Jasmine Nights Read Free

tray, sat down on the edge of the piano stool and poured the coffee. ‘Thank you, Misou,’ he said, using his childhood name for her.
    He took her hand. ‘It’s all right,’ he wished she would stop looking so worried. ‘Nothing hurts now. Look, hold it properly.’ A surge of anger as he felt her tentative squeeze.
    She bobbed her head shyly, not sure what to say. She’d been so proud of him once. Now his injuries seemed to have brought with them a feeling of shared shame – there was too much to say and to conceal.
    During his months in hospital, he’d fantasised about being exactly where he was today, on this sofa, in this house in St Briavels, a tiny village on the borders of Wales and Gloucestershire. Sitting on the train that took him from Chepstow to Brockweir, he’d been determined to give his mother at least a few days of happiness to make up for the months of misery and worry she’d endured. No talk about flying again; no talk about friends, and maybe, in a couple of days’ time over a glass of wine, an upbeat account of Annabel’s departure.
    A taxi had met him at the station. As they crossed a River Wye sparkling in the spring sunshine, a line of swans, stately and proud, were queening it across the water, and on the far side of the river a herd of Welsh ponies grazed, one with a sparrow sitting on its rump.
    He asked the taxi driver to stop for a while. He said he wanted to look at the view, but in fact he was having difficulty breathing. The choking feeling, now familiar, came sudden as an animal leaping from the dark, and made his heart pound and the palms of his hands grow clammy. It would pass. He stubbed out his cigarette, and sat breathing as evenly as he could, trying to concentrate on only good things.
    ‘Lovely,’ he said at last when it was over. ‘Beautiful sight.’
    ‘Perfect morning to come home, sir,’ said the driver, his eyes firmly ahead. ‘Ready to move off?’
    ‘Yep. Ready.’
    As the car rose up the steep hill, he concentrated fiercely on the field of black Welsh cattle on his right, the scattered cottages bright with primroses and crocuses. He was going home.
    A long rutted track led to the farm; from it he saw the Severn estuary gleaming like a conch shell in the distance, and when Woodlees Farm came into view, his eyes filled with helpless tears. This was the charming whitewashed house his parents had moved to twenty-five years ago, when his father had first become a surgeon. Low-ceilinged, undistinguished, apart from large south-facing windows, it stood on its own in the middle of windswept fields. The small wood behind it was where he’d played cowboys and Indians with his sister Freya when he was a boy. They’d raced their ponies here too, dashing along muddy tracks and over makeshift jumps. He’d been born behind the third window to the right upstairs.
    The car crunched up the drive between the avenue of lime trees his mother, a passionate gardener, had planted in the days when she was a homesick girl missing her family in Provence. Sparkling with rain, glorious and green, unsullied by the dust of summer, they appeared like a vision. He’d grown to hate the severely clipped privet hedges surrounding the hospital lawns. Beyond the trees, new grass, new lambs in the field, a whole earth in its adolescence.
    His mother ran down the drive when she heard the taxi. She stood under the lime trees and took his face in both her hands. ‘My darling Dom,’ she said. ‘As good as new.’
    As they walked back to the house arm in arm, dogs swirled around their legs and an old pony in the field craned nosily over the gate. She’d said, ‘How was it at Rockfield?’ All she knew about it was that this was the place the burns boys were sent to, to shoehorn them back into ‘real life’.
    ‘Surprisingly jolly,’ he said. He told her about the lovely house near Cheltenham, loaned by some county lady, about the barrels of beer, the pretty nurses, the non-stop parties, the