If I Could Tell You - Softcover

Wilhide, Elizabeth

 
9780143130437: If I Could Tell You
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0143130439 ISBN 13: 9780143130437
Verlag: PENGUIN GROUP, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

“A marvelous work of historical fiction, beautifully crafted and inhabited by morally complex and fully realized characters... compelling, immersive, and utterly impossible to put down.” —Jennifer Chiaverini, New York Times bestselling author of Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker

Anna Karenina meets World War II, a novel of love, war, and the resilience of one woman's spirit 
 
England, 1939: Julia Compton has a beautifully well-ordered life. Once a promising pianist, she now has a handsome husband, a young son she adores, and a housekeeper who takes care of her comfortable home. Then, on the eve of war, a film crew arrives in her coastal town. She falls in love.
 
The consequences are devastating. Penniless, denied access to her son, and completely unequipped to fend for herself, she finds herself adrift in wartime London with her lover, documentary filmmaker Dougie Birdsall. While Dougie seeks truth wherever he can find it, Julia finds herself lost. As the German invasion looms and bombs rain down on the city, she faces a choice—succumb to her fate, or fight to forge a new identity in the heat of war.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elizabeth Wilhide is the author of Ashenden. Born in the United States, she has lived in Britain since 1967. She has two children and lives in south London.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

London, 1944

People fell from the sky. Some spread-eagled, some twisting and flailing, others drifting down as if weightless. Face after face after face passed her by, neared then disappeared into greyness. They were angels, falling from the angel roof. She understood she was to join them.

They were men and women and children. They were war dead.

She understood she was war dead too and reached out her hands.

Death is truth, they told her, falling.

Her mouth was caked in dust. Her throat was dust. Dust was in her nose. She took a breath and it was ashes. She coughed and there were knives in her chest. She couldn't move her arms, her hands, her legs, her feet. She could move her head a little. She tried to call out but her voice was shut up in her throat.

Someone else called. She heard their thin cries. It was dark.

Her mother told her she needed a little colour at her neck. Her mother told her that if she'd had her opportunities when she was a girl she wouldn't have thrown them away. 'Half a pound of antimacassars,' said her mother.

She was pinned. She couldn't move her hands, her arms, her legs. Dust silted her mouth and choked her.

It was sunny and hot. The tide was out. She was walking down a shingle beach with a mermaid's purse in the pocket of her dress. The sea was sparkling.

Something shifted, tilted, gave way. A cavity opened up, a vacancy. From above came a narrow probing beam of light.

Someone groaned; something moved. She smelled gas. The light went out.

She was walking down a shingle beach with a mermaid's purse in her pocket.

Protect my family.



Chapter One 

1939

Julia Compton was frightened, of course she was. The gas masks dangling from the hallstand in their cardboard cartons - hers, her husband's, her son's and their housekeeper's - lurched her stomach every time she laid eyes on them. Obscene things, rubbery and goggle-eyed. She couldn't remember much about the previous war - she'd been too young - only the maroons banging and bursting at the end of it. That did not stop her from imagining a miasma of yellow mustard gas creeping over the town, borne inland on sea breezes, settling into the furrows of ploughed fields.

That summer they all knew it was coming. The papers were full of it, the pubs and pulpits too. Appeasement had failed. Any day now the waiting would be over. Twenty years, and they'd scarcely got over the last one, people were saying.

For this reason she was as relieved as everyone else when a film crew arrived from London in the last week of August and gave them all something different to talk about. The great topic of conversation was why they had come. It was a small town on an east-coast estuary with nothing noteworthy about it. Trippers passed it by routinely; amateur painters tired of hunting for subjects and didn't stay long. What could possibly interest them?

Fishing, it turned out.

The news was received with surprise. You caught fish, you smoked them, you sold them. No one in their right mind filmed them. Somewhat later the penny dropped. Films about fishing must feature those who made their living that way. Women were the first to realize this and the hairdresser on the high street found herself busy.

'What is it,' said Julia, 'that so attracts people to filming? Is it glamour, do you think?'

The six o'clock bulletin was over - no war yet - and they'd switched off the wireless. A pleated paper fan hid the summer hearth. On the mantelshelf: a green ceramic bowl of spills for the fires they would have to light soon, a brass carriage clock, an engraved invitation on stiff white card to a yacht-club dance propped against well-dusted ornaments.

Richard looked up from the newspaper and lamplight glanced off his face.

These days she often forgot how handsome her husband was - it was the same as the mantelshelf ornaments, familiarity cloaking their original appeal - but on this occasion it struck her as if she were seeing it for the very first time, as if he were a rare prize displayed in a shop window alongside bric-a-brac. He was nearing forty, eight years older than her, and age, which would eventually dim and blur her slight, dark prettiness, was only maturing his good looks, confirming them with a few crow's feet and a distinguished scattering of grey. Beauty was unfair that way: it treated men and women differently. The matinee idol, her mother had called him. He was a solicitor and oddly lacking in vanity.

She set down her sherry glass on a leather-topped coaster. 'Peter's been down at the quayside all afternoon watching them, along with half the town.'  Their son Peter was nine.

'In his case, I suspect it's the mechanics of it.'

'The train-set aspect?'

'You have to admit it's rather impressive kit they've got.'

She laughed. 'You're just as bad as he is.'

He put the newspaper to one side. 'I think I might have secured a counsel for Perry Clayton.'

Two months ago Perry Clayton, who worked in the smokehouse on Brewer Street, had got into a brawl with a man who was sleeping with his wife and beaten him so badly he later died of his injuries. He was currently on remand awaiting trial at the assizes.

'That's good,' said Julia.

Harry, their housekeeper, came in to announce dinner was ready. Peter's footsteps pounded down the stairs as they went into the hallway.

'Walk, don't run,' Richard said to him. 'How many times have I told you? Don't they teach you that at school?'

By the time they sat down at the table, her husband's appearance had regained its customary normality. A phrase occurred to her: 'the institution of marriage'. She slipped her napkin out of its bone ring.

Julia tidied up the clothes her son had left on the floor. 'Have you brushed your teeth?'

'Yes, Madre,' said Peter. He was in his pyjamas, pushing his Hornby engine to and fro with a bare foot.

'Pop into bed then and I'll read to you.'

Peter bounced on the mattress and flopped back. 'Mr Birdsall let me look through the camera.'

Julia closed a drawer. 'Who's Mr Birdsall?'

'He's in charge of the filming,' said Peter. 'People who are in charge of films are called directors.'

'Are they,' said Julia. 'I hope you weren't making a nuisance of yourself.'

'Filming's ever so complicated,' said Peter. 'Like maths.' Peter was good at maths.

'Get yourself under the covers now.' She sat down on the edge of the bed and opened the book. The Story of the Treasure Seekers. 'Are you sure you want this one again?'

He nodded.

'Being the adventures of the Bastable children in search of a fortune,' it said on the title page. Underneath was her name in an eight-year-old's loopy letters. Peter never seemed to tire of it. Perhaps as an only child he enjoyed imagining himself part of a large family.

When he settled himself down she began to read. '"It is one of us that tells this story - but I shall not tell you which: only at the very end perhaps I will. While the story is going on you may be trying to guess, only I bet you don't. It was Oswald who first thought of looking for treasure. Oswald often thinks of very interesting things -"'

A satisfied chuckle from the pillow. 'He gives the game away. Right...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
PENGUIN GROUP
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0143130439
ISBN 13 
9780143130437
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9
Plovdiv
Bulgarien

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780241209592: If I Could Tell You

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0241209595 ISBN 13:  9780241209592
Verlag: Fig Tree, 2016
Hardcover