by Peter Walker
And there had in fact been a heavy cost, he thought. He once tried to tell Sandra the story, and later Candy, but he had lost them both in the telling. Sandra looked inscrutable. Candy had simply laughed at him. It was one of the reasons, he thought, they began to drift apart. In the end he kept it a secret, the story, his story of Morgan, camouflaged it, hid it away, almost from himself, in the absence of a single verifying detail. And then he had stopped just back there and looked at the top of the tree, as slender as a whip, and Lucas pointed: ‘We used to jump off there, Morgan and I . . .’
The latch closed with a click. The others had gone in ahead of him. Suddenly, surprisingly, everyone was in a good mood. Here they were in the sun, far from their usual lives and about to visit Morgan who had never really left their thoughts. The wind was blowing through all the trees outside the graveyard, and all the bushes inside were bowing this way and that. In his mind’s eye Race saw Toby and Jojo on the other side of the hill, wind-surfing on the swirl of the waves. The wilder the better – that was Toby’s view. Race saw all the brushstrokes of the wild sea, and he thought of his son and daughter-in-law with a pang of dread.
‘But what can you do?’ he said aloud.
‘What can you do?’ said Tolerton, who was sympathetic, as a general principle, to all.
Then Race thought suddenly – ‘Toby!’
Maybe, one day, he would tell Toby. And he saw Toby and Jojo, no longer children – Inga was right, after all – going out of sight among the brushstrokes of the future.
And he and Tolerton went on through the bowing shrubs.
But there was another surprise waiting there, something that none of them had ever really thought of. The gravestone, a hundred yards from the sea, was wind-worn and sun-whitened and starred here and there with patches of silvery lichen.
‘Oh, God,’ said Candy.
Morgan’s grave was old.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Randall Cottage Trust and Creative New Zealand.
The author and the publishers acknowledge the following permissions to reprint copyright material:
Extracts taken from ‘All Along The Watchtower’. Words and music by Bob Dylan © 1967. Reproduced by permission of B Feldman & Co Ltd/ Sony/ATV, London W1F 9LD
Extract taken from ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, Copyright © Wallace Stevens, 1954, copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC and by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. All rights reserved
Extract taken from ‘Chantilly Lace’. Words and music by J.P. Richardson © 1958. Reproduced by permission of Glad Music, USA, Peermusic (UK) Limited
Extract taken from ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Words and music by Mae Boren Axton, Tommy Durden and Elvis Presley © 1956. Reproduced by permission of EMI Harmonies Ltd, London W1F 9LD
Extract taken from ‘Blue Smoke’. Words and music by Rangi Ruru Karaitiana © 1949. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Rangi Ruru Karaitiana
Extract taken from Ravelstein by Saul Bellow, Copyright © Saul Bellow, 2001, used by permission of Penguin Books Ltd
A Note on the Author
Peter Walker is a New Zealander who has lived in London since 1986. He worked for seven years on the Independent, and three on the Independent on Sunday, where he was Foreign Editor. He has also written for the Financial Times and Granta. His first book, The Fox Boy, and his second, The Courier’s Tale, were both published by Bloomsbury in 2001 and 2010 respectively, and were widely praised.
By the Same Author
The Fox Boy
The Courier’s Tale
Also available by Peter Walker
The Fox Boy
The story of an abducted child
Mutual kidnapping between the Maori and the English inhabitants in New Zealand had dated back to the 1760s. In 1869, after an English defeat in battle in the Taranaki forest, one Maori boy, aged five, was captured and adopted by the Prime Minister.
Educated to become a lawyer and an ‘English gentleman', Ngataua Omahuru (or little ‘William Fox’), had played a crucial role in New Zealand's history. As Peter Walker followed the little captive out of the forest and into the drawing rooms of Wellington and London, he found himself on a personal journey which converged unexpectedly with the tale he had uncovered.
‘The Fox Boy is a triumph’
Independent on Sunday
www.bloomsbury.com/PeterWalker
Also available by Peter Walker
The Courier’s Tale
As the King’s young cousin, an admired scholar living in Italy, it falls to Reginald Pole to make the case for Henry’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon. And it falls to the hapless Michael Throckmorton – the younger son of an impecunious titled family – to become Thomas Cromwell’s messenger to Pole in Rome.
This dubious privilege makes Throckmorton’s life a tragicomedy of endless journeys back and forth between England and Italy, but it also makes him a canny observer of the great dramas of his time. And like his King, he too nurses a thwarted desire. . .
‘A thoughtful, often witty book and well worth the read’ Daily Mail
‘A splendid debut about Michael Throckmorton's endless journeys across Europe on behalf of his master, the future Cardinal Pole’ AN Wilson, Financial Times
‘If you loved Wolf Hall, you will delight in The Courier’s Tale’ Carmen Callil
www.bloomsbury.com/PeterWalker
http://bloomsbury.com/uk/the-couriers-tale-9781408824504/
First published in Great Britain 2014
This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2014 by Peter Walker
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