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

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СКАЧАТЬ all directions, before grabbing her towel and roughly drying herself, teeth chattering.

      A time when she might feel normal, be normal, seemed further away than ever. She knew that her mother was longing to kidnap her, to bind her up and smuggle her back to England. She knew she was being obstinate in staying.

      ***

      It was only on her return to the stone house in January that Sophie remembered the box with the letters. What had happened to it? It was no longer in the bureau and her perfunctory attempts to tidy up had not revealed it. She felt a stab of pain and loss – another thing she longed for but could not have. She turned the house upside down but couldn’t find it. Mileva must have taken the box with her after all.

      Disappointment over the loss of the mysterious letters combined with the onset of the long, lonely weeks of deepest winter induced a fresh apathy in Sophie. Instead of fresh beginnings, the new year brought grey skies and Biblical rivers of rain. It shattered onto the mountains and cascaded downwards, surging through dense undergrowth and past fig, pomegranate, and citrus trees, sometimes uprooting them and bringing them with it.

      The rainwater gully beside the house ran full and the drains on the streets overflowed, sending sheets of water across the tarmac to fall purposefully into the sea. Mountain springs ran fresh and hard and, at various places around the bay, winter waterfalls sprang up, blossoming and billowing, barely able to contain the quantities of rain that fell, day after day. One long, sleepless night Sophie stood at the window and watched whilst lightning split the sky as if Zeus himself were in residence.

      In these January evenings, after the watery sun had set, a profound cold descended on the bay, clinging to the stone floors and walls of the old house, curling itself into every nook and cranny. Sophie felt chilled to her core. In one of the ground-floor konobas – a word meaning taverns as well as storage rooms– she found a small stash of firewood; it was bone dry, signifying it had been there for some time. Presumably no one had visited outside of the summer months for years. In the first-floor sitting room was an open fire, a monstrosity built into the corner of the room and taking up a huge amount of unnecessary space.

      Sophie wondered if the chimney was clear, if it had ever been swept. She peered up it, narrowing her eyelids instinctively against any falling soot. She could see nothing, not the merest chink of sky, not the faintest glimmer of daylight. For a few days, she sat and shivered, going to bed early in an attempt to keep herself warm. And then the cold got the better of her and she lit the fire anyway and to hell with it if there were a chimney blaze. At least she wouldn’t freeze.

      She had nothing with which to entertain herself or pass the long, empty hours except her Kindle. She would go into town to the internet café and load up books on it, book after book, in all genres including those she had never read before – fantasy, sci-fi, romance – then go back to the stone house, light the fire and read.

      Every now and again her reading would be interrupted by tears that crept insidiously up on her and began to inch out of her eyes and run down her cheeks, dropping onto the screen and blurring the words. Sometimes she indulged the crying. At other times she tried to stop it. At still others, she could do nothing but curl up on the oversized beanbag she’d bought from one of the furniture stores on the road to Budva and mourn everything she had lost.

      Apart from that beanbag, almost nothing in the house was new or hers. Everything was what Mileva had left behind: her antique bed with towering head and end boards, her fraying sofa, and Sixties-style table with two chairs. Sophie was living in the past, but whose past it was often evaded her.

Chapter 7

      The hours, days, and weeks went by, melding into one, forming a huge vacuum inside which Sophie flailed and floundered. And then February came, and with it one of the rarest occurrences in coastal Montenegro. Sophie woke early one morning and immediately sensed the quiet stillness that snow brings. Shivering in her cotton pyjamas, she flung open her window and stood, wonderstruck, at the sight she beheld.

      The bay was frozen, the water a black plate of ice. On the far side, the roofs of the houses were coated white and behind them rose the dark mountains, grazed by a covering of snow that glimmered in the light of the still-present moon. Sophie felt very far from the sky, as if at the bottom of a volcano’s caldera, enclosed within its steep, insurmountable sides.

      Looking down at the street directly below her window, she saw that the snow had been thrown into piles along the roadside by the vehicles that had already passed by, and she discerned the gleam of ice on its compacted surface. She would be apprehensive about driving anywhere in these conditions or even taking the bus; there was no wall along most of the bay front and it would be only too easy to end up skidding and going over the edge.

      But such weather might never happen again and she had the urge to go out, to see Kotor in the snow, to wish people good day, to shun the evasion of all contact that had become habitual. She felt like Scrooge, transformed on Christmas morning.

      She pulled on her warmest socks and boots and jammed her hat down over her ears. By the time she left the house, children were out all along the road, building snowmen, sliding on the packed ice, screaming with joy, cheeks ruddy and eyes sparkling. A snowball grazed her nose and made her jump, causing shrieks of delight from those assembled on one side of the road and shouts of apology from the other, from whence the errant missile had come. She smiled and waved and almost skipped as she continued her journey.

      A fragile frosting of snow lay on the tips of the junipers, oleanders, and figs that lined the bay and, now the sun had come up, Sophie could hear the steady patter of droplets of water falling to the ground below. The ice on the bay was also melting in the rising sun’s rays, the evaporation forming a thin layer of light fog that stretched as far as the eye could see. A boat coming from the open sea towards Kotor seemed to be sailing in upon the clouds.

      Sophie thought back to her solitary wanderings of the previous summer, the August that had crawled so painfully and inexorably on. Sometimes, she had wanted to disappear and at others she had simply willed the world to stop, unable to understand the cruelty of a globe that could continue to turn when there was no point to any of it any more. She had gone out, occasionally, but often only got as far as the bus stop before turning back again. Once or twice she had made it to the park and walked by the boating lake.

      The summer had been dismal; cold, constant rain, skies perpetually overcast with dull grey clouds. By the lake, flocks of similarly grey Canada geese honked and squawked as she pushed her way through them, the grass covered with their dung, their greedy beaks thrust intrusively forwards in case she was carrying food. She remembered considering taking a rowing boat out but then assessing what was involved – standing in the queue, engaging with the boatman, paying – and it was all too exhausting to even contemplate. She had returned home instead, and cried some more for Matt.

      It occurred to her now that she no longer felt the utterly visceral misery of that summer, so though it seemed that nothing had changed this was not in fact the case. It was far too soon to be getting better, but at least she was getting different and that was an improvement on the months of stagnation.

      Continuing her walk, her stomach growled in response to the scent of warm bread that wafted towards her from a baker’s shop. She went in. Freshly ground coffee mingled with the delicious, homely aroma of baking and suddenly Sophie was starving, properly hungry for the first time in months. She bought half a baguette to take home and two fat croissants for now, chomping through one of them before she’d covered another fifty paces.

      The old town, when she got there, was picture-perfect with a topping of snow adorning the ramparts, and a backdrop of mountains that glistened in the morning СКАЧАТЬ