The Darkening Read Online Free PDF Page A

make apple pancakes Sunday.’
    ‘You can make them.’
    ‘I really can’t.’
    They smiled at each other.
    ‘You’ll be fine,’ said Suzette. She paddled his bum with the dryer. ‘Now, go get me the blue suitcase.’

    The rain on the roof grew louder until it was as steady and manic as applause at a rock concert.
    Nicholas lay staring at the ceiling boards. This had been Suzette’s bedroom - lying in his own old room would have made the image of a failed artist too complete.
    His mother was wrong. No one had regarded Cate’s death as an accident. Certainly, Cate’s brother, her parents, her friends, their mutual friends, even his own London friends, had all said the word ‘accident’ aloud, but the silences that followed debased its currency. An undertow of quiet blame dragged the time along whenever he met his in-laws. They knew he could have taken the car, if only he’d bothered to speak with the neighbour. They knew he’d already dropped his bike once in the rain, on a roundabout in Wembley. They knew that he knew Cate would be up the ladder when he telephoned. Their daughter’s death may have been an accident, but it had been an avoidable one. Cate’s had been a cruelly swift ending, and the blame for it would roost forever darkly on Nicholas’s shoulders.
    The Nicholas Close ‘Welcome to Widowerhood’ freeze-out had been choreographed with a subtlety that was a credit to London society. It began with a dwindling of phone calls, ratcheted to a sharp decline in dinner invitations, and climaxed complete as a solid, glacial wall of quiet.
    Nicholas had tried to keep working. But it was hard to be productive and persuasive when one kept seeing things that, logically, shouldn’t be there.
    The motorcycle accident had left him almost unscratched but not without injury. After the crash, headaches came as unbidden and unwelcome as evening crows. After hitting the car and sailing through brisk London air, the bolt-of-pain landing had rammed his teeth together (slicing out a nice chunk of inside cheek) and jarred his brain like stewed tomatoes in a tin thrown against a brick wall. His growing panic that Cate wasn’t answering the phone shoved the bright headache to the wings. The gutting despair and the hollow business of the funeral preparations kept the nagging pain in the background, but as sad days spun out to sad weeks, he was forced to acknowledge that headaches had made permanent nests for themselves in the dark eaves of his skull.
    The decision to sell the Ealing flat was the only easy one he took in those lead-lined weeks. He listed it with a tall and jolly estate agent, found a room to rent in nearby Greenford, and began excising his life from the rooms he’d planned to share for years with Cate.
    The one mercy was that Cate’s brother and his girlfriend had volunteered to box up Cate’s and Nicholas’s belongings. Nicholas knew this wasn’t to spare him more grief, but rather so that almost everything of Cate’s could be taken back to the family home in Winchmore Hill without the need for a scene. He didn’t argue. The idea of packing make-up brushes that would never again touch Cate’s skin and dresses he would never again pull from her shoulders had been filling his chest with a cold and stultifying mud, so he was grateful to find the small hillock of boxes marked ‘N’ packed in the front hallway.
    He’d been carrying a last and cumbersome pile of boxes, topped with a framed photograph of him and Cate on their honeymoon in the Orkneys, down the front outside stairs when he stepped on a discarded Boots carrier bag. His feet snapped out from under him. He felt a brief and quite lovely sensation of weightlessness before the concrete steps seemed to fly up and hit him brutally hard in the small of his back and the rear of his skull. The world skipped forward a few seconds - moments lost in an inverted lightning flash of darkness.
    When his eyes fluttered open, his headache was gone.
    True,