Read Online The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey - Free Book Online

Wisbech. Kingsley stopped the car and we got out. The sun had set, and there were one or two stars. We stood listening to the wind moving through the trees, and it was like a benediction on our conversation.” She glanced toward the window as if the wood lay just outside. “The next time my mother said she wished she were dead, I said if that’s really what you want, we can help. Once she understood what I was offering, she became her old self. If I’d ended up going to jail for five years it would have been worth it to see her have those last few weeks in control again, not scared.”
    Watching her face, Sean wondered was there any large choice in his life about which he felt such certainty, such a lack of regret.
    Bridget insisted on making tea before she told him about her husband. While the kettle boiled they chatted about the village: the erratic train service to London, the newly reopened shop. Then he switched on the tape recorder again.
    “This is harder,” she said. “Kingsley was only forty-one when he was diagnosed, and it just seemed unacceptable that he wasn’t going to have more time, that we weren’t going to have more time. I wanted him to keep fighting, to keep looking for alternatives. Between conventional medicine and the acupuncture, the feng shui, the coffee enemas, the sleeping on electrical beds—well, there was always more to try. What I came to understand was that there is a level of pain that destroys a person. If you take enough medicine to avoid that pain, you don’t become your old self; you become a drugged zombie. I finally realized that I couldn’t ask Kingsley to endure that for a second longer than he had to.”
     
    She held out her hands, palms up, for inspection. A thin white scar bisected the mound of Venus on her left hand; a fresh cut nicked her right index finger. “They tell you to leave the pills in reach, not to actually give them to the person. Maybe that changes things legally but it doesn’t change them morally. I look at my hands and I know I’ve killed two people. That’s what the sculpture I’m working on is about.”
    “You must be lonely,” said Sean. “Yes.”
    She was looking at him across the table, her eyes deep and steady, and he knew that if he stretched out his hand she would lead him to her bedroom. He sat there, meeting her gaze, imagining the skin he could see leading to the skin he couldn’t, imagining the pleasure of sex without history. At last, not sure if he was being courageous or cowardly, he looked away.
     
    ll the way back to London he kept thinking not about that final moment but about the conversation. He and Valentine ought to be writing a much larger book, there was so much to say, and they ought to be talking to a commercial publisher. When he got back to the house, he phoned Valentine, first at home and then on his mobile.
    Valentine answered the latter on the fifth ring.
    “I just did this amazing interview,” said Sean. “I’ve been thinking we should try to take this book to another level. Or write another book.”
    “Sorry. I didn’t catch that. I’m on the train to Leeds.”
    “Leeds?” His geography was poor but Leeds was no more than twenty miles from Bradford.
    Valentine said something—the connection was bad—about a new museum. Then his voice came through, clear and strong. “The north-ern arts beat. By gum, lad, they do have culture north of Oxford. Listen,
     
    tell me your plan about the book when I get back. Or shoot me an e-mail. I’ll be checking in.”
    “When do you get back?” said Sean, but the line was dead. He stood holding the empty phone in the empty house. He could call Abigail, he thought, but either he would get her voice mail, or she would talk at length about how well things were going. As he replaced the phone, he remembered a conversation he’d had with Georgina about Keats’s attacks of jealousy. In May 1820 Fanny Brawne had gone to a party, unchaperoned, and Keats had written her