Last Quadrant - 1981

John Murray (Publishers) Ltd

Extract

From Chapter One

‘May I come in then?’ Kyo asked.  She had not waited at the outer gate, but let herself in and approached the front steps, as if such familiarity was in order.  It was twenty years since Eva last saw her.

In the fierce light of the doorstep Kyo’s small figure was bright and hard as a chip of stone.  Eva blocked the passage with an arm before the open door.  From behind came the odour of stewing bones from the soup she was preparing, a bald and fetid smell.  Escaping the kitchen it seeped out aboaut her into the sun of the garden and the borders of marigolds.  Their colours were deep and velvet against the parched dry beds of soil.  Eva stared over the half moons of her glasses, and shock flushed in a cold dry burn.

Dropping her arm from the doorway, Eva moved a fe steps back.  Kyo’s cheap perfume sharpened her nostrils, before the cooking bones engulfed it.  The cloying film of make up was thicker than before, the lips pulped and soft from that secret life Eva knew little of.  But suddenly she saw again the fine texture of Kyo’s skin, stretched over the wide flat planes of her face, scrubbed and shiny, free of make-up, on that first day Eva brought her to the orphanage, more than twenty-five years before.  Now she thought, how changed she is, how old she has become, she must be forty-five.

Kyo followed Eva into the room but stopped at its carpeted threshold. ‘Not a thing has changed.’ She looked about in a deprecating way and then stepped boldly forward.