The Carousel by Rosamunde Pilcher Read Free Book Online Page A

made a pattern of time, like the minute hands of a clock, ticking life away.
    I felt philosophic, peaceful. And then, suddenly, very happy. This happiness caught me unawares, as I used to be caught unawares by the random ecstasies of childhood. I looked around me, as though the source of this reasonless euphoria could be seen, pinned down, remembered. I saw everything in that familiar kitchen with a rare and heightened perception, so that each humble and ordinary object appeared both pleasing and beautiful. The grain of the scrubbed table, the bright colours of the crockery on the dresser, a basket of vegetables, the symmetry of cups and saucepans.
    I thought about Daniel and Phoebe, rooting around together in Chips's dusty old studio. I was glad that I had not gone with them. I liked him. I liked his beautiful hands and his light, quick voice and dark eyes. But there was also something disturbing about him. I was not sure if I wanted to be disturbed.
    He had said, "You are not only exceptionally pretty, but you are talented as well."
    I was not used to being told I was pretty. My long straight hair was too pale, my mouth too big, my nose snub. Even Nigel Gordon, who—according to my mother—was in love with me, had never actually got around to saying that I was pretty. Smashing, maybe, or sensational, but never pretty. I wondered if Daniel was married and then laughed at myself, because my thought processes were so painfully obvious, and because it was exactly the question that my mother would have asked. My own self-ridicule broke the spell of that extraordinary moment of perception, and Phoebe's kitchen dissolved into its usual mundane self, left neat by Lily Tonkins before she had donned her head scarf and bicycled home to get her husband's tea.
     
    When tea was over, Daniel pushed back his cuff, looked at his watch, and said that he must go.
    "I wish you were staying here," said Phoebe. "Why can't you come back here? Fetch your things and then come back to us."
    But he said that he wouldn't. "Lily Tonkins has got quite enough on her plate looking after the pair of you."
    "But we'll see you again? You're down for a little?"
    He stood up. "A day or two, anyway." It sounded vague. "I'll be back to see you."
    "How are you going to get back to Porthkerris?"
    "There's probably a bus ..."
    I said, "I'll drive you in Phoebe's car. It's a mile to the [51]
    bus stop and it's still raining and you'll get soaked." "Don't you mind?" "Of course I don't mind."
    So he said good-bye to Phoebe and we went out and got into her battered old car, and I backed it cautiously out of the garage and we drove off, leaving Phoebe silhouetted in the lighted doorway of Holly Cottage, waving her good arm and wishing us a safe journey, as though we were setting off on some marathon rally.
    We bowled up the hill through the rain, past the golf club, onto the main road. "You're so clever to drive," he said admiringly.
    "But you can surely drive a car. Everybody can drive a car."
    "Yes, I can drive, but I simply hate it. I'm a total fool about anything mechanical." "Have you never had a car?"
    "I had to have one in America. Everybody has a car in America. But I never really felt at home with it. I bought it secondhand, and it was enormous, long as a bus, with a radiator like a mouth organ and huge, phallic headlights and exhaust pipes. It had automatic gears, too, and electrically operated windows, and some sort of supercharged carburetor. I was terrified of it. When I'd had it three years, I finally sold it, but by that time I'd only just worked out how to operate the heater."
    I began to laugh. I suddenly thought of Phoebe saying, when you settle down with a man, it is absolutely vital that he makes you laugh. Nigel, it was true, had never made me laugh much. On the other hand, he was a wizard with cars, and spent a good deal of his spare time either with his head under the hood of his M.G., or else prone beneath it, with only his feet sticking out,