Beyond Black: A Novel by Hilary Mantel

Author:Hilary Mantel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780312426057
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2006-04-17T22:00:00+00:00

That summer, the birch trees were cut down and the last birds flew away. Their song was replaced by the roaring of road drills, the beeping of the earth movers backing up, the cursing of hod carriers and the cries of the wounded, and scrubland gave way to a gashed landscape of trenches and moats, of mud chutes and standing pools of yellow water; which within a year, in its turn, gave way to the violent emerald of new turf, the Sunday morning roar of mowers and strimmers, the tinkling of the ice-cream vans, the trundling of gas barbecues over paving and the stench of searing meat.

The flat in Wexham had sold to the first people who saw it. Alison wondered, will they sense something: Morris glugging inside the hot-water tank, or murmuring in the drains? But they seemed delighted, and offered the full asking price.

“It seems so unfair,” Colette said, “when our flat in Whitton wouldn’t sell. Not even when we dropped the price.”

She and Gavin had sacked Sidgewicks, tried another agent; still no takers. Eventually, they had agreed Gavin should stay there, and buy her out by installments. “We have hopes the arrangement will be persuasive to Mrs. Waynflete,” his solicitor had written, “as we understand she is now living with a partner.” Colette had scrawled over the letter, Not that sort of partner!!! It was just for her own satisfaction that she wrote it; it was no business of Gavin’s, she thought, what kind of partnership she was in now.

On the day they moved from Wexham, Morris was fuming and snarling in a corner. “How can I move,” he said, “when I have given out this as my address? How will Nick find me, how will my old mates know where to come?” When the men came to take the pine dresser away, he lay on top of it to make it heavy. He infiltrated Al’s mattress and infused his spirit sulks among the fibres, so that it bucked and rippled in the men’s hands, and they almost dropped it in alarm. When the men slammed the tailgate and vaulted into the driver’s cab, they found their whole windscreen had been spattered with something green, viscid, and dripping. “What kind of pigeons do you have around here?” they said. “Vultures?”

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