The Shadow Wife [antikvár]

Chapter One WHILE waiting in the old house in Copenhagen, Det Gamle Huus, as the Danes would caU it, with a fire crackling on the wide hearth and a gale sweeping up the Sound so that flying spume clouded the windows, I decided to write my autobiography. It was the only way to make what had happened to me believable. I searched for a beginning, knowing that something in my own character was more than half to blame for my strange predicament. So I had better start by being completely honest. Vulnerability was my trouble. I was both emotionally and financially insecure, and those two things were a dangerous combination. I will explain at once that this is not an autobiography in the conventional sense, because it covers such a short period of my life. Yet it is in the true sense, since this past year was the one in which I began to live. None of those childhood anecdotes and total recall for me. This was the year I, me, began. The other person, the child, the adolescent, the dreamer, the only sister of five brothers, had become a ghost. My brothers called me Lou or Lulu. I was the yotuigest, and they had kept me a baby. So had my parents. I hadn't realized the loving, claustrophobic atmosphere I had lived in until suddenly it all vanished and I was thrust out into the chilly, hard world. Five years ago my parents had died within six months of each other. Soon after that two of my brothers emigrated to Australia, one joined the army and was sent overseas, and the remaining two had jobs in Scotland and the north of England, respectively. I had decided to live in London and pursue my chosen but terribly difficult career as a writer. I won't dwell on the intervening five years, except to mention briefly a disastrous love affair that inevitably shaped subsequent events. It appeared that from the beginning the man had never intended to marry me, and had eventually become bored by my too intense devotion. After that moment of truth, badly scarred but still alive, I had avoided any serious relationships and devoted myself to my career. My 7 •(.'I P; 1, i-