Autumn Laing Read Online Free PDF

boundaries indeterminate. Taking her hand in his large knobbly one and leading her forefinger on a journey across the old atlas, Alexander Keith Johnston, F.R.G.S., 1857, on Mercator’s Projection. A great book all the way from the family home on the bank of the Nith between the lofty hills and fertile holms of Dumfries, the largest private house in the county. The book. Yes. Shelved there once upon a time in his own grandfather’s library, another Thomas Anderson in a line of them from the Border country, the book’s elephant folio sheets giving off a smell of the other world on the other side when he laid it open on his broad oak desk, as she stood close beside him in his studio in the house where her own mother had been born, a dwelling elegant and Victorian, on the fashionable foreshore of Brighton.
    To speak of the other side is to refer to death by another name. Even then she knew it. Her grandfather’s jacket smelling of Erinmore tobacco. The grip of his hand making the first joint of her finger bend like a hockey stick on the heavy paper asthey made their imaginary journey together, crossing the ocean (whose breathing and sighing is with her in the kitchen at this moment), so firmly guided by him then; ‘We sail past the stormy tip of South America, then touch South Africa. A big tack between Crozet and Kerguelen islands. And here we are already!’ Leaning together, his moustache tickling her cheek now, ‘The bottom of Australia. I—think—I—can—just—see—us. Can you see us? Yes! There we are! See, the pair of us?’ His free arm around her, cuddling, just the two of them in the quiet of their own story, among the smell of old books and turpentine. She misses him. It is already four years since his housekeeper, Mrs Dress, found him lying on his back beside the long kitchen table, his feet together, a familiar old man clad in pyjamas and slippers, his glasses and his pipe and tobacco pouch neatly arranged beside him, his striped cottons freshly laundered. But, oddly, without his plaid dressing-gown. Perhaps he thought the ancient garment unfit for the occasion? ‘So there you are,’ Mrs Dress said, stepping around him, and made herself a cup of tea before telephoning his daughter. He had evidently felt the approach of the moment. A wavering light at the periphery of his vision, was it? A mild anxiety and tightening across his chest? We shall never know. And had prepared himself so as to cause the least shock and trouble to those whom he cared for and whom he was about to leave on this side.
    Edith wonders if she will always miss him. He had no time to say goodbye but was gone, suddenly, without a word. She had found her mother by the telephone, sitting on the big camphor wood chest in the hall, weeping. Will she always carry her loss as she goes on through her life, Edith wonders, becoming old herself one day, a grandmother, her grandfathera noble resident of her childhood memory, loved and missed? Will it always be like that? Or do our dead eventually leave us? He is her inspiration for this life that she has chosen, and she needs his approval for her work. Art. Her mother’s father. But Edith does not call herself an artist. She is far too uncertain of herself for that; too deeply conditioned to the habit of womanly modesty to openly admit the secret ambition of her heart. He, her grandfather on her mother’s side—whenever sides were taken—had been either happily ignorant of or indifferent to the innovative schools and styles of his time. The great artistic debates and feuds had left him untouched. His palette throughout his life a range of golden browns with their own inner light, achieved with a knowledge of the classic craft. He had seen no reason to snub the tradition that had given him his splendid livelihood. He was not a visionary. He did not see it as his business to challenge the authority of his masters. His subjects were leisurely pastoral scenes, farm buildings, crops and roads