Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Coffee Break

Widows' Peak

The Bitter Scent of Moonlight

What Reviewers Say

Other books by Alma Alexander

Contact Alma

About the Author

Plaisir d’amour

Alma Alexander

Copyright Alma Alexander 2012

Published by Kos Books

Kos Books

A & D Deckert

343 Sudden Valley Drive

Bellingham WA 98229

Foreword

You might know a lovely sweet sad tune which goes by its French name "Plaisir d’Amour" - its lyrics speak of how the pleasure of love only lasts for a moment while love's woe can last forever.

I moved to New Zealand in the autumn of 1994. By Easter of 1995, I had met a man whom I believed – whom I knew – that I would spend the rest of my life with. He seemed to know it too, and early on in our relationship he asked me, that if I didn’t want to make this ‘long-term’, to walk away immediately. I took it like a gift, gave him all of my heart, and looked forward to … a certain future.

To this day I am not certain what happened next. Something did. The man who was supposed to be the other half of me sort of stopped being with me, even when we were together. Just shy of a year later, after that promise he had exacted about long-termness, he decided that forever was way too long – and couldn’t we just be friends…?

I had thought that being a writer was an indissoluble part of who I was, that I could not exist without being one. But in the wake of having my heart handed back to me in a thousand pieces, I simply… dissassociated. For an entire year I existed in silent limbo, my words and my voices gone, or at the very least my ability to see, hear, acknowledge them. And then, near to breaking, a solitary little voice which was that of my inner writer finally got through to me. It said, Write, or we both die.

So I started to write again.

Predictably, still in mourning, the first stories that emerged in this period belonged to chagrin d’amour, the plaisir being only a distant memory full of regrets. These are not happy stories. But in the manner of the time-honored saying, what did not kill me made me stronger – and they’re good stories. They may be tales of heartbreak and how to survive it, but they’re also by that very definition tales of life and of living. I was alive. I was alive, and dammit, I was a writer. I always would be. If I had ever doubted it before, I knew it now.

These are three of the stories that took me by the hand and led me back to the land of the living. If you’ve ever had a broken heart, they will have a lot to say to you.

Welcome to the Alexander Triads, Book 5: Plaisir d’Amour.

Alma Alexander, 2012

This story was… an experiment all the way. It is a story in dialogue. Only dialogue. Everything is given in speech – the identity of the speakers, the location, the time of day and of year – character, setting, plot – everything is contained in this extended conversation between two women. This is not an easy thing to do, as I found out – I kept itching to introduce, you know, narrative. But somehow the story took on a life of its own without a single word of narrative in it, and the end result is oddly immediate, oddly involving, as though you really were a fly on the wall overhearing these two people talk to each other. I have never done another story like this, before or since. It stands, quite simply, unique in my archives.

Coffee Break

“Excuse me... are you Sarah?”

“Penny?”

“Yup. Well, that was easier than I thought. Mum and Dad just described you as tallish, with reddish hair. I could just see myself accosting every redhead at the airport until I got arrested for molesting the passengers. Is that all your luggage?”

“I travel light.”

“So I see. Here, let me take that. Did you have a good flight?”

“A bit bumpy over...”

“Over Oamaru? Yes, always is, that’s a classic.”

“It’s also snowing outside. It makes a difference from Auckland.”

“It would. But it’s only a flurry, it won’t last - although it’s been really cold down here lately. Over there, the car’s just over there, follow me.”

“God, it stings! I’ve forgotten how snow stings! And how wet it is when you get out of it into a nice warm car and it starts melting all over you!”

“Just throw the parka onto the back seat.”

“But there’s...”

“Never mind that mess. It’s Timmy’s. Legacy of having a five-year-old to keep amused in the car.”

“Thanks for coming out, by the way - I really appreciate it.”

“That’s okay, it’s just a wee detour - I had to do a run up to the flat anyway - the plants need watering, although I suppose you could take that over now while you’re there. Would save me the daily trips in and out of the place.”

