Jakob’s Colors by Lindsay Hawdon Read Free Book Online Page A

called out, she would not hear it. But then, as swiftly as they had come, the reveries would break. Her mother’s hand would drop, and she would wander the room, manicured fingertips caressing the smoother objects, a high hum of a tune absentmindedly resonating from her lips as she returned to her surroundings.
    There was this, this blissful inertia of youthful ambition, before age threatened to make her regretful, but then there was the other. Days, sometimes weeks, spent coiled up on the bed in her room. A shadowy obliqueness, a void, where the world was dark, as if already life had left her stale and wanting.
    â€œHer father was killed in the war, you know? Her mother was Polish. An heiress, apparently. She drowned herself,” Lor had heard people say in hushed tones into their cocktail glasses as if that explained something. Lor had found her once in the river, standing with the water lapping against her thighs, her coat pockets full of stones.
    â€œIt’s beautiful,” Vivienne said. “This moment before. Exquisitely so.”
    â€œBefore what?” Lor had asked.
    â€œBefore after.”
    Lor had looked out at the ripples and the currents that circled in wide slow pools.
    â€œWill you swim?” she asked.
    â€œNo, I won’t swim. I shan’t swim a single stroke.” Vivienne let her fingers rest on the surface, let the water rush between them. “My mother always told me there was a family of kingfishers who lived here. I’ve never seen them. In all the years I’ve been here, from childhood to now, I’ve never seen them. Not once. What do you suppose that says about me?”
    Lor took off her shoes, waded across the currents to her mother, linked her arm through hers.
    â€œIt’s not so very strong,” she said. “The current. We shan’t be swept away.”
    â€œNo, perhaps not,” her mother had said vaguely. “ Zyli wsrod roz ,” she whispered. “ Nie znali burz .”
    â€œWhat are you saying, Mother?”
    â€œWe live amongst roses, darling. Know of no storms.” And with that they had made their way back to the shore.
    â€œYou are good, you know that, Vivienne, don’t you?” they said of her half-finished paintings. “You could be great if you were more prolific. If you weren’t so afraid of mediocrity.”
    Often she would take Lor to the antique market in town that, now that the Great War had ended, was overflowing with lost and unclaimed objects, with widow’s wares. They never came home empty-handed. The house was filled with silver spoons, Worcester china, George III silver-shelled ladles, a baluster coffeepot, boxes of war memorabilia, a dead soldier’s medals. They bought sketches in gilded frames and faded photographs of people they had never known: a group of scholars in top hat and tails, standing on the steps outside St. Paul’s Cathedral; a crowd of Welsh rugby fans, cheering beneath newspapers held over their heads in the rain. There was an African pot in the hallway that still smelled of the sour cheese that hadfed a nameless village; an oriental rug lay by the fireside still stained with soil from Kerala; a portrait of someone’s beloved family horse. Vivienne said she had a tale for each and every object, that war was the best time for stories, but somewhere, deep in the tone of telling this, there was the sad half-acknowledged truth that they weren’t her stories. That she had simply found them in a town hall that smelled of the rain brought in on the soles of other people’s shoes. Of her own story there was very little. Such was the glossy monotony of her life.
    Lor’s father, Andrew, listened to his wife in silence. A heavy silence that could last for days. Like Vivienne, he was tall, broad, with dark, almost black hair, slicked back with a defined right parting that he combed meticulously into place each morning. He had a way of standing that