The Custodian of Paradise Read Online Free PDF

waterlines of the tides and above them those of storm surges, the rocks growing a darker green the higher up the “steps” I looked.
    From this prospect I could see the shape of the entire settlement. On the highest point of open land stood a small white church with a single steeple, the church front facing me so squarely it might have been a mere facade. Within the Roman arch that once had framed the door was a sheet of plywood. In the belfry, dangling like the fragment of a noose and swaying slowly in the breeze, was a piece of rope from which the bell had hung.
    Starting directly in front of the church, a cart road zigzagged downhill among the houses. It consisted of two paths on either side of a ridge of high grass, wheel ruts that had been worn so deep it might be centuries before anything took root in them again.
    All the houses faced the sea and, like the houses of Quinton, had their windows boarded up. Loreburn looked to be in a permanent state of mourning, each family withdrawn to endless solitude behind those boarded windows. The houses were like faces whose eyes and ears had been patched and whose mouths had been taped shut.
    There was nothing that looked like it might have served as a school, though given how few people had lived here, it was possible that the children of Loreburn had been taught to read and write in the front room of one of these houses.
    I searched among them for the place that he had mentioned, starting from the top and working down. I scanned from side toside, counting the houses as I went, conducting my own census, looking for a window, a rogue pane of glass, a door with a latch, a pile of firewood, a clothesline. But I saw no sign that any of the seventeen houses had recently been lived in. Nor any that someone was waiting for me.
    “Patrick,” I said, “which one is yours?”
    “Not mine,” he said. “Just a place I fixed up, that’s all.”
    He pointed slightly away from Loreburn, where, almost hidden among the largest of the trees and nearer to the beach than any of the other houses, stood a house that was larger by one storey than its fellows. A three-storey house perhaps a hundred yards removed from its nearest neighbour. House number one, or house number eighteen. The house of someone who, for some reason, had chosen not only to live apart from the others but out of sight of them, and almost out of sight of anyone regarding Loreburn from the sea.
    There were still a few remnants in the water of the wharves and fishing flakes, posts that had once supported them protruding at jagged angles from the water like the masts of sunken ships.
    The only wharf still intact lay in front of Patrick’s house. It was not new but looked like an old one that had been restored. After manoeuvring the boat to a ladder on the side of the wharf, he tied the trunks with khaki-coloured canvas straps to which he hooked and fastened the nylon rope of his boat’s small winch. He cranked with both hands as he had done at the wharf at Quinton, but there it had been much easier because it had only been necessary to lower the trunks into the boat, not lift them from it. I watched the trunks sway and revolve as they rose from his boat.
    Also in the trunks were the notebooks. The ones in which for years I had kept a journal. And the ones Sarah said David had written and had told her to send to me in case … I knew that I should not think of the notebooks or of my children now. What would Patrick do at this point if I began to cry? I stared hard at the trunks, terrified that the rope or winch would break or the trunks would come loose from the hooks and their contents spill irretrievably into the water.
    By the alacrity with which he went about the business of hoisting the trunk from the boat, he might have landed travel trunks at Loreburn every day. There were glistening drops of what might have been either sweat or seaspray in his hair, both perhaps. He drew the back of his hand across his mouth.
    “Do