Read The Furies: A Novel for Free Online

into the living room and caught sight of the empty shelves on the far wall. He squeezed my arm the way people had taken to doing in the last few months, like they needed to check I was really there. ‘Are you living like a monk for a reason?’
    ‘No.’ Even as I said it I could hear how defensive I sounded. ‘I just didn’t want to bring more than I could carry.’
    ‘Where are the rest of your things? I thought you’d moved out of the flat in…’ He paused, trying to remember. ‘Richmond, wasn’t it?’
    ‘It was, and I did. Luke’s parents have the rest of it.’
    ‘They took your things as well as his?’
    ‘Yes. I was going to chuck it all, but they didn’t want me to. I told them if it was important to them, they could have it, but I didn’t have anywhere to put it. So they said they’d take it and keep it for “when I was ready”.’
    ‘Was that really what you wanted?’
    ‘I didn’t want anything. I just wanted not to be in London. And because of you, I’m not.’
    Robert sighed. ‘Well, it’s lucky I brought you these, then,’ he said as he dropped the books on the table. ‘At least you’ll have one shelf to keep you going.’ He looked down at the pile and back at the shelves. ‘I’ll bring you some more tomorrow. Don’t for God’s sake let me bring Jeff here, or you’ll have to move in with me for a week while he decorates the place.’
    ‘Thank you.’ I took the books.
    ‘Do you just watch TV every evening, Alex?’ He was still looking around the room, as if he were expecting hobbies or magazines to leap from the walls.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I come home and I turn on the news and make dinner. Then I watch silly costume dramas which sometimes have someone I know in them, playing a housemaid or the third daughter of a duke or something, and I think how funny it is that I used to be part of that world and now I’m not. Then I go to bed with the radio on, and I listen to it as I fall asleep. Sometimes I fit some ironing into the mix.’
    ‘Fun, fun, fun,’ he said. ‘What will you do at weekends?’
    ‘I’ll swim, and walk, and go to the National Gallery. What do you do at the weekend?’
    ‘Drink, mainly,’ he replied. ‘They’re long weeks.’
    ‘These are great.’ I was looking at the spines of the books he’d brought. A complete Shakespeare in four volumes, and A Man For All Seasons that was losing some of its pages as the glue on its spine had splintered away. A dilapidated copy of The Caretaker , a dog-eared Candide , with the part of Pangloss underlined in pencil, and at the bottom of the pile, Lorca’s Blood Wedding .
    ‘We’d better go out for dinner,’ he said, looking around again. ‘So I don’t feel like I’m in prison all evening.’
    ‘OK, OK. I’ll buy a picture, or something, if it’ll cheer you up.’
    He looked at me. ‘Will it cheer you up?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Then I’ll buy you one. A nice poster of a Highland coo or the Loch Ness monster, if you’re lucky.’
    ‘Promises, promises.’
    His eye suddenly caught the small wooden box on the bottom of the bookshelves.
    ‘What’s that?’ he asked. ‘Alex, it isn’t…? You haven’t brought…?
    ‘It’s nothing,’ I told him. ‘I mean, it isn’t nothing. It’s my engagement ring.’
    ‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. I thought you’d brought his ashes up here in an ornamental tin, like some demented Russian widow.’
    ‘No. It’s just the ring.’
    ‘Don’t you want to wear it?’
    ‘No. Not really.’
    ‘I suppose it would remind you every time you looked at your hand,’ he said.
    *   *   *
    I didn’t cry now when I talked about Luke. For the first few months, I cried all the time. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean that the tears were ever-present in my eyes and required no provocation to make them flow. I don’t know what I expected grief to be like, even though I’d lost my father a few years before. When that was still a fresh