Under an Amber Sky: A Gripping Emotional Page Turner You Won’t Be Able to Put Down. Rose Alexander

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ don’t mind not being pregnant if you just give him back to me,’ she would hear herself silently saying. ‘We’ll have plenty of chances for babies, all the time in the world, just let me have him back.’

      There was never any answer, and she didn’t expect there to be. But she couldn’t stop the bargaining.

      ‘Did you know when you fell pregnant with Tomasz?’ she asked Anna one evening, amidst the chaos of Anna’s dining table, where you had to clear a space of post, newspapers, paint pots and brushes, mugs, toys, and books just to find room to put your elbows. Sophie didn’t tell her why she was asking. She knew she would not be able to withstand Anna’s insistence that she do the sensible thing and just buy a test, and she couldn’t face doing that right now.

      ‘As soon as he was conceived.’ Anna sighed happily at the memory, though it was not one of fantastic sex with a gorgeous man. Despairing of ever finding a life partner after being disappointed and let down once too often, Anna had conceived Tomasz as a single mother with the help of IVF and a sperm donor. Nevertheless, a pregnancy is a pregnancy however it occurs and Sophie didn’t feel pregnant at all.

      ‘How did you know?’ she pressed, insistently.

      Anna shrugged. ‘I just did. Women know these things. You’ll know when you –’ Anna stopped, abruptly. ‘What I mean is, often people just … know it. That’s all,’ she continued, lamely.

      Sophie looked into her cup of tea as if the leaves might have the answer. She couldn’t be pregnant, then, if she were so uncertain. And if she wasn’t now, she never would be. The bargain hadn’t been accepted, because there didn’t seem to be a baby and there wasn’t Matt, either.

      Tomasz wandered in, halfway to bed, the ankle-skimming legs of his pyjamas marking his latest growth spurt. Sophie ruffled his white-blond hair as he passed. She had him, her godchild. She would always have Tomasz to love. He would be enough.

      Realistically, even if she had ever been carrying a child, or the very beginnings of a child, she couldn’t be any more. Surely such extreme emotion, such terror and shock as she had experienced, would have killed it off? What minuscule bunch of cells could survive such trauma? And then giving those cells no nutrition, so many days and weeks passing when she could hardly swallow anything down without gagging, even if she bothered to get round to trying, would only have contributed to the harm. But still – at the back of her mind resided the possibility of a baby.

      Despite Sophie’s gratitude for Anna and Tomasz’s company, their house was anything but restful. Sophie had not accounted for the constant comings and goings, or the casual droppings-in of the motley collection of inhabitants who occupied the other floors. On her last evening, it was even more hectic than usual; there were visits from the sound recordist downstairs who wanted Anna’s opinion on a new jingle he’d written, the penniless playwright in the attic who needed her to comment on the authenticity of a Polish character he had created, and the ‘self-employed’ (euphemism for unemployed) hipster from the flat in between who came to borrow a teabag and stayed ‘for a chat’ for three hours.

      When she did finally get to bed, Sophie sank under the covers with a huge sigh of relief. She found herself longing for the stone house on the waterfront, for the peace, quiet, and solitude that awaited her there.

Chapter 5

      The airport was heaving, despite the fact that it was late October and only 5 a.m. Sophie remembered that it was half-term and she couldn’t believe that after all her years of teaching she’d forgotten that it always fell at this time of year. Weaving her way through torrents of men, women, and children pulling suitcases with thunderous wheels or loaded down with bags dripping from every arm and shoulder, she fought back rising waves of panic.

      The intermittent announcements rang out across the terminal building, shattering her nerves. Apart from the last few days at Anna’s, she had been living silently since Matt’s death, not listening to TV nor radio, not travelling on the tube, not going to work where there was constant noise and bustle.

      The flight was uncomfortable, as she was crammed into the budget airline seat that was far too upright to make rest, let alone sleep, possible. The little girl seated next to her became fractious and had to be bribed with chocolate, which led to a predictable messy, sticky outcome. Sophie felt anaesthetized to it all, not caring about the child’s cries or her liberal distribution of smears of chocolate that constantly threatened Sophie’s own book and cardigan. What did it matter? What did anything matter?

      Now that the denial and the desperate bargaining were over, she was starting to feel angry – searing, entrenched fury coursing corrosively through her veins. She was enraged with Matt for not taking care of his health and therefore bringing upon himself the aneurysm that had killed him. The reports on his death had come through and a massive, catastrophic bleed to the brain had been diagnosed as the cause.

      But her wrath was tinged with guilt; Matt had been complaining of headaches and she had not given it much heed, advising him to take an ibuprofen and get an early night. It had seemed to Sophie that headaches were inevitable with the hours he worked and the stress he was under and she had tried to mitigate both with good, nutritious food and lots of love. But it hadn’t, in the end, been either of these things that he had needed. He should have been having proper medical treatment, MRI scans, and consultant’s appointments, not lamb tagine with couscous or something healthy with aubergine from Deliciously Ella and so, as well as her anger at him, she was incandescent at herself. She could have averted this tragedy but she hadn’t and now it was too late.

      Eventually, after what seemed like days of travelling rather than hours, Sophie arrived in the village that was to be her home, and found that she could only look around and think that Matt would have loved it, too; that they should have been embarking on this new adventure together, not just her, alone, pretending she could cope. On entering the house, she found it was even stiller and more silent than when she had first seen it in the summer, its contents fossilized by age and neglect.

      She meandered from room to room, picking up objects that lay on tables or shelves, and putting them back down again. Everything was covered in dust, layers of it, so thick it turned her fingers grey and made them feel gritty and sticky to the touch, setting her teeth on edge like the scratch of fingers on a blackboard. She could have been a decaying Miss Havisham, moving among the sordid remnants of her misery. It occurred to Sophie that she must be the only person she’d ever met who’d bought a house on one viewing. Her impulsion, without Matt to temper it, had really landed her in it this time.

      In each hushed chamber, the shutters were closed and barred, letting in only the smallest chinks of light. She found her breath coming in great heaving sighs. Her emotions had been oscillating so wildly since Matt’s death that she had almost got used to going from normality to despair to agony in the space of a few minutes and on an hourly basis. But now the feeling of wanting him hit her so hard that she physically could not stand. She sank down onto one of the heavy, dark pieces of furniture, her head in her hands. She had underestimated what a wreck the house was, how much work would be needed to make it properly habitable.

      The three rooms Mileva had used were more or less all right but everything else was in rack and ruin: filthy, floorboards soft and rotten from some previous roof leak, and riddled with woodworm. Bits of lino covered the worst areas but on her first journey up the stairs with her heavy suitcases she put her foot straight through one tread and it was clear that they all needed replacing. How could she do this without Matt? She couldn’t even deal with the washing machine filter.

      She went to the window and opened it, taking deep, gulping mouthfuls of fresh air. It was this view that had captivated СКАЧАТЬ