“Of course.”

“Thanks. “

“It’s the least I can do. Your parents have been very kind, letting me use the flat...”

“Don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but... how on Earth did you cross paths with them?”

“I... er... well, we got introduced. By a... mutual friend.”

“Do I know this friend? Sorry, I’m being terribly nosy...”

“That’s okay, I suppose. I’ve no idea if you know him, they’ve known him and his family for years and years. We only met when I came down here for Christmas last year with Richard, and we spent... yeow!”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to brake that hard... thought I saw... Richard? Richard Wilson?”

“You sound so surprised.”

“I am. I mean, I didn’t know... Are you still...”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“No, it’s all right. It’s been over for a couple of months now.”

“That makes no difference. It doesn’t look like it’s blown over for you. Look, I’m sorry, I’m a wretched busybody. God, this weather is appalling. Do you have any plans for tonight?”

“Hot bath and early bedtime. Why?”

“Do you want to go out for a coffee somewhere?”

“I... yeah, all right, but... oh, OK, but we could have a cuppa at the flat unless you have some esoteric Dunedin nightspot you want to show off to the new girl in town...?”

“Esoteric nightspot? Dunedin? You really are new to this place. No, the flat actually sounds quite nice. It’ll give you a chance to figure out the place while I’m there as well - and you can kill two birds with one stone and boil the water for your hottie at the same time.”

“I’m glad I don’t have to drive in this weather. They said that even the runways were beginning to ice up.”

“Dad’s road, when the weather’s like this, is suicide - you either have to try and drive up an iced-up hill, or down it, and I don’t know what’s worse. I suppose this park’s as good as any. Oh God, it’s snowing again. Grab your parka and the little bag and scoot in, I’ll bring in the suitcase.”

“Which way?”

“Grab the lift, the flat’s on the fourth floor... no, that way... number 12. Hang on, I’ve got the key somewhere in my pocket...”

“It’s a nice place.”

“It’s not huge, but it’s all they need. There’s your new friends, all in a row - the ferns need quite a bit of water, the rest you can do every second day or something. The coffee’s up in that cupboard - that’s instant, though. They do have the real stuff if you feel like it. The coffee pot...”

“I see it. I’ll just make a plunger, then, shall I?”

“Remember the kettle’s not automatic, you have to watch it. What is it? What did I just say? You looked as if I’d just stepped on a corn.”

“You did in a way. There’s a similar kettle in another kitchen I can remember.”

“Take it from me. He’s a selfish prig. Don’t waste time mourning him.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh dear. Well, you might as well know - I had a fling with Richard years ago, before I met Matthew. That’s my husband. It’s not very inspiring to see that nothing has changed in all that time. He is still pulling out of the proverbial kitchen when he can no longer stand the heat. “

“Yeah, well, it takes two. I’m the sort that says gesundheit when someone kicks me, and then offers the other cheek.”

“You probably did nothing wrong. Let me guess. He said he wanted a long-term thing, and then, when it looked like that might actually happen, suddenly cooled off. I expect that he found that he was very busy, that suddenly there was this dearth of free time; when you were together he was usually miles away, and you could sit next to each other on the same couch and he might as well have been in Timbuctoo.”

“You have met him.”

“You’re not the first, you know.”

“The first what?”

“The kettle’s boiling. The first girl he’s brought down here. Mum and Dad have been sort of surrogate parents, even before his father died last year. His mother died years ago, but you know that - do you also know that his mother played heavy favorites and he wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, I gathered that.”

“Yes, well. Oh dear, I suppose we really should have stopped off for some milk or something - I hate that coffee creamer stuff, it makes these horrible floating powder-iceberg things. But there’s some in that cupboard if you want it - Dad’s emergency supplies.”

“Thanks. No, on second thought - I’ll just have mine black. What about this other girl?”

“What? Oh. Well, Mum and Dad have been a sort of approval board for years. He keeps on bringing people south.”

