The Way Back Home Read Online Free PDF

jabbed a finger at the final photo. ‘Where’s that then?’
    The girls looked.
    ‘The oriel windows,’ Oriana said, ‘right at the top. But it can’t be Louis’.’
    They read the details.
    ‘How on earth did they make
three
bedrooms out of his apartment?’ Oriana read on. ‘
Two
bathrooms, one en suite?’ She looked up at Cat and Django. ‘I loved it when it was Louis’. It was my place of choice for tea. It was always so genteel.’
    Django laughed. ‘Fabulous old queen.’
    Oriana turned to Cat. ‘Do you remember – after school – going for toast and to do homework at his kitchen table because it was so much quieter than downstairs?’
    Cat looked at the details anew. ‘I can’t believe that this is Louis’ place. And yes, of course I remember.’
    ‘I practically lived there during exams,’ Oriana said.
    ‘Well – between Louis’ and ours,’ said Cat.
    ‘Two bathrooms and three bedrooms,’ Oriana marvelled again.
    ‘Crivens,’ Django murmured at the guide price.
    ‘Will you visit?’ Cat asked.
    Oriana looked at her with exasperation.
    ‘I meant Windward,’ Cat said cautiously. She thought about it. It hadn’t been so long ago that she and Django had been estranged. However temporary it had been, it was hideous at the time. Oriana looked tired. Behind the smile and the teeth-whitening and Bobbi Brown cosmetics, it took an old friend little time to detect a degree of emotional exhaustion.
    ‘What’s the point? I haven’t spoken to my father in years. I rarely heard from him before that anyway. And I don’t know anyone there any more.’
    It was only after Oriana had left, when Cat and Django were reviewing her visit, that they realized none of them had mentioned the boys. Not once. Not even when poring over the details of the apartment that had come up at Windward. The Bedwell brothers. Malachy and Jed. And Cat wondered whether they, like Robin, were dead to Oriana too.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The front door was never locked but Jed was always acutely aware how nowadays, Malachy’s was one of only three dwellings whose front door remained resolutely unlocked. Nearly all the other apartments in the old house had new security systems and even burglar alarms. Still, along the Corridor – running subterraneous through the house like a hollow crooked spine – the internal doors joining it were unlocked. That had been the very point, back at the end of the 1960s, when the pioneering group of artists and writers and musicians had rented Windward. There was to be flow, Windward ho – ideas and creativity, triumphs and failures, music and colour, characters invented and real – into and out of the rooms, through the windows, across the seasons, during the days and nights. Now, with only two of the original seven artists still living there, Windward was a quieter place. Apartments were much changed. White-collar people lived there now, quietly, privately. Music, if it could be heard at all, came in faint, civilized drifts from radios and sound systems, not resident musicians. Colour these days was polite Farrow & Ball, rollered to a perfect chalky finish; not Winsor & Newton oils squeezed direct from the tube and daubed in a glistening cacophony of hues. There was a distinction between day and night now, between your place and mine. These days, residents wouldn’t dream of entering without knocking.
    Nowadays, Windward was sedate, like a peaceable old uncle whose youthful tattoos were hidden from view. Cars were either German coupes or four-wheel drives and were parked neatly, herringbone style. Not Jed’s, though. He parked as he’d been taught, when learning to drive at Windward – askew on the gravel like a skate on a turn. Malachy knew this wasn’t in defiance of the residents’ association standards, it was because Windward was still home to Jed. He couldn’t distinguish between the Windward of his youth and the place today. And he didn’t understand the importance of compliance,