Antarctica Read Online Free PDF

monkey-puzzle shadows poured into the sitting room. Cordelia could sit under the light of the reading lamp in daytime and pretend it was night. Time altered, took on unfathomable dimensions. Sometimes, when the weather was warm and the rhododendron buds opened, she walked naked around the sheltered house, brushing against the smooth, damp leaves, the swollen blooms, and petals fell around her feet. Nobody ever saw her.
    *
    Hunchbacked clouds slide across the headland at Strandhill, grey-dull clusters gathering momentum out along the cliffs while behind them night discharges darkness. A mossy parchment with a view of the sea. Nothing and everything has changed. Cordelia feels tired. She feels that she has run a very, very long race and now her heartbeat is slowing down to normal. She puts her hand up to her face, takes comfort in her hot breath. She feels the wind dying, the slop of ocean on the strand. She pulls her coat around her, fastens up the buttons. She waits. Not long now. She closes her eyes, remembers rhododendron petals falling, pale pink blooms and grass, damp, long grass, beneath her feet. The snip, snip of a hedge clipper, his scissors cutting her hair, hot, broken sleep, a green bruise fading on her neck, fallen apples, his hand winding her hair, the pale man in the waiting room.
    She wakes to the sound of a small parade, people marching across the hill, holding torches, gearing up formidnight. Brass, trumpet music. A boy in costume beating a drum. They march in their own time. Girls in mini-skirts , twirling batons, making for the lights of town.
    ‘Cordelia.’ The woman to whom the voice belongs stands over her, keeping her hands hidden. ‘You don’t know me. I believe you knew my husband; he was the doctor,’ she says.
    Was the doctor? Was?
    ‘I have come here to tell you that the doctor won’t be coming.’
    Cordelia says nothing. She just sits there and listens.
    ‘You didn’t think I knew?’
    The doctor’s wife is a lithe, small woman with lots of white in her eyes. She pulls the belt of her raincoat tight around her waist as if to make it smaller. ‘It was obvious . When your husband comes home from house-calls with sand in his shoes, his shirt-buttons done up wrong, hair brushed, smelling of mints, and a gigantic appetite, a wife knows.’ She takes out a pack of cigarettes and offers Cordelia one. Cordelia shakes her head, watches the woman’s face in the flame of the lighter. Heart-shaped face, short eyelashes, a determined chin.
    ‘You write nice letters.’
    A drum is beating on the headland.
    ‘You know the funniest thing?’ the doctor’s wife says. ‘The funniest thing is, I used to pray he’d leave me. I used to get down on my knees and say one Our Father and ten Hail Marys and a Glory Be for him to leave me. He kept your letters and things in the attic; I used tohear him up there at night, getting the ladder. He must have thought I was deaf. Anyway, I was sure he’d leave me when I discovered them, when he walked in. If it’s any consolation, he was in love with you. I’m sure of that. I didn’t have the heart to leave him, nor him me. We were cowards, you see. It’s a damned tragedy.’
    She looks out towards the ocean and composes herself.
    ‘Look at your hair. Your hair’s white. What age are you?’
    ‘Not yet forty.’
    The doctor’s wife shakes her head, reaches out to touch Cordelia’s hair.
    ‘I feel like I’m a hundred,’ says Cordelia.
    The doctor’s wife lies down on her back in the reeds and smokes. Cordelia feels no ill-will towards this woman, none of the biting envy she imagined.
    ‘How did you know I would be here? Nobody knew, only he and I. And I thought it absurd when he first asked me to wait.’
    ‘He has a terrible memory, writes everything down. And he believes his handwriting is illegible. You’re pencilled in. “C. Strandhill at midnight.”’
    ‘Strandhill at midnight.’
    ‘Not very romantic, is it? You’d think he would remember