Lost Read Online Free Page B

her little gold earrings catching the light. Alice let go of Dan’s hand and watched him pass through the open door of the hotel and disappear into the sunlight. Then she pushed the glass door into the dining room.
    Its theme was a Napoleonic encampment: pink, red and gold striped wallpaper hung with sombre prints and an array of military paraphernalia, mostly swords and pistols. The room was empty. A few tables were still strewn with debris from breakfast. She made her way to the only one that was laid and sat down.
    She had let Sam into her bed the night before. Dan had stayed asleep on the other side of her and she and Sam had lain awake together, listening to the incongruously urbane percussion of service from the dining room and the shrieks ofchildren in the square. Before he fell asleep he said, ‘I know what we’ll call him.’ He had never been able to think of a name for the fish while it was alive. ‘We’ll call him Fish Breath.’ She had told him it was a lovely name.
    Later she had gathered up his sleeping body and carried him across the room to the camp bed near the window. She had laid him down, never taking her eyes off his face, closed and perfect like a lilac mask in the light from the square. She had leaned over him and felt the breath from his nostrils on her lips and then kissed his cheek, and he had moaned and brushed his face as though he had stumps for hands. Then she had taken the glass from the window sill, flushed the dead fish down the lavatory and refilled the glass.
    Alice sat in the room and savoured the moment of peace before the boys returned. Someone was whisking eggs in the next-door room. She saw the summer with the boys stretching before her; she should learn to pace herself better. The man from the check-in desk came to take her order. He had a baker’s livid complexion and he was wearing a dirty white T-shirt with the island’s emblem printed in black across his chest. There was a sound like footsteps on gravel inside her ears and her own voice was muffled to her. He scratched his arm and listened without looking at her, then left.
    This refusal of the islanders to behave in any manner approaching servility had always irritated her husband. There were so many things he hated about the island. He even said he had chosen her because she was as far away as he could get from it. Mathieu had spent much of his short life trying to shed all traces the place had left in him. Still, she knew that if she kept returning here with his children, it was because it was here that she felt closest to him.
    The little girl with the earrings peeped round the swing door that led to the kitchen. Alice smiled at her, too late: she had vanished. Thinking of Mathieu had become a luxury. She was deeply impressed by this process operating within her by which a source of pain had become a source of pleasure .His death had become intelligible to her; he was a story she told herself and the boys and his absence was as much a part of her life as her children were. Her mother had dug this out in her infallible way: ‘You’ve got to stop carrying your dead husband around with you, my love. You’re scaring people off.’ She had meant men, of course. Alice had slept with two men since his death, both friends of his. But now sex made her cry. She realised that she would have done better to sleep with a stranger, if only estrangement were an immutable state.
    Dan was standing at her side.
    ‘Can’t find Sam,’ he said.
    Alice studied his face.
    ‘I told him to stay in the square.’
    She stood up and followed him through the hall and into the sun. On the threshold of the hotel she shielded her eyes with her hand. No sunlight had ever seemed so white. The dog had gone and the square was empty. ‘Shit,’ she said. At the far end was a cluster of trees planted in thick rows. She strode out into the heat cursing Sam. Dan ran at her side.
    ‘Are you cross with him?’
    ‘Yes. Samuel!’ she