The Break in the Circle [antikvár]

1 - WHAT LINDA SAW . . . it was strange, she thought, how everyday, quiet things suddenly brought happiness flooding into you—how bitter memory could suddenly draw back and leave you free again. She sat down on the low stone wall, leaning against the grey bulk of her cottage, built, as were all the houses in Wainport, to withstand the two winds: rumbustious buf-fetings from the west and cruel, sand-streaked attack from the east. She felt the grey stone warm against her back; she stared at the wet towels and the yellow-edged tablecloth, which she had just pegged to the line, watching them flap against a blue spring sky, thanking them for this unaccountable happiness. Was she escaping at last, she wondered? Escaping from those far-reaching, damnable tentacles of the past which clung so avidly despite the passing of time. For so many months she had lived with her own private misery that this sudden sense of freedom took her by surprise; she hadn't supposed that she would ever feel free again. Divorce, with all its legal trappings, had never appeared to her as something which would flay the emotions—not until it had appeared, monstrous and menacing, in her own life. Divorce had seemed to be the way in which maltreated women cast off their husbands; it had never presented itself to her imagi- 3