Wind on his Back

Mary Alexander

Description

The Wind on his Back is a beautifully-written collection of six short stories that explore different aspects of love. From a furious divorced man who refuses to forgive his errant wife, to the wife faced with losing her husband of 30 years to a sudden terminal illness, to the motley group of relatives who come together to celebrate Christmas Eve, each story has love - and its offspring, pain and loss - at its core. Each story can be read independently of each other, although they are united by a common theme of love. The Wind on his Back will have you feeling a range of emotions as you share in the highs and lows in the relationship in each story, and will appeal to fans of female novelists such as Barbara Pym, Donna Tartt and Kate Atkinson, all of which the author enjoys herself. The Wind on his Back is a heartfelt collection that is ideal for those who are looking to dip in and out of a love story.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781788031776
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Wind on His Back

and other stories




Mary Alexander
Copyright © 2017 Mary Alexander

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 9781788031776

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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
“Love is as strong as death”

Song of Solomon
Contents
The Good Samaritan
The Wind on His Back
Christmas Eve
After Rick
One More Train
The Lost Button
The Good Samaritan
Winston found the train easily enough. It was a journey he had taken many times. The fast train usually left from platform three – if the word ‘fast’ could accurately be applied to a journey that took a minimum of four hours and possibly even five – to Cornwall. His destination, St Austell, from where he would get a taxi (old habits died hard) to the house.
Swinging his dark blue leather holdall up into the train and climbing aboard after it, he tugged the unwieldy bag into the space for luggage – he didn’t enjoy carrying heavy things – and dropped it there, before entering the first-class carriage.
At first glance it looked deserted, then Winston noticed that at the far end of the small carriage there was a grey-haired, slightly squat businessman with a colourless face who was already bent industriously over a set of papers, a paper coffee cup at his elbow.
Winston selected a single seat, opposite another single seat, with a small table rising between like a sandbank. He didn’t want to be too near the other occupant of the carriage, but at the same time, he didn’t want to be too near the door and a possible cold draught. He had long been susceptible to colds, and he didn’t want one now. He could always tell when a cold was coming, knew from the first shadow of an ache, that this germ would start in his knuckles and spread through his body like water colonising a flood plain, that he would be ill for five days and that there was simply nothing he could do about it. In the old days – it astonished him how quickly he had consigned those twelve years of marriage to his past – he would have taken to bed and waited for bowls of home-made soup to be brought to him, and cups of coffee and the telephone, so he could at least make his work calls. Now, heading alone to Cornwall and the house, being ill would mean being ill alone.
Pulling his stripy cashmere scarf a little more closely around his neck, Winston knew some people might say that he shouldn’t be sitting in first class, but at the same time, he was someone who prided himself on having scant regard for the ‘shouldn’ts’ of life. Not in a hooligan way, with their mindless disregard for the law, but in a way that suited a more educated, cultured person like himself. And since he had always travelled first class, it was part of who he was, and he didn’t quite understand why he should stop that now, despite the fact that he had a second-class ticket in his inside jacket pocket. So he took off his dark brown fur-lined overcoat and draped it over the opposite seat, and arranged his newspapers – Financial Times, The Telegraph – into a tidy pile. Next, he took his ink pen and his leather-bound notebook out of his black satchel, and lined them up neatly, a pair of tools well matched in their suggestion of purpose, next to the papers. He stowed the satchel under the table. Finally, satisfied with the orderly nature of his goods, Winston sat down.
The satchel had been a present from Suki, his wife, or, he mentally amended, his soon to be ex-wife. She had given it to him on his forty-fourth birthday two years ago, and as usual she had managed to choose him something that he didn’t like or need.
‘Why,’ he had asked, with a smile playing across his lean, confident face, ‘would I like a satchel? Am I going back to school?’
