Gentlemen & Players by Joanne Harris

Author:Joanne Harris [Harris, Joanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Humorous, Black Humor, Thrillers, Psychological, Suspense
ISBN: 9781407056463
Google: CCCTJJ4-TgAC
Amazon: 0060559152
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2006-12-25T16:00:00+00:00

2

I suppose I should have guessed. It was my mother. Three months ago she had begun to write to him again, in vague terms at first, then in more and more detail. My father had not told me of her letters, but in retrospect, their arrival must have coincided more or less with my first meeting with Leon and the beginning of my father’s decline.

“I didn’t want to tell you, kid. I didn’t want to think about it. I thought that if I just ignored it, it might just go away. Leave us both alone.”

“Tell me what?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Tell me what?”

He told me then, still sobbing, as I wiped my mouth and listened to the idiot birds. For three months he had tried to hide it from me; at a single blow I understood his rages, his renewed drinking, his sullenness, his irrational, homicidal changes of mood. Now he told me everything; still holding his head in his hands, as if it might break open with the effort, and I listened with increasing horror as he staggered through his tale.

Life, it seemed, had been kinder to Sharon Snyde than it had to the rest of the family. She had married young, giving birth to me only a few weeks before her seventeenth birthday, and she had been just twenty-five when she left us for good. Like my father, Sharon was fond of clichés, and I gathered that there had been a great deal of hand-wringing psychobabble in her letters; apparently she needed to find out who she was, conceded that there were faults on both sides, that she had been in a bad place emotionally and claimed a number of similar excuses for her desertion.

But she had changed, she said; finally, she had grown up. It made us sound like a toy she had outgrown, a tricycle perhaps, once loved, but now rather ridiculous. I wondered if she still wore Cinnabar, or whether she had grown out of that too.

In any case she had remarried, to a foreign student she had met in a bar in London, and had moved to Paris to be with him. Xavier was a wonderful man, and both of us would really like him. In fact she would love us to meet him; he was an English teacher in a lycée in Marne-la-Vallée; was keen on sports; adored children.

And that brought her to her next point; although she and Xavier had tried and tried, they had never been able to have a child. And although Sharon had not had the courage to write to me herself, she had never forgotten her Munchkin, her sweetheart, or let a single day go by without thinking of me.

Finally, Xavier had been convinced. There was plenty of room in their apartment for three; I was a bright kid and would pick up the language with no difficulty; best of all I would have a family again, a family that cared, and money to make up for everything the years had denied me.

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