The Rain Before It Falls Page 21

  ‘What sort of news?’

  ‘It’s fine, love, really. I’ll call you again later. Is that all right? I’ll call you in about half an hour. I’d better get off the line, your sister might be trying to get through.’

  Gill hung up and stood in the centre of the kitchen, giddy, her thoughts still spiralling. A patchwork, made up of… coincidences? Was that what they were? If only she could stand back, see the design more clearly. But if anything it was getting fainter, already. From far away, far off in London, Catharine’s sense of loss and abandonment was transmitting itself, stealing into her mother’s heart, freighted with anger as well as pain. That bastard Daniel… She had known, she had known all along that he would do something like this…

  But no… Don’t let the present wipe out the past. Not yet. The answer was there, it was there for the finding. Surely she was being offered something precious beyond belief, some supreme revelation. There was meaning in all this…

  The phone rang again. Caller display told her that it was Catharine this time. Gill waited, waited just a few more seconds before picking up and in that stretched instant she felt the promise of revelation curl, evaporate and vanish; watched in despair as it slipped for ever through her mind’s grasping fingers. Even before she heard her daughter’s first, broken words, she knew that it was too late. The pattern she had been searching for had gone. Worse than that – it had never existed. How could it? What she had been hoping for was a figment, a dream, an impossible thing: like the rain before it falls.

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  Note

  The Rain Before It Falls

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