Read Online A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale - Free Book Online

relentless little band had arrived and were tuning up as he hurried out after Frank.
    He insisted on shaking Frank’s hand as he saw him off.
    ‘Kind of you to come down to tell me in person,’ he said.
    ‘The least I could do. Is Winnie well?’
    ‘Yes. And the baby.’
    ‘Phyllis.’
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘You’ll consider what I said?’
    ‘Of course.’
    And Frank turned away with entirely characteristic abruptness.
    Heading back through the ticket barrier, Harry was lightly bumped by a serious young woman running for the same train, book in hand, glasses like bottle bottoms. Elfine! he thought, with a little surge of affection for the prickly young man who had just taken such trouble to break bad news.
    Since boyhood, probably since his mother’s death, he had periodically indulged in fantasies of being liberated by catastrophe. War would descend around him, or revolution, plague, earthquake, tidal wave, something elemental and huge that would shatter all certainty and stability and leave him suddenly, dizzyingly free.
    Since becoming a husband and father, he had noted how the fantasies had shifted to become brutally local and specific. He would return from a night away to find Winnie and Phyllis – and the maids, naturally – dead from an overnight gas leak. Or turn the corner on to handsome South Parade, as he did now, to find a mayhem of shouting crowds and firemen and a smoking crater where their house had stood. The images that came to him were appalling. He assured himself they were a symptom of love, no different from a mother’s fearful imaginings when her children were out of sight, but he kept them to himself.
    Winnie was standing in the conservatory, dandling the baby in her arms to show her the view of the sea. She laughed and waved Phyllis’s chubby little arm to him as he came up the path.
    Since her confession on their honeymoon, he had decided he owed it to her always to be equally honest in return. He would tell her over lunch.

Chapter Six
    Telegraph boys in London were a common enough sight. Smartly uniformed, often with the cheek to go with it, in Harry’s mind they belonged, nonetheless, to that less tidy class of labouring men, of grooms, navvies, gardeners and builders. Theirs was an urban tribe whose busy physicality, as he strolled by, could leave him feeling rebuked in his idleness, even as it drew his gaze. This was perhaps particularly the case with the telegraph boys, since Harry led a life quite without urgency, so had never received a telegram and thought it unlikely he ever would.
    In the soft nursery scenes of Herne Bay, where it seemed no communication was so insistent it could not be made by letter, telegraph boys were a rarity. Seeing one bicycling swiftly along the front, Harry assumed he could only be bringing exceptionally bad news – of tragedy or financial ruin – to some unlucky neighbour, so was shocked to see him lean his bicycle against his own garden railings and march up the garden path.
    The telegram came from Mrs Wells and said simply: Please come at once . Assuming there must have been a family death, although there was no black border, he replied that they would catch the next train they could, then hurried upstairs to the nursery to alert Winnie.
    Winnie had inherited her mother’s tendency to worry. All the way from Herne Bay to Victoria, she rehearsed out loud the possible scenarios before them: a boating accident, although their father had seen to it that they all could swim; a heart attack – their mother had long suffered from palpitations; Barry slaughtered by savages in Basutoland. Or perhaps, which was harder for her to put into words, Frank or Robert had done something wrong at work and now faced professional ruin or even arrest!
    Harry soon gave up trying to reason with her, as it only made her the more fretful; he had learnt that at such times, although she would often voice her worries as questions, she was actually talking to herself,