A Secret Alchemy Read Online Free

reach for the shower gel, which does hair as well. Someone gave some to Adam for Christmas, ages ago, and I liked the smell so much, and the straightforwardness of it, that I took to using it too. Neck, chest, arms warm and slippery with eucalyptus and mint. When I’m clean, I take some more gel and try to find all the twinges and aches of traveling: shoulder muscles tight under my fingers, sides and lower back so stiff that when I dig my thumbs in it’s as sharp as pinching myself. Even the soles of my feet seem to have knots in them. But at last I must get out, get dry and dressed, must find my England Adminnotebook and ring the estate agent, then make appointments with banks, solicitors, accountants, and stockbrokers.
    I pull on sweatpants and a top and go down to the corner shop with the air threading coldly through my still-damp hair. Last time we were here the shop never seemed to have much more than long-life milk and sliced white, but it’s changed hands. I come back with an expensive bagful of organic salad, wholegrain bread, and free-range eggs; the wine’s much better. But I’m suddenly so impossibly weary that I don’t want to eat anything, or even have a drink. “Grief is exhausting,” I remember Adam saying of someone else, some patient’s wife or husband. “It’s like having a permanent leak in your vital systems.” I can do nothing but go to bed, defying travelers’ wisdom and medical sense, and I dream, as always, of Adam.
     
    I don’t remember Izzy’s block of flats being as tall, dark red, and unrelievedly Edwardian as it looks to me in the yellowing evening light. She herself has narrowed and neatened, inside her well-cut black sweater and trousers that make my jeans and T-shirt seem too casual; her hair is short and sharp, more silvery than dark but then she is five years older than me. We hug.
    “Una, it’s so good to see you. You’re looking well. How are you? How are things?”
    “Fine, thanks. Busy, you know. Sorting out the house and so on.”
    She takes my statement at face value. “Of course. Still, it shouldn’t be hard to sell.” And then, like a satellite delay, what I haven’t said reaches her, and she answers it with another hug of my shoulders. “I’m so sorry. But I’m sure it’s the right thing to do.
    You must say if I can help.”
    Izzy flew out to me when Adam died. There’s nothing else she needs to say. “Of course I will,” I say.
    Her studio’s at the back. I stare down into the communal garden, where a blackbird is standing in the now-violet light, his ebony head cocked and his yellow beak ready to stab into the earth. To the left of the great, north-facing window is her Ballets Russes shawl, framed in dark wood and hanging on the wall. The fringes are combed and pressed straight, and the light from the window lies on the glass and makes it hard to see the silky curls of orange and scarlet and peacock blue. Evidently she doesn’t wear it anymore. I remember her trailing around in it at Chantry studio parties. Even the smell of her studio is the same as it was then: the familiar creamy-sharp smell of paper and ink overlies the faint spice of seasoning box-and pear-wood blocks. For a moment I’m wholly, head-spinningly, back in my childhood, watching the way she moved, laughed, talked, and wondering if I’d ever have that ease with all these people, that grown-up kind of belonging.
    There are a couple of photographs of Izzy’s daughter Fay, and a charming wood engraving—Izzy’s work—of her digging in the sand at the seaside. But on the workbench I see that Izzy’s sandbag has no half-sketched-out block waiting, and she’s set aside the big lens on its stand.
    “You know the Chantry archive’s going to San Diego now I’ve finished cataloging Grandpapa’s letters?” says Izzy to me. “I’ve only got to get it all together now, and it’ll be ready for shipping. They’re going to put everything on microfilm for anyone to look at. Even on