Read Online The Colonel's Daughter by Rose Tremain - Free Book Online Page A

arranging and reordering; she has furnished his entire existence. A simple man, he thinks, I am at heart a simple man and Amelia has perfectly understood me. Even at Christmas, in her choice of beige cashmere, she has never erred and in her peculiar love of mountains she has lifted me up.
    â€˜I think,’ he says earnestly, ‘we have to put all these tragedies out of our minds, Amelia, and try to go on as before.’
    She doesn’t answer. Her face looks slack, flattened almost, rearranged by some brutal palm.
    â€˜Amelia?’
    â€˜They were all about death.’
    â€˜What were?’
    â€˜Her poems. The deaths of one thing or another.’
    â€˜Stop it, Amelia! Got to keep a grip.’
    The dog is woken by Duffy’s voice. It gets to its feet and shakes itself. ‘Siddown Admiral!’ Duffy snaps.
    Amelia pats the dog’s head. It is, perhaps, the only thing left in need of her protection. Then she lifts her head and looks out. The evening is deep blue at the window and the room is getting dark. She remembers the day the rose garden was planted and a pedestal built for the sundial. How old was Charlotte then, she wonders. Four? Five? Too small to understand the symmetry of a rose garden. The child used to scrunch the perfect blooms in her fat little hand.
    The sky is darkening, too, over Camden. The reporters have gone, notebooks and spools of film replete with facts released by the woman-loathing Bowden, too late for the nine o’clock news. In the morning, the popular dailies will lead with the story, in which they have already taken sides. Editors in search of imagery will invoke serpents’ teeth and thankless children, the while aware of the gulf separating their readership from a work of literature Amelia Browne had only inadequately understood. Charlotte is friendless, alone with the suicide of Jim Reese. His death binds and binds her head, like her bandage. She refuses the supper brought to her. She can’t eat while the body of her lover is unburied. Yet, like her mother silently taking leave of her senses in an armchair by an unlit fire, she doesn’t weep. She has seen the challenge in Bowden’s eyes. She will not cry. If she is alone with the drowned limbs of Jim Reese, so too is she alone with her strength. Jim has failed her. She will not fail herself. When, near dawn, she sleeps, she dreams of Sowby. Her parents, manacled together by the handles of their tennis rackets, go wading into the lily pond like adventurous boys. Goldfish and newts nose their legs, but they stand very still at the pond’s centre, holding up their skirts and trousers with their free hands.
    *
    Margaret has telephoned Doyle twice since he returned to the flat, hungry and excited. He has answered neither call. Into his Answerphone she has stammered out messages of her confusion.
    Doyle has visited an all-hours delicatessen, bought himself sesame bread, Russian salad, Italian salami and a bottle of wine and has eaten these watching the ten o’clock news, on which the first mention of Charlotte’s crime appears, well supported with photographs and information about her involvement with pacifist and feminist groups and her previous convictions.
    Doyle crosses the room and catches sight of himself in a gold-framed mirror. His beard is as long as the stubble growing through on Charlotte’s head, his eyes are vast and bright, his cheeks are blotchy and feverish. Round his neck is the white sling which carries his arm. The ancient mariner slung with the albatross? The comparison slips into his mind and stays there while he stares at his altered image. The weariness in his limbs, the throbbing of his wound, the astonishing clarity of his eyes: all suggest some kind of journey. His rational self, the lazy, cautious Franklin Doyle, argues for sleep and rest. But he ignores the lazy, the rational. He simply removes himself from his own sight and goes almost hurriedly to his desk,