The Darkening Hour Read Online Free Page B

what is it now, light or dark?’
    ‘It’s closed?’ she said, and he laughed and I heard the smack of his kiss on her cheek.
    Daddy’s bereavement, the work that lay ahead of us in caring for him, had passed clean out of Simon’s consciousness now the funeral was over.
    Yes. It seemed that every one of my siblings began to show their true colours, the day we buried Mummy.

CHAPTER FIVE
    I come down on Sunday morning to find Mona in the kitchen, perched on a stool, her hands squeezed between her thighs.
    I’m thankful to Roger for organising this, but reel a bit at the enormity of what he’s achieved. Transporting a whole person across Europe especially for me. It showed, I suppose,
that he still felt guilty that I’d been the one to have to leave, that I was supporting our son.
    And it was OK. It was legal-ish. At the border, Roger had had to make out she was
his
live-in help – that she was tied to him. Fortunately, as we were once married, it
wasn’t difficult to make it all look above-board. If questions were asked, I would simply say Roger had returned and Mona had stayed on with me.
    Her visa means she can’t change employer, however; she is mine and mine alone.
    ‘You must meet Daddy,’ I say.
    Mona stands up and follows me out of the front door, along the side of the house to the basement steps. Daddy’s main entrance would once have been the back door to the house. I’d
sealed off his front door at the bottom of the steps – which led straight up to the road – to prevent Daddy wandering out, or burglars forcing their way in.
    The garden is unruly. I haven’t time to mow the grass and there are limits to what I can ask of Leo. Golden leaves from the trees at the end of the garden filter through green ones. Pears
lie rotting on the grass. The air seems full of falling things – leaves, spiders, seeds, husks, the last languid insects. I can’t believe it’s October again, a year since Mummy
died.
    ‘Daddy has his own flat,’ I tell her as we go down the steps to the basement. ‘It’s a way of keeping an eye on him, while maintaining his independence.’
    She looks at me. I wonder again how much English she understands.
    I open his door at the bottom and take her inside.
    At first, I’d welcomed having Daddy in the house, in spite of the sad circumstances. Mummy dead after her swift illness, Daddy, who had relied on her, uprooted and moved
into the granny-flat beneath me. Two lively, successful, even glamorous people diminished within a year, one to dust, the other to a shadow of his former self. Daddy’s proximity made me feel
whole again, as if two parts of myself that had been separated, adult and child, had been reunited. I would show Daddy I was still the same person, deep down, he’d treasured before I’d
grown up.
    Work had been going well then. I’d been promoted to mid-morning after my first minor forays into radio and had been given my own show,
Theodora Gentleman, the Voice of South-East
England
. Leo had come back to attend a sixth form over here. Roger wanted him integrated into English society in time to go to university, and we’d got him a place at one of the best
schools in the area.
    Then he got in with a bunch of friends who turned out to be a bad influence. He began to skip lessons. It all came to a head when he was found dealing drugs outside school. He was hauled up to
the Principal’s office. After that he withdrew, dropped out. Roger still blamed me.
    For a while Leo helped look after Daddy. They got along together, though they didn’t do a lot. Then, as Daddy’s health deteriorated and Leo lost interest in everything, including his
grandfather, I could no longer cope with them both. In the end I’d cracked, phoned Roger, listened to him rant about my working too many hours and neglecting our son.
    ‘It’s unfair to expect him to care for his grandfather.’
    ‘Maybe. But I have an important job and I can’t do everything.’
    ‘We all work,