The Way Back Home by Freya North Read Free Book Online Page B

might be prudent but they might not know the word. ‘I’m Binky.’ It was the first name that came into her head. Thank God it was two young girls she was lying to. The name sat perfectly well with them.
    ‘Are you visiting someone?’
    ‘Sort of,’ said Oriana, getting out of the car and closing the door thoughtfully. Do people lock their cars now, she wondered. She glanced at the other vehicles. Mercedes. BMW. Range Rover. They probably lock
them
.
    ‘We live in the Ice House,’ the little one, Kate, said.
    ‘The Ice House?’ said Oriana and Kate pointed across the cherry-walk lawn.
    The shack is called the Ice House? Someone
lives
in the shack?
    ‘We’re sisters,’ said the elder. ‘I’m Emma and I’m eight.’
    ‘Our mum is called Paula and our dad is called Rob,’ said Kate in a tone of voice which suggested she’d had to repeat this often. But Oriana was only half listening, moving slowly away from the children, ignoring their chatter, gravitating towards the house whether she wanted to or not.
    ‘Well, bye,’ Emma was saying.
    ‘See you later, alligator,’ Kate called after her.
    Suddenly, the girls were in the very periphery of Oriana’s consciousness and she did not respond.
    She
’s not very friendly, the girls concurred. We’ll not be inviting her to
our
place. We’ll not introduce her to
our
mum.
    Eighteen years. A little over half her life. Instantly, her adulthood was condensed and reduced to a flick of light-speed separating the time when she was last here from now. The new cars – they were incongruous; as unbedded and jarring as a new and overly ornamental shrubbery might be in an overgrown garden. But the house – it was wonderfully, frighteningly, unchanged. Everything was recognizable and known. The mineralized rust around the leaking rain hopper which she always thought would be soft and slimy to the touch until she’d shinned up the drainpipe at twelve years old and found it to be hard and cold. The cracked pane in the fanlight above the front door. The chunk of stone missing from the base of the pillar of the portico, like a wedge of cake stolen. The strangulating cords of wisteria claiming the walls as their own, the defensive march of rose bushes skirting the house.
    She started circumnavigating the building. Everything, denied for so long, felt forbidden. She moved lightly, quickly, holding her breath.
    The familiar feel of the gravel underfoot.
    The sound of it.
    Tiptoe.
    As in a dream, strange new details distorted the old reality. Curtains where there hadn’t been, now framing the windows of what had been the illustrator Gordon Bryce’s flat on the second floor. The customary tangle of flung bikes by the stone steps leading down to the cellars – but Oriana’s wasn’t amongst them. And no brambles by the yard. Instead, a residence now converted from the stables with an Audi parked outside on uniform cobbles.
    Where do you play hide-and-seek these days then?
    Oriana walked straight past her own front door at the side of the building, without once turning her head to acknowledge it. She was vaguely aware of the velvety-leaved pelargoniums in their soil-encrusted terracotta pots currently on the inside windowsills, where they’d be for another month or so before enjoying their summer sojourn out of doors. But she turned deaf ears to any sound that might seep through the gaps in the window frames. Those hateful old frames through which the icy breath of winter would slice into her sleep and the wasps in the summer would sneak in and target her.
    Suddenly she heard it. The groan and creak of the great old cedar of Lebanon. She hurried ahead, towards the grounds at the back of the house and finally it came into view.
    No one climbs me the way you used to, Oriana. The children are different these days. They play in different ways.
    She walked quickly to the tree, crept under its boughs and up to the trunk. There, behind its protective barrier of branches welcoming her