Eden Falls Read Online Free PDF Page B

soon.’
    He groaned. ‘Do you mean you’re sending me away?’
    She nodded and adopted a stern expression. ‘I need to finish this.’ She turned back to the painting with that firmness of resolve which, generally speaking, was one of the qualities Amos admired in his wife but at this moment would have happily exchanged for something else: helpless desire perhaps; wanton lust. But he knew his Anna well. Nothing would be gained by pestering so he left her to it, resigned to breakfast for one and the relentlessly perky chatter of Norah Kelly.
    Anna Rabinovich hadn’t been looking for a safe harbour, but she had found one anyway. Since childhood she had embraced the principle of change and adventure, had always known that there was more than one life to be lived in the allotted span of one’s existence. But there was probably a limit, and these days she assumed that for her it had been reached. For now, at least, she wanted no more than she already had, and when her previous lives impinged on her present – when the memories barged in, unbidden – she felt a small wave of anxiety at the possibility that everything might change again. She was twenty-eight years old, and she had already known so many different ways to live. She had been the cosseted child of a merchant in Kiev; she had been the young wife of a Russian Jew reviled by her parents; she had been an immigrant, fleeing the pogroms and leaving Russia for England in search of sanctuary; she had become a mother and then a widow, and had known abject poverty; she had found peace and friendship in Netherwood, and forged relationships that would always sustain her; and now she was Anna Sykes, and she hoped this fundamental fact would never change, or anyway, not soon. She cherished the present because she understood how different it could be from what was to come.
    A woman can’t be permanently grateful, however. When she came downstairs to find Amos already gone and the table in disarray she felt a flash of annoyance: with him, with herself and with Norah. There was a pot of stewed tea, a silver rack bearing one slice of brittle toast and a dish that, judging by the unappealing traces of cold fat inside it, had once borne bacon or sausages but was now quite empty. There were crumbs on the tablecloth, lids off the preserves and no clean cutlery or china anywhere in evidence. The morning sun was unforgiving; it streamed through the windows, highlighting the sorry scene.
    ‘Norah!’
    Anna waited. Really, the girl had very little to accomplish in the mornings. They were such a small household, especially with Maya away. The child was in Lyme Regis with her governess, Miss Cargill, who had studied Greats at Cambridge and was now funding further academic study by tutoring Maya in all of her own enthusiasms. She took a lively, itinerant approach to teaching: at the moment they were fossil hunting at Church Cliffs, and would be gone for two weeks.
    ‘Norah!’
    Maid of no work, Amos called her, which would have been funny if it hadn’t been so depressingly true. Footsteps from the kitchen signalled her approach and then there she was, smiling all over her freckled face as if she couldn’t be more delighted to have been summoned.
    ‘Mrs Sykes,’ she said. ‘We’d given you up for lost, me and the mister.’
    Norah was from Limerick, where, she was fond of recalling, the pace of life was slow and what work there was to be done got done in its own sweet time. This interesting life philosophy hadn’t emerged until after she had been appointed.
    ‘Norah, do you think it might have been an idea to clear away Mr Sykes’s breakfast things? Do you think it might have been nicer for me to find table looking spick and span?’
    Anna’s Russian accent grew stronger when she was cross. Ordinarily, her command of English was near faultless; she had made a hobby of it, collecting idioms and correct pronunciations like other people collected stamps or china thimbles. Annoy her,