The Bell Ringers Read Online Free PDF Page B

got a bloody nerve criticising my life here when your career is hardly the sum of all you hoped for. Yes, you go to DC with the prime minister and you have dinner with the president in the White House but, Jesus, Eyam, you seem so damned unhappy and strung out.
    I’m doing what I do best and I am doing it very well. You don’t have the right to judge the decisions I’ve made, just as I have no right to question yours – and I never have.
    You deny yourself nothing except the truth about yourself; and while that may make it easier to see the faults in others it doesn’t necessarily make what you say true or welcome. By the way, you need a holiday.
    And you might have thanked me for dinner.
    Kate X
    To: Kate Lockhart
From: David Eyam
As ever, lovely to hear from you, Sister, though I thought your email was rather sharp. I don’t want us to fall out over this but I do not resile from the view that you are made for better things.
    When I said you were in danger of becoming a prisoner of your gift I simply meant that your job at Calverts, impressive though it is in many ways, is beneath your actual talent; also your humanity. This could have been expressed with more sensitivity and I apologise for being crass. Your remark that I denied myself everything but the truth was unscrupulous because you attacked me for what you suspect to be your own weakness. For the record, neither of us is that stupid. Thanks for dinner.
    Eyam X
    It was typical of him to write an apology that had the last word. The email remained in her inbox without being answered and was quickly buried as scores of new emails piled on top. But it stayed in her mind and she now recalled that she did write a long defence of her life at Calverts telling Eyam what she actually did; that for years after the crash her work was saving jobs and technology as huge sovereign funds took over struggling American companies, sacked thousands to make the numbers work and exploited or suppressed the innovations of those smaller companies. She said it was just dumb and narrow-minded of him not to see that this was important legal work, which was as much concerned with injustice as money.
    She never sent it. Then somehow it became too late to reply and a silence settled on their friendship that would turn out to be terminal, although at the back of her mind she’d always thought they’d make it up, and when he called that Saturday she had been really pleased, actually relieved.
    From the pocket in her purse she took out a slender wallet, which she flipped open to the two photographs. On the left was her husband Charlie Lockhart, dead from cancer, on the right her father, Sonny Koh, dead from suicide. She didn’t look at them often but she always kept the dead men in her life with her. They were always there. The little red diptych would now have to become a triptych of remembrance, as long as she could lay her hands on that picture of her and Eyam at Oxford, the only photograph she possessed of him.
    She stood the open frame on the bedside table and slid down into the bed to watch the footage of the riots that had been violently put down the year before. Suddenly it occurred to her that she was guilty of ignoring Eyam’s less attractive side – in particular his love of exercise of power. For some time before that dinner in New York she’d noticed him becoming colder, more removed and, she had to admit, objectionably pleased with his own opinions. Doubt made almost every personality acceptable to Kate. But as he rose higher and higher, Eyam had lost the ability to express the slightest worry about himself or his decisions. She had to confess that he had become a little boring. ‘You were a little bit of a prig,’ she said to the room.
    Eventually she slept. The following day she stayed in bed latewatching the rooks plummet into the trees on the other side of the rocky spur,