An Intimate Obsession is the first of more than a dozen page-turners by Elizabeth McGregor.
This edition is the first publication of this title outside the United Kingdom.
An Intimate Obsession is the first of more than a dozen page-turners by Elizabeth McGregor.
This edition is the first publication of this title outside the United Kingdom.
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Overview
An Intimate Obsession is the first of more than a dozen page-turners by Elizabeth McGregor.
This edition is the first publication of this title outside the United Kingdom.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504019408 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 08/11/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 358 |
| File size: | 567 KB |
About the Author
Elizabeth Cooke lives in Dorset in southern England and is the author of fifteen novels, many of which she wrote under the pseudonym Elizabeth McGregor, as well as a work of nonfiction, The Damnation of John Donellan: A Mysterious Case of Death and Scandal in Georgian England. Acclaimed for her vivid, emotionally powerful storytelling and rigorous historical accuracy, Cooke has developed an international reputation. She is best known for her novels Rutherford Park and The Ice Child. Her work has been translated into numerous languages.
Read an Excerpt
An Intimate Obsession
A Novel
By Elizabeth Cooke
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1988 Elizabeth McGregorAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1940-8
CHAPTER 1
She went to the door and listened to the end of the year.
The sea was still up, rushing in the distance. It had a voice, the blunted voice of the water throwing itself in the darkness at Chesil Bank. Hidden behind the last rise of hills before the coast, the farmland that belonged to Hugh Scott was a dark body lying on its side; the fringe of bare trees, spokes of branches in the gloom, lining the long garden.
Eve stood on the doorstep, waiting.
The darkness, below the first hill, was whistling and hammering. Two miles away, in the village, the dog at the post office was barking hysterically at the volley of unaccustomed sound. Ghost voices wailed up through the blackness. Standing at the crown on the hill, looking down into the dark, Eve realised that they were chasing out the old year. She had forgotten the custom ...
She, too, started whistling breathily between her teeth; the air picked it up and froze it into moth-like clouds. The wind came rolling up the long hill and up through the trees at the edge of the lawn, picking up the tin trays and hammers of the village in its fist, and carried her own melody away.
Her patience gave out. 'Come on,' she called. 'I'm freezing. I'm waiting.'
Until ten to twelve, she and her father had been playing cards. The kitchen table was littered with them: he had thrown them down when he realised that he could not win. The kitchen was a warm pool of cream light, a circle in the darkness. The oil boiler ticked away the time, the gearing of its enamel clock worn down. It sent its minutes methodically whirring and falling along the pipes of the wall. She walked back, sighing, turning her head and listening for her father. But he was nowhere near the door.
Each day a game. More horrible than the last.
It had begun about a year ago. Her father, retired six years from his teaching post in the secondary school, had begun to get up at night in the house they shared.
She would come down in the morning and find some peculiar anagram of shapes facing her: glasses of all different sizes lined up, for instance, on the kitchen sink, each with varying degrees of milk or fruit juice in them. Or pairs of socks lying in a row on the floor. Or the newspapers cut into pieces and stacked neatly on the table. The absurdity of the tableaux could make her laugh. In fact, she remembered one morning when she and her father had both stood at the kitchen door, staring at a perfect display of flour, scrolled and patterned on the worktop. They had both been baffled; they had looked at each other. He had had only a vague memory of having done it, and she had patted him on the arm as he'd rubbed his forehead in exasperation. Your dreams are getting out of hand, she had said, and — worse still — as they had stepped forward to clean it up, You're going a bit potty in your old age, you know, Dad ...
The memory of those remarks now was uncomfortable. They were not in the least funny. They had looked into the future as neatly as any clairvoyant.
By the spring of this dying year, he had begun arguing with her about which day it was. He would pick a fight over a television programme, or something she was wearing, or the fact that he couldn't find his own clothes. And it had been — she tried to recall exactly — probably June before she had mentioned it to her doctor. The diagnosis had been quick.
'But it's been so sudden,' she remembered saying, sitting in the consulting room at the hospital, while outside, through the panelled glass, she could see her father sitting upright, only his wringing hands a sign of inner confusion. 'Last year he was fine, absolutely fine ...'
The consultant had been all sympathy. No practical bloody use, of course. No use at night, or in the mess of the mornings, or in the evening when her father sometimes became so aggressive she could feel his breath plastering her face. But sympathetic, yes.
Actually, the consultant had been rather attractive. Blond, about forty-five, conservatively dressed, with a good, unpolished smile. As he had leaned forward — Aramis, cigarettes, ink — she had blushed a little. He had neatly manicured nails on pale fingers, she noticed. Sensitive hands that she had deliberately drawn her eyes away from. 'This can sometimes go on for many years,' he had said. Modulated voice. Public school and Oxbridge. 'In your father's case, it's come rapidly. That might be the pattern for him. A rapid escalation, a rapid demise. But no one can say for certain.'
