Read Quilt for Free Online

gloom of uncoming buses is repeated in the sky. The brilliant sunshine is inexplicably smacked on the back of the head. Big clouds tumble over, clowns without coherence. The darkness spreads like strong, spilt medicine. Gusts of wind scrap, a chill has crept in. Is this his father’s work? There is nothing eerie about it, everything is simple and matter-of-fact. He goes back to the car park to put more money in the meter and pick up something warmer to wear. In the back of the car he notices the unbeatable knockdown sale-price black trousers and black raincoat he has bought. The sky looks so black it must open.
    Back at the bus station news has filtered through that no one has been injured in the accident, and other bus arrivals have been held up by two to three hours.
    When she comes it is as usual as if she had beaten him to it, been hiding round the corner and sprung out like the return of the dead that she always will have appeared.
    She sees the blank pall of a man undone. He takes her in his arms. She observes his trembling and waits for his speech. He says, already weeping into her shoulder and neck and ear:
    – He’s already gone.
    It is as if she knew, gathering it thousands of feet in the air, over the night ocean. For some minutes he is fixed, like a piece of paper blown onto her, senselessly secured by the wind. Then he falls back, still speechless. He becomes aware of her baggage, a suitcase and otherbags, and wonders how it got there. She tries to take in his stooped, stopped-up form, his strange display of tears in a public place, his frighteningly wiped-out face.
    – It was this morning, he says.
    On the way home, the sunshine comes back, as if televised, as if the relay were again real, breaking out of a period of implausible interference. Passing through a quiet village, she points out the pretty church and he suggests they stop and have a look. The path up from the lychgate is shady and they pause in the cool of the porch. Her eyes run over the pinned-up notices, her own language but foreign: flower-arranging, organ practice, an announcement for the village fete already two weeks ago. Everything is destroyed. She knows he wants to kiss in the porch, always yes, kiss, the portal, find her lips in the cool shade of the threshold before entering and she lets him, she has him touch her mouth with his fingers, stroke her beautiful face, longing to throw herself into the mirror of his grief while herself already effaced, happy, yes, that she will have been just a character in a book, unrecognisably old and worn away. Nothing of her will get through, not a name, not the faintest vestige of a gesture. She insists on the truth, therefore nothing more can be said. But of course now more than ever with his father dead, she cannot give him up, she cannot leave him. He holds her in his arms in the cool of the porch and runs his fingers through her hair, eyes bulging in stupefied speechlessness gazing into hers, as if she is going to let him be who he had imagined himself being before any of this happened. She lets him kiss her, on the cheeks and lips, she lets her lips be affronted, comforted by the thought that for him she is just a character, she has madethat abundantly obvious, and will never be the subject of anyone’s attention and all their love-making, so wild and singular and untranslatable, will pass unrecorded.

    The house is inconceivably empty. There is so much to do it seems more logical to leave again, evade the emptiness and perhaps, when the bright day is done, return in the cool of summer dusk. They drive down to the coast and walk up a cliff-path they have taken once before. She feels paralysed. She can only stay a fortnight. In that period she will do everything she can to make things less unbearable. But there is so much to do. He doesn’t tell her about the mimosa, fearful of what she would think. The order is impossible to disentangle. There are all things at once. There is the phoning, the