Solace [antikvár]

One When did it all start? She would never know for sure, although later she would trace it, like a finger on a map following the broad river back to the invisible thread of its beginnings, to one evening in early winter. Outside, she remembered it as cold, dark, full of damp, gusty wind; the ratde of dustbin lids, the hiss of cars through puddles, the rusde of bushes, the creak of bending trees. Inside it was warm and the puddles of brightness cast by the lamps and the candles made the room seem like a deep cave in the secret heart of London. She dwelt on what might have happened until she could no longer distinguish between what she knew and what she had imagined. She illuminated the shadowy corners, poured into mysterious silences the suggestive murmur of their voices, allowed herself to picture them together: a moment when the match was struck, its cool flame licking at the dry tinder, and nobody had any idea of the conflagration to come. And if they had known, would they have stopped it? Blown out the flame, left it at that: a moment of possibility, something they would remember later, if they thought about it at aU, with a rueful sense of life's precariousness. And what about her? If Irene herself could have turned the hidden destruction of that evening back on its oiled hinge, closed it off with a neat click, would she have done so? Would she?