Read The Carousel for Free Online Page B

myself." "You can't have it all."
    We fell silent. It was noon now, and the sun was very warm. I heard the soft buffet of the breeze, the lap of water against the seawall. Across the flooded estuary, from the distant causeway, came the hum of passing cars. A flock of gulls fought over a piece of rotting fish.
    He said, "You know, once, centuries before Christ, in the Bronze Age, this estuary was a river. Traders sailed all the way from the eastern Mediterranean, around the Lizard and Lands End, laden to the gunwales with all the treasures of the Levant."
    I smiled. I said, "I've read Vanishing Cornwall, too." 
    "It's magic." He opened the book and it fell open at a much-studied page, and he read aloud:
    For the watcher to-day, crouching amidst the sand dunes and the tufted grass, looking seaward to where the shallows run, imagination can take a riotous course, picturing line upon line of high-prowed, flat-bottomed craft, brightly coloured, their sails abeam, entering the river with the flood tide.
    He closed the book. "I wish I had that sort of perception, but I haven't. I can only see the here and the now, and try to paint it the way it happens to me."
    "Do you take that book everywhere with you?"
    "No. But I found it in a shop in New York, and when I first read it I knew that someday, sometime, I had to come back to Cornwall. It never leaves you. It's like a magnet. You have to return."
    "But why to the Castle Hotel, of all places?"
    Daniel looked up at me, amused. "Why? Don't you think I fit in there?"
    I thought of the rich Americans, the golfers, the twin-setted ladies playing bridge, the genteel teatime orchestra.
    "Not exactly."
    He laughed. "I know. It was a fairly incongruous choice, but it was the only hotel I could remember and I was tired. Jet-lag tired, London tired, everything tired. I wanted to get into an enormous bed and sleep for a week. And then when I woke up this morning, I wasn't tired any longer. And I thought about Chips and knew that all I wanted to do was come and see Phoebe again. So I walked down to the station and caught the train. And then got off the train and met you."
    "And now," I told him, "you're coming back to the house with me, and you're going to stay for lunch. There's a bottle of wine in the fridge and Lily Tonkins has got a bit of lamb in the oven."
    "Lily Tonkins? Is she still going?"
    "She runs the house. She's doing all the cooking as well just now."
    "I'd forgotten Lily." He picked up my sketch pad once more, and this time I didn't mind. He said, "You know, you're not only exceptionally pretty, but you are talented as well."
    I decided to ignore the bit about being pretty. "I'm not talented. That's why I work for Marcus Bernstein. I found out the hard way that there was no hope of me earning a living by being an artist."
    "How wise of you to realise," said Daniel Cassens. "So few people do."
     
    Together, with the sun on our backs, we climbed the slope of the hill. I opened the wooden gate in the escal-lonia hedge, and he went ahead of me, cautiously, as a dog will go, nosing his way into once-familiar territory. I shut the gate. He stood looking up at the face of the house, and I looked, too, and tried to see it with his eyes, after eleven years away. To me, it looked as I had always know it. I saw the pointed Gothic windows, the garden door open to the brick terrace and the morning's warmth. There were still geraniums blooming in their earthenware tubs, and Phoebe's ramshackle garden chairs had not yet been put away for the winter.
    We walked up the gentle slope of the lawn, and I led the way indoors.
    "Phoebe?" I opened the kitchen door, from whence came delicious smells of cooking lamb. Lily Tonkins was at the kitchen table, chopping mint, but she stopped when I appeared.
    "She got home about five minutes ago. Went upstairs to change her shoes."
    "I've brought a visitor for lunch. Is that all right?"
    "Always plenty to eat. Friend of yours, is it?"
    Daniel, behind me, moved