Her Living Image by Jane Rogers

Author:Jane Rogers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857869494
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2012-09-01T08:52:08+00:00

Chapter 14

When Alan and Carolyn had been married for four years, Alan’s grandmother (Lucy’s mother) died, leaving him and Pamela £20,000 each. Everyone was surprised. Lucy and her mother had fallen out years before, and the children hardly knew her. She had lived alone, with a housekeeper and gardener, ever since her husband died of a heart attack thirty years before. To Lucy, her only child, she left nothing.

Coinciding as it did with Alan’s trainee appointment to the firm of Lark and Clarkson, Architects, back in the city where he was born, the money marked the beginning of a new era in Alan and Carolyn’s married life. Suddenly they zoomed up the social scale. Or rather, Alan bobbed back, to float again at that level from which (in his family’s eyes at least) Carolyn had dragged him down. They bought a house in the wealthy area to the south of the city some twenty miles away from their parents. It was “respectable semi-detached Victorian gothic”, according to Alan. A palace, Carolyn told herself, a dream house. The roof sloped steeply, and the front of the house was ornamented with mock-Tudor black and white beams. There were four bedrooms. In the back garden, the oval lawn was surrounded by beautifully tended flowering shrubs and bushes, giving complete privacy.

Alan lay on his back on the grass, hands clasped under his head, eyes closed. The sun was pleasantly warm on his skin. From the garden around him came murmurs of sound which were as soothingly constant as the sunshine. He could hear Carolyn reading a story to Annie, the words coming clear at certain points then fading back to a murmur, “UPjumped the troll . . . I want to eat you up. No! No! mmmm mm mmmm. . . .”

He could hear the constant rapid clicking of Meg’s knitting needles, and her erratic conversation with Christopher, who was lying on the grass at her feet, drawing. “What’s that, Chrissy?”

“It’s a rocket.”

Long pause.

“Ninety-two. Is it? That’s very good. Will you do me one to take home with me and put on the wall?”

Rustle of paper.

“Of – what?” Christopher’s serious childish voice, making that odd little pause between words, as if he still needed to think of them.

“Um – just a minute love – a hundred and ninety-four, good. Um, do one of your Mummy and Daddy for me, will you?”

Further away, intermittent, came the sound of Arthur’s clippers. He was having a go at the privet hen. The privet hen had been a joke ever since they moved in; a piece of topiary of which the house’s previous owner had been inordinately proud. Very quickly it grew ragged and dishevelled. Carolyn had had a couple of goes at it and made it into – well, more of a privet dodo than a hen. Now at her request Arthur tackled it, serious and silent as ever. Alan was glad he was busy. There was, even now, a strain between the two men.

“We must be going, Carolyn,” Meg raised her voice to interrupt.

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