Coincidence: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

relieved the vicar of the baby. For an instant it looked as if he might also deliver an uppercut.
    â€˜Please,’ protested the vicar weakly, ‘she isn’t baptised yet.’
    â€˜She needs a bloody doctor, not a baptism,’ said Hall, passing Azaliah to her mother.
    â€˜But we’ve so nearly finished.’
    â€˜Stuff it,’ said Marion, taking the baby from Hall, ‘we’ve had enough.’
    â€˜But my child,’ insisted the vicar, ‘in the eyes of the Church we have yet to . . .’
    â€˜Stuff your bloody baptism,’ crowed Marion, ‘and stuff all this.’ She flung her Book of Common Prayer with all of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s finely crafted words at the vicar. The book bounced off him and landed in the cold water of the font with a splash.
    â€˜Come on,’ Marion cried to the congregation. ‘We’re going.’ Whereupon she, and the three godfathers, and Azaliah Yves covered with her own blood and still only partially baptised, and a dozen or more of the assembled worshippers, stalked out of the church and into the secular world that lay beyond.

4
    June 2012
    T here is jeopardy, Thomas Post thinks, in cultivating a psychoanalyst as a friend. How much of the friendship is sincere? Can he ever escape her instinct to analyse? If he whiles away time in her company, is she, perhaps, still at work, surreptitiously psychoanalysing him?
    Dr Clementine Bielszowska may not be the most prepossessing of characters, sunk in her chair like a little weathered owl, peering through her half-moon spectacles, intemperately tapping her walking stick on the wooden floor; but as a psychoanalyst her reputation is exalted. No matter, as she would airily say to Thomas with a dismissive wave, that she hasn’t practised for almost thirty years; no matter that she engagingly disavows the discipline. ‘I don’t even believe most of it,’ she often says. Perhaps this is true; but she is nonetheless a disciple of Freud and Jung, and she does still tutor students in the dark arts. It isn’t hard to imagine her with a notebook and pen in a wing armchair, lips tightly pursed, while a patient on a couch agonises over buried infatuations, complexes and phobias. It isn’t difficult either, as she hunkers down in Thomas’s fifth-floor office, to imagine her agile mind at work on Thomas’s fragile psyche.
    Thomas has turned away from the window and is looking forlorn. His visitor gazes at him with calculating eyes. ‘Explain it to me,’ she says.
    â€˜Explain what?’ Thomas strikes a faintly defensive pose.
    â€˜A little while ago you said that you thought Azalea might be dead.’ She is tapping on the floorboards with the rubber end of her stick.
    â€˜No I didn’t. I said . . . I said she isn’t dead yet .’
    â€˜It’s the “yet” that I don’t understand. And you said that her coincidences were . . . what? Proof of something?’
    He is wide-eyed now. ‘Evidence,’ he says, ‘not necessarily proof. But compelling, all the same.’
    â€˜Evidence of what? Destiny?’
    â€˜It’s a good word, “destiny”. Yes. I do like destiny.’ He ponders this, tugging uncomfortably on his earlobe. ‘Or “kismet”, as the Turks say, which implies . . . I don’t know . . .’ he swings his arm around as if in search of a thesaurus, ‘predetermination.’
    â€˜Predetermination?’
    â€˜Or something like it.’ He gives a grin that radiates apprehension. He isn’t comfortable with this line of questioning. His limbs are twitching as if assailed by invisible needles. He turns his face away. ‘What if I don’t have an explanation?’
    â€˜My dear boy,’ she says, ‘you always have an explanation.’
    â€˜Do I?’
    â€˜You do.’
    He relaxes just a little. ‘The Japanese have