Voices in Summer Read Online Free PDF

of doing up the house could not make up for morning sickness, lassitude, and occasional fatigue.
    And now, she hated Alec going back to the Far East without her. She resented his going on his own, while she stayed behind, mouldering in London, just because of Gabriel.
    'You can't blame Gabriel. Even if we didn't have Gabriel, you couldn't come with me because it's not that sort of a trip.'
    'And what am I supposed to do with myself? While you're gallivanting around with the geisha girls?'
    'You could go and stay with your mother.'
    ‘I don't want to go and stay with my mother. She fusses over Gabriel until I could scream.'
    'Well, I tell you what . . .' She was lying on their bed during this particular exchange, and now he sat beside her and laid his hand on the sulky curve of her hip. Tom Boulderstone's been on to me about an idea he's had. He and Daphne want to go to Scotland in July . . . for the fishing. The Ansteys are going as well, and they thought that we might go too and make up a party.'
    After a bit, 'Whereabouts in Scotland?' Erica asked. She still sounded sulky, but he knew that he had caught her attention.
    'Sutherland. It's called Glenshandra. There's a very special hotel, with marvellous food, and you wouldn't have to do anything but enjoy yourself.'
    ‘I know. Daphne told me about it. She and Tom went last year.'
    'You'd like fishing.'
    'What about Gabriel?'
    'Perhaps your mother could have her? What do you think?'
    Erica turned over onto her back and pushed her hair out of her eyes and gazed at her husband. She began to smile. She said, 'I'd rather go to Japan.'
    He leaned over and kissed her open, smiling mouth. 'Next best thing.'
    'All right. Next best thing.'
    And so the pattern of their lives evolved, and as the years slipped by, Alec's career broadened and became more involved and more responsible as he climbed his own particular ladder of success. Gabriel was four. Then she was five and starting school. When Alec had time to stop and stand and look at his family life, he supposed that they were as happy as any of his friends. There were ups and downs, of course, but these were only to be expected, and always –like a glittering prize waiting to be grasped at the end of a long run –there was the holiday in Scotland, which had now become an annual event. Even Erica loved this and looked forward to it as much as Alec. A natural athlete, with an athlete's sense of timing and quick observant eye, she had taken to fly- fishing like a duck to water. Her first salmon had reduced her to a mixture of laughter and tears, and her childlike delight and excitement had almost caused Alec to fall in love with her all over again.
    They were happy in Scotland, the carefree days as refreshing as a gust of clean wind blown through a stuffy house, dispersing resentments, clearing the air.
    When Gabriel was old enough, they started taking her with them.
    'She'll be a nuisance,' said Erica, but she wasn't a nuisance, because she wasn't that sort of a child. She was charming, and it was at Glenshandra that Alec really got to know his little daughter – to talk to her, to listen to her, or simply to enjoy her companionable silence as she sat on the bank of the river and watched him casting over the brown, peaty water.
    But even Glenshandra was not enough, and Erica was restless. She still resented Alec's overseas commitments, his constantly leaving her for glamorous foreign parts. Every time he went, there was a row, and he would fly off, miserable, with the sound of her angry, unforgiving words ringing in his ears. Now, she decided that she hated their house. Initially she had enthused over it, but now it was tog small. She was bored with it. Bored with London. He wondered if she was going to tell him that she was bored with him, too.
    He could be stubborn. At the end of a long, tiring day, faced with a moody wife, he could be more stubborn than usual. He told her that he had no intention of relinquishing his convenient