The Path to the Sea. Liz Fenwick

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ THE WAYMARKER

1

       Lottie

       3 August 2008, 11.30 p.m.

      All was silent except for the sound of the waves reaching the beach. ‘Happy anniversary,’ he said.

      Lottie frowned. ‘Anniversary?’ Turning, she tried to see his expression. ‘Are you taking the piss?’

      He traced her mouth with his finger. ‘Would I do that?’

      ‘Yes.’

      She felt rather than heard his laugh as his body was stretched out next to hers, thigh to thigh, hip to hip.

      ‘We’ve been together for a month and a half.’

      ‘So, we’re celebrating half months as well as months?’

      He kissed her long and slow and she wasn’t sure what they had been talking about as his hand ran across the skin of her back, just above her jeans.

      ‘I celebrate every day, every minute, every second that you are mine.’

      Her breath caught and held, and she looked up to the sky. The milky way stretched above, vast and mystical. She was captivated. The universe and all its glory filled her. Here on this beach, wrapped in his arms, was where she wanted to be always. It could happen if they wanted it enough and she believed they did.

      ‘Alex?’

      ‘Yes?’ His arm tightened around her.

      ‘Will . . .’ Just then a shooting star sped across the sky and seemed to fall into the sea. She wished with all her heart that she could be in Alex’s arms for the rest of her life. She rolled onto him. ‘Did you see it too?’

      ‘The shooting star?’

      ‘Yes.’ He kissed her.

      ‘Did you make a wish?’

      He nodded and pushed her hair back, tucking it behind her ears. ‘I did.’

      ‘I wonder if it was the same thing?’

      ‘I hope so,’ he whispered against her ear.

      She brought her mouth to his, praying that he would be hers forever. ‘Tell me.’

      ‘No, because if I do it won’t come true.’ He pulled her even closer to him.

      ‘You are all my dreams come true,’ she said, wrapping her arms around him.

      He hummed Gramps’ favourite song, ‘A Kiss to Build a Dream On’, and she knew then they would make it happen . . . Alex and her and Cornwall forever.

SEA ROADS

2

       Diana

       3 August 2018, 12.00 p.m.

      St Austell Bay gleamed in the distance as Diana Trewin turned left towards Porthpean and Boskenna. Once she had longed for Boskenna with everything that was in her. Every night she would clutch her pillow to her chest and pretend she could hear the sea, then she would dream. In those dreams she wandered sunlit rooms, seeing glamour and hearing the echoes of music and laughter. She would discover new rooms and new treasures then she would wake and the world around wasn’t as bright or as beautiful. Those dreams still came to her, mostly at times of stress. She escaped to those visions of blue sea and sky, big lawns and a library filled with every book she could want. No real house could live up to what her mind had created.

      Last night she’d had that dream again. She’d walked Boskenna’s halls, seen the views and discovered new rooms. It was achingly familiar and yet entirely new. Something was forever just out of reach. She had always assumed that it was her father. If Diana found one more room, or the right book on the correct shelf then a secret door would open and her lost childhood with her father would appear. He would tell her that he’d just been playing hide and seek. She was his fierce huntress and she had found him. But no book, or panel or secret door would reveal her father, Allan Trewin. The morning light always showed the truth. Boskenna wasn’t a palace of delights but a big draughty dwelling, housing two old people.

      Now she was just moments away and the lane narrowed, funnelling her towards the beach. A sharp turn and she was through the gates. Yesterday the call that every adult child expects and dreads when their parents reach a certain age had come. ‘Your mother’s dying,’ George Russell, her mother’s second husband, had said. She wasn’t sure how she felt about returning to Boskenna or about her mother. But that didn’t matter. Some things have to be done.

      She parked next to George’s old Jag and grabbed her overnight bag. A shiver of recognition and homecoming covered her skin as she walked across the gravelled drive towards the house. She’d only been back to Boskenna a few times since she’d left it as an eight-year-old. Her heart had broken then – and a few more times since – and now it was whole, if patched. It performed its job a bit like the roof on the caretaker’s cottage to her left where a bit of blue tarpaulin covered an eave.

      Outside the front door she stopped and turned to the bay. The heat of the sun beat down on her and the happy cries rose up from the beach. The world went on, while somewhere inside her mother was dying. She paused, feeling that sharp contrast between life and death, between the holiday world on the beach below and the everyday life in Boskenna. Even back in 1962 when she had spent her last summer holiday here, Boskenna existed on a different plain. She had tripped lightly among the intelligent and interesting, the suntanned and the salt-encrusted. That was all she remembered because tears had erased the important bits.

      A seagull landed on the lawn and peered at her. The tilt of his head asked her why she was here. Duty she guessed. She pushed a piece of gravel with her toe. Diana and her mother, Joan Trewin Russell, had nothing to say to each other. They hadn’t for years. If Diana were honest this was a sadness she had sought to lose in her work. Travelling the world as a war correspondent had filled the void for years, but now she was slowing down and that left gaps. Unwanted thoughts and questions had begun to seep into the spaces.

      Looking at the lawn, a memory of playing tag with her mother flashed in Diana’s mind. She was laughing and so was her mother. Once they must have been close but since her father died over fifty years ago, that had evaporated. Her mother loved Diana in her way. Diana had wanted for nothing . . . except her. Everything changed and she knew it was because of that long weekend fifty-six years ago.

      The front door was open, and she couldn’t stand on the threshold forever, as tempting as the view was. George would be around somewhere. Striding in, she put the past aside to focus on what was happening now.

      In the hallway the temperature dropped, and she shivered. The newspaper on the large round table in the centre of the hall flapped. Due to her early СКАЧАТЬ