Son of Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

Only Jake guessed Mary would have made him swear not to tell. Whatever it was.
    Jake looked up, recognizing the song that was playing. It was Sandy Denny, ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’.
    He smiled, feeling a sweet sadness. Annie had always loved this song.
    ‘You’re a sweet woman, Mary Hubbard,’ he said, looking back at her. ‘But you must leave me be. I am as I am. If I loved your sister too much, then there’s no blame
in that. I’m not ready yet, okay?’
    ‘Okay. I’ll leave you be.’
    But she said it softly, and to his ears it sounded much like Annie would have said it, had Annie been there.
    A faint breeze ruffled the huge, makeshift screen, making the image ripple, as if the dreamlike aura of the ancient movie were suddenly revealed for what it was. A chimera. A fiction about a
life that now seemed equally a fiction.
    Even so, nothing, at that moment, seemed more real, more true, than what was unfolding on that screen.
    Sat there among those who loved him best, his face all but hidden in the half dark, Jake wiped away the tears that had been rolling down his cheeks unchecked. It was absurd, he knew, but this
scene – where Sergeant Troy stooped over the coffin of his dead love, Fanny Robin, and kissed her cold, dead lips – always got to him. Nothing had the power to move him more. Watching
it, he knew Troy’s despair; knew just how he could utter those awful, soul-destroying words to the living woman he had so cruelly and mistakenly married.
    To prefer the dead ideal to the living reality. It was absurd… but true.
    Beside him, Peter was quietly shaking with emotion. It was, as so often, all too close to be comfortable. Jake wanted to reach out and take his hand, but there was that awful restraint between
them – that inability to talk of the matter. And so each suffered it alone.
    As the final frame finished and the credits ran, Jake quickly made his way across to the back of the inn, squeezing through the packed back bar – where the men were crowded round the
tables, talking and smoking their pipes – and into the gents.
    He was standing there, relieving himself, when Tom Hubbard came and stood beside him.
    ‘And married the woman that had the gold…’
    Jake smiled. It was a line from an old song, and, as so often, it said perfectly what he had been thinking. He himself was no Troy – no adventurer. Oh, he had been in the past, but not
these days. No. Nowadays he was more of a Gabriel Oak figure, sturdy and reliable. But when it came to love…
    He glanced at his old friend. ‘It all comes full circle, don’t you think?’
    Tom shrugged. ‘I dunno. Watching that… well, the whole damn twentieth century might as well not have happened. I sat there thinking… this is about us , now .
Only, if none of that had happened – all that stuff that came between times – then we’d not have had the film. Ironic, eh?’
    ‘We live in ironic times.’
    ‘Maybe. Yet we’re comfortable enough, don’t you think?’
    Jake buttoned himself up. ‘Another beer?’
    Tom shook his head. ‘Not me, boy. I’m headin’ back. Need some rest before our trip tomorrow. But the girls are stayin’ on.’ He glanced at Jake and smiled.
‘We’re not abandoning you.’
    Again, there was something behind the words, only Jake was too muddled to work out what. He’d have another beer himself then go. Tom was right, after all. You needed your wits about you on
the road.
    They made their way back out into the long back bar. There, at the crowded central table, Geoff Horsfield, a tall man in his sixties – a historian by profession, who had run the school in
Corfe for the past twenty years and more – was holding sway.
    ‘I was just saying,’ he said, looking up at Jake and reaching out to hold his arm. ‘Some’at’s got to change. How we are… how we live… it can’t
go on. We’re driven as a species to evolve, socially as well as biologically. This here… this little pocket of