Free The Book of You: A Novel by Claire Kendal Page A

there were so many people about.
    Still, she was nervous when she stepped into the railway arch behind the station. She paused to look inside the tunnel: no Rafe. And on the bridge, before she stepped onto it to cross the river: again he wasn’t there.
    But there was someone in the middle of the bridge, crumpled inside a heap of shabby blankets and encircled by empty beer cans, clutching a bottle of cheap spirits. There were several plastic bags around her, with her meager belongings.
    Normally, Clarissa would keep as much distance between them as she could. This time, she approached the woman, though she fought a stab of the same mixture of fear and pity that Miss Lockyer made her feel. She gripped her bag more tightly.
    The woman’s hair was so greasy and matted Clarissa couldn’t tell what color it was. Her flimsy shell jacket was torn and filthy on her skeleton frame. Her wrinkled skin was so rough and red and flaky it must have hurt; she appeared at first glance to be an old woman, but probably wasn’t more than forty. Would this be Miss Lockyer, someday? There was a stench of sour flesh—an unmistakable mix of unwashed genitals and anus and armpit sweat—that made Clarissa gag and try to breathe through her mouth, hoping the woman didn’t notice.
    “Money for the shelter?” The woman held out a hand that was almost blue with cold. Clarissa took off a mitten and drew out a twenty-pound note, knowing it would probably be used to purchase a wrap of crack cocaine and a wrap of heroin. “Bless you,” the woman said.
    Clarissa peeled off her other mitten and offered the pair, uncertain if her mother’s knitting would be wanted. The woman hesitated, then took them and put them on, slowly and clumsily. “Bless you,” she said again, not meeting Clarissa’s eye, and Clarissa moved forward, pressing her now-frozen fists deeply into the pockets of the warm coat she’d cut out when Henry had still been there.
    Henry, smiling faintly then, a glass of wine and the paper in his hands as she kneeled on the living-room floor, bending over the indigo wool she’d quilted into diamonds, immersed in her plans for it. Henry, crackling with energy even when he was still. Henry, shaving the few hairs he had left in the shower each morning so he was entirely bald—a style choice rather than unwanted fate, and yet more evidence of his infallible aesthetic judgment. Henry, in Cambridge now, a world away from this woman and from Clarissa.
    Clarissa hurried on, wanting to get home as fast as she could. She reached the old churchyard within minutes. Miss Lockyer must have passed it countless times, including the day they took her. Had she ever noticed the only tomb that hadn’t been torn out? Green with mildew, the gray stone box marking the location of the bodies was the size of a large trunk. Many centuries ago the graveyard had been a wood. It was another of Clarissa’s special places. She liked to think it was a source of magic for her, and that someday that magic would take effect, though it hadn’t happened yet.
    A woman had been buried there with her two babies in the middle of the nineteenth century. Three deaths in two years. Clarissa couldn’t see the inscriptions in the dark, and the engraved letters were losing their definition, but she knew them by heart.
    Matilda Bourn, Died 21st August 1850, Aged 4 Months
    Louisa Bourn, Died 16th September 1851, Aged 6 Weeks
    Jane Bourn, Mother of the Above Children,
    Died 22nd December 1852, Aged 43 Years & 6 Months
    Clarissa always imagined the two babies cradled in their mother’s arms beneath that damp earth, and the mother happy at last to be able to hold them to her. Had they been her only babies? Probably there’d been many others; that was more likely. Probably her health had been ruined by too many pregnancies too close together—that might have been what killed her. Clarissa could have researched it, but she didn’t really want to know. She preferred the story she