Transgressions (41 page)
She ran her fingers along the spines until she found it, then slipped it into the machine, cuing it into the track and watching the seconds tick by as it played. . . .
We’re gonna make music underneath the stars
We’re gonna play to the violin and the two guitars
We’re gonna sit there and play for hours and hours when the healing has begun . . .
Like all great albums this one renewed itself with each era. She had once made love to this song with a man who had turned out to be less important than she had at first thought. But the track itself had grown and grown inside her, until she knew every flow and note of it—the way the piano came in like shafts of sunshine, the way the arrangement got looser and looser, like two bodies who couldn’t get enough of each other, the sense of their intoxication growing through each long musical phrase.
Maybe that was the point about love. You never knew where you were going to find it. Which one was going to last or which one fade away. That was why you had to keep on trying. Until then, all you could do was to keep on listening.
She turned the music up and looked out over the back gardens. Christmas night and the world was a safer place than it had been twenty-four hours before. Safer and emptier. She found herself looking for the one light that she knew would not be on. How much was she going to miss him? Or the him in her. It wasn’t a question she could answer yet. Maybe she never would.
I want you to put on your pretty summer dress.
You can wear your Easter bonnet and all the rest
And I wanna make love to you yes, yes, yes and when the healing has begun.
Roll on the spring, when she could open the windows and let the world in again.
Go to bed, Lizzie, she thought. You have a book to finish and in the real world the night is for sleeping.
As the track finished she turned and went upstairs to bed, leaving the CD playing and the door to the rest of the house unlocked behind her.
acknowledgments
This book, like my life, is made much richer by the music in it. A special thanks to Van Morrison and Exile Publishing Ltd./Polygram Music Ltd., who gave permission for me to use lyrics from “So Quiet in Here” and “And the Healing Has Begun.”
“The Mind of Love,” words and music by k.d. lang and Ben Mink, copyright © 1992, Bumstead Productions (U.S.) Incorporated/Polygram International Publishing Incorportated/Zavion Enterprises Incorporated/Rondor Music International Incorporated, USA. Polygram Music Publishing Ltd., 47 British Grove, London W4/Rondor Music (London) Ltd., 10a Parson’s Green, London SW6. Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd. All rights reserved. International Copyright Secured.
“Ain’t Got No Money,” words and music by Frankie Miller, copyright © 1976, Chrysalis Music Limited, The Chrysalis Building, Bramley Road, London W10. Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd. All rights reserved. International Copyright Secured.
“Drop Baby Drop,” words and music by Eddy Grant by permission of International Music Publications Ltd.
S
ARAH
D
UNANT
has written eight novels and edited two books of essays. She has worked widely in print, television, and radio. Now a full-time writer, she is adapting her novels
Transgressions
and
Mapping the Edge
for the screen. Dunant has two daughters and lives in London and Florence.
ALSO BY SARAH DUNANT
The Birth of Venus
Mapping the Edge
Under My Skin
Fatlands
Birth Marks
Snow Storms in a Hot Climate
Praise for
Transgressions
“Scary and deviously absorbing”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A taut thriller that will strike fear into every woman who lives on her own.”
—Cosmopolitan
“Through [Dunant’s] deliberations over this text and her own slow-building vulnerability she explores the nature of brutality—and, in particular, how women who experience the worst forms of violence from men can manage to escape the tag of victim and take control. The author draws you into a stark and disturbing world where she scrutinizes her own craft and motives while keeping you on tenterhooks right until the final spine-chilling denouement.”
—Good Housekeeping
“Don’t read Sarah Dunant’s fifth novel at night if you live on your own.”
—The Daily Telegraph
“Original and disturbing.”
—The Sunday Telegraph
“Brave and interesting . . . [Dunant’s] narrative pulses with emotional truth and heart.”
—The Mail on Sunday
“Dunant’s unflashy, well-modulated prose brings the story on swiftly and engrossingly.”
—The Observer
(London)
“An unsettling, often chilling portrait.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An intelligent psychological thriller.”
—New Weekly
“Dunant’s unsettling novel is compelling to the end.”
—Sunday Express
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2005 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1998 by Sarah Dunant
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
T
RADE
P
APERBACKS
and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by BCA in 1997 and in the United States by HarperCollins in 1998. This edition published by arrangement with the author.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Dunant, Sarah.
Transgressions: a novel / Sarah Dunant.
p. cm.
eISBN 1-58836-482-8
1. Women translators—Fiction. 2. Stalking victims—Fiction. 3. London (England)—Fiction. 4. Single women—Fiction. 5. Stalkers—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6054.U45756T7 2005
823′.914—dc22 2005042757
v1.0
