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Автор Стивен Галлахер
Stephen Gallagher
The Boat House
PROLOGUE
He hadn't been out to McCarthy's old place on the Step in almost a year. It held too many memories for him, and not only recent ones; the bad and the good were all thrown in together, and sometimes it seemed as if the good could be almost as painful. He'd think of childhood summers, spent in that same shaky wooden cottage with his sister and her family after their parents had died, and of the three years with Nerys when they'd just been married, both of them too poor to afford anywhere better as they saved for a stake in the boatyard. Now the boatyard was all his, had been since before Wayne had learned to walk, but Nerys was long gone.
Those had been hard times, but happy ones. He only wished that he could have realised it then.
"Shape up, Ted," he told himself. "Don't get morbid. " And he tried not to crash the van's worn second gear as he made the turn onto the leaf strewn headland track.
If only.
If only that last, terrible summer could be wiped away. Not just burned out of his mind with a controlled dose of lightning, but actually wiped away as if it was a poem on a blackboard that had somehow turned wrong, and the rhythm picked up again as if nothing bad had ever happened. What would he give? The answer to that one was anything, right down to his soul. Anything, just to have it all back the way it had been. The memories, he'd keep.
As memories alone they wouldn't be able to hurt him then but, by God, how they'd make him appreciate what he'd had.So much for not getting morbid.
The track was fairly rough, and had begun to get overgrown. The van bounced where old ruts had dried in, and in some places low branches slashed at the windshield. As a child, he'd always loved the Step best of anywhere in the valley. It was a high, wooded headland jutting out into the lake, a steep climb to its summit from the shore and a tortuous drive from the road; easier access would have made it less private and less privacy might have taken away some of the magic, and the magic was what had made it so special. He'd played here, he'd grown here; and the last time he'd been here, he'd sat on the high rocks overlooking the water and he'd wept in solitude and without shame.
He didn't need to wonder what the view from the top would be like today. It would be of the valley and, whether the sun shone or the clouds cast a shadow across it or the rain came down, it was the homeland that would never let him go.
The track was coming to an end. The old place — lately McCarthy's place, although Pete McCarthy had moved out almost a year ago — lay just ahead.
Springtime was okay, although most of the valley people seemed to think that the autumn was the best time of year around these parts. Then the sunsets were like red gold in the mountains, and the woodland stood as dark and shady as anything out of a fairytale. Strangers had been known to spend an hour or more out on the terrace behind the Venetz sisters' restaurant, watching the evening mists rise from the lake with tears in their eyes.