“He loves it down here.”

“Yes, well, actually I can understand that... but you’re the third. That I know of, anyway. There were two before you - I haven’t met either of them, but Mum told me about it. Number One was almost ten years ago, just after I got married - she looked like a strong possibility but she fizzled after about eighteen months. Then - it must have been just after Timmy was born - Richard came down with Number Two, but Mum said she could sense immediately that it was just not going to work. This one was apparently pretty but vacuous - and beauty might intrigue our Richard but he needs more than a pretty face in his women.”

“And then there’s me.”

“I think I may have just heard you do a rather nasty putdown on yourself. Don’t let him do that. You’re all right. It’s just that he’s a horse that can’t seem to stop himself from taking fright at the last hurdle, and tossing whatever rider he’s carrying at the time across on their nelly.”

“That sounds true enough - something’s broken all right.”

“You know what the best cure is for falling off a horse.”

“Getting straight back on again?”

“You got it. And pick a better-bred beast this time. I know it’s still raw, but there will be someone else - someone better - there always is.”

“ I don’t want anybody else!”

“D’you want a drop of brandy in that coffee? I know where Dad keeps his secret stash. No, don’t shake your head at me. And cry if you want to. In my post-Richard, pre-Matthew period I cried and cried and cried - I didn’t know I had that many tears in me. And I do know - he gets under your skin, he does. Mum adores him.”

“She’s safe.”

“Here. It’s good stuff. Dad’s a bit of a connoisseur. Yes, she’s safe. And so are you, now. Look on it as a vaccination. And there will be somebody else. Trust me. God, you look so young, I feel like an old hag. How old are you, anyway?”

“Thirty two the day before yesterday.”

“Seriously?”

“Why?”

“Don’t look so suspicious! I’m surprised on two counts, actually - you look about five or six years younger than that, I wouldn’t have given you more than 25 or 26 - and it was my birthday yesterday, one day after yours.”

“And how old are you, exactly, oh old hag?”

“I don’t really look it, do I? I just turned thirty eight, actually.”

“That sounds properly haggish, all right. Oh! Sorry! That fair cracked my jaw!”

“You look as though you’ve just flown in from Edinburgh and not Auckland!”

“It’s been a tough couple of days, actually. And there’s always the fact that I was coming down here again...”

“Is it the first time since...”

“Yes. And he should have been with me. He should have been with me! He promised to take me out to see the albatrosses...”

“Are you going anyway?”

“Yes!”

“Don’t sound so defiant, I was going to say good on you. Hey - reclaim. It isn’t his back yard. It’s your country too.”

“They mate for life, you know. He told me so.”

“Yeah? It was paradise ducks with me. They mate for life too. I thought - and obviously you did too - that he was trying to make a point, not just offer extracurricular zoological facts. Did he also tell you that albatrosses are the freest thing in the air, that they spend most of their lives floating on the wind, only coming to ground to lay eggs and rear a chick or two?”

“I knew that.”

“Sarah - don’t let him keep you waiting for him. He isn’t coming back. Not ever. He never does. It would surprise me if he’s even thought of you at all - well, not much, anyway - in these last few months that you have been torturing yourself by thinking of him. He has a very good way of just wiping the slate and getting on with his life. That way there is no blame, no responsibility, not with him. You’re the only one who is holding on. Let go. You can.”

“It’s not fair...”

“Catch the wind, Sarah. You watch those albatrosses take off when you go to Taeroa. Look out there. Out of the window.”

“It’s dark, Penny.”

“Yes - but what do you see?”

“It looks like a nice view. Nice lights...”

“And you can only see them when you’re above them.... Good God, is it snowing again? Look, I’d better go - it’s late, Matthew will be wondering what happened to me. The hottie’s in the bathroom cabinet when you want it. It really has been cold down here over the past week or so - you might have heard on the news that the hospitals are full of people with flu down here in Otago. And...”

“What?”

“Never mind. Take care. And good night.”

