The Month of Borrowed Dreams by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

Author:Felicity Hayes-McCoy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2021-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

Brian sat on his living-room floor, thinking he wouldn’t miss this impersonal flat he’d chosen to live in simply because it was close to the council offices. Moving out was going to be easy, physically as well as emotionally. He’d come to Carrick with few possessions, and accumulated hardly any since he’d been here.

Looking round the bare room, with its desk, television, and large, expensive armchair, he realised that the bulk of what he owned amounted to marks on paper and canvas – stacked portfolios of drawings, photos and sketches, and ridiculous numbers of books, which were also piled up on the floor.

In the first few years in his boring council job he’d walked endlessly, photographing Finfarran’s beauty from every possible angle, until the walls of his rented rooms were lost under shots of majestic mountains and glorious sunsets. Eventually, when the last square of magnolia paint had disappeared under yet another study in scarlet and gold, he’d taken the photos down and lived surrounded by hundreds of pinholes, like constellations of tiny black stars. The shots of the mountains had appeared sterile, and it seemed to him that the scents and sounds central to the experience of a sunset had been lost in his efforts to stop it slipping away. So, telling himself that the exercise had been pointless, he’d thrust most of the photos into the bin.

Later he’d realised that what he’d really lost was shared experience. Life with Sandra, his wife, had been all about togetherness, so nothing had made sense without her presence, and no other human relationship could compensate for her absence when she’d died.

Confused, grieving, and resentful, he’d ignored offers of friendship from colleagues in the planning office, where he was overqualified for his job and most of the people he’d worked with had been younger than himself. Ironically, the age gap had added to his problem in ways that hadn’t occurred to him when he’d chosen to take the post. The last thing he’d wanted was to be reminded of what he’d lost, but in seeking to escape from painful memories, he’d surrounded himself with colleagues whose main focus was finding love, getting married, and having kids.

None of this had been clear to him until he’d met Hanna. Prickly, difficult, and resentful of what life had thrown at her, she’d somehow jerked him out of his own self-absorption. To begin with, he’d been moved by nothing more than empathy, but before long, to his amazement, he’d found himself deeply in love.

In one of his portfolios there was a charcoal drawing he’d made more than a year ago. Getting up, he fetched it and took it out onto the balcony. He’d sketched it from a photo he’d taken of Hanna on their first ramble on the mountain. Softening the little wrinkles round her wide-set eyes with his thumb, he’d drawn her straight, uncompromising eyebrows, unconsciously adding the crease that appeared between them whenever she was troubled. This wasn’t the open, laughing Hanna he now loved to spend time with.

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