Unhallowed Ground Read Online Free PDF

it. No wonder there was fear to suddenly find herself stepping outside. In all the awful intensity she’d almost forgotten there was an outside, she had forgotten it was possible to step over the edge and into the void.
    Toby was a best friend. Her first. She married him after a six-week engagement. She had not known such love was possible.
    The last time she came to Devon Toby had been with her, so that must mean she hadn’t been down here for the last ten years—incredible! Those were the days of hotels, the days of normal holidays, walking, exploring, riding, fishing and sailing. No children to think about, she smiled into her shiny white cup. The plastic spoon seemed to bend in the coffee, almost a Uri Geller illusion. Well, yes, they rode over that one, but not without pain. She could have them, he could not, that awfully unfair apportionment, deep swallows, meaningful glances and endless reassurances and no, she did not want to be inseminated with some student’s sperm; no, she did not want to adopt; no, she did not love Toby any less or think him less of a man or fear she would spend the rest of her life mourning the children she never had.
    Childlessness meant that they kept their careers, and they took more interest in other people’s (children I mean, not careers). Godmother. Babysitter. Escort to the pantomime. Scourer of Hamleys at Christmas. It sounded rather sad put like that, a little pathetic when you looked at it, but it wasn’t sad in any way, she and Toby had loved it. You could set off and spend, quickly, recklessly, enormous parcels, favourite things.
    My God, my God. The toys she had carted round to the Hopkins’s flat, not purchased at Hamleys, of course, but provided by generous well-wishers. (They had to sort through the tat that some people seemed to consider fair enough for the feckless poor.) Anne Stubbs’s office was full well before the end of November, so that all Georgie had to do was go in and choose the appropriate gifts. Anne was so suitable, a female version of Father Christmas with frosty white hair and even the suggestion of fluff on her chin. She beamed merrily over all the proceedings with flushed apple cheeks and a paper hat. But she who cared so much, who organized the toy campaign with so much enthusiasm, never got to see the joy she gave. At the end of the day all she was left with was an empty office, a few tattered pieces of string, carrier bags and cardboard boxes. Ah well. That’s life.
    Yep, that’s life. Heart attacks? Heart attacks were for old men on golf courses in the wind, or sitting around board-room tables, too much gin, too many veins, too much hard living. Heart attacks were irrelevant, they just did not apply to young guys of Toby’s age who jogged and played squash and believed in low fat and high fibre. The disbelief, the unfairness of life almost throttled Georgie then, that, and the being alone again, nobody’s favourite person. When a decent length of time had gone by, people (her mother) said, ‘You are young yet. You will find another life, another man…’ as if, without Toby she had died, too, flung herself on his funeral pyre, especially as they were without issue. When the point of her life was so illusive work became all important.
    ‘Although why you work with those terrible people I’ll never understand.’
    ‘I know you won’t, Mum.’ Georgie met her eyes calmly. ‘So there’s no point in you trying.’
    When she looks back on herself and Toby she marvels at how young they had been.
    Work and friends became very important. But now Georgie had no work and felt uneasy around her friends, it was easy to think, once again, that without them she no longer existed. Death by proxy, like when Toby died. Especially here, in this motorway service area with the wind blowing blotchy sleet at the windows and the chrome hot-chocolate machine dribbling bubbles of hot froth.
    Of course, when this was all over, when she was found to be