Past Secrets. Cathy Kelly

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      Now, a lifetime later, Ethan was thirty-three, Shane was almost thirty and Christie was a grandmother twice over.

      The long dark hair she’d worn in a loose ponytail all those years ago was now cut to jaw length and waved, its cool silvery white highlighting the warmth of her olive skin and dark, winged eyebrows.

      She still wore a delicate flick of eyeliner, which gave her eyes a magical tilt at each olive green corner, but had swapped the block of cake eyeliner she’d grown up with for a modern miracle liner pen. She liked embracing new things, believing that living too much in the past made a person look their age.

      The kitchen wasn’t showing its age, either. Currently on its third incarnation, it had been decorated in brightly coloured chic, then antique pine and was now showcasing modern maple. Many woman-hours of hard work had turned the garden into a honeytrap for lazy bees, which moved from one variety of lavender to another in the height of summer.

      Now, in the last days of April, the old French rose that Christie had been nurturing to sweep over the pergola had produced its first decent crop of antique white flowers with a musky, amber scent. Her garden was so sheltered that her roses bloomed at least a month before they should and she could smell their fragrance from the open window as she stood rinsing the breakfast dishes at the sink.

      Scrubbing at some stubborn crumbs of toast glued to a white plate, Christie tried to rationalise the niggling anxiety in her head.

      Anniversaries brought up old memories, that was all it was, surely.

      Christie had been so lucky these past thirty years. Blessed, almost. There had only been that one time in her married life when it had all nearly gone wrong, and, like catching a falling glass before it hit the floor, Christie had averted the disaster. There was a tiny crack left behind from that time, but nobody except Christie could see it. That couldn’t trouble her now, could it?

      No, she decided firmly, as she slotted the clean plate into the drying rack. That was all in the past.

      She knew she was blessed. James was as good a husband as he’d been when she married him. Better, in fact. They’d grown closer as they’d grown older, not apart, like so many others did. Christie knew plenty of people her own age who’d stayed married and had nothing to show for it except spite and old wedding photos. They bitched and bickered and made everyone around them uncomfortable. Why bother? Christie wondered.

      Wouldn’t it be better to be happy on your own instead of coupled off in sheer misery? She liked to think that if she and James fell out, God forbid, they could end it with dignity and move on.

      ‘I bet you wouldn’t,’ her sister Ana had pointed out mischievously once, at the end of one long night on the small terrace in the garden when the wineglasses were empty and the conversation had turned to what-ifs.

      ‘There wouldn’t be a bit of dignity involved. I bet you’d stab James with your secateurs one night, bury him under the rhubarb and act delighted when it turned out to be a good crop!’

      ‘Ah, Ana,’ said James, feigning hurt. ‘Christie would never do that.’ He paused for effect, looking round the garden his wife adored. ‘The lilac tree needs fertilising, not the rhubarb. That’s where she’d bury me.’

      ‘You’re both wrong,’ said Christie amiably, reaching out to clasp her brother-in-law Rick’s hand. ‘I’m going to bury James right here, under the flagstones, then Rick and I are going to run off into the sunset together.’

      ‘As long as I get this house,’ Ana said, getting to her feet, ‘the pair of you can do what you want.’

      It was a beautiful house, Christie knew. One of the loveliest on Summer Street. Christie’s artistic talent had made it just as beautiful inside as outside.

      ‘If Mum and Dad could see this place,’ Ana said wistfully as the sisters hugged goodbye in the hall where Christie had black-and-white photos of the family hung alongside six watercolour paintings of irises of the kind that she used to sell to make money during the early days of paying the Summer Street house mortgage.

      ‘Dad would hate it,’ laughed Christie easily. ‘Too arty farty, he’d say.’

      ‘Ah, he wouldn’t,’ protested Ana, who at fifty-four was the younger by six years. ‘He’d love it, for all that it’s nothing like the house in Kilshandra.’

      Kilshandra was where they’d grown up, a small town on the east coast that was never a destination, always a place cars drove past en route to somewhere else.

      ‘No, it’s not like Kilshandra,’ Christie murmured and the fact that it was nothing like her old home was one of the best things about it.

      Thinking of the past made the anxiety tweak again. She didn’t want to think about the past, Christie thought with irritation. Get out of my head. She’d spoken out loud, she realised, as the dogs looked up at her in alarm.

      The dishes done, she poured a cup of coffee to take into the garden while she went through her list for the day. She had groceries to buy, bills to pay, some letters to post, a whole page of the by-the-phone notepad filled with calls to return…and then she felt the strange yet familiar ripple of unease move through her. Like a thundercloud shimmering in a blue sky, threatening a noisy downpour. This time it wasn’t a mild flicker of anxiety: it was a full-scale alert.

      Christie dropped her china cup on the flagstones. Both Rocket and Tilly yelped in distress, whisking around their mistress’s feet, their matching brown eyes anxious. We didn’t do it, we didn’t do it.

      Automatically, Christie shepherded them away from the broken china.

      ‘You’ll cut your paws,’ she said gently, and shooed them safely into the kitchen. Dustpan in hand, she went outside again and began to sweep up.

      Her whole life, Christie had been able to see things that other people couldn’t. It was a strange, dreamy gift: never available on demand and never there for Christie to sort out her own problems. But when she least expected it, the truth came to her, a little tremor of knowing that told her what was in another person’s heart.

      As a child, she’d thought everyone could do it. But there was no one in her deeply religious home whom she could ask. Something warned her that people might not like it. Her father prayed to centuries-dead saints when things went wrong, ignoring them when all was well, but he disapproved of the local girls having their fortunes told and hated the Gypsies’ gift of sight with a vengeance. Her mother never ventured any opinion without first consulting her husband. Opinions that Father didn’t approve of meant his black rage engulfed the house. So Christie had learned to be a quiet, watchful child. Her six elder brothers and her baby sister made enough noise for nobody to notice her, anyhow. And as she grew older and realised that her gift wasn’t run of the mill, she was glad she’d kept it quiet.

      How could she tell people she’d known the McGoverns’ barn was going to burn down, or that Mr McGovern himself had set fire to it for the insurance money?

      The first time she even hinted at her gift was when she was nineteen and her best friend, Sarah, had thought Ted, handsome with smiling eyes and a blankly chiselled face like Steve McQueen, was the man for her.

      ‘He loves me, he wants to marry me,’ said Sarah with the passion of being nineteen and in love.

      ‘I just have this feeling СКАЧАТЬ