The Water's Lovely
- (2006)
Weeks went by when Ismay never thought of it at all. Then something
would bring it back or it would return in a dream. The dream began in
the same way.
She and her mother would be climbing the stairs, following Heather's
lead through the bedroom to what was on the other side, not a bathroom
in the dream but a chamber floored and walled in marble. In the middle
of it was a glassy lake. The white thing in the water floated towards
her, its face submerged, and her mother said, absurdly, "Don't
look!"'
The dead man was Ismay's stepfather, Guy. Now, nine years on, she and
her sister, Heather, still lived in the same house in Clapham. But it
had been divided into two self-contained flats. Their mother lived upstairs
with her sister, Pamela. And the bathroom, where Guy had drowned, had
disappeared.
Ismay worked in public relations, and Heather in catering. They got
on well. They always had. They never discussed the changes to the house,
still less what had happened that August day...
But even lives as private as these, where secrets hang in the air like
dust, intertwine with other worlds and other individuals. And, with
painful inevitability, the truth will emerge.
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