Anticipation Read Online Free Page A

There’s talk of Maggie needing a little holiday up north, at some kind of stone-fruit farm. Roger puts his foot down.
    ‘She’s just tired,’ he says. ‘She needs time off from the baby.’
    He goes to see Nanny Biggs. Poor struggling Sarah. What’s she to say? It’s twenty years too late for the truth.
    I am given my mother’s old room. In it, my grandmother and I regard each other as best we can, cautionary tales that we are, blurry lines to past and future. There’s too much between us for closeness.
    I start to cry. Sarah consults her watch, then shuts the door. She means to come back, no doubt, but lately she’s been getting really quite forgetful.
    An hour or so later, salvation arrives. It is in the unlikely form of William Biggs, who is having more than his usual difficulty in sleeping between night shifts. Bleary and desperate, he picks me up. It’s better than nothing. I stop crying.
    William’s requirements of me, and mine of him, are generously low. Silence, and a heartbeat. What do we feel? Gratitude. Relief. Let’s call it love, why don’t we?

THREE
    T he builders sank the first piles for the jetty today. There’s a heron sitting on one of them already. Now the tide is in, they’re just three lonely posts sticking out of the sea, green timber soaking to black. Too late, I worry how it may seem, my straight-planked convenience, the inviting length of it, sturdy and square as a welcome mat. It might send out the wrong message.
    Four years ago, visitors used to flock here. Electricians and plumbers were ferried back and forth on a constant stream of complaint. A week after I took possession, Gillian declared a team-building day and brought out the whole office. Friends, lumbered with wine and flowers and kids, trekked through the mud. Some even came to help. For a while, Paul and Andy came over every fine weekend to give design advice and hack away at the garden. Sally and I spent days making pyres of Shining Spirit leftovers, scrubbing down walls and skirting boards, evicting thin translucent spiders from high corners.
    But one visit was enough for most. The island’s novelty waned with the temperature, and the first winter whittled callers down to a stubborn few. It takes forethought — an effort of will — to reach me here, guarded by the ebb and flow of my green moat from whim and chance acquaintance.
    Sally still makes it over now and then. She came for lunch last week, on a still, blue-water day, the harbour slow and sparkling. We drank, finally, the good bottle of champagne Dion sent me when I moved in. His card was still attached, his smiling face next to the banner
Thinking of Selling?
Underneath he’d written ‘Don’t call me’.
    Of course, if I’d fully understood how much work the housewas going to be, I might never have started. A measure of ignorance, I’ve come to see, is essential to achievement. It was my first experience of an old timber building — traditionally, the Hardings have chosen to shelter themselves behind walls made of sterner stuff. (London brick, for two centuries, replaced latterly by Summerhill stone, crushed seashell aggregate and, no doubt, a sprinkling of asbestos.)
    But I was charmed by those peeling weatherboards. Their lightness. A house that might float, if the sea ever rose to claim her. Of course, half the boards were rotten. And beneath was framing soft as the forest floor, piles eager to reunite themselves with the soil, where their cells might transpire again as magnolia and Norfolk pine, Black Doris plum and mangrove.
    Instead, they inhaled my money — consuming, if not quite an arm and a leg, then surely six digits of my net worth as it stood back then. By the time we’d finished, they’d swallowed not only the cash reserves allotted to them, but the equity in a mixed-use site in Freemans Bay and two townhouses in Newton.
    The builders kept as much of the old wood as they could, but my grande dame’s joints are now pinned with straight