‘The receipt’s inside,’ she had said, unsurprised by his reaction. ‘Change it if you don’t like it. The salesman said they are very fashionable.’
‘Maybe for schoolboys or people who describe themselves as ‘freelance’,’ he had mocked.
‘Daddy, don’t be mean,’ Hannah, his daughter, had chipped in.
‘Hannah, darling,’ he had explained patiently, ‘I am not being mean; I am just being honest. The truth is, this bag isn’t anything I would use.’
Just then, Sammy had cannoned onto the bed, still plump with baby fat at just three, rubbing sleep from his eyes, drawn upstairs by the noise and the fact he was still umbilically attached emotionally to his mother in a way that Winston found rather tiresome.
‘Happy birthday, Dada,’ he had said.
‘Daddy,’ he had corrected automatically.
Suki had glanced at him with ill-disguised disgust and left the room.
Well, now, it seems he had been wrong; he was finally using the satchel. He wasn’t quite sure why. His therapist, a new addition to his life, might say that it represented some subconscious desire to make amends with Suki. Winston snorted at the thought. He had needed a small bag to put his things in for the journey and the mere sight of his briefcase hurt too much at the moment. So, he had found this in the back of the cupboard, and decided it would do.
The train tugged once, twice, then was free of its buffers and on its way. Winston looked out of the window, enjoying West London’s flats and houses limping past him, slowly at first and then faster as the train picked up pace, giving him a blink’s worth of a person’s life. The man talking on the phone, the woman stirring a saucepan on a hob, the child who should be at school standing with his hands pressed to the glass, looking out at the train.
Then he turned to his papers, and ran his eyes over the headlines. More banks in trouble, a short roll call of household names going under, all of which somehow made him feel better. It was unprecedented times. It could happen to anyone. The bubble had burst. Winston opened his notebook, picked up his pen, and began to write.
He managed to keep this up until the train reached Reading – freewriting, his therapist had called it. At Reading – some twenty minutes out of London – he put his pen down to observe the bustle of the moment, with people joining and leaving the train. Even from where Winston was sitting, he felt the cool hiss of air that entered the carriage indicating the opening of the automatic door. A man in a suit and overcoat took the seat to the side of Winston, while a slim dark-haired woman in a fitted black dress with a thin, shiny black belt sat in the seat in front. Both carried briefcases, and immediately settled to their work like conscientious schoolchildren. Winston turned back reluctantly to his own writings. The scribblings of a washed-up individual, the cruel voice everyone has in their head jeered. Winston slammed the book shut and glanced again at his neighbour. The man had taken out a laptop, and a sheaf of papers, and was now entering data. Insurance salesman, Winston thought. He wondered if the woman was a barrister. Something about her clothes being black, the determined set of her mouth, reminded him of the predatory lawyer his wife had chosen to handle her side of the divorce – but most of all it was the fact that the papers she was looking at were tied up in pink string.
Winston’s father had been a barrister, and his briefs had always been tied with pink string. As a boy, Winston had often gone into Middle Temple Chambers where his father worked, on a Saturday morning, and waited idling around the fish pond if it was sunny, or been entertained by the clerks if it was wet, while his father picked up more work. His father had loved to work, more than anything else in the world. He had been a very successful barrister, and had gone on to become a respected judge. Winston’s mother had supported her husband in his desires – as wives did in those days, Winston thought, a trifle bitter at the apparently changing times.
Even though he had died two years ago, Winston’s father was still a well-remembered name at large. So, often, when Winston gave his full name, Winston Young, to anyone well informed in life, they would ask, ‘not related to Sheridan Young, by any chance?’ and then he would admit that yes, Sheridan Young had been his father, and the person would inevitably wax lyrical about how he had met Sheridan at the theatre once, or seen him in court, or been his pupil for six months long ago, or cleaned his rooms for twenty years, or whatever. For complicated reasons he didn’t understand, Winston had never enjoyed this.
The train was moving again, the door hissed like a belligerent snake, and Winston frowned. The trolley rattled through, and Winston requested a coffee and a bottle of still water, complimentary to all first-class passengers.
“And a packet of shor