Another Heartbeat in the House by Kate Beaufoy Read Free Book Online Page B

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    A patch of damp by the window had caused a strip of wallpaper to come away, revealing a layer of Amaranth purple paper, and beneath that another of Prussian blue. Edie picked at the edge but resisted the temptation to start pulling, because she knew that once she started she would not be able to stop. There was a word for it, she knew – a word for layers upon layers upon layers. Palimp-something. It would come to her later.
    Hilly would have known it, for Hilly had been brilliant with words; Edie had badgered her for years to write a novel. She remembered how they had once spent an afternoon concocting a pastiche of a popular bodice-ripper, with a cast of characters that included a heroine with silvery blonde hair, a dashing French aristocrat and a Russian prince. They had all danced to tzigane music at Maxim’s and disported themselves on the polo field and on the croquet lawn and in bedrooms in Claridge’s, and feasted on Beluga caviar and quails’ eggs. Hilly’s fabricated blurb described it as a story of dainty sentiment, fishy goings-on and hot kisses, and Edie had laughed so hard that she had fallen off the sofa and onto the fire irons, giving herself a black eye.
    Suddenly she felt cold – and she was hungry, too, she realized, and very, very tired. She had had a cheese sandwich on the boat and a bar of chocolate on the Dublin–Cork train, and nothing since.
    â€˜Come on, sweetheart,’ she said to Milo, who was chewing the fringe on the carpet. ‘Let’s go get some grub.’
    In the kitchen, she set about finding something to eat. Mrs Healy had left milk, butter, eggs, cheese and ham in the cold larder; soda bread, jam, tea and cornflakes in a cupboard. There was a packet of Marietta biscuits, too, and a bowl of apples. She helped herself to bread and cheese and scraped the remnants of yesterday’s minced chicken into Milo’s bowl, hoping that and a biscuit or two would do him until she could make the journey into town. If he was really hungry, she could give him some ham, or try him on an egg. Mac had loved raw eggs …
    It was the first time since her arrival that she had allowed herself to think of Mac. Before then he had never strayed far from her thoughts: he and Hilly, though they were dead, were still more real than legions of people in Edie’s life. Every day she heard her friend’s voice utter the last lines of the letter she had written:
We have been so stupid. Let’s pretend last year never happened.
And every day Edie tried her best to pretend because she knew that Hilly would want her to – but it wasn’t easy. Every day she thought thoughts like: ‘Hilly would love this song!’ or ‘Hilly would hate this book!’ or ‘Hilly would know this!’
    And then she remembered the word that had eluded her earlier. It was ‘palimpsest’. It had been the answer to a crossword puzzle clue, and when she and Hilly consulted the dictionary they had found, among the less prosaic definitions: ‘pă´lǐmpsĕst, noun: a layering of present experiences over faded pasts’.
    For Edie the faded past – the summer holidays, the afternoon teas in Valerie’s, the carefree evenings at the Gargoyle – was irredeemably precious. She wished she didn’t feel so very guilty for continuing to live in a present that did not have Hilly in it.
    The next morning, Edie was astonished to find that she was the recipient of a letter. She had slept well for the first time in months, risen late, washed, and dressed in clothes appropriate for the day’s work (an old pair of gaberdine trousers and a flannel shirt). She had just sat down to a bowl of cornflakes when the scrunch of feet on gravel announced the arrival of a visitor. Peering through the kitchen window, she saw that the postman had leaned his bicycle against the wall of one of the old outhouse buildings and was putting something