Read Online Last Nocturne by Marjorie Eccles - Free Book Online Page A

hurriedly, without help. She was thin enough to have no need of tight lacing, as she’d told Susan often enough, though it was really the comfort and freedom that had made her dispense with such purgatories. What, not even a bust-improver? No, not even that. Let Susan roll her eyes as she would.
    The last button fastened, she chose a velvet throat band with a pearl drop, and her favourite pearl earrings to wear, not the pink pearls, but the ones her lover had given her. Their opalescent gleam against her skin flattered her face, as he’d known it would. She began to pin her hair up and the memory came, unbidden, of him holding the heavy weight of it in his hands as he used to, kissing the tender place on the back of her neck, and she felt again the tiny, exquisite shiver of the butterfly touch of his hand as he stroked her arm from wrist to shoulder against the fine hairs of her skin.
    They came, these sensuous, almost unbearable moments of unexpected awareness, like little poisoned darts, sharp enough to pierce the carefully contrived carapace she’d built around her emotions. But she’d long since found action to be the best remedy against these dangerous memories, at least when they came inappropriately, at times like this. At other times, she would savour them, let the pain itself act as sympathetic magic.
    She stood up, willing herself to be positive. Brave enough even to ignore the post she heard arriving on the doormat and the sinking feeling that it might have brought yet another of those letters.
    The West End – shops, sunshine, crowds, delicious as only London could be in April. Walking up New Bond Street, turning a corner, she almost bumped into an effete young man, his high collar nearly choking him, his hair brilliantined either side of a central parting. Emerging from a flower shop, he pranced past her, holding a basket of spring flowers balanced on one hand, like a waiter, the lead of a ridiculous woolly poodle in the other. The flowers gave off a heavenly whiff of scent. She decided she owed herself a little indulgence, though the frail, short-lived blooms would be a fleeting pleasure, a luxury that wouldn’t last long. Jonquils. The essence of spring. He used to come with huge bunches of them, brought into the Vienna flower shops from the mountain slopes where they’d been gathered.
    The memory was so sharp it actually brought her to a standstill, though only for the briefest of moments. Here, in the middle of Brook Street, was no place for reminiscences. Yet her dream of the night was not yet quite over: for the duration of that infinitesimal space of time it was as though her past life, with all its bittersweet ups and downs of pain and exquisite pleasure, that was the actuality, and the solid London pavement on which she stood, the shops and the people around her, which had no existence. She was brought sharply back to the present when an errand boy caused a small commotion by darting straight across the road between an omnibus and a horse-drawn, gilded black carriage whose driver thought that his passenger, autocratically peering through a lorgnette, had the right to order her carriage to stop right before the entrance to Claridge’s Hotel, no matter what.
    The ruckus subsided and she went into the flower shop. Emerging a few minutes later, her arms full of a froth of tissue paper and the sharp yellow fragrance of spring, and feeling extraordinarily exhilarated by such a small purchase – there, almost as if her thoughts had summoned him up, she saw him across the road, on the opposite pavement. For a split second she was unable to credit the evidence of her own eyes. The world was spinning backwards. It couldn’t possibly be Viktor.
    It was.
    She drew back instinctively, raising the cone of flowers to her face, though it was unlikely he would see her across the traffic, and in any case he was walking rapidly, looking straight ahead in his self-absorbed way, oblivious of his surroundings. Only a