Kehua! Read Online Free Page A

drops it into a dusty corner where it joins its family
     of assorted dried-up, dead-and-gone insects. We all go up for tea in the living world.
    The next night it snows and it settles, so when I go down early to work and open the shutters, light streams in and for once
     the room is actually bright, so I don’t have to turn on the overhead light. The early sun is making the snow sparkle, and
     the red spindle-berries glow in the hedge the far side of the garden, so it’s all white, green and red, like the Italian flag.
     And then I see a large rat runacross the snow just in front of my window, leaving a trail where his belly dragged. Mice leave rather charming little footprints,
     rats leave runnels. Well, well, it’s all metaphor.

Running into a trap
    Let me remind you. Scarlet is our heroine, Louis her common law husband, and Jackson her lover. She is between her husband
     and her lover, but although we are already on page 23 she has still not got any further than her grandmother’s kitchen where
     she has brought food for the freezer. It is this sort of novel, I am afraid. Like a river that overflows its banks, it spreads
     sideways rather than carves its way forward, plot-wise. Well, never mind. It is what it is. If Scarlet had lived in a more
     ordinary house we could have got on faster; had she only known, she could have blamed Louis for this too, for making her live
     in Nopasaran. Yet the unofficial wedding party was held in its garden and she was happy enough about it at the time. So much
     sexual guilt will do you in. Blame and opprobrium are hurled with abandon by the betrayer towards the innocent party.
    Beverley is the grandmother with the new knee and the splendid kitchen in Highgate. So far referred to but undescribed are
     Scarlet’s mother Alice, a staunch Christian, and Cynara, Alice’s daughter, fifteen years older than Scarlet, who is a staunch
     feminist barrister. Staunchness runs in the family, though it does seem to have rather bypassed Scarlet. Lola, whom we met
     briefly pretending to be asleep in the spare room at Nopasaran. Lola, who is Cynara’s daughter and Scarlet’s niece, is a treacherous
     little bitch, staunch only in her desire to have Louis and Nopasaran for herself.
    The goodies from Waitrose that Scarlet unpacks – should you have a yen for such detail – include creamy fisherman’s pie, lamb
     biryani chicken with lime and coriander, oriental salmon with lima beans, steam-fresh broccoli, par-cooked croissants. (I
     am really hungry as I write this – I have had no breakfast and it is already lunchtime.) Scarlet, as we know, had hoped to
     be out of the house by mid-morning, but now that she has rashly blurted out the truth, her grandmother will clearly not let
     her go without further discussion. Scarlet wishes she’d stayed quiet and waited for news to seep through to friends and family
     in the normal way. As it is there will be uproar enough when they find out.
    You can’t do this, Scarlet,
her mother will say.
Just stay where you are and see it through. You inherit instability from your fathers. Both you girls do. I will pray for
     you as ever – what else can I do? – but sometimes I feel I’m wasting God’s time.
    You are, you are,
Scarlet will want to say.
Not that there is a God. And Alice will want to reply, What are we then? A plague of woodlice on a rock hurtling through space?
So they will not have the conversation. The subject is too fundamental. Neither mother nor daughter is quite prepared to
     cut the other off. Both hope the other will recover their reason and believe as they do.
    Scarlet’s sister Cynara will roll her eyes sigh and say,
Out of the frying pan into the fire. Do think again, Scarlet. Louis isn’t so bad, but isn’t there some nice woman you can
     shack up with? Anyone can see you’re a lesbian.
Which they can’t. But then Cynara’s specialty is seeing what she wants to see, not what is, and what she sees everywhere
     is the