Coincidence: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

a good word: “hitsuzen”.’
    â€˜ “Hitsuzen”?’ She puckers her lips on the unfamiliar term.
    â€˜Hitsuzen is an event that happens according to some preordained plan or design. Something that was always supposed to happen.’
    â€˜A bit like Insha’Allâh?’
    â€˜A bit. “Deo volente” is what the early Christians would have said. If God wishes. Hitsuzen is more a property of a past event. Something happened because it was hitsuzen. Because it was supposed to happen. The Japanese also have the word “guzen”, which is something that occurs by chance. A guzen doesn’t belong to any greater scheme of things. It’s just random, if you like. In Japanese philosophy, everything that happens is either guzen or hitsuzen.’
    Clementine Bielszowska exhales. ‘You’re losing the thread,’ she says. ‘Can we stick to English?’
    â€˜If you insist.’
    â€˜I do.’ She offers him a benign smile.
    â€˜You need to promise me something.’
    â€˜Usually when someone says that it’s a good time not to promise anything at all,’ she says.
    â€˜I don’t want you to psychoanalyse me,’ he says. ‘This isn’t that kind of problem.’
    â€˜In that case,’ she says, ‘it is a very easy promise to make.’
    â€˜I’m serious, Clementine.’
    â€˜So am I, dear boy.’ She is observing him with professional relish.
    â€˜There is nothing in this story that you can help me with,’ he says. ‘There are no neuroses to resolve. There are no fixes. In six days it will all be over, one way or another. Azalea will be dead. Or she won’t be.’
    A shadow interrupts the stream of sunshine from the narrow window. A pigeon has landed on the windowsill. It bobs its head expectantly, peering through the glass.
    â€˜He comes for crumbs,’ Thomas says. He takes a biscuit from a tin, crumbles it in his hand and opens the window. The pigeon retreats a little way. Thomas scatters the fragments on the sill, and in moments the bird is back.
    Thomas settles himself again in his chair. ‘Perhaps I should tell you the story of the seagull,’ he says.

5
    January 1978–January 1984
    A zalea Lewis, the girl who was almost christened Azaliah Yves, owed her life to a seagull. The situation arose because Marion Yves was all set to become an unmarried mother. We should remember that in 1978, in villages like the one where Marion was born and raised, single motherhood wasn’t the lifestyle choice it is today. Perhaps, in a city, Marion might have registered as just another statistic, and on city streets she might have pushed a pram unnoticed. But this wasn’t Dublin or London. It wasn’t even Douglas. This was the village of Port St Menfre, a clutch of whitewashed stone cottages that jostled down a precipitous hillside towards a small shallow harbour on the coast of the Isle of Man. Here, when Marion took to the street with baby and pram, heads would turn and tongues would wag, and this would be the only way that it ever could be, for her business was the business of the village, just as their business was hers. In Port St Menfre, every face was familiar. If a girl walked out with a man, people would know it from the top of Haven Hill to the far corner of the bay before the couple could even make it home. When Gideon Robertson, the fisherman, moved out of his dockside rooms in 1976 and moved into 4 Briny Hill Walk, where Marion had previously lived alone, this was the main subject of conversation for almost a week. When the community could bear it no longer, the Reverend Doctor Jeremiah Lender was dispatched to seek assurances from the couple that their living arrangements were purely commercial; a case perhaps of landlady and tenant rather than a matter of sinful cohabitation. The Reverend emerged from the cottage looking grim. Had excommunication been an option, then