Lovesong Read online

  She held a piece of paper in her hand. There was a child’s drawing on it.

  ‘I got a prize for my drawing of Mum!’ She was breathless with it. I scarcely had time to look at her drawing before she snatched it away and ran past me and went around behind the counter and held it up for Sabiha to see. ‘Mum! Look! I got a prize for it!’ Sabiha picked her up and hugged her and Houria struggled and yelled, ‘Look at my picture, Mum!’

  Sabiha was Clare’s age when she fell pregnant with Houria. I wondered if it was just possible that Clare might have a child too. Clare had never felt Sabiha’s overwhelming need for motherhood. I looked at the two of them now, Houria talking like crazy, correcting her mother’s attempts to interpret the drawing. ‘No, that’s your nose, not your eye!’ Whenever Sabiha was asked by her Italian customers, as she quite often was, Why did you call your pastry shop by an Italian name when you and John are not Italian? Sabiha always told them, Signor Fiorentino was a man who gave us something precious for which we can never repay him. But of course she never told anyone what this precious thing was that Signor Fiorentino had given them.

  John and I greeted each other. He hefted his satchel. ‘English assignments,’ he said. ‘I might not be doing too many more of these.’

  I said, ‘I wouldn’t give up your day job just yet, John.’

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  I t’s getting dark outside. I haven’t switched the light on. I’m sitting at my desk looking across the road at the last of the sun slicing through the elms in the park. I have Sabiha’s blessing now, her permission. One day I will talk to her about my fiction. The house is quiet. My notebook and box of sharpened pencils are on the desk in front of me. I don’t use a computer. I like to lean on my desk and twist my notebook around and chew my pencil and look out at the elms. A screen in front of me would stop me from dreaming. Writing is my way of avoiding the Venetian solution, not encouraging it.

  Stubby nudges my leg with his nose. I’m watching the last of the sun. It is a very beautiful sight. When I told Clare earlier that John was writing his story, she said, ‘I told you he would be.’ I said, ‘Yes, he’ll probably call it Murder in the rue des Esclaves.’ She said, ‘You might be surprised.’ I said, ‘I might be.’ Then she asked me, ‘What will you call your version?’ I said, ‘We’ll see.’ I’m not convinced by John’s claim to have become a writer overnight. However forgiving he is of Sabiha, there is a sense in which he has closed off those difficult channels into himself that a writer needs. I just don’t see him getting it. ‘Come on then, Stubbs,’ I say, and I get up. ‘Let’s do the walk while there’s still a bit of light left to us.’ Sabiha’s story had come out of her and been carried to me; now, after I had lived in it jealously myself for a while, I would carry it to others, and in the end would let it go and be done with it, like all the other stories I have carried.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to my editor, Annette Barlow, and the team at Allen & Unwin, and to Ali Lavau.

  Also by Alex Miller

  Landscape of Farewell

  Prochownik’s Dream

  Journey to the Stone Country

  Conditions of Faith

  The Sitters

  The Ancestor Game

  The Tivington Nott

  Watching the Climbers on the Mountain

  International Praise for Alex Miller

  ‘Alex Miller is a wonderful writer, one that Australia has been keeping secret from the rest of us for too long.'—John Banville

  ‘Few writers since Joseph Conrad have had so fine an appreciation of the equivocations of the individual conscience and their relationship to the long processes of history … [Landscape of Farewell is] a very human story, passionately told.’—Australian Book Review

  ‘As readers of his previous novels will know, Miller is keenly interested in inner lives … As one expects from the best fiction, Landscape of Farewell transforms the reader’s own inner life. Twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award, it is only a matter of time before Miller wins a Nobel.'—Daily News, New Zealand

  ‘Miller is a master storyteller.'—The Monthly

  ‘The most impressive and satisfying novel of recent years. It gave me all the kinds of pleasure a reader can hope for.—

  —Tim Winton on Journey to the Stone Country

  ‘A terrific tale of love and redemption that captivates from the first line.’

  —Nicholas Shakespeare on Journey to the Stone Country

  ‘Miller’s fiction has a mystifying power that is always far more than the sum of its parts … His footsteps—softly, deftly, steadily—take you places you may not have been, and their sound resonates for a long time.’

  —Andrea Stretton, The Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘A wonderful novel of stunning intricacy and great beauty.’

  —Michael Ondaatje on The Ancestor Game

  ‘In a virtuoso exhibition, Miller’s control never once falters.’

  —Canberra Times on The Tivington Nott

  Copyright

  Lovesong

  © 2009 by Alex Miller.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2010 ISBN: 9781443405409

  Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  First published by Allen & Unwin: 2009

  First published in Canada by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd in this original trade

  paperback edition: 2010

  FIRST CANADIAN EDITION

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

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  ISBN 978-1-55468-803-6

  RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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