Read Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) for Free Online

a golden light, bound for Izmir and the day excursions to Ephesus. She let the curtains fall together again.
    “I shan’t leave you,” she said, “until I hand you over to your son.”
    “My son is in America. He can only come as fast ashe can, or not at all. And I can’t move from here until the money comes from my bank, and I have just to sit here, waiting to hear what is happening from the Consulate-General.” A great shiver ran over her. “This terrible room,” she whispered. “This terrible room. I don’t know what I must do. I hardly listened to anything they said.”
    “I’ll go to see the British Consul right now.”
    “But I know they know.”
    “All the same, I’ll go, and be back as quickly as I can.”
    “Yes, do, do,” Amy begged her.

4

     
    “I should like to go home,” Amy said to her son, James. “I can’t for a while face the little girls.”
    “It will be too sad for you there.”
    “It is all too sad for me anywhere.”
    At least she is not being stoical, he thought. She may recover sooner because of that. Not spend her grief in dribs and drabs, or put it on the slate for a stunning repayment.
    “Well, at least Ernie’s there. Let’s hope he’ll be some use.”
    “I want
you
to be some use. I can’t see to all those… awful…”
    “No, no,” he said quickly. “Don’t worry. Would you like me to stay the night? I can ring up Maggie.”
    “There’s no need. If you’d just see to everything; just tell me what to do.”
    “Of course. Perhaps you’ll come to us in a day or two. As soon as you feel able.”
    She did not answer.
    So they drove now away from the airport, towards London.
    What are we going to do with her? he wondered. His anxiety about her future surmounted his sorrow for the loss of a much-loved father.
    “Is there something one should do about that American girl?” he asked.
    Martha had kept her word. Having tried to sustain Amy through their nightmare flight, she had handedher over to her son at London Airport, and, as they embraced, she had slipped away. Amy, at last lifting her head from James’s breast, had seen the last of her stepping off the escalator below them, her Turkish bag slung over one shoulder of her dirty raincoat.
    “I didn’t expect her to disappear like that.”
    “I will write to thank her. It was a great act of friendship to cut short her holiday like that – and all the extra expense.”
    “I paid that, and she really only missed Ephesus,” Amy said ungraciously. “But, oh, yes, she was very kind.”
    Mourning seemed to give the go-ahead to every sort of rudeness and selfishness, he thought, fearing more of the same thing to come. Later that night, he said to Maggie, his wife, that his mother’s grief was having a bad effect on her character. “She was never like it before,” he was to say – to which his wife would make no reply.
    “If only I could have brought you back myself,” he said. “If only I could have got there in time.”
    “As a matter of fact I don’t know where she lives,” Amy said indifferently. “The American. Somewhere or other.”
    “In England?”
    “Appears to be what she calls ‘domiciled’ here. Highgate, I think, or in that area. Writes books.”
    She lifted her head to watch a plane climbing the sky, its flashing lights blurred by steady rain. All those people inside, not knowing what might happen to them before the end of their journey.
    “Back in Blighty,” Nick had always said, on theirreturns from sunshine into rain. “A week ago he was alive,” she said; had meant to say it to herself, but spoke it.
    “Yes.”
    “Gareth never said there was anything wrong with his heart.”
    “No, I know.”
    And it was Gareth Lloyd, the doctor, who opened the door to them when they reached Amy’s home. A tear-stained Ernie Pounce was in the background, giving James no sort of confidence. Gareth put an arm round Amy and shook hands with James. Ernie was obviously sulky as well as