When I first wrote this, I knew something had changed about my writing and my craft and my ability to grasp and convey character. In this story… I found it surprisingly easy to do. One thing that my breakup had taught me, apparently, was to look behind the facades of people’s faces with a lot more confidence and self-assuredness – and in fiction that meant characters who bristle with life, whom you could pick up from the confines of any one given story and plant them someplace else and know exactly and precisely how they would react – and you would be right. I know these characters. If I met them in the street I might even recognise them. I know, all these years later, almost exactly what they would be doing and where they would be living right now. The price of this knowledge had been high, almost too high, but I have learned to know its value.

Widows’ Peak

Darling - there’s milk and cheese in the fridge, baked beans in the pantry, coffee in the cupboard, and a dairy on the corner. You won’t starve - and please feed Fat Boy if you see him. The cat food’s on the bottom shelf of the pantry. Have a good weekend. PS I hope Kim finally decided to come too. Welcome to New Plymouth, Sis. I’ll see you both on Monday night. Love, Jess.

The note was on the fridge door when Kim walked into her sister’s kitchen. The room was tiny, but immaculate; the contrast to her own cluttered home couldn’t have been greater. Less than five minutes into Jess’s house, and already she was feeling shown up and inadequate.

“In here, Darling,” she called out. “There’s a missive from Jessie on the fridge. Who’s Fat Boy?”

A neat grey-haired woman with trim ankles poked her head around the kitchen door. “A stray cat who has been making himself welcome, I understand.”

Alice Fairgray had been Darling to her two daughters all their lives - they had never heard their father call her anything else, and they had began calling her that, too, instead of Mum. It had been known to cause difficulties - when Kim and Peter had first started living together, he had been really disconcerted at his new girlfriend’s way of picking up the phone and exclaiming “Hello, Darling!” into the mouthpiece with what seemed to be indecent enthusiasm given her commitment to himself. He got used to it; by the time the pair married he was calling Alice Darling himself.

“She says there’s milk and cheese in the fridge, and she’s just about right,” said Kim, exploring the empty shelves in Jess’s ancient refrigerator. It had a permanent and disconcerting hum because it had to be leaned back against the wall with its front propped up on a block of wood, this being the only way that the door would stay shut. Jess was a contradiction - a Bohemian who got by on a shoestring, living with a penniless poet in a dilapidated house with plumbing suffering from an advanced case of borborygmi and appliances that were practically extinct, but who would not allow so much as a stray dressing gown to disturb the pristine tidiness of this eclectic abode.

Kim, on the other hand, was surrounded by more gadgets she could possibly use in a single lifetime, lived in a modern Auckland house with aluminium windows where there was actually enough water pressure to have a shower - and she usually had to excavate her bedroom when she wanted to find something to wear in the mornings.

Yes, well, that was less of a problem than it used to be. The outfits that she would consider acceptable these days were limited - although anything would do, really, as long as it was black. She smoothed her skirt, black bobbled wool, and straightened, shutting the fridge door on the humming emptiness within.

“I think I might pop down to that dairy of Jess’s, Darling,” she said. “If we’re lucky we might get to have macaroni cheese for tea.”

“Get some cereal or something, too, and a few eggs,” Darling called from the other room. “We’ll need a decent breakfast tomorrow if we’re going to go up that mountain.”

“Oh, Darling!” groaned Kim. “Do we really...”

“You’ve never even seen it,” said her mother tartly, “so stop whingeing in advance. While you’re about it, see if they’ve got a few apples - and get a couple of muesli bars. We’ll need something to keep our strength up tomorrow.” She came out of the room, arms akimbo, her blue eyes snapping with determination. “And don’t think you can weasel out of it now.”