She'd met his eyes, smiled, and fought down a sudden and completely irrational desire to kiss him between the moist, bedside-manner eyes. Either that, or slap him — just there, on the smooth, babylike cheek. Something to make him take notice. I'm not a professional carer, you see? I don't know how to do that. I just happen to live in the same house as my father. Beside him she saw the neat pile of case notes: other people waiting for his decision, his life sentences.
She'd walked out of the hospital, arm-in-arm with her father. This tall, imposing man who had always guarded and dominated her. They'd walked past roses, very pretty — yellow and full of scent — to the car. The sun had been shining. It had been a glorious spring day. And somewhere between the roses and the car, she'd let go of the arm of her father and taken hold of the hand of a child.
Her father was now, seven months later, markedly worse, and a stranger. In the past — even in her father's past — the doctors would have called his illness by a different name. Crueller, more succinct. Those great Victorian redbrick mausoleums would have put a clean tag on it straight away. No cloudy talk of displacement or stress or neurological failure then. They would have had a name that the relatives could catch hold of. Lunacy. Madness. Something nice and gritty to set your mind to. Something unshakeable. Something both harder and easier to take.
The label tacked on to her father's file at the hospital made it sound clean and tidy: all the things, in fact, that it was not.
Alzheimer's had ambushed him; the bandit in the rocks, the highwayman flourishing his pistol in the path of age. A beast had opened its mouth and swallowed him, effortlessly: he lived in its stomach, a Jonah calling for help.
At sixty-six, her father was far from old. He loomed larger than life, as he had always done. He was six foot three and powerfully built: his hands were freckled and very large, easily capable of crushing her own. His face was flattish, broad and rather crude, a Mr Punch-like face, with thick eyebrows over large green eyes. His yellowish-pink hair had once been wiry red. His voice matched his build: a voice that filled you with guilty dread; a great sergeant- major's voice. He still carried himself very straight; no shuffling. But inside the big body lived a furious, violent and bewildered baby.
That night, shortly before midnight, he had got up unexpectedly from the card table. He had taken the chrysanthemum plant, an armful of little bronze suns swaying in his grasp. And a piece of coal from the bucket. And a slice of bread. And rattled money in his trouser pocket. For a minute, he had banged about in the hall.
'Here, you, let me out! I want to go first-footing! It's lucky ... Where're the keys? Here, you ...'
She had known better than to cross him in this high temper, and had taken the key from the top ledge — the new place — and opened the door.
Now, Eve turned on the radio.
The local station was crammed with static, but they were broadcasting the chimes of Big Ben from London. For some unfathomable reason, she turned off the light and listened hard. Clearer. It was up to the fourth or fifth chime, that dark rumbling note of the clock.
Almost midnight.
Eve put her hand to her throat, and, in that second, panic charged down at her, trampling her, until she had to lean on the frame of the door just to breathe normally. All the year draining out of the clock, all the time going away: March, August, December. The dry spring, the garden flowerbeds going grey with the chalk rising to the top of the soil; the rings of Bronze Age barrows in the field beginning to break through. And then that drenched Easter. Frost in May. Heat in May. Their trip to Brownsea Island. Foam-grey sea. Wildly electric blue sea on a sunny day in November.
All those days.
Her father had never been her friend. Her father had never been Daddy — there had never been anything remotely approaching that between them. They had lived, inclined upon each other in their lives and proximity for more than thirty years in that same house; but that did not mean there was any kindliness in their relationship. It had been more like a thirty-year truce in a war. More like thirty years of fencing and scoring points; two intelligent combatants too tired actually to fight. There was, of course, a sort of comfort in that. They knew each other; they could make each other laugh. But there was no sharing of secrets or intimacies, no breaking down before each other. Eve had grown up adult and serious before her time, aping her father's sardonic smiles, his breathtakingly hard criticisms of other people.
When she had gone away to college, the yoke of him had gradually fallen off her. She had flourished, enjoying herself, and some part of her personality that she always considered similar to her mother's had risen up from under his influence.
This last year, watching him, seeing the layers peel from him, seeing his tears for the first time, trying to find a place to put this new unpleasant, embarrassing, helpless person who was her father: the sensation had been dizzying, bending mirrors and reeling paths. She had tried to walk straight through the unwinding months: by some freak, she found that she had succeeded more often than not.
All the days of the year.
All those colours and shades running wildly out of the clock. All those days lost: the night when she had opened the window and the warm harvest had rolled in, blond crop rippling in the curious half-light that was not darkness at all, that July ... All those moments bleeding out of the clock, vanishing for ever.
All year she had gone into school, into the classroom where she taught thirty- two six-year-olds; had seen their faces turned up to her from their cross-legged position on the floor as she held the register; seen their absolute faith in her as the keeper of law and order. No matter what farce she had just stepped from at home, here she was the woman who knew more than their mothers and the prime minister and the vicar put together. 'Miss Ridges' to them. Miss infallible Ridges who knew just fractionally less than God and who was infinitely more powerful than Him. And sometimes she thought, Hey, let me sit down there. You come up here. I'm dizzy up here ...
