Devotion

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Louisa Young. Devotion

LOUISA YOUNG. Devotion

Praise for Devotion:

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Acknowledgements

Also by Louisa Young. FICTION

NON-FICTION

About the Author

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

The Times

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But Riley was not coming. Nobody was happy about this, but everybody accepted it. He had to go to work, of course. Men usually had to go to work, one way or another. This was the main way of telling that Peter was getting better: he was working now. Writing this Homer book for Riley to publish! There was a manuscript to prove it. Peter had shown it to Tom, with an expression on his face similar to the one Tom wore, on the few occasions when he’d liked a teacher enough to want to impress him. Peter had said, ‘Well. There it is. First draft,’ and Tom had looked at it and thumbed it, and said, ‘That’s a lot of words’, and that had seemed to do. Anyway, as Riley said now, ‘Books don’t publish themselves’, so he had to work, and not come on holiday, so the joy was clouded. If Tom had paid more attention he might have picked up that strong, tough, humorous, hardworking Riley, who could cope with anything (and had), simply did not want to take a train across Europe to meet new people, to have to talk to them, to stay in a house as a guest with them when he didn’t know them, and they would not understand his mangled voice (in English or his remnants of Italian), or know that he could not eat most solid food, or that he had to be able to sleep when he needed to, to stop talking sometimes even in the middle of a conversation, to leave the moment leaving became necessary.

For a brief period he had thought she meant ‘sole’. If Riley could cope with a wounded face, and be kind, then surely only a nothing-kind-of-man would be bothered by a wounded sole? One afternoon, while his father was asleep in his study, Tom had seen his large white feet flopping over the arm of the leather chaise. There was nothing wrong with them.

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