Kissed a Sad Goodbye Read Online Free

flotsam from a storm.
    Jo knelt and touched him on the shoulder. “Did it cut you? Are you all right?” When he didn’t answer she pried his hands from his knees and checked them. They were unblemished. She kept one hand in hers and tried again. “Harry, did you break the vase because you were angry with me? You know what you did last night was wrong, but maybe I was wrong to punish you instead of talking about it.”
    Harry turned his head further away from her and the sunlight slanting in from the window lit his hair like a flame. What an irony it was, thought Jo, that while Sarah had inherited her own dark auburn coloring, Harry might have been cloned from her sister’s genes. And her father, who had always adored Annabelle at Jo’s expense, had fastened his expectations on Harry as the heir to, if not the family name, at least the family tradition.
    “Sometimes mums can be wrong, too,” she continued. “But somehow I have to make you understand that you can’t say things like that to people. I’m sure you hurt Annabelle very—”
    “I don’t bloody care.” Harry snatched his hand away and for the first time looked at her. “She’s a
whore
. I meant to hurt her.” He blinked and tears spilled over into his pale lashes.
    “Harry, you mustn’t use words like that. You know better—”
    “I don’t care! I
hate
her.”
    “Harry, darling—”
    “Don’t call me that.” He pushed himself up from the floor and stood over her. “I’m not your darling, and I hate
you
, too!” Then, with a slam of the door, he was gone.
    T HE COINS CLINKED INTO G ORDON F INCH’S clarinet case in a staccato, irregular rhythm. The children tossed them, then stood as close as they dared, rapt with attention, moving their bodies unselfconsciously to the music. Both the small girls and boys were bare-chested in the heat, the definition of their ribs showing like the delicate tracery of the branching veins in a leaf. Their faces were flushed from the sun, and some held half-forgotten ice creams in sticky fingers.
    He envied them their uncomplicated innocence, intact until someone came along to bugger it up for them. Thank God he hadn’t the responsibility for the shaping of a life. Caring for Sam was about as much as he could manage, and he’d been off his nut to think otherwise.
    He finished “Cherry Blossom Pink” and wiped the clarinet’s mouthpiece. The children watched him, large-eyed, jiggling up and down in expectation. Their parents stood behind them, some half sitting on the knee-high iron railing that separated the flower bed from the round, brick bulk of the Isle of Dogs entrance to the foot tunnel. Lifting the clarinet to his lips again, he played a bit of “London Bridge.” The children giggled and he thought for a moment, searching his memory for tunes they might like, then improvised “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.”
    A pied piper with a clarinet, he slid into “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” then “When I’m Sixty-Four,” from the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper
album, and the children bounced and swayed happily. But after a bit their parents grew restive, and one by one the families began to drift away. They all had agendas, he thought as he watched them leave—places to go, things to do, people to see. Surely he didn’t envy them that as well?
    Finishing the piece, he drank from the bottle of water he’d bought at the refreshment kiosk a few yards away. He stood with his back to the spreading plane tree at the far end of Island Gardens. Behind him, just the other side of the tree, ran the river promenade. People strolled by at the undemanding pace dictated by the hot summer day, pausing occasionally to rest on the benches or gaze at the bright glint of the Thames. Directly across the river, the twin white domes of the Royal Naval College irresistibly drew the eye, echoed by the round dome of the Greenwich end of the foot tunnel.
    Between the Naval College and the tunnel rose the tall masts of the
Cutty