She had kept going all year. Made jokes about Dad in the staff room. Accepted help where she could. Got him into a day centre once a week. Made do and mended, always hoping for a change. Always hoping to step outside the spiral of the illness; to wake up, perhaps, and find it was nothing more than a dream. Complained over coffee and stolen gin-and-tonic half-hours in the pub to Sarah. Laughed and stormed a little. Talked to the doctor, the consultant. Had her hand on the phone to call a support group several times — had never rung them, hoping for the miracle.
She'd always hoped for the knight on the white charger who would gallop through the gloom, loop Dad over his arm and carry him away. Not carry her away ... oh, no! Her fantasies were far more practical. Just let him carry Father away. Sarah had roared laughing at that.
Now, in the darkness of the year's end, Eve put both hands to her face. The room seemed to tilt a little, and in that single second she felt the scent of something coming. Something huge, some immeasurable change, something terrible, casting its shadow before itself in time.
In the village, they began to ring the church bell.
She straightened up, shaking her head. 'Mustn't drink Scotch,' she said, wryly, to herself. 'Somebody's got to stay upright in this house.'
She smoothed back her hair, sighed. Midnight was past, as was the terrible sensation of vertigo. The next year was waiting on the step.
She went to the door again.
'Dad!' she called. 'Dad!'
There was no reply.
'Oh, you bloody fool,' she whispered, under her breath.
The dip of the land was dark.
Somewhere down in that dip, over that rise, Hugh Scott sat in his farmhouse. She wondered if he was by himself. Perhaps, as his nearest neighbour, she should have invited him up to play cards; it wouldn't have been much fun, but it might have been better than being alone on New Year's Eve. And then, smiling to herself, she dismissed the idea. It was bad enough sharing today, alone, with Dad. Not Hugh as well.
She stepped down on to the path.
'Dad! Come on now, Dad ...'
It took a moment for her eyes to accustom to the utter blackness of the garden. At the far end she could make out the large, white-painted gate that was propped permanently open. Humped, dug-over furrows where the vegetables would be. Strips of green path. She squinted about.
'Dad!'
Beyond the hedge was their lawn, sheltered from the wind on the east side of the house. She went to the gap in the privet and peered through.
Something was on the lawn; something crouched there. Her heart leapt for a second — Christ, what is that! — but then died down. Only her father had that shock of hair. His shoulders were perfectly rounded, hunched, so that he looked, funnily, like an immense tortoise stranded there in the dark.
'What're you doing?' she called.
He did not reply, so, wrapping her arms protectively around herself, shivering, she went to him.
His forehead was almost touching the ground, and he was passing his hands across the grass religiously, slowly, with almost loving care. She thought he was combing the grass. Combing with one hand, smoothing down with the other.
She touched his arm.
And then the truth hit her.
Around him, on the lawn, were fragments of ... stones? Shells. The curled spiral shells of garden snails. The big ones that plagued their flowerbeds. The place was rife with them. Her father was cracking ... cracking the shells and ...
'Qu'est-ce que tu voudrais?' he asked himself. He was back in class, taking his French lesson before a sulky group of fourteen-year-olds; talking in that classroom-stilt he used, the tone that completely vanished when he went to France itself. 'J'ai faim ...' he whispered. I'm hungry. 'Je voudrais des ...'
She suddenly understood what he was doing.
'Oh — Jesus!'
Her father looked up at her vaguely. The hand on the lawn made a scraping motion, like the move you would make scraping food together on a plate.
He was not combing the grass. He was ...
Oh Jesus, Jesus.
She swallowed down a sudden, urgent sickness.
'Oui, je veux bien ...' said the bland, white-framed face beneath her. Without a trace of recognition. I would like to ...
'God,' she whispered. She neither laughed nor cried. Some sick jokes went beyond being funny, even blackly funny. 'What next?' she breathed. 'What next?'
She tried to get her father to his feet, trying not to look in his face, holding her breath. Gritting her teeth unconsciously. But he tore her hands away, punching at her.
She cradled her bruised forearm, cursing. In the end, there was no alternative but to wait for him to finish.
'Happy New Year,' she whispered, closing her eyes.
It was cold in the solitary house, but Hugh Scott had not noticed it. The stove burned perilously low in the kitchen, a door banged loosely overhead in the dark. The window revealed a yard and a farm field and a narrow road without lights. It was New Year's Eve, but there were no callers at this house. He was utterly alone. But he had his little book. His important little book. And that was all that mattered.
He considered carefully. This was the most important date he would ever fix. He had to get it exactly right. Women liked you to get things right. To know. To be in charge. And it was to be a surprise, just before the time. To sweep her off her feet.
Because they liked that too.
Not winter or autumn: too cold. And summer was too busy, with the harvest. What did every woman want for a wedding? May, or June.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from An Intimate Obsession by Elizabeth Cooke. Copyright © 1988 Elizabeth McGregor. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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