The Carousel by Rosamunde Pilcher Read Free Book Online Page B

and conversation reduced to requests for a larger monkey wrench.
    I said, comfortingly, "You can't be good at everything. If you're a successful artist, it would be too much to ask to be a mechanic as well."
    "That's what's so fantastic about Phoebe. She paints like a dream. She could have made a really great name for herself if she hadn't happily subjugated her talent in creating a home for Chips . . . and for all the stray students like myself who lived with them and worked with them and learned so much from them. Holly Cottage was a sort of refuge for so many young and struggling artists. There were always immense, delicious meals, and order and cleanliness and warmth. You never forget that sort of security and comfort. It instills in you a standard of good living—and I mean 'good' in the true sense of the word—for the rest of your life."
    It was marvellously satisfying to hear another person state aloud what I had always felt myself about Phoebe, and yet, somehow, had never been able to express.
    I said, "We're the same, you and I. When I was a child, it was just about the only time I ever cried, when I had to say good-bye to Phoebe, and get on the train and go back to London. And yet once I was home again, back with my mother, and with my own room, and all my own things around me, it was all right. And by the next day, I was always quite happy again, and involved, and glued to the telephone, ringing up all my friends."
    "The tears would have been the direct result of the insecurity of two different worlds touching. Nothing makes one more miserable."
    I thought about this. It made sense. I said, "I suppose so."
    "Actually, I can't imagine you being anything but a happy little girl."
    "Yes, I was happy. My parents were divorced, but they were both wise and intelligent people. And it all happened when I was very little, so that it didn't leave what you might call a lasting scar."
    "You were lucky."
    "Yes, I was. I was always loved and I was always wanted. You can't ask more than that out of any childhood."
    Now the road sloped and curved towards Porthkerris. Through the murk, the lights of the harbour sparkled far below us. We came to the gates of the Castle Hotel, and turned in, and made our way up the winding drive, the avenue of oak trees. There was an open space, with tennis courts and putting greens, and then a wide gravel sweep in front of the hotel. Lights shone from windows and the glassed revolving door. I drew up between a Porsche and a Jaguar, pulled on the brake and turned off the engine.
    "I can't help feeling very slightly out of place. Do you know, I've never been here before. Nobody's ever been rich enough to bring me."
    "Come in and I'll buy you a drink."
    "I'm not suitably dressed."
    "Neither am I." He opened the door. "Come on."
    We left the car, looking dusty and forlorn between its aristocratic neighbours, and Daniel led the way through the revolving doors, and inside it was tremendously warm and thickly carpeted and expensive-smelling. It was that slack period between tea and cocktail time, and there were not many people about; only a man in golf clothes, reading the Financial Times, and an elderly couple watching television. 
    The hall porter gave us a cold glance, then recognised Daniel and hastily rearranged his expression.
    "Good evening, sir."
    "Good evening," said Daniel and headed straight in the direction of the bar. But it was my first visit to the Castle, and I wanted to linger and inspect. Here was a writing room, and here, visible through open double doors, an overheated, overupholstered apartment arranged as a card room. In this, by a blazing fire, sat four ladies around a bridge table. I paused for a moment, my attention caught; the scene was so reminiscent of some play from the thirties. I felt that somewhere I had seen it all before: the long brocade curtains, the chintz-covered chairs, the set piece of the elaborate flower arrangement.
    Even the ladies wore the correct clothes: the