Free The Carousel by Rosamunde Pilcher

had never married. And yet I was not surprised. There was something nomadic, free, about Daniel, and I found I was envious of this.
    I said, "I wish there was time in life to do everything."
    "You've got time."
    "I know, but already I seem to be in a sort of rut. I like the rut. I like my job and I'm doing exactly what I want to do, and I love Marcus Bernstein, and I wouldn't change my job for anything in the world. But sometimes, on a certain sort of morning, I drive to work, and I think, I'm twenty-three and what am I doing with my life? And I think of all the places I long to see. Kashmir and the Bahamas and Greece, and Palmyra. And San Francisco, and Peking and Japan. I would like to have been to some of the places you've been to."
    "Then go. Go now."
    "You make it sound so simple."
    "It can be. Life is as simple as you make it."
    "Perhaps I haven't got that sort of courage. But still, I would like to have done some of the things you've done."
    He laughed. "Don't wish that. Some of it was hell." "It can't still be hell. Everything's going so well for you now."
    "Uncertainty is always hell." "What are you uncertain about?" "About what I'm going to do next."
    "That shouldn't be too frightening."
    "I'm thirty-one. Within the next twelve months I've got to make some sort of a decision; I'm frightened of drifting. I don't want to drift for the rest of my life."
    "What do you want to do?"
    "I want . . ."
    He leaned back against the knobby granite of the harbour wall and turned his face to the sun and closed his eyes. He looked like a man who longed for the oblivion of sleep. "When this exhibition at Peter Chastal's is over and finished with, I want to go to Greece. There's an island called Spetsai, and on Spetsai there is a house, square and white as a sugar cube. And there's a terrace with terra cotta tiles on the floor, and geraniums in pots along the tops of the wall. And below the terrace there's a mooring and a boat with a white sail like the wing of a gull. Not a big boat. Just large enough for two." I waited. He opened his eyes. He said, "I think I shall go there."
    "Do that thing."
    "Would you come?" He held out his hand to me. "Would you like to come and visit me? You just told me you wanted to go to Greece. Would you come and let me show you some of its glories?"
    I was very touched. I laid my hand in his and felt his fingers close about my wrist. How different this was, how frighteningly different, from the invitation Nigel had painfully offered me, to visit his mother in Inverness-shire. Two different worlds. The insecurity of two different worlds touching. I wondered if I was about to burst into tears. 
    "One day," I told him, in the voice of a mother placating an insistent child. "One day, maybe, I'll be able to come."
    The sky clouded and it grew cold. It was time to stir ourselves. We gathered up the picnic rubbish and found a little bin by a lamp post, and threw all the trash into that. We walked back to where I had left Phoebe's car, and there was the smell of rain in the air and the sea had turned angry and leaden.
    Red sky at morning, shepherd's warning. We got into the car and slowly drove back to Penmarron. Phoebe's heater did not work, and I felt cold. I knew that there would be a fire ablaze at Holly Cottage, and possibly crumpets for tea, but I wasn't thinking about these things. My mind was filled with images of Greece, of the house above the water and the boat with a sail like the wing of a gull. I thought of swimming in that dark Aegean sea, the water warm and clear as glass . . .
    Memory stirred.
    "Daniel."
    "What is it?"
    "That night I got off the train from London, I had a dream. It was about swimming. I was on a desert island, and I had to walk a long long way through shallow water. And then all at once it was deep, but so clear I could see right to the bottom. And once I had started to swim, there was a current. Very fast and strong. It was like being swept down a river."
    I remembered again the