The Lie of You: I Will Have What Is Mine Read Online Free PDF

sharpness of the blade against his thumb. ‘Yes, she was the anchor for the main channel.’
    ‘You never said. Why on earth would she give that up? I mean, something like that to work on the magazine?’
    He shrugged, absorbed with the knife’s blade. ‘Helsinki is a small city, it doesn’t satisfy everyone.’
    ‘She just doesn’t strike me as someone who would be a television presenter, though. She’s a bit too much of an ice queen for British TV.’
    ‘She was much admired in Finland,’ he said.
    I’d peeled far too much garlic and would have to throw some of it away.
    ‘So it’s odd she left that job. I don’t get it, do you?’
    He opened the kitchen drawer and put the sharpening rod and the knives away, each in its allotted place.
    And then he said rather coldly, ‘Why should you care?’
    I felt rebuked by him and was instantly defensive. ‘Why shouldn’t I be interested? I work with her every day.’
     
    Something has changed with Markus since I went back to work. We aren’t easy with each other as we were during my pregnancy and I wonder if he thinks I should have stayed at home with Billy. We talked about it and I felt sure he supported me going back to work. He’s become more withdrawn these days and our silences are getting longer and more difficult to bridge. We don’t giggle together any more. So I chatter on in my nervousness to try to fill the silences and I know this irritates him even more. And he has created taboos around certain subjects. He will never talk about his life in Finland and I know very little about how he spent the first thirty-six years of his life. I wish he would tell me more but I can’t push it. I think there must have been a major rift with his family as none of them came to our wedding.
    Why did we marry? I did not expect it and, in fact, it was Markus who said that for the baby’s sake we should marry before the birth. He said that in order to be free you needed to know which of society’s rules you could break and which rules you had better observe. Hardly a romantic reason to get married. We had this low-key registry office affair, which upset my mum, who would have liked us to marry in a Catholic church with the full service. There was no way Markus would have agreed to that. I was heavily pregnant at the time and only close friends and family were invited.
    My parents came over from Lisbon and my aunt Jennie was there and I was sure someone would come from his side, one of his brothers if not his parents. His only guest was his partner from the diving club, someone he has met since moving to London. Did he even tell his parents in Helsinki that he was getting married? There has never been any word from them, not even a card. When I asked him about it he was cagey and changed the subject.
    We hardly spoke over dinner that night. The stuffed peppers were OK, but it was not one of my best dishes and tears were pricking behind my eyes after his earlier rebuff. I knew I was being over-sensitive. It had been a difficult day and he’d made me feel foolish. I wanted to tell him that Billy had pulled himself up into a standing position just before dinner. Now I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. His face had its familiar closed-off look.
    Straight after dinner Markus went into his workroom. It used to be Aunt Jennie’s dining room. She never used it much and when Markus moved in with me he made it his own. He took out all the old furniture, ripped out the ancient carpet and sanded the floor. He painted the walls white. Then he built new shelves for his books and installed his drawing table and plan chest. He has hundreds of books and each one is lined up exactly at the front edge of the shelf in the most precise way. He has turned it into a very attractive if rather minimalist workroom. There’s his brown leather armchair by the door and I sometimes sit there and read while he works.
    Tonight he was sitting as usual on his high stool in the arc of light