“Yeah. Tell her. I’ll go and see her myself. That’s great!”
The Yacht Club in the estuary wasn’t a club at all, it was the Harbor Restaurant, but the Welsh were inventive with names. Angie Lime was only called that because her husband’s name was Harry. Consequently, he wasn’t Harry Williams, his real name, but Harry Lime, as in The Third Man, and she was Angie Lime. They’d had the Yacht Club for a year or so. Ginny and Dad had been there for a meal; it was small and friendly and bistro-like, and Angie was a good cook. It would be fun working there. It would be fun having Andy around. Everything was good suddenly, everything was fun, everything was as it should be in her mile-wide kingdom by the sea, as the last visitors trudged up through the soft sand toward their cars and the waves kept falling neatly and the sun sank toward the edge of the world in a welter of blood-red sky.
—
“Dad? You know Andy?”
“Andy Evans? I saw him today. He was talking to Dafydd in the garage. Why?”
“Well, he said they needed someone to help in the Yacht Club, in the kitchen, right, and I said I’d do it. In the evenings.”
“What, the whole evening? Aren’t I going to see you at all?”
It was late. Dad was lying in the hammock in the hot night, with something by Mozart playing very quietly through the open window and the underside of the leaves lit up above him by the floodlight at the base of the tree. He often lay in the hammock. Sometimes he slept out all night. Sometimes she joined him, bringing her mattress and duvet out under the stars. It was going to be hot enough for that tonight, but there was a distance between them now, after Wendy Stevens’s visit.
Ginny reclined the deck chair to its limit and sat down, not far away, gazing up at the canopy of leaves, the lightest viridian against the velvet black.
“Only from six till eight o’clock,” she said.
“Well, that sounds all right. D’you want to?”
“Yeah. That’s why I said I would.”
“So you did. How much are they going to pay you?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t actually spoken to them yet.”
“Counting your chickens again,” he said.
“Well, maybe.”
They sat companionably, without talking, for a few more minutes. The Mozart tape came to an end and clicked off.
“You ought to have your Walkman on,” she said. “Then you wouldn’t have to keep getting up to turn the tape over.”
“I don’t have to. I ask you nicely, and you do it for me.”
“You reckon?” she said, getting up.
“No worries.”
“D’you want the other side?”
“No. Chopin Nocturnes. The Rubinstein one.”
She went in, found the tape, set it going.
“I still think it’d be easier with the Walkman,” she said, outside again.
“I don’t want to shut the rest of the world out. I want to hear the music coming quietly from a distance, with all the night around it. As if you’re hearing it through the open windows of a great house across a lake…”
“Yah! Pretentious twit!” she said, but the image secretly delighted her, and she pictured it to herself, composing the scene in her mind like a painting. She could see it taking shape; her imagination worked effortlessly, taking what it needed from every memory she had of classical buildings, and lawns, and light reflected off dark water. Unlike memories of people, memories of things came easily to her; she had only to think of an object or a place to find it before her, correctly textured, three-dimensional, casting shadows. There were a lot of things about herself she didn’t know, and one was how rare this gift was, though she was beginning to sense it.
She lay back in the warm night, in the magic circle of light under the old tree, with Chopin coming faintly across the imaginary lake, with her beloved father close by, and felt unbearably rich. She loved him so much. The world was so full, so strange, and she and Dad understood each other so well; this was how it should be forever.
PHILIP PULLMAN is the author of the internationally renowned His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass, winner of the Carnegie Medal (England); The Subtle Knife, winner of a Parents’ Choice Gold Award; The Amber Spyglass, the first children’s book ever to win the Whitbread (Costa) Book of the Year Award; Lyra’s Oxford; and Once Upon a Time in the North. Philip Pullman’s other books for children and young adults include The Scarecrow and His Servant, Two Crafty Criminals!, I Was a Rat!, Spring-Heeled Jack, Count Karlstein, The White Mercedes, and The Broken Bridge. He is also the author of the award-winning Sally Lockhart mysteries: The Ruby in the Smoke, The Tiger in the Well, The Shadow in the North, and The Tin Princess.
Philip Pullman lives in Oxford, England. To learn more about the author and his work, please visit hisdarkmaterials.com and philip-pullman.com, and follow him on Twitter at @PhilipPullman.
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The White Mercedes Page 14