Read (1990) Sweet Heart for Free Online Page A

‘You don’t know much about your past, do you? You don’t know anything about your real parents, about your ancestors?’
    ‘My real mother died in childbirth,’ Charley said; the thought always disturbed her.
    ‘How did your real father die?’
    ‘He died of a broken heart.’
    ‘
What?
’
    ‘It’s what my adoptive mother’s always told me,’ Charley said defensively.
    ‘Do men die of broken hearts?’
    ‘They can do.’ Broken heart. Throughout her childhood that explanation had seemed fine, but the scorn on Laura’s face made her doubt it and she wanted to change the subject. ‘You know what I think the regression thing was? It was a horny dream, that’s all. Tom and I have had sex once in the last two months,after we got back from seeing the house for the first time. These things come out in dreams, don’t they?’
    ‘What’s your acupunturist hoping to achieve by making you celibate?’
    ‘He’s trying to get the balance in my body sorted out so I’ll be more receptive. Don’t laugh, Laura. You’re the one who suggested acupuncture.’
    ‘They have weird ideas sometimes. Want some coffee?’
    ‘I’m not meant to have any. Another of his things.’
    ‘Tea?’
    ‘That’s a no-no too. Have you any juice?’
    ‘Aqua Libra?’
    ‘Sure. Have you ever heard of a couturier called Nancy Delvine?’
    ‘Nancy Delvine? Rings a bell. Why?’
    ‘She lived in Elmwood Mill.’
    ‘Elmwood Mill? Oh, the house, right! Any news on it?’
    ‘We should be exchanging on Wandsworth this week, and if we do we’ll exchange on Elmwood.’
    ‘Excited?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You don’t sound it.’
    ‘I am. It’s just — it’s a big change.’
    ‘I love the countryside. I’d move there if this place wasn’t such a tie.’ She went into the little room at the rear of the shop and emerged a few minutes later with a mug of coffee and a glass. She handed the glass to Charley and stirred her coffee.
    ‘Flavia Montessore’s worried about you,’ she said at last. ‘She rang me before she went to the airport this morning. I didn’t really know whether I should tell you or not.’
    ‘What do you mean, worried?’
    ‘I don’t know. She wasn’t very precise. She said shewas picking up some bad vibes.’
    ‘What about?’ Charley said, suddenly alarmed.
    ‘She thinks she ought to give you more regression when she gets back.’
    ‘Sounds like a good con-trick.’
    ‘She’s not like that. She only regresses people she genuinely believes have had past lives.’
    Charley smiled. ‘The way I could only sell a dress to someone if I genuinely believed it suited them?’ Like wallpaper over a crack, her smile masked her unease. She walked over to the window. Shapes passed outside blurred by the rain sliding down the glass. Blurred like her own past.
    The unease had begun when she’d awoken on Flavia Montessore’s bed. It had stayed with her through the night and throughout today. As if sediment deep inside her had been stirred and would not settle.

Chapter Seven
    Charley changed the flowers in the vase in her adoptive mother’s room, as she did every week. It was all she could do for her.
    She shook the water from the stems of the carnations and dropped them into the waste bin. The sun streamed in through the window. It was hot in the room. Stifling. Charley paid the nursing home extra for the view over the park, a view her mother had never noticed and was unlikely to.
    The white-haired woman lay silently in the bed that she refused to leave these days, the regular blink of her eyes every thirty seconds or so virtually the only sign that she was alive.
    ‘Your favourite flowers, Mum. They look lovely, don’t they?’ She touched the cold cheek lightly with the back of her hand and held the roses up. There was the faint twitch of an eye muscle. Until a few months ago her mother might have uttered some incoherent words, but now Alzheimer’s disease had claimed even those.
    Small and functional, the room