The Kindness Read Online Free Page A

the toes have shaped it; the soft leather sole has yielded, the heel bulges, so it is almost as though he has her little foot in his hand and not just her shoe.
    Around him familiar shadows watch, the friendly ghosts of four generations of Vales. It’s snug in here, with beams so low they just clear his head, a couple of ancient armchairs, Turkish rugs on the floor that have had their corners chewed by a succession of his mother’s dogs. ‘Hey, how about this as a playroom for Mira?’ Julia tried suggesting the first time he showed her the estate agent’s pictures of Firdaws.
    ‘Oh, but that was always my den.’ He couldn’t help but be crestfallen. ‘It’s probably the best place for me to write.’
    It’s cosy, this room of his: the familiar west-facing window partially covered by the vines, lending a suggestion of a cave or an arbour.
    He replaces Mira’s shoe and closes the drawer. This desk was once his father’s. On the day he and Julia moved in, his mother had all the old furniture taken from storage and sent around in a van. Julia was uncharacteristically grumpy as it all came through the door: the big kitchen table, the Welsh dresser and its brightly painted pottery animals, chests of drawers, armchairs, rugs, this desk. Sitting here now, he’s struck by the thought that perhaps nothing had happened to him. For a moment he is a boy again, looking up at the same patch of sky through the same leaded glass, waiting for his mother to call him to the kitchen for soup. He drains the last of the wine, closes his document, puts his computer to sleep. He won’t be far behind.

Two
    Firdaws is the last cottage along the lane that winds from the village to the river and since the schools have broken up it seems there is never a day someone isn’t around, whistling to a dog or shrieking on the way down through the water meadows. Most of the other houses have front paths and gardens, but Firdaws is reached across a small meadow of scrubby grass filled at this time of year with yellow wildflowers, cornflowers and dog daisies. Its chimney rises tall and crooked and in the evenings soft mist rolls in from the river to surround it, giving it the appearance of a house in a dream. Of a gentle weathered brick and hanging tile, it was built into a natural nook, so if you lie on the riverbank looking up towards the village it’s the first house you see, tucked close into the bosom of the landscape with nothing but dark-green conifer woods at its shoulders and the spire of St Gabriel’s pointing to the sky.
    Beyond the meadow the lane from the village comes to a meandering halt at Jerry Horseman’s fields, whose rusting gates with their elaborate bracelets of baler twine are of no consequence to locals long decided this access to the river is common land. Occasionally Jerry Horseman livens things up by grazing a bull in one of his fields but on the whole he is amicable and leaves this part of his empire to a rough hay which is always too full of buttercups.
    At the back of the house a small wooden porch faces the downward slope of the garden across the fields with their waving fronds of yellow and rusty dock and on to the river that glints through the trees. When it rains it’s good to sit in the porch, to smell the wet earth and smoke and listen to the water dripping off the roof and leaves. On a really still night you can hear the owls at the river, and around the house the squeaking of pipistrelles that flit among its creepers.
    There’s a small terrace for herbs and beds for clambering roses, a few fragrant shrubs. The rest is down to fruit trees and seedy grasses; that is, if you can manage to ignore the three formal flower beds the Nicholsons left behind, where massed bushes of candy-pink roses have flowered all summer long, the air made heavy by their scent.
    Strung between the furthest pair of apple trees the hammock mocks him with a low-slung smile for the hours he spent feeling safe, Mira cradled beside him