Long Sonata of the Dead Read Free

they ought to have a bloodstained pheasant or a dead trout inside. I lifted the flap and checked the main compartment and the side pockets. I found nothing but the Guardian , the Spectator and a couple of crumpled paper handkerchiefs.
    Straightening up, I patted the coat. In one pocket was a packet of Polos and a shopping list on the back of an envelope. The list was in Adam’s scrawled handwriting: burgundy , flowers , milk , salad veg. The other was empty.
    I nearly missed the coat’s third pocket, which was inside and fastened with a button. It contained something small and rectangular that didn’t yield to the touch. I slipped my hand inside and felt the outline of a phone.
    It was an iPhone. I had one myself as it happened, though mine was an older model. The ringer switch was in the off position. I pressed the control button. The screen lit up.
    The phone was locked. But someone had sent a text, and this was briefly displayed on the screen.
    I miss you more and more every moment we’re apart. J xxxx
    There was no name attached to the text, only a phone number.
    So that explains the Post-it note, I thought. The complete shit is having an affair.
    Nothing new there.
    So I come back to Mary. She told me later why she kissed me in the garden at the party: as a demonstration of disdain to her newly ex-boyfriend, who was watching us through the kitchen window. But it developed into something else.
    While the party thudded away in the house, we stayed in the garden and talked and drank and smoked another joint. I can’t remember what we talked about. But I do remember that for once in my life I seemed to have leapfrogged the paralyzing shyness that usually characterized my attempts to talk to attractive girls and landed without any apparent effort into something approaching friendship.
    Later I walked her home, and she kissed me again when we said goodnight. The next day we met between lectures for coffee, dispelling my lingering fear that she’d have forgotten me completely overnight. By the end of the day we had tumbled into bed together.
    I felt as if I’d been turned into someone new and infinitely preferable, like the frog kissed by a princess. Mary was so beautiful, so vital. She always knew what she wanted and she was very direct about getting it. I envied her that. The mystery was why she wanted me. It was still a mystery.
    We lasted nearly a term as a semi-detached couple before Adam decided he would have her for himself. He and I no longer shared a room, as we had in our first year. But we still saw a fair amount of each other. I was useful to him—I was the organized one, you see, who knew when the supervisions and lectures were, which library books we needed, how to find the material that could lift your grade from a B to an A.
    In a sense, it was Francis Youlgreave who brought Mary and Adam together. I knew something about Youlgreave, even then, because my mother had grown up in Rosington. Youlgreave was a Canon of Rosington Cathedral in the early twentieth century. She had one of his collections of poems, The Judgement of Strangers , which had once belonged to my grandparents. I was using this as the basis for my long essay, an extended piece of work we had to do in our final year which counted as a complete module of our degree. I’d made the discovery that there were several advantages to studying obscure literary figures—fewer secondary sources, for a start, and a better than average chance of impressing the examiners with one’s initiative.
    Mary was waiting for me in my room when Adam turned up one evening. He said he’d wait for me and, while he waited, he investigated the papers on my desk while chatting away to Mary. He found some of the Youlgreave material and Mary told him more.
    By the time I returned with an Indian takeaway for two, they were smoking a joint and chatting away like friends on the brink of being something closer. She responded to his charm like a plant to water. He had the