Little Face by Sophie Hannah Read Free Book Online

things are going to get.
    I have locked myself in the bedroom. David has tried to reason with
me through the door, to persuade me, feature by feature, that the baby
in the house is so identical to Florence in every particular that she can
only be Florence. He has given up now. I didn't allow myself to hear
him. I blocked out his words with a pair of foam earplugs. I keep these
in the top drawer of my bedside cabinet at The Elms. Without them,
David's snoring would keep me awake. He is always indignant when
I mention this. He says I snored while I was pregnant and he didn't
make a fuss about it, but then David could sleep through a rock concert. Nothing wakes him.

    This is one of the details I know about my husband. What else do
I know? That he is excellent with machines of all kinds, anything electronic or mechanical. That his favourite meal is roast beef with all the
trimmings. That he buys me flowers for my birthday and our anniversary and treats me to long weekends in five star hotels to celebrate
these and other special occasions. That he calls women ladies.
    I have never opposed him before. I have always perceived him as
being too fragile. When we first met, Laura had recently left him and
he was dealing not only with the disintegration of his hopes for a
happy family life but also with the agony of separation from Felix.
Although he didn't like to talk about how much this hurt him, I could
imagine it all too easily. I handled him with extreme care, not wanting
to add to his unhappiness in any way.
    When Laura died so suddenly and violently three years ago, David
stopped confiding in me altogether. He became quiet and withdrawn,
and I found myself being even more tactful and placatory around him.
Felix came to live at The Elms, which must have made David happy,
yet at the same time he is bound to have felt guilty and confused
because the event that led to his reunion with his son was one which
must have been terribly painful for him. I have learned from the counselling component of my homeopathy training that it is often much
harder to deal with the death of somebody who is close to us if our
feelings for that person are in any way unresolved or problematic.
    I thought that by respecting David's emotional privacy and loving
him as fiercely as I did, I would eventually convince him that it was safe
to open up to me, but I was wrong. As he got used to life with Felix at
The Elms, and as he came to terms with the idea that Laura was not
around any more, David became, on the surface, his old, charming self,
but the emotional distance between us remained, and he seemed so
resistant to my attempts to close it that I began to wonder if he
actively wanted a barrier in place. I was reluctant to force or rush him.
I told myself that he probably still found the rawness deep down too
painful to confront, that in order to believe in his fapade of normality he might need to operate, for a while, on a more superficial level. Three
years on, we have still not discussed Laura's death, and I have never
managed to shake off the feeling that I must be careful not to say anything that will disturb his mental equilibrium.

    Part of the reason I refused to open the door when he begged me to
is that I cannot bear to confront the damage all this is doing to him. I
worry that the nightmare we have embarked upon today will destroy
him.
    Vivienne is coming home. She is cutting short her and Felix's holiday, as I knew she would. How could she not? I don't know what she
will say to Felix, what any of us will say. Nothing, if the past is any
kind of indicator. Neither Vivienne nor David talks to Felix about
Laura, at least not in front of me. Her name is never mentioned.
    I wish I could spend more time alone with Felix. If things had been
different, he and I might by now have become close. I might have been
almost like a mum to him. I want to be a proper step-mother, but there
is no room for such a figure