Read Online Flowers in the Rain & Other Stories by Rosamunde Pilcher - Free Book Online

stone stair and drew her down beside him. She sat, sinking down in a whisper of satin skirts, wrapping her arms about her knees. She was smiling at him, but he knew that she understood. A combination, perhaps, of everything that could fill him with pleasure and satisfaction. The time, the place, and the girl.
    Kitty. Whom he had known for the best part of his life; and yet had never known at all. She was part of it all. Part of this evening, part of Kinton. He looked about him, at the painted ceiling, the perfectly proportioned curve of the stone staircase upon which they sat together. He looked into her lovely face, and all at once was filled with joy.
    He said, “When are you going to move out of your caravan and into your house?”
    Kitty began to laugh. “What’s so funny?” Tom asked.
    “You. I thought you were going to come out with something enormously flattering or romantic. And instead you ask me when I’m going to stop living in a caravan.”
    “I’m keeping the romance and the flattery for later on in the evening. This is the moment for humdrum affairs.”
    “All right. I told you, in about two weeks.”
    “I was thinking … if you could wait for a month, I’m due for a few days off. I thought I might go to Spain, but I’d much rather come to Northumberland and perhaps give you a hand with your move. That is … if you’d like me to.”
    Kitty had stopped laughing. Her eyes, unblinking, enormous, very blue, were on his face. She said, “Tom, you must never be sorry for me.”
    “I couldn’t be sorry for a person like you. I might admire, or be envious, or even be maddened. But pity would never come into it.”
    “You don’t think we’ve known each other for too long?”
    “I don’t think we’ve known each other nearly long enough.”
    “I’ve got Crispin.”
    “I know you have.”
    “If you did come and help me—and I can’t think of anything I’d like more—and at the end of it you decided you’d had enough … I mean, I wouldn’t want you to feel that I wasn’t able to be on my own … be independent. Do things for myself…”
    “You know something, Kitty? You’re floundering.”
    “You don’t understand.”
    “I understand perfectly.” He took one of her hands and sat looking at it. He thought of Mabel and Kinton. Kinton a ruin, and Mabel and the dogs living in a small centrally heated house and probably warm for the first time in their lives. He remembered Kitty sleeping out on the battlements, stubborn and resolute and brave, and he thought of her son Crispin lying in his bed in Kitty’s new house, and watching, through the window, the sun rise.
    Kitty’s hand was ingrained and rough and broken-nailed, but he thought it beautiful. He raised it to his lips and planted a kiss in her palm and folded her fingers over it as though he had given her a present.
    “What’s that for?” she asked him.
    “Endings,” he told her. “And beginnings. Perhaps we’d better move.”
    And so he stood, still holding her hand, and gently pulled Kitty to her feet. Then together, side by side, they went on down the stairs.

F LOWERS IN THE R AIN
    Through thick, wetting mist and a cold east wind, the slow, stopping country bus finally ground its way up the last incline towards the village. We had left Relkirk an hour before, and as the winding road climbed up into the hills, the weather had worsened, turning from an overcast, but dry afternoon, to this sodden, cheerless day.
    “Aye, it’s driech,” the conductor commented, taking the fare from a fat country woman with a pair of carrier bags filled with her morning’s shopping. And the very word, driech, took me back into the past, and made me feel that I was almost coming home.
    I rubbed a patch of clear glass on the window and looked hopefully out. Saw stone walls, the vague shapes of silver birch and larch. Small turnings led to invisible farmsteads, lost in the murk, but by now I recognized the road, and knew that in a moment