Sheltering Rain by Jojo Moyes Read Free Book Online Page B

streets of the port town contained no shops she could imagine wanting to hang out in, being stuffed with, as far as she could see, old ladies’ stiffly upholstered underwear or car parts, while outside it seemed to be all hedgerow, dotted by modern bungalows bearing a sprinkling of satellite dishes, like some strange fungi sprouting from the brick. It didn’t even feel like proper countryside. There was a park dedicated to a dead president, but she couldn’t see herself becoming desperate enough for greenery that she needed to use it.
    â€œIs there anything to actually do in Wexford?” she had asked Thom, and he had turned briefly toward her and laughed, his mouth curled reluctantly around it, as if it didn’t happen too often.
    â€œOur big city girl is bored already, is she?” he said, but it was in a friendly way, so she didn’t mind. “Don’t worry. By the time you leave here, you’ll be wondering what there is to do in the city.”
    She somehow doubted it.
    To take her mind off her nerves, Sabine thought about Thom’s arm, which was resting on the hand brake next to her. She had never met anyone with a false limb. Would it actually be attached to him, with some kind of glue? Or would he pull it off at night? Would he put it in a glass of water like her neighbor Margaret put her false teeth? And then there were the practical things—how would he put on his trousers? She had once broken her arm, and found it impossible to do up her fly one-handed. She had had to ask her mother to do it for her. She found herself stealing a look at his fly to see whether there was some sort of Velcro fastening and then glanced away quickly. He might think she was perving at him, and, nice as he was, she had no intention of a bit of one-armed banditry while she was here.
    During the rest of the drive, Thom spoke to her only once more, to ask her how her mother was.
    Sabine looked at him in surprise.
    â€œHow do you know her? You must have been here forever.”
    â€œNot quite. But I was around as a lad. And then I left to work in England a couple of years after she did.”
    â€œShe never mentioned you.” She realized as soon as it came out how rude it sounded. But he didn’t seem offended. When he spoke, she had noticed, he did so with a kind of permanent time delay, as if measuring the words before he allowed them out.
    â€œI don’t know how much she’d remember me. I worked in the yard, and she was never a great one for the horses.”
    Sabine gazed at him, desperate to ask more questions. It seemed somehow strange to picture her mother here, friends, perhaps, with this one-armed horseman. She could picture her mother only ever in an urban environment: in their house in Hackney, its stripped floors, spider plants, and art-show posters broadcasting their liberal, lower-middle-class credentials. Or eating in one of the ethnic cafés in Kingsland Road, chatting earnestly to her long-earringed, angry female friends, trying to put off the ugly moment when she had to go back to writing her piece. Or arriving home in raptures from some arty film she had seen at the cinema, while Geoff, ever the realist, complained about its diversion from the German school’s traditional imagery. Or whatever.
    Thinking of Geoff made her stomach clench, and, annoyingly, provoked a renewed fluttering of nerves. She wondered, briefly, if he would try to write to her. Somehow knowing that he and Mum weren’t going to be together anymore made it all awkward. She didn’t know how to be with him anymore. He would probably find some new girlfriend within months, as Jim did, and then Mum would get dumped by Justin Stewartson and end up all bitter and upset and ask why men were “such aliens .” Well she wasn’t going to give her any sympathy. And she was never going to agree to go on holiday with Geoff if he got a new family. That was for sure.
    â€œHere we