Long Lies the Shadow Read Online Free PDF

pregnant.”
    Gin stares at her. The lenses have the odd effect of making the doctor’s pupils small and far away. “I can’t be,” she stutters. The doctor squints sceptically at her, and her glasses slip down her nose. “I mean –,” says Gin, “I thought –”. She does not finish.
    Simon’s child.
    Doctor Oldman shifts the black rims back up her thin nose. “About twelve weeks.”
    Twelve weeks. Is it only twelve weeks since Simon took himself from her life as suddenly as he had re-entered it?
    A white car, heading directly at them.
    Gin had returned to England duty-bound, for want of purpose. The faintness in her head as the plane lifted from a tarmac rippled with heat, a nausea only now equated with something other than grief.
    His hands, gripping the wheel.
    She continues to stare at her General Practitioner. Doctor Oldman is new to the practice. In some ways she reminds Gin of Nick Retief, hiding behind the authority of her position. Perhaps from embarrassment, perhaps out of confusion at Gin’s silence, the doctor has started talking at her rapidly, writing notes, making arrangements for regular check-ups, midwife appointments, further tests.
    His hand, outstretched to her.
    This has been her journey back to London. Dirty, crowded, desperate London. Squashed tubes, uncaring commuters, angry cabs,politics and rhetoric, repressed rage. Lonely London. But dear London, dependable London. Home all the same. Home. She had breathed a sigh of relief to escape her other home, the claustrophobia of Africa’s south. The air less free there, polluted with its past. Somehow England’s stains have bled with time into the very walls. Somehow they wound her less, somehow she feels less raw. Something endures here. Walking past the sturdy fragility of Parliament, the black majestic statues of Empire, the winter sun is a hazy shimmer of assurance on the other side. Over the bridge, the river beneath is a sheen of rippled glass. Watching the tiny white specks of seagulls soar above the polished gold Westminster spires. But lonely still. And grey, cold London. February, mercifully short given its infinite nights, mercifully gone before her return. March. She walked a lot, hoping Simon’s eyes would fade from her mind. The faintness and the nausea ever-present. Simon’s death, her father’s, these things have changed her.
    She had sat, irretrievably distant, as her colleagues lectured at her after her absence. She had looked at them, once her friends, seen them hardened by avarice and changed by commerce. She had enough money to live on, albeit simply; she could survive. Her silence had elicited shock, her resignation recrimination.
    Gin leaves the doctor’s surgery in a daze, starts the half-mile back up the Portobello Road, past the market stalls, back up to the Gate. The market is busy despite the damp, overcast afternoon. Lights are strung from stall to stall, looped against the dimness. April and its promise of spring. The daffodils have fought their bright and yellow way through the ground, pushing stiff green stems through wet earth with that unknown life force. The same life force as that within her.
    Twelve weeks.
    The days are longer and lighter now, though still grey. London has a thousand shades of grey. Green-grey, brown-grey, blue-grey; river, houses, sky.
    Simon’s child. From his last two days of life.
    “Can I help you with anything?” says a woman’s voice.
    Gin, stopped at a bookstall, is staring sightlessly at the hard spines of children’s books. She focuses.
Peter Pan, The Famous Five, Nancy Drew, Grimm’s Fairytales
. Books from her own childhood, which her dad had read to her and her twin brother before bedtime. Back in the big house, upstairs. And she had always been afraid of the giants and the witches, of the
tokoloshe
, the long-tailed bogeyman that Evelyn their nanny had told them about. The
tokoloshe
was the reason Evelyn put her bed on bricks, as if on stilts. This, she had confided