On Green Dolphin Street by Sebastian Faulks Read Free Book Online

came to Mary in fragments, as though some self-defensive censor were breaking it up into morsels she could manage. She stared hard at the branches of the black tree. This was the moment against which she had prepared herself in her imagination for almost forty years. Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don’t know what I’d do.
    Now that it was here, or might be here, the first thing that she and her father did was to agree that everything was still all right. Each reassured the other: wait and see … nothing we can do anyway … know more next week … exactly.
    They agreed that there was no reason for Mary to go back to London; then Elizabeth herself came on the line to lend weight to James’s optimism. As a doctor, she brought some authority to the cheerful prognosis; she seemed in any case more interested in Louisa and Richard and whether the Christmas presents she had sent had yet arrived.
    When she had rung off, Mary stood, staring out of the window at the leafless tree for a long time. Everything was all right. Her mother was alive, that was the important thing: nothing had changed.
    She went up to the top floor and kissed the children good night. There was a photograph of her mother holding Louisa as a baby in the garden of the Regent’s Park house on a summer afternoon. Perhaps even when she had taken it, Mary had been aware of how few such occasions there were: you talked them up into a life, a history, but in fact you could count the days on the fingers of two or three hands.

Chapter 3  
    D r. Weissman ran liver function and other tests on Charlie van der Linden, but, to Weissman’s irritation, the readings all fell within the prescribed range. He told Charlie that unless he cut down on the amount he drank he could not accept responsibility for what happened: there would be blackouts, accidents, organ damage. He recommended that Charlie go more often to see the psychoanalyst with whom he had begun treatment the previous autumn; he also prescribed barbiturates to help him sleep.
    Charlie’s absence from work excused him from the trip to California, but when he went back in January he found his diary uncomfortably full of the diversionary appointments Benton had made. His will to survive was still strong enough for him to recognize that a period of quiet efficiency was required of him. He did the meetings and he did the lunches; he went to the offices on the Hill and talked to congressional aides; in the afternoons he drafted convincing telegrams. He reassured London that Richard Nixon, for all his spotted past domestically, was unlikely to be a Taft-like isolationist in foreign affairs. He gave reasons. He wrote a memo on the significance of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.He kept to two martinis before lunch and nothing in the afternoon; when the vodka bottle in his desk drawer was empty he did not, immediately, replace it.
    At Number 1064 the first twelve weeks of the new decade were quiet with the stillness of life suspended. The children went, with other diplomatic exiles, to England, where Mary’s mother met them at London Airport. Mary was alone in the house. There were no school bags and coats dropped anyhow in the tiled hall; she did not trip on sections of Richard’s wooden railway when she crossed the kitchen to the fridge; Louisa’s painful practice at the piano no longer provided the lounge music at the cocktail hour. She went up to their rooms, but they were tidy now and she had no excuse to linger: for the first time in ten years the toys were in their proper boxes; the expensive christening mugs were not lying beneath the bed; a silver watch left to Richard by Charlie’s father was no longer the damp treasure in a muddy pirate ship beneath the maple.
    Mary picked out some of their books from the