Learning by Heart Read Online Free

fun of Daddy. What a bloody liability Daddy is. You know you do. You make me feel like a shit.’
    Zeph hesitated. ‘You are a shit,’ she said.
    ‘And now you can prove it,’ he said. ‘Now you can tell Cora and anyone else who’ll listen to your catalogue of woe what a complete waste of space I am, and they’ll all agree with you, and I’ll be Public Enemy Number One.’
    ‘That’s right,’ she said grimly.
    There was a second or two of complete silence.
    ‘And you can believe it?’ he asked.
    A fraction of a second’s pause. ‘Of course I can. It’s true.’
    ‘But I take Josh to school, don’t I? I pick him up most days, too, if I’m here.’
    ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘congratu-fucking-lations. Once in a blue moon.’
    ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Not as often as I should.’
    ‘You sit up there in your ivory tower and act like you’re the important one.’
    ‘All right,’ he said. ‘All of that. I sit up there working when I could help you out maybe.’
    ‘There’s no “maybe” about it!’ she exploded. ‘I work part-time and I run this place full-time. And then you expect me to be a rampant nymphomaniac for your pleasure.’
    ‘For our pleasure,’ he said. ‘Remember that? For our pleasure.’
    She was silent. Gradually, her face softened. He saw something else in it: regret, sadness. His heart felt as if it had taken a single great beat of relief.
    ‘Zeph,’ he murmured.
    ‘Yes, I remember,’ she told him quietly. ‘But once it’s gone you can’t get it back.’
    ‘You can,’ he protested, and tried to take her in his arms.
    She pushed him away. ‘No,’ she told him, with finality. ‘You can’t, Nick.’

Two
    Cora glanced at the sky as she came out of the house. The forecast had been for rain, but there was nothing yet, merely iron-dark clouds, sweeping in from the Quantock Hills. She stood in the yard of the farmhouse, shrugging on her rain-jacket, so old that even the waxy finish was threadbare in places.
    ‘Denny!’ she called, narrowing her eyes to focus on the fields, where the dog might have strayed. ‘Denny!’
    The Labrador was elderly; he had gone out first thing that morning, and not come back, as he usually did, fifteen minutes later. Cora had opened the window and called him to no effect. Worried now, she had come out to find him.
    The farmyard was in almost permanent shadow from the three sides of the house that surrounded it, but in a few paces the route through to the fields brought her to a slight slope thick with hawthorn. There was a gate in the hedge, and beyond that, two large horse-chestnut trees at either side of the path. In late spring, Cora would wake to see their vast banks of white candles; last year, they had been particularly abundant, and she had lain in bed for some time on May mornings, looking at them. She always woke at first light, and never drew the curtains. She had seen the trees as thick with snow as with leaves; seen them, too, bent against the westerly gales.
    She gazed at them now, as she came through the gate, then lifted it to secure the latch. The timber had cracked and the gate had dropped; it was another job that needed doing. She hunched her shoulders automatically, and looked back at the house from her vantage-point.
    Two things characterized her day more than any other. First, there was the view of the house below the chestnuts, a sanctuary whose roof was sunken in the centre, a peculiar warping of age above eighteenth-century walls. The overgrown lane and the road to Sherborne beyond it, invisible unless a car was passing down it. Beyond that, she could see field after field, tree after tree, and the distant grey-green rise of the Blackmoor Vale.
    She turned away, and leaned against the gate.
    Second, there was this view to the west of the farm, now laid out before her; this was the passion that had kept her going in the last few years.
    Nine thousand trees were planted beyond the gate. Dabinetts and Michelin, Yarlington