Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott Read Free Book Online Page B

nice to have him there when I get home. We get on.”
    “Not enough reasons to have him live in your house, though. You don’t need a housekeeper or a handyman. Not you.”
    “I know, I know. I made a mistake. But that’s boring. I don’t want to talk about Peter or even think about him. You know, I don’t think I’m going to go back till he’s moved out again. Elizabeth’s funeral yesterday changed some things, like a switch had been thrown in my head. It’s a cliché, I know, but I suddenly saw it, in black and white: life’s too bloody short. I’ve had enough of all that wadding—you know, the day-to-day stuff, the habits, the routines. I want something else. Want to go back on the road for a bit. Somewhere a bit wilder.”
    “
Again?
Jesus, Lydia. You should hear yourself.”
    “So you’d have me settle down, would you? A little house in the suburbs and some children? I can’t do that.”
    “There’s other ways of doing it.” Kit hesitated, ran her finger over her bottom lip and pulled her gown around her feet. “You stayed put for Cameron. Long enough for him to mess up your head.”
    “Now, that’s complicated. I gave up trying to understand that years ago. But you’re right, I did stay put—in a way. Have you seen him?”
    “I bump into him at parties from time to time. Anthony sees him when he’s in Cambridge.”
    “He’s not around much?”
    “Cameron Brown’s a big shot now. He travels a lot. Anthony says he’s working on some major neuroscience project. Top secret. He’s up for some big European science prize. Can’t remember which one. He looks older these days. Works very long hours at the lab, apparently. And he has to be very careful who he sees and who he talks to. Security levels have been stepped up in Cambridge because of the NABED group. Cameron’s right in the firing line, doing what he does.”
    None of this surprised me. If you joked about your mother’s obsessions, it was because you knew how it was to pursue a question so far that it began to consume you from the inside. You were always your mother’s son. When you were at the lab or working late on your papers in your office at Trinity, you’d forget to eat for whole days. There were times for both of us, when I was writing too, when we could only claw ourselves back to sanity in the depths of each other’s skin in the dark of the night, desperate and mindless and hungry for something we couldn’t name.
    You’d wake sometimes in those nights and reach for paper to write something down, some solution that had come to you in the night, some formula or some new question. You’d laugh in the daylight, looking at the words you’d written, nonsensical words scribbled on the back of anything you could find: paperbacks, bills, even once the corner of a lamp-shade. Though you claimed otherwise, it was never the academic rewards and adulation that drove you, but the head rush of unearthing something no one had put together before, being the first one to see it. Sometimes, ecstatic with some new breakthrough, you’d begin to tell me something, then stop yourself, remembering the silence that had to wrap itself around your work. You thought I didn’t notice. Then the man of silences would make up stories. First thing in the morning, before dawn sometimes, spinning stories, ridiculous, brilliant stories. Write that down, you’d say. Do something with that. And I did. Stole your plots and the made-up people you brought me.
    Once, eight years ago or so, when we were sitting talking about everything and nothing, nursing hangovers and drinking tequilas in a cabaret bar buried in a flea market in northern Paris, right at the heart of a knot of streets lined with shops selling chandeliers the size of upturned trees, jewelled swords, antique clocks, medical models of men and animals with every sinew labelled, jewels and glass and piles of lace and linen, boiled and ironed to stiff whiteness, I said:
    “You’re a pretty good