Read The Sea House for Free Online Page B

own.
‘No.’
Helga. He spoke the word to himself. ‘No. I’m not offended at all.’
    Of course a shadow has no shape alone. I don’t mean a cast shadow on a flat surface, but the shadow which explains where a solid object turns from the light . Max read feverishly. If only, he thought, he could write to Henry now. Remember , he had said, the whole object has a shape to be drawn, not the shadow by itself .
That night Max wandered through the rooms of Heiderose. He drifted through walls, following the notes of the piano, into the blue room with its oval table, the long windows opening out on to the terrace where his mother liked to sit. Up, he was going up the stairs, past the bathroom with the great juddering boiler which toiled and bleated and woke him in the night, past Kaethe’s room, so neat and tidy, the high bed smoothed, the white sheet tucked tightly in. Light filtered through the window, dappling across her desk, and he took out his sketchbook and held it open to show her what he’d done. Kaethe, he called, and then still in his dream he remembered it was Kaethe who had made him stop. ‘It pains you too much,’ she’d said, and as soon as he’d arrived in England she’d organized a job for him as a book-keeper. He’d been good at figures, his fingers clever on the page, and just as with painting, she’d told him, you didn’t need your ears to multiply and subtract.

8
    Lily was woken by the smash and shattering of glass. She lay quite still, her eyes open, her blood pounding, and tried to remember if she’d locked the door. There was silence now. Only her own breathing, and she waited, paralysed, for someone to leap out at her from the corner of the room. She didn’t dare sit up or turn her head, and then, just when the waiting was more than she could bear, there was the scramble of raised voices and a scream rang out. Lily leapt out of bed. She spun around, unsure what to do, and then the thud of something heavy hit the wall.
‘I don’t want to hear it!’ It was the woman’s shrill voice, and underneath it, the man’s, a growl of rage. ‘I’ve told you! I’ve warned you…’
Instinctively Lily shielded her face and, as she did so, there was that scream again, another crash, and then the sickening roll of someone tumbling downstairs. Lily ran down her own steep staircase and stood in the darkened kitchen, where in a flash of white a figure rushed past the window, head bent into the night. The gate clanged open and then shut, and she heard the choking of a car.
Lily stood, her feet slowly freezing, unable to think what she should do. Those little girls were still inside there, and she imagined them lying, eyes wide open, too frightened to speak.
Very slowly Lily opened her own door. The night was radiant with stars, thick dazzling clusters, dripping from the sky. A gust of wind swept by her and then she realized that she was surrounded by sound. From behind the house, across the Green and up and above the sand dunes came the crashing of the sea. Lily forgot what she’d come out for. She opened the side gate and stepped round into the lane. The noise was louder now. Wave after wave of sound. Was this noise always there, and was she simply too busy to notice it during the day? If you didn’t know, you might think it was a motorway, the lorries hurtling by, but as she listened she could imagine the water drawing back to crash on to the shore. Lily glanced back towards her cottage and saw a figure lit up in the window of the house next door. It was the man, leaning against the glass, and then in an instant the light flicked off and he was gone. Shivering, she turned and hurried back inside. She closed the door with an unexpected slam and listened for a moment. No. There was nothing. Silence. No calls or whimpers, and then she wondered if it was possible the children had slept right through the fight.
    The next morning she saw him. He was standing in the yard, sawing a length of wood between two