Eden Falls Read Online Free PDF

with some satisfaction as it leapt from the stem and into the air. Another, then another, and then she stopped, thinking that if this were Maya’s game instead of her own she would certainly forbid it. She sat down on a convenient bench and tucked her hands under her legs, as if to keep them from further mischief. She was small and slight and colourfully clad in a blue frock and an Indian shawl that depicted exotic flowers in yellow, crimson and white: gaudy flowers she doubted existed, even in India. She was hatless; her preferred condition at a time of day when she knew there would be no passers-by to judge her unrespectable. Her hair – blonde, cropped to just below the jawline – looked tousled, as if she had yet to brush it, which was indeed the case.
    On her bench, watching the day begin, Anna considered the light; the way it filtered through the haze of early morning and the leaves of the trees, and fell across the grass in a dappled, lacy carpet. There was no warmth in this dawn sunshine, merely the suggestion of it. Why not, she thought, depict exactly this on the walls of Marcia de Lisle’s summerhouse? Or perhaps each wall of the hexagonal building could show another phase of the day: dawn through to dusk, the light waxing and waning on its progress. The idea excited her and she stood abruptly, startling a pair of pigeons that had ventured too close, lulled into complacency by her stillness. The birds erupted into ungainly flight and alighted on a gas lamp, from where they watched her with beady, mistrustful eyes. Galvanised by her thoughts, anxious to commit them to paper, Anna walked briskly through the garden and across the road to the elegant Georgian house. She pushed open the door and entered the hallway, and the grandfather clock struck six, as if in greeting. Norah, the maid of all work, heard the latch click shut and stuck her head around the door of the parlour.
    ‘Morning missus,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Beat me to it again?’
    Anna smiled, but abstractedly, and without pausing to pass the time of day she took the stairs, two at a time, all the way up to the top floor of the house where once there would have been a nursery and servants’ bedrooms, but which was now furnished with desks, easels and shelf after shelf of artists’ materials. She took up a paintbrush and a palette of water-colours and, at a draughtsman’s board on which a large sheet of paper had been attached, ready for just such a moment as this, she started to duplicate the images in her head.
    An hour later she was still there and so absorbed in her work that she didn’t hear her husband’s footsteps on the stairs, clomping upwards from the first-floor landing. Amos Sykes might be an MP these days, but he still dressed like a miner, and on the occasions when even he deemed it proper to wear a suit he refused to put anything on his feet other than sturdy boots better suited to a pit yard than the House of Commons. Rightly or wrongly, Amos judged a man by his footwear as much as by his principles. A fellow in two-tone calfskin spectators with a sole no thicker than a rasher of back bacon was not a man to be trusted. For a reasonable man, Amos was unreasonably stubborn in this regard.
    ‘Morning, Rembrandt,’ he said now.
    His wife looked at him and rolled her eyes, then returned to her work. He laughed at his own joke, since she wouldn’t, and then he came up behind her, lifted her hair and kissed the soft nape of her neck.
    ‘Can you see what I’m getting at?’ Anna said, stepping back into the circle of his arms. He tilted his head left and then right.
    ‘Dawn, I’d say. Sunrise over Bedford Square.’
    She was pleased. ‘For that,’ she said, ‘you get this,’ and she turned around and kissed him on the mouth, lingeringly, as if all she had to do today was this, and she was committed to doing it well. When at last she broke away they held each other’s gaze for a beat, then she said, ‘I’ll be down