The Water Diviner Read Online Free

comb from a chipped enamel mug sitting on the back stoop and runs it through his hair.
    There’s a moment of quiet as the day gives way to night, and the water diviner drops his shoulders and exhales for what feels like the first time today.
    The screen door swings, screeches and slams.
    ‘Sounds like that hinge could do with some oil. I’ll get onto it tomorrow morning.’
    Eliza sits at the table, hunched over and immersed in the job at hand. She tilts her head towards Connor and gives a papery smile. Although she still has the fine complexion and clear green eyes he first fell in love with, the grey streaks in her hair belie her relative youth and signal an advancing frailty. She seems to be disappearing; folding in on herself. The sharp line of her fine nose and dark hollows beneath her jawline become more prominent every day. Where once she had filled her pin-tucked, tightly waisted dresses with womanly curves and soft skin, now she stitches new seams into her clothes to disguise her diminishing frame. When Connor has occasion to embrace her, she feels as insubstantial as an armful of chicken bones.
    The day is not over for her. She works with brush and cloth to polish a line of schoolboys’ boots to a mirror-like shine, her knuckles stained nugget-brown.
    ‘Lizzie. . .? Everything all right?’
    She doesn’t glance up, trying to avoid his gaze. ‘Dinner’s waiting.’
    Connor looks towards the table where a solitary, uninviting meal sits; cold pressed ox tongue, mustard pickles and some slices of bread. Next to the plate sits a small brown paper–wrapped parcel, opened but face down.
    He moves towards the table. ‘Lizzie – what’s this? Who’s it from?’
    Eliza rubs at one small boot and holds it up to the lantern light.
    ‘For goodness’ sake. Arthur’s worn through the toe of his boot again. What on earth does he do to them?’ Her face softens as she looks up at Connor. ‘The boys are all in bed. They’re waiting for you to read to them.’
    ‘I’m bone tired, Lizzie.’
    ‘You mustn’t disappoint them, Joshua. It’s their favourite part of the day. They waited up specially.’
    Connor concedes with a resigned nod and drags his waterlogged body down the hall towards the bedroom door.

    Connor lowers himself carefully onto the end of one of the three single beds. He smiles and takes a small blue leather-bound volume from a bedside table. He opens it and begins to read
The Arabian Nights
, the boys’ favourite.
    Prince Hussein called to the man and asked him why the carpet he wished to sell was so expensive, saying, ‘It must be made from something quite extraordinary.’
    The Merchant replied, ‘My Prince, your amazement will be all the greater when I tell you that it is enchanted.’
    Connor’s voice, honeyed and sure, drifts through the room and down the hall.
    ‘Whoever sits on this magic carpet and closes his eyes may be transported through the air in an instant to wherever his heart desires to be.’
    Connor closes the book and rests his hand on the hollow place in the mattress where his son should lie.
    Moonlight shines in the window and illuminates the three empty beds, cold and unjumped-on, the white pillows missing sleep-tousled heads, the neatly made starched sheets unrumpled by sweaty slumber.
    He is alone.

    After he composes himself Connor slips out of the bedroom, closes the door and makes the desolate walk back to the kitchen table. Eliza sits, arms crossed, her heart burnished raw like the shoes lined up before her. Connor takes the seat opposite, with the small, brown parcel and years of arrested grief perched between them. His dinner sits, untouched, at the other end of the table.
    Connor has been reading to empty beds now for four years, ever since the first telegram arrived from the army telling them that ‘regrettably’ Henry was missing, presumed dead.
    ‘Read to him,’ Lizzie beseeched. ‘I’ll close my eyes and imagine him back here safely. He’s just lost.