Through a Camel's Eye Read Online Free PDF

get out of the house, to calm herself by walking.
    It seemed important to choose the right hat.
    Camilla fetched one from the hall cupboard. She supposed it was the kind once worn for tennis, though she’d never enjoyed the game. Proficiency at sports had eluded her, like so much else. But youthful losses were vague now, and that was a blessing. The memory of missed opportunities had become so slippery that she no longer felt the need to grapple with it, to ask again whether such-and-such a skill had ever been within her grasp. Still, she stared at the old white hat with its rust-coloured brim and put it on with a sense of reliving some kind of athletic occasion.
    The phone rang. It was Simon.
    â€˜Is that you, Mum?’
    Camilla wondered who else it could be, and why her son insisted on phoning when he knew she hated it.
    â€˜How are you, Mum? Is everything okay?’
    Camilla nodded at the phone. She put a hand up to adjust her hat and realised with shame that she was crying.
    Simon said she shouldn’t live alone. It was not the first time he had said this. He told her he was sending her some brochures in a querulous, insistent voice.
    Camilla put the phone down, asking herself when things had begun to go wrong between herself and her son, if she could mark the point where a hostile young man had emerged from the chrysalis of childhood. She knew that Simon blamed her for his father’s death, still blamed her, with the unforgiving grief of a ten-year-old boy. And wasn’t this the point, that blame and grief had remained locked in him, unchanged? Any attempt to talk about it while he was growing up had been met with hostility.
    Alan Renfrew had died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight. His heart had been weak, but nobody had known that until it was too late. The day before the heart attack, they’d argued. Alan had been a cold, punitive and jealous husband, and had punished her for failing to produce more sons. After eleven years of marriage, she had hated him. Simon had loved his father. Father and son had loved one another.
    Camilla shrank from the idea of selling the house she’d been born in; but perhaps she should. Perhaps she should give in.
    She jammed her hat firmly on her head and closed the door behind her. Already she felt guilty for hanging up on Simon. Nervous of giving offence, she had always shied away from the question of why Simon’s wife had left him after they’d been married for only two years. Now any matter between mother and son was best broached in writing. The failure of Simon’s marriage was a subject that remained firmly closed.

SIX
    One photograph of Margaret Benton showed a dark-haired woman in her middle forties staring into the wind and clutching the collar of a black coat with her left hand. Wedding and engagement rings caught the light, but she wasn’t smiling, and the mood of the picture was sombre.
    Anthea stood beside Chris in the clear morning light. He felt her involuntary shiver. She’d downloaded photographs of the missing woman from the internet, and they’d pinned them up. They’d photographed the coat Chris had found before delivering it to the courier and were sure that it was the same.
    Margaret Benton had been missing for eight months. Until her disappearance, she’d lived with her husband, Jack, on an orchard on the outskirts of Swan Hill, within walking distance of the Murray.
    â€˜Have you found him?’ Julie Beshervase demanded.
    â€˜We’re working on it,’ Chris said mildly.
    He took out Camilla’s drawing and handed it across. Julie threw it on the floor. ‘I don’t believe this!’
    Chris picked the drawing up and pointed. ‘These boys, do you recognise them?’
    Julie made a noise in her throat that was somewhere between a growl and a sob, but she did condescend to look.
    â€˜I think this one’s parents run the caravan park,’ she said.
    After Chris left,