Read Online Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks - Free Book Online

offer a smaller dowry. Thomas Midwinter went up to his bedroom and took up the book he was reading, Quentin Durward by Sir Walter Scott. He had chosen it from the library because of a single line of Scott's poetry: "O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west'. The last word suggested mists and freshness and romance odd, he thought, when really the west was where the sun went down and the day ended. The word 'young' made Lochinvar easy for Thomas to identify with (he felt sorry for old people) yet also worryingly vulnerable; and some terrible, precarious hope was in that sighing "O'. What Thomas loved most about the line, however, was the word 'is'. In his grammar class the master had explained that this was an archaism, yet the two common letters sent shivers of delight through him. Quentin Durward, on the other hand, was drudgery. At that moment, Louis XI was being reconciled, slowly, with Charles the Bold at Peronne, while Quentin's affairs had been left to drift. Thomas settled on the bed and pulled the candle closer to him. He was fairly certain that he had broken his left arm, but did not wish to intrude on the business of the day. After a while he closed his eyes, folded the book on his chest and gave in to the ache of his limbs. Often at such moments he heard his voice. It was that of a narcoleptic man who had spoken to him regularly since childhood. It was not like hearing his own thoughts, which invariably came in fully formed sentences as though uttered by himself, silently into his mind's ear (the sound of thoughts was similar to the sound of reading, when, however rapidly his eye skimmed the lines, the words did form and resonate, albeit inaudibly). His voice, by contrast, could be heard, like Edgar's voice or Sonia's; it was outside him, not produced by the workings of his own brain but by some other being. Generally, it soothed him. It offered comments of an indifferent, sometimes inconsequential nature on what he was doing or thinking or proposing. It did not try to interfere with his life and he was not frightened of it. The voice was always slow and dream-weighted, as though its owner had drained off a bottle of laudanum before speaking. He heard it less and less often these days, but it had been for so long such an intimate part of his experience of living that he had never thought to question it; nor had he ever mentioned it to anyone. There was no voice in the dark December afternoon, no sound at all in Thomas's bedroom or from outside, where the garden and the village lay beneath the muffling weight of snow. It was dark, dead winter, Saint Lucy's day, and the sequence of Thomas's thought broke up into single images, in whose hypnotic light he faded into sleep. There was a knocking at the door. It rose through his dream, where it was briefly incorporated as a hammer on an anvil, then awoke him. He stood up and crossed the floor. "Wake Duncan with thy knocking," he thought, "I would thou couldst... Sonia!" "Can I come in?" "Yes. What's going on?" "They have been in the study for almost two hours." "And still no puff of smoke?" "Oh there's plenty of smoke. It is like a London fog." "You know what I mean. Come and sit on the bed." "I had to show Mrs. Prendergast round the house and then take her outside to look at the grounds. I saw that awful man Fisher swigging from a bottle in the kitchen garden. Luckily it was almost dark by then so I don't think she saw. Are you all right, Thomas? You look pale." "It's my arm. I think it's broken." "Then we must take you to a doctor at once. Or I'll send... I'll send..." "Well, whom will you send? There's no one to send any more, is there? Jenkins, I suppose. But listen, Sonia, it's all right. I'll get Edgar to take me when they've gone. I don't want to distract them from their business." Thomas put his good hand in his sister's lap, where her own fingers were clasped together. "So," he said. "What do you think of him?" "I do not love him." "Really, Sonia. No one could