Wakening the Crow Read Free Page B

with all her strength, and then opened her palm and shook the bloody jewels out.

 
    Chapter Three
     
     
    S OME OF THEM must have stuck to her skin, because, a day or two later, I found them in the pocket of her coat when I was putting it into the washing machine.
    Seven o’clock on a Monday morning. Rosie was leaving for work.
    It was still dark outside. Not snowing. Too cold for snow. It was warm and cosy in our new home, there was toast and marmalade and coffee and Radio 4 and I was going to stay home with Chloe. So Rosie, buttoning herself into her coat, wrapping a scarf around her neck, pulling the flaps of a weird Peruvian hat over her ears and about to set off into the bitterness of a January morning and walk twenty minutes to work... Rosie had the unmistakable aura of martyrdom about her.
    ‘So have a nice day, you two,’ she said pointedly. ‘What are you going to do, a bit of playing shop, maybe a jolly outing? A bit of writing, I doubt it.’
    Rosie. Never a sylph when I’d first met her, now she was more than plump. Was it Titian or Raphael who’d painted women like her? She had a certain fullness of figure, and now, in many layers of clothing and that extraordinary hat, she looked... she looked extraordinary, not so much voluptuous as voluminous. Her pointy, pink mousy face was already flushed before she’d even set off... yes, she was still cute and certainly womanly, but there was a bit of busy-body Beatrix Potter about her. And the woundedness, of course.
    ‘Oliver, I don’t know why you’re putting a wash on, how do you think it’s going to get dry on a day like this? If you put it in the airing-cupboard you’ll steam up the whole place... anyway, up to you. Me, I’m off to work and back about five, I guess.’
    She gave me a kiss on the cheek. She smelled of jasmine, a spray I’d bought her for Christmas. And then, leaving me aside, she leaned down to the child.
    She gathered Chloe into her body. She seemed to envelop her in the many folds of her clothing and the very being of her motherhood, as though she could go back in time and make her, once again, a physical part of herself – to start again, to protect her with her life, to keep her from all the harms and nonsensical accidents of the outside world.
    And she whispered, as always, ‘My dear Chloe, where are you?’ Every day, she said it every day, like some kind of prayer, a mantra. ‘My Chloe, I miss you so much. When will I ever have you back again? Please, please come back to me...’
    Then she was gone, dabbing tears from her eyes, down the stairs and out into the midnight darkness of a January morning: Rosie, my wife, longing for the difficult, challenging, combative daughter who’d been taken from her and might never return... leaving me in a turmoil of my own doubts and suspicions.
    I heard the door close. I heard Rosie’s footsteps, down below on the pavement outside. I tried to silence the mad mutterings in my head, but I couldn’t. A notion which had crept into my consciousness over the past months, something mean and unworthy and shameful which I couldn’t keep out... I heard it now, ringing like the truth and daring me to deny it. I loved my daughter more, I liked her more, since she’d been changed by the accident.
    I looked across the kitchen, where Chloe was silently engrossed in spreading butter and jam on another slice of toast. Even in that, she was smiling. And I saw myself in the mirror. My first ugly instinct was to flinch from my own eyes, but then I made myself look.
    You shit, Oliver Gooch. You got it easy now. Chloe gets a smart little whack on the back of the head, and you got it made. Admit it. It’s better now, yeah?
    ‘Better for me, is it, Chloe? What do you think?’ I didn’t expect her to reply. She didn’t. She was playing with her mouse.
    They’d told me and Rosie to talk to her, to keep on talking and involve her in conversation as though she understood everything we said, and one day,