Rocky Place

Nicholas Day-Lewis

Description

Rocky Place is a short street in the coastal village of Wintersea. Attempting to regenerate their failing mariage Quentin and Lyn move there to live. One of their two children has become uncontrollable, further complicating their relationship. As they start life in their new house a dispute develops with their neighbours, a licentious family whose lives revolve round loud music, bumper stickers and sex. The problems that arise from this conflict start affecting other residents of Rocky Place, together with both the children and friends of the two families. In the heat of summer events become increasingly fraught, leading to a horrific tragedy that no one saw coming, but many could have stopped. “We're all to blame,” said Lyn. “Every one of us.”

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris AU
• Date de parution: 16 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669889342
• Langue: English

Extrait

Rocky Place
Nicholas Day-Lewis

Copyright © 2022 by Nicholas Day-Lewis.
 
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6698-8935-9

eBook
978-1-6698-8934-2
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 08/03/2022
 
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
AU TFN: 1 800 844 927 (Toll Free inside Australia)
AU Local: [phone] ([phone] from outside Australia)
www.Xlibris.com.au
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Contents
Part 1
Quentin
Lyn
William
Quentin
Lyn
William
Quentin
Lyn
Quentin
William
Lyn
Quentin
Lyn
Quentin
Part 2
Tess
Rick
Quentin
Peter
Jodi
Lyn
Quentin
Tess
Cathy
William
Quentin
Jodi
Tess
William
Tess
Quentin
Rick
Jodi
Peter
Tess
Part 3
Lyn
Elizabeth
Jason
Quentin
Jodi
William
Lyn
Jodi
Quentin
Jodi
William
Alice
Quentin
Jason
Cathy
Epilogue
Jodi
 
For my beloved and loyal Margaret
Part 1
Should thy love die;
O bury it not under ice-blue eyes!
And lips that deny,
With a scornful surprise,
The life it once lived when it wore no disguise.
Should thy love die;
O bury it where the sweet wild-flowers blow!
And breezes go by,
With no whisper or woe;
And strange feet cannot guess of the anguish that slumbers below.
George Meredith
 
