The Dying Light Read Online Free PDF

cigarette, lit up and listened to the message again, straining to hear every sound and inflection in the message. 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.

    ‘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 the shallowest 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 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