The Bell Ringers Read Online Free PDF

before. She turned the volume down and switched on her phone. Why hadn’t she picked up? It was inconceivable because she had been in the office that Saturday, working on the last details of a deal that went through on the following Monday, and they were waiting to hear news of the other side’s response. There was no way her phone would have been switched off then. And if she’d been speaking to someone else she would have received the message immediately on hanging up. She tried to remember where she’d listened to the message and what she had been looking at when she heard Eyam’s voice, but nothing came to her.
    She flung open the windows to a damp and windless night; tiny particles of moisture glinted in the light. Her suite overlooked a wooded valley and she could just hear the murmur of the river below. She went back through the messages and when she reached Eyam’s voice placed the phone on the windowsill and pressed the loudspeaker button. ‘Hello there, Sister – it’s me. Eyam,’ he started. ‘I felt like having a chat but it seems you’re busy.’ Eyam was there with her in the room, present and alive. When it was over, she reached for a cigarette, lit up and listened to the message again, straining to hear every sound and inflection in themessage. This she did three or four times, staring out into the dark. Then, shaking her head, she swore to the night and viciously stubbed the cigarette out on the stone window ledge. She stepped back into the room, pierced by a shaft of grief, and sank onto the bed. Eyam was dead and it was doing her no good to keep listening to him.
    After a few minutes she reached for her small laptop, opened it and logged onto Calvert-Mayne’s web mail, using a succession of security passwords, which she kept in her wallet. She began to read the dozen or so emails between them, which she had stored on the site. Up until the final exchange, the emails were rushed but always affectionate. The break came after an exchange that followed dinner in a restaurant on the Upper East Side. Eyam was passing through New York on the way back to London from Washington. The fatigue showed in his eyes and his conversation was harsher than she had ever known it. She remembered returning to their table and finding him lost in thought. When she spoke he looked up, disorientated and in that moment she knew she could have loved him – no, that she did love him in the most unexpressed way possible. She wanted to take his head in her hands and hold his face to hers. He saw what she was thinking and they talked of becoming lovers that night, in his case with scathing and rather hurtful objectivity. She reminded him that once, for a brief period when they were undoubtedly too young, they had been lovers.
    â€˜We didn’t just go to bed, we made love for an entire week,’ she’d said. But he ignored it and then to protect herself she’d matched his flippancy and his cruelty, and very soon it was impossible to return to the point before love and sex were so coolly dismissed. Eyam had a way of moving a conversation along, recasting history, skirting any subject he wished to avoid, and when you challenged him he would turn his mild Socratic genius on you and elicit so many unwilling affirmatives that you ended up agreeing with him.
    And on that night he made his usual diversions, but then started criticising her life in New York, which he claimed was ‘unmoored’ and lacked moral principle. Sitting back with his wine, he told her that although she was successful, rich and sought after she had put down no roots in New York. She was like a beech tree – the tree with theshallowest root system. He called her his big, beautiful beech. She didn’t laugh at the pun.
    Then a few days later she fired off an email to him late at night.
    From: Kate Lockhart
To: David Eyam
You’ve