Free The Light of Amsterdam by David Park Page A

It was warm that summer’s day and she remembered the red patches on her knees where the sun burnt them. She must have been wearing shorts. Not like these black legging things she had on now that stopped at the ankles and thickened her legs even more. She recalled herself in a series of photographs. The four girls – they always thought of themselves as like the Four Marys out of the Bunty – linking arms outside the caravan door, a chorus line about to do a high-stepping dance. But if there were four of them in the photograph who was taking the picture? She didn’t know. On the beach, Susan standing on her head with Hilary holding her legs. The Four Marys. Tiptoeing in the sea, squealing at the cold lace of the water embroidering their feet. Lillian dead now from breast cancer; one living in America out of touch except for the Christmas card that had come every year for thirty years with the couple of sentences that told of children’s marriages and the birth of grandchildren; one divorced and on her second marriage and still living close by but whose life never seemed to cross her own.
    A lot of water under the bridge, a lot of years. Everything getting added on like rings in a tree. Your life getting bigger and heavier with possessions. Growing more branches, spreading more roots. How could it be possible to stay the same and not also become part of that growth, the ever-increasing weight of solidity that made a life established and permanently fixed? Two sons, both in good business careers, a daughter living in France, a home that had more rooms than they could ever use and a business that provided for everything they needed. Her legs were already sore but she cycled on, remembering all those trite sayings that linked pain with gain. And perhaps she deserved the pain for not fighting hard enough to hold on to that young girl. For letting herself go. For not struggling enough. She looked at her hands, the blue veins beginning to rise like flooding rivers, her knuckles creasing into deepening whorls, the two rings that seemed old-fashioned in their clumpy design. He never wanted a wedding ring, always turned his nose up at any idea that a man might wear jewellery. So he never wore a ring and she supposed it made him feel more of a man in just the same way that he would never carry an umbrella or push one of his children’s prams in public.
    And this present – and she can’t even begin to think of it as a present – of a year’s membership of this swanky fitness and leisure complex was filled with unanswered questions and once again it confused her that a man who could speak so directly in business continued to be someone unable to express himself openly in other matters. So was he telling her that she’d let herself go and needed to pull herself together? Was this his way of expressing his disappointment? She stopped pedalling and freewheeled through the uncontrolled spin of her thoughts. Time had been kinder to him. Barely heavier than when they got married, with even the grey seeping through his hair giving him a sense of dignity, of gravitas, and it struck her as unfair that a man who loved his food more than she did should be effortlessly able to burn off every calorie that crossed his lips. The energy he put into the garden centre and a round of golf a week seemed enough to keep him trim and fit-looking. A handsome man. He was slowly leaving her behind and at this thought she lowered her eyes from the mirror and started to pedal again. But she had touched something unintentionally with her hand and now it was harder and harder and she was pedalling uphill and in her mind she couldn’t believe she was ever going to catch up.
    Afterwards the changing room provided an even worse torture. She undressed slowly in the poor privacy of a corner, sheltering half-heartedly behind a towel as if she was on a holiday beach, trying not to look at the young woman who had stepped out