Read The Life of Houses for Free Online

still his success—he was already a partner—had released in him no ease. If anything, the law had brought a moral dimension to the long disciplining of his will. Never possibly a crusader, he had nonetheless this almost chivalric devotion to justice.
    Anna said, ‘How dignified you look, staring off like that.’
    He set his briefcase down on the cobblestones. ‘This isn’t real to you. If someone seeing us together can frighten you so much.’
    She could not speak. She fixed her eyes on the river, its saving indifference. She said, ‘You talk about custody of your dog.’
    â€˜Benji?’ His head flinched sideways. ‘Clare’s keeping Benji.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I can’t be late today.’
    He was going to walk away up the street. The anger she had felt, which she had been almost glad to feel, abruptly fell away, leaving her with vacant dismay. Though all morning she had longed for solitude, now, this moment before they pressed their cheeks together, mothwing-like, she felt stricken, full of small delays of tenderness, as though only this anticipation of parting, a foretaste of remorse, allowed her feeling to achieve its true dimensions.
    He took a step and turned. ‘You know I won’t get to you till eight tonight. Client meeting.’
    â€˜You said.’
    The crowd around him had broken into individual faces. A woman, freckled, stark-faced under yellow curls, stepped past them both and turned to stare. That instant, Anna pictured the two of them as they were printed on that stranger’s retina: two figures reduced and facing each other.
    â€˜Peter…’ But he had stepped already into that blank of time between their meetings.

Chapter Four
    W hat time was it? Greyish morning light swayed on the far wall. Kit could hear nothing from the house. The room surprised her with its ugly but reasonable daylight proportions. She had fallen asleep as soon as she lay down, only to wake later with a sense of vertigo in utter darkness. That moment, she could not have guessed where the ceiling was, or the floor. She had stretched one hand out, guessingly, into a dark that was not empty but pricklingly alive, made of points turning about themselves. Her hand fumbling around had touched nothing, gone into a void…The next moment, she had touched the wall behind her pillow.
    Now, light had returned the room to itself. From the height of her bed she could see beyond the verandah a faded garden of tea-tree and tussock grass. It was early, she decided, the sky uncoloured: it would be hot later. Hunger, which had started as an ache, now made its own almost painless delirium. Light-headed, restless, she fought free of the bed. Did they have breakfast together? She felt at once the queasy anxiety bound up with the business of other people.
    The window swung outwards on hinges. As soon as she had opened it, she heard the sea’s single onrush break into separate waves. The day was ahead of her, a blank. How strange she felt. Beyondthe garden, a dune appeared to float in air still hazed with night’s sea-dampness. In the last months at home, conscious always of the question, ‘What are you doing?’—worse, of the thought, ‘What is she doing?’—all that she did had worked to thwart attention. She had never read so much in her room with the door shut. She had never consumed so much television. Now, solitude made a vacancy; at once forlorn and exhilarated, she could not remember what she had ever done. She checked the time on her phone. Not much after five o’clock. Had she ever been awake this early? She thought about calling her father. What time was it in London?
    On an impulse of defiance—at the same time, planning to tell anyone who might see her that she needed phone reception—she climbed through the window and stepped onto the verandah. The tiles were cold under her feet. Bare concrete steps led down into