Flowers in the Rain & Other Stories by Rosamunde Pilcher Read Free Book Online Page A

around it. I think it looks just right, don’t you?”
    She showed him a pine dresser that she had bought and was going to fill with coloured china. She showed him a chair that she had made from a barrel sawn in two. She showed him her own bedroom, which was on the ground floor and had French windows leading out onto what would one day be a terrace.
    He stood and looked out at the churned mud and the piles of bricks.
    “Who’s going to put the garden straight for you?”
    “I’ll do it myself. I’ll have to dig it, because there are all sorts of hideous treasures buried there. Like old bedsteads. I thought of putting a cultivator through it, but I think a cultivator would be broken in a matter of minutes.”
    He said, “Are you going to live here with Crispin?”
    “Of course. What else would I do?”
    “Sell it. Make an enormous profit. Move on.”
    “I couldn’t sell it. I’ve put too much of myself into it.”
    “It’s very isolated.”
    “I like it.”
    “And Crispin? What will happen to him? Where will he go to school?”
    “Right here. In the village.”
    He turned from the window and faced her. He said, “Kitty, are you sure you haven’t taken on too much?”
    For a moment she met his gaze. Her eyes were enormous in her thin face, their very blueness startling. Then she turned away from him.
    “Look, Tom, these are my fitted cupboards. See how huge they are. And I’ve only got one pair of jeans and a dress to put in them. But you see, we used old shutters for the doors. They’re lovely, aren’t they?” She laid her hand on the satiny honey-coloured wood, and it was like watching a person caress some living creature. “There’s this pretty plaster moulding. At first I thought it was carved wood and I nearly rubbed it off…” He saw her hand, the nails broken, the skin roughened and ingrained with dirt.
    “Kitty, is this what you really want?”
    She did not at once reply to this. Her hand continued to stroke the wood. He waited, and after a little she said, “In a moment, Tom, you’re going to say, ‘Kitty, you don’t want to live here.’ It’s what people have been saying to me all my life. Kitty, you don’t want to ride that horse. Kitty, you don’t want to wear that dreadful dress. Whatever I really wanted to do my parents always told me that I didn’t. How could they know? It wasn’t any good telling them that I didn’t want to go to Paris and be an au-pair girl, but if I hadn’t gone, then I’d have been sent to some dismal place to be taught how to cook or type or arrange flowers. I’m not that sort of person, Tom. That’s why, when I got chucked out of that job in Paris—and it wasn’t my fault, Monsieur was a sexy creep—I didn’t come home. I knew that if I didn’t escape then, then I never would. And as for Terence,… if only everybody had just left me alone, I know I’d never have married him. But it started right away, just as soon as they’d set eyes on him. ‘Kitty, you don’t want to have anything to do with a man like that. Kitty, you don’t want to spend the rest of your life living on a boat. Kitty, you don’t want to marry him.’ So in the end, I did. It’s as simple, and as stupid, as that.”
    Tom leaned his shoulders against the cold glass of the French windows, and put his hands in his pockets. He said cautiously, “I wouldn’t ever tell you what you want. I wouldn’t know what you want. I just don’t want to see you make another mistake, get into a situation that’s way over your head.”
    “I’ve been making mistakes all my life. Either that, or my horoscope’s gone mad, and all my stars are in the wrong order. But still, I must be allowed to do my own thing. I must lead my own life. I’ve got Crispin and I don’t need a lot of money. And I like it here in Caxford. I like being near Mabel, I like being near Kinton and remembering all the fun we had when we were children. That’s why I came back to Northumberland, and that’s