Read Online Lighthouse by Alison Moore - Free Book Online

night’s hotel, he sits down on the doorstep to unlace his dusty boots. As he eases them off his feet, the smell of hot socks escapes like a groan. Underneath the bloodied wool, his heels are tender, his smaller toes too.
    He goes inside, finds the owner and is given the key to his room which is on the ground floor with French windows overlooking a little rose garden. He limps into the bathroom and washes his feet in the sink, dabbing at the sore bits with a sponge. There is an inviting bath but he is too tired. He puts on his pyjamas and gets into bed, not even trying to read, just turning off the light.
    Another thing which he knows always irritated Angela was the look on his face whenever she came home smelling of cigarette smoke. In the early days, he had not objected in the slightest when he thought that Angela had been smoking. He even liked the smell. But by the time they began trying for a baby, he did indeed mind when she came home smelling of cigarettes, when Angela – who claimed not to smoke and who would always mention a stinky staff room or some pub she had been to or a friend who had smoked in her car – tasted of smoke when he kissed her. He wished that she would at least suck mints before coming home to him. He noticed it more towards the end of their marriage. He supposed that she was unhappy and this was her crutch.
    And their trying for a baby was a source of tension in itself. There were many pregnancies but each time she lost the child. She accused him, in each aftermath, of rushing her into another attempt, however much time had gone by. He reminded her of her age. ‘Time is running out,’ he said to her. She was thirty when they met but forty-four when she became pregnant for the final time, some months before they separated.
    He turns onto one side and then the other, worrying about intruders hiding in the garden, behind the rose bushes, coming in through the French windows while he is asleep. He wonders how fast he could run. He is already regretting not having that bath. He can feel his muscles stiffening.

CHAPTER SIX
    Stilettos

    Just after noon, on the day after the storm, Ester lets herself into the private apartment. Despite Bernard’s warnings, Ester has left the door unlocked again. Sometimes Bernard discovers the unsecured apartment and gives her a lecture, a reminder. ‘It’s an open invitation,’ he says.
    Inside, Ester finds that she has also left the lights on. This is another bad habit of hers, turning on the light when she enters a room and then forgetting to turn it off when she leaves so that sometimes the whole of Hellhaus is ablaze.
    She has finished her work for the day. The rooms are as clean as they are going to be and she is not expecting any guests this afternoon.
    In the bedroom, she sits down at the dressing table and looks in the mirror. She sees the little creases at the corners of her eyes and mouth where her make-up has gathered; her short-cut, home-bleached hair grown out, the shape gone and inches of dark roots showing. Her gold-effect necklace burrows into her shallow cleavage, and the denim bulge of her stomach rests on her spreading thighs like a warm cat comfortably settled in her lap.
    She was impressive as a girl. She remembers the look on Bernard’s face the first time he laid eyes on her. She was twenty-one, with platinum blond hair in a pixie cut. She was slender and shapely, her figure flattered by the pink satin dress she was wearing for her engagement party. The dress was sleeveless and backless, the hemline just above the knee.
    She was in her stilettos phase and had a collection of high heels in black and white and silver and pink and all sorts. She kept them in their boxes with Polaroids of the empty shoes stuck to the front. But when she met Bernard, she was wearing his mother’s slippers.
    Ida had welcomed Ester into the family the moment Conrad brought her home. She called Ester her daughter-in-law long before Ester and Conrad became