Free The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness Page A

was from ‘all over’, she said when he asked her over dinner that night, and had been a sort of teacher. Overseas. In developing countries.
    ‘It sounds noble,’ she said. ‘I do not want it to sound like that. Like some great woman offering her services to poor, adoring unfortunates. Not at all. It was not like that. It was like . . .’
    She trailed off, looking into the dark wood panelling that overpowered the ceilings and the walls. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, George had taken her to a self-consciously old-fashioned ‘English’ restaurant, such as men in morning suits might have eaten at anywhere from 1780 to 1965. A small sign above the door read ‘Est 1997’. He’d been surprised she’d accepted his invitation, surprised she’d been free at no notice whatsoever, but she said she was new to this place and not, at the moment, overflowing with friends.
    She’d used that word. Overflowing.
    ‘The teaching,’ she said, furrowing her brow, ‘the
interaction
, I should say, was like a hello and a goodbye, all at once, every day. Do you know what I mean?’
    ‘Not even a little,’ George said. She spoke in an accent he couldn’t place. French? French/Russian? Spanish/Maltese? South African/Nepalese/Canadian? But also English, and possibly Japanese like her name but also neither or any, as if every place she may have travelled hadn’t wanted her to leave and insinuated itself into her voice as a way of forcing her to take it along. He could understand the feeling.
    She laughed at him, but nicely. ‘I do not like talking of myself so much. Let it be enough that I have lived and changed and been changed. Just like everyone else.’
    ‘I can’t ever imagine you’d need changing.’
    She pushed some roast beef around her plate without eating it. ‘I believe you mean what you say, George.’
    ‘That was too much. I’m sorry.’
    ‘And I believe that, too.’
    She’d had a relationship, perhaps even a marriage, that had ended at some point, though it didn’t seem amicably so, like his had with Clare. She didn’t want to talk about that either. ‘The past is always filled with both joy and pain, which are private and perhaps not first date conversation.’
    He’d been so pleased she’d called it a ‘first date’ that he missed several of her next sentences.
    ‘But you, now, George,’ she said. ‘You are not from here, are you?’
    ‘No,’ he said, surprised. ‘I’m–’
    ‘American.’ She leant back in her chair. ‘So you perhaps do not quite belong either, do you?’
    She said she’d taken up the cuttings on her travels. Paints and brushes were too hard and too expensive to truck around from place to place, so she’d first started using local fabrics – batiks or weaves or whatever was to hand – and had moved, more or less by chance, to feathers, after coming across a market stall in Paramaribo or Vientiane or Quito or Shangri-La perhaps, that sold every colour of feather you could imagine and beyond, some concoctions so unlikely they hardly seemed to have come from an animal at all.
    ‘And looking back on it,’ she said, ‘what an impossible market stall to find. Feathers are difficult to source, and expensive. Yet here they were, pinned to the walls of a poor market seller in melting heat. I was bewitched. I bought as much as my arms could carry, and when I went back the next day, the stall was gone.’
    She took a sip of mint tea, an odd thing to have with roast beef, but she’d declined all offers of the red wine George was desperately trying not to drink too quickly.
    ‘Your pictures are . . .’ George started, and faltered.
    ‘And again, the sentence you cannot finish.’
    ‘No, I was going to say, they’re . . .’ Still the word failed him. ‘They’re . . .’ Her face was smiling, a little shy at an incoming critique of her work, but beautiful, so beautiful, so beautiful and kind and somehow looking right back at George that to hell with it, in he went,