Come Away With Me
Page 39
Antonio smiles and bites my finger. ‘Then I say no more. I sleep contented. Goodnight, you and baby number four.’
I lie awake, thinking. Antonio has nurtured my security and happiness so tenderly and now he feels vulnerable. He senses danger and a need to protect our life together. I have been taking for granted the strength and quality of his love. I almost missed something essential: Antonio’s ability to love without judgement.
Sorrow rises in me. I want him to know I understand. I move as close as I can with my bump and he falls asleep against me with the moon streaming like butter over the covers, making a passage of light across the polished floorboards.
I wish it were not so, but there are things I can never tell him.
I believe there is a pattern to all things and that I can never break this pattern. I can, with all the power in my body, try to protect those I love. But I know that some things are preordained. I have always had an instinctive fear that Adam will gamble with his life, nudge his fate a certain way. Antonio has made me realise that I must live each day as if this were not so.
I think of Ruth and Peter with their twins. I think of James gone, and Bea and Flo seeing out their old age together. I think of Adam and I cannot bear to think of a world that he is not a part of. I can’t, despite all that I have, be sure it would be worth living.
I turn over carefully. I think of the duplicity of love. All the things we say to those we share our lives with and the damaging complex feelings we can never share. It is a lonely thought, for it means that love is never wholly truthful.
Antonio dare not reveal his true feelings about Adam, he just bravely fights them. I cannot say to Antonio that whatever truth lies embedded in me is not to do with my love for him or the children, but with a whole life that was wiped out in an afternoon.
Was I ever entirely truthful with Ruth? I wrapped the truth cleverly from myself and made it acceptable; but then so did she.
‘I don’t deserve you,’ I whisper to the sleeping Antonio. ‘You are too good for me.’
He is not asleep and he laughs. ‘Will you stop dwelling on your wickedness and go to sleep?’
It is Adam’s last Sunday with us. The day is baking and airless. I am lying inside on the sofa with the french windows thrown open for any breeze. Antonio is down on the beach with the children and the au pair.
Tomorrow we return to Milan. Adam comes into the room and joins me. He has been down the hill to the village for the English papers.
‘Look.’ He grins at me excitedly. ‘There’s a huge article on you in yesterday’s colour supplement.’
I laugh. ‘It’s the time of year for the fashion writers, darling.’
The sun sizzles outside on the veranda. The noise of cicadas rises and falls in crescendos and diminuendos. I feel languid and heavy as my time comes.
Adam moves around the room restlessly, unable to stay still. In a few days he will be in Afghanistan. I know that nervous pacing. It means he wishes he were not going at all. It means he is excited and fearful and anxious to be gone. It means he does not want to leave me.
My child kicks hard and I shut my eyes against the glare of the day.
‘Is the baby moving around?’
I nod sleepily. I would like another girl.
‘Can I feel the baby?’ Adam asks suddenly, coming to rest beside me.
I open my eyes and I see Tom with his hair flopping over his left eye. I smile and lift my top and place his hand on my stomach. I watch his face as the child moves in a strong little squiggling movement, then turns a little, changing the shape of my stomach. I can see Adam is astonished by the independent movements of this person not yet born.
His hand is warm on my skin. He is struggling with some deep emotion. His eyes are a vivid, startling blue. ‘I wish you had waited for me. I wish I could have married you, Jenny.’
He is half smiling, trying to make a joke. Sadness crosses his face like a small shadow. He leans forward and places his head on my stomach to listen to the pulse of life that beats beneath my skin. His arms encircle me. He is very still.
I place my hand on his cheek and stroke with one finger the fair hair that grows almost white in front of his ears. I say gently, ‘Remember what I said to you once. You will always be a part of me, however old I am or faraway you are. That won’t change, ever.’
Adam’s tears cool my flesh. This is very hard.
‘I love Antonio, darling, and you will find a young girl to love. You will bring her here to meet us all. You will have children and I will love them because they are part of you. This is how it will be.’
Adam is weeping for he knows not what: for a wistful fulfilment of a thing intangible; an amaranthine love; for a visceral sense of loss caught achingly under the ribs and in the darkest moments of a night.
The pressure of him moulds with the weight of my child. I cannot tell where Adam ends and I begin. He is beneath my skin and in the pulse and beat of my blood. His head bent to my child and my hand in his hair are as natural and unsullied as his warmth had been in my bed. He is familiar; he is known. Time cannot change what has an everlasting life of its own.
Adam begins to hum softly and tears rise in my throat, for all that I lost, for all that I have. He hums. His breath like a butterfly kiss on my bare brown stomach, his mouth pressed intense against my skin.
Come away with me…in the night…I want to walk with you on a cloudy day…on a mountain top…in a field of blue…I’ll never stop loving you…I want to wake with the rain falling on a tin roof with you…Come away. Come away with me…
My darling boy.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks, as always, to Susan Watt, and to Katie Espiner for encouragement and patience; to Jane Gregory and her lovely team; to my friends, for love and support, especially to Jenny Balfour-Paul, who let me use her lovely poem and Broo, who give me much needed e-mail companionship, inspiration and laughter; to Margaret and Laura, who unknowingly found the right word and deed at the right time.
I am grateful to Paul Smith, headmaster of Truro School, who found time to show me around his stunning school on an A-level result day. Any inaccuracies are mine.
Last, but certainly not least, my love and thanks to Tim for forbearance and food parcels delivered with four footed friends to whom a deadline means nothing.
About the Author
Sara MacDonald was born in Yorkshire and travelled extensively as a forces child. She attended drama school in London and worked in television and theatre before she married, living abroad for many years before moving to Cornwall with her two sons. She has written three previous novels for HarperCollins: Sea Music, Another Life and The Hour Before Dawn.
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Sea Music
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The Hour Before Dawn
Copyright
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2007
FIRST EDITION
Copyright © Sara MacDonald 2007
“Come Away With Me” Words and Music by Norah Jones © 2002, EMI Blackwood Music Inc/Muthajones Music LLC, USA Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC3H 0QY
Sara MacDonald asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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EPub Edition © AUGUST 2009 ISBN: 978-0-007-34346-1
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