids not quite shut and a tiny sliver of the whites still showing, as if he were a corpse. The Cold War. It didn’t get much colder than that December in Berlin.

She waved Stephen off at the front door. It was early; she was still bundled in her quilted dressing gown with the tea-stains down the front. In spite of the cold that instantly sucked out whatever warmth there was in the small house, she waited at the open door and watched until he turned the corner and was out of sight. This is her unvarying habit and every time he leaves her Stephen has the same thought: this might be the last time that I see her.

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