The Home Corner by Ruth Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

and adjusting the belt of my dress so it sat at the right, cowgirl-ish slant on my hips. It was a dark-blue shirt-dress with little pearlised buttons that Stella had insisted Ed would find irresistible.
    ‘He’ll think you’re gorgeous in that,’ she’d said.
    Although when I got there he was nowhere to be seen. And how could he think I was gorgeous or resist the buttons on my dress if he wasn’t even there?
    I spent most of the party standing in the kitchen with a boy called Craig Dillard. Craig was in my geography class at school: he was studying geography, like me, and he was going to carry on studying it at university. And everything about geography, that night, had suddenly seemed extremely unappealing.
    ‘I’m going over land erosion,’ I remember Craig saying, quite early on in our conversation.
    ‘What?’ I asked, clutching onto the enormous glass of red wine I’d poured for myself on arriving.
    ‘I’m going over land erosion,’ he said again.
    He was tall and thin, Craig, and there was nothing wrong with that; it was just that he kept looming in too close. His eyes were intense, blurry things, like overripe blackberries, and they had a way of boring humourlessly into you. I kept having to look away for light relief. I remember peering up at the frieze stuck around the top of the kitchen wall – a cheerful repeating pattern of lemons – and also at an enormous clock above our heads. It was like a clock you might have found on a Paris railway platform circa 1937, except there was nothing romantic about this one. Its hands just clunked slow and inevitable around the dial.
    ‘Have you revised land erosion yet?’ Craig persisted.
    I gulped some more wine from the glass I was holding and wondered where Ed was. My heart already felt full of his absence. I was in love, that was the problem. I got here at nine , I thought, peering up again at the clock, I got here at nine, and it’s still not even ten. And already I had drunk too much.I was aware, standing beneath Craig’s stooping figure, of movement and colour at the edges of my vision, and of a jumbled clatter of words falling without meaning into my ears. He was saying something now about basalt . About basalt and granite and limestone quarries. About quartz. About pearlite. I thought about the buttons on my dress. And where was Ed? Where was the host of this party? There were a lot of dark rooms off the hallway with the scent of cigarettes emerging from them and the sound of music and low conversation, and I felt as if I was standing in the wrong house; a house that was never supposed to have me in it as a guest. It was impossible to make out who was in those rooms, so I remained in the kitchen which was at least reassuring – being a kitchen – despite having Craig Dillard in it.
    ‘Za’ clock uppair ackerchy working?’ I asked, my heart a lead weight of disappointment.
    Craig didn’t reply. He just stared, as if mesmerised.
    Now I wondered if the red wine had coloured my lips. They often went a kind of burgundy colour if I had not applied enough lipstick. Or lip gloss – if I had not put on enough lip gloss that evening. My lips went like that in the winter. Maybe that was why Craig was looking at them. Nothing did appear to be wrong with the clock, in any case; it was probably, I felt, more likely that something was wrong with me . Or possibly with Time: maybe Time, that evening, had developed a strange, elastic quality. It had begun to seem like a lost weekend  now, the party at Ed McRae’s house, a kind of timeless cave. I felt like Persephone, having eaten the pomegranate seeds and unable to find her way back out. I swayed and swigged wine and listened to Craig talking about pearlite and put my hand by accident onto a hot slice of pizza that someone had put down on the kitchen table.
    ‘You all right?’ asked Craig, his face looming in with concern.
    ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m fine’ – although I had in fact scalded my hand quite