O never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seem’d my flame to qualify:
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul, which in my breast doth lie;
That is my home of love; if I have ranged,
Like him who travels, I return again,
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,
So that myself bring water for my stain.
William Shakespeare
Quentin
The taxi stopped at his Brighton address. He paid off the driver, picked up his suitcase and crossed the road. Despite the late hour there was still a regular hum of vehicles speeding along the main road, and a distant screech of tyres as a car pulled away, far too quickly, from the South Road traffic lights. Seconds later a souped-up Ford Falcon swept past the end of his road with a roar, already hitting eighty and still accelerating.
‘Bloody hoons,’ he muttered.
The night air felt warm and humid after the air-conditioned taxi. A trickle of perspiration ran down his spine. A heat wave had settled over Melbourne on New Year’s Eve; the incessant sultriness irritated Quentin. As he pushed open the gate to his front garden he glanced up at his bedroom window. All was in darkness. Lyn must be asleep already. Quentin felt saddened; he hadn’t seen his wife for a week and had been looking forward to her welcome. All the way down from Sydney in the plane he’d been thinking of her. He should have phoned her to tell her he was coming home earlier than expected, but his dash to catch the last flight home had been a last minute decision. There had been no time to alert her. Anyway, he thought she would enjoy the surprise.
He unlocked the front door. It had a habit of sticking in warm weather and he remembered to lift it slightly as he opened it to prevent it squeaking. He turned on the hall light, leaving his suitcase by the door, and looked into the lounge, resting his eyes on an empty wine bottle that stood on the low table in front of the settee. This was strange. Lyn didn’t drink much, and certainly not on her own. She was too conscious of her figure – she dieted and worked out twice a week at the gym. He was proud of her, of her trim, shapely body. When they were out together, he loved showing her off to his friends. She was always the star attraction at company functions.
He looked at himself in the hall mirror, combing his thinning grey hair with his long fingers. Then he turned off the hall light and felt his way upstairs, stepping softly on the thick stair carpet. Lyn was a light sleeper and any strange sound or movement in the house, no matter how insubstantial, would wake her. Quentin thought it must be a result of her years of mothering.
As he gently opened the door to their bedroom he became aware of a strange smell: a mixture of sweat, a faint odour of peppermint and something he couldn’t at first place. He recognised Lyn’s breathing cycle, but there was another sound, one that should not have been there. Horror-stricken he walked quickly to the bed. There, on his pillow, was a face, a face with a moustache and wisps of blond hair plastered to its forehead. The man’s eyes were shut. In sleep he looked ridiculously young, a teenager almost.
They were both naked with only a sheet up to their waists, and his hand lightly covered one of Lyn’s breasts. The street light outside the window lit up the shocking scene with stark clarity.
Quentin just stood there, stunned. He remained like that for a long time, trying to take it all in. Then he took a step back, his heart thumping. He’d identified the smell now. Sex. And they’d defiled his bed with their act!
He shook with anger. It was not the moral principle that infuriated him, not at first anyway. It was the way the man had taken possession of Lyn’s breasts. Quentin felt a pride of ownership over them. Despite feeding their two children they had remained firm and shapely, and Quentin loved them. They were his. Damn the wretch! He stood, frozen to the spot, staring at the man who’d stolen them from him.
He must do something. Honour demanded that he attack the man: grab his hair, hit him, scream at him, anything. But Quentin was incapable of violence. He stood silently, unable to think coherently. He hated arguments, and any sort of conflict. And he realised to his horror, even as he watched them sleeping, that he was being irrational, that Lyn was equally guilty.
Finally, in frustration at his impotence, he did the only thing he could think of doing. He walked back to the door and, with a trembling hand, switched on the light.
Lyn woke first. She sat up, her long black hair covering much of her face. When she saw who had come into the room, she cried out. Quentin watched as her expression quickly changed from confusion to fear and she pulled up the sheet to try to cover her nakedness.
Her cry woke her toy boy. He looked at Quentin, but it took him a few moments to understand his predicament. He blinked sleepily. Then his eyes opened wide in panic.
‘Oh sheet!’ he said. ‘Oh sheet!’ He had an American drawl. His words, instead of being abrupt and filled with alarm as would have seemed natural in someone caught red-handed, virtually in the act as it were, sounded lazy and unhurried, almost as though he didn’t mean them. It was only then that Quentin began to really hate him.
Lyn buried her head in her pillow and started weeping, her body shaking with her sobs. Quentin turned his back on them. He wouldn’t demean himself by slamming the door; he shut it gently, leaving the light burning, and made his way downstairs.
As he entered the lounge he saw the empty wine bottle. It stood there on the table in the half-light, a challenge to his authority. Something snapped in his mind. He grabbed the bottle by the neck and hurled it at the wall. It caught the corner of a picture, and shattered into a thousand fragments. The picture crashed to the floor, its glass broken and its ornate frame twisted. It was a watercolour painted by a great-aunt of his, a picture of the old farm house belonging to his family. Quentin’s anger subsided a little when he realised what he had done. The irony of the situation didn’t escape him either, for it was a picture Lyn disliked whereas he had insisted on it remaining in the lounge against her wishes.
He moved to the settee and sat for a long time in the dark, unable to understand. His face was burning as he contemplated his future, and his shirt felt damp and cold on his back with his sweat. They’d had a good marriage on the whole, even though Lyn was fifteen years younger than he. She had seemed happy, despite his having to go away so often on business. They had always communicated well, and if anything was troubling either of them they could talk it out. He was successful and he’d provided well for his family. And if their sex life had dwindled to an occasional caress, she’d never complained. Or perhaps she had brought up the subject, in her own quiet and roundabout way, but he just hadn’t been listening. He knew that there were times he didn’t listen to his family as he should have done, that there were times when he lost empathy with Lyn, that he’d become something of a workaholic. But somehow he seemed unable to change his ways.
Eventually Quentin became aware of voices above him, muted but urgent. Then a door opened and footsteps came down the stairs – not Lyn’s, because he would have recognised hers. The toy boy must be making his escape, the rat leaving the sinking ship. Lyn’s lover reached the b