Supper was a silent meal - Kim wasn’t sulking, exactly, but she was in no mood for talking. Mount Taranaki had been one of Peter’s passions. He kept on saying that he would fly her down here one day in one of those small Cessnas he flew every weekend for a hobby - but somehow they had wound up going everywhere else but here. In retrospect, it was as though they knew that their perfect relationship would not, could not, last. that they would be given only a limited number of days to share, because such sustained happiness as they had known was something that was not given to ordinary mortals for long. They lived fast, loved fast - met in May, moved in together in August, married in October. And she had buried him in April.

Buried what was left of him, the charred mockery of Peter’s body that they had scraped from the burned-out cockpit of the wrecked Cessna. Six months had passed since that accident, and Kim was still blaming herself for not going with him that time. They had had one of their rare rows, all the more blazing because they didn’t have them often - and he had gone up on his own. And died alone.

And of all the places Darling could have chosen to snap her out of her focused and enduring mourning, she’d picked Mount Taranaki. It was shrewd, in a way - it was a place that Kim hadn’t been to with Peter, and therefore it would hold no memories. There was also the convenience of Jess’s sudden trip out of town and the invitation to spend the long weekend in her New Plymouth house - but, perversely, it was just because Taranaki was something Kim hadn’t shared with Peter that she found his ghost more persistent than ever. It was as though she could sense his presence, hear him saying mournfully that the two of them should have come here together. And tomorrow, Darling - who could be remarkably tough and stubborn when she chose to, despite her Dresden shepherdess appearance - would chivvy Kim up that mountain even if she had to drag her up all the way.

“Sleep well,” Darling had said after they had cleaned up the debris of the meal and stacked the dishes in the drying rack. And Kim had retired to the unfamiliar bed - the mattress was too soft, the blankets were too heavy in comparison with the duvet she was used to at home, and the room was too cold - and then lay awake for hours staring at the shadowed ceiling. She heard the cuckoo clock in the corridor cluck out two a.m. before she finally drifted off to sleep, and it seemed that it was only minutes later that she was being gently shaken awake.

“Go away,” she muttered sleepily, trying to burrow under a duvet that wasn’t there. But the shaking wouldn’t stop, and then she encountered a mouthful of mohair blanket and sat up suddenly, pushing the blanket away from her face and spitting out small clinging hairs.

“Ugh!” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’ve just had a sudden inspiration about what to get Jessie for Christmas - a duvet which I can use in the unlikely event of ever coming back to this place... what’s the time, anyway?”

“Half past seven,” said Darling blithely.

“Mother,” said Kim, deliberately using what in this family was almost an alien form of address in order to make her point, “I am your daughter whom you are supposed to have known intimately from early childhood. Don’t you know I’m not alive at this hour in the morning?”

“The coffee’s made,” said Darling, ignoring this outburst, “and we should be starting soon.”

“Oh, Darling...”

“I said you weren’t going to weasel out of it.”

Darling stood guard over the bed, implacable, until Kim groaned and swung her legs out of bed. The morning was utterly strange, somehow - made even more unreal by the fact that, for the first time in months, she got up and donned a pair of khaki shorts and a T-shirt in which she would actually leave the safe seclusion of the house. Ever since Peter had died she had not set foot outside her own place unless she wore black - she felt naked without its protection now, and guilty, as though she was abandoning Peter by abandoning the widows’ weeds, even for just a day. As if she was turning her back on his memory.

“You look nice,” said Darling, glancing across to the kitchen door from the stove where she was scrambling a couple of eggs in a huge cast-iron saucepan.

Kim stood leaning heavily on the doorjamb, feeling as though the kitchen was dipping and swaying. “I feel awful,” she said.

“Nonsense,” said Darling crisply. “A bit of breakfast, and you’ll be right as rain.”

“Daddy used to say that,” Kim said.

“Yes,” said Darling, suddenly looking pensive, “yes, I suppose he did...”

“Do you still miss him?” asked Kim unexpectedly.

“Of course I do,” said Darling, turning around sharply to look at her daughter. Her eyes softened. “Kim, love, you always miss them. They were a part of your life. But if you loved them at all, or if you believe that they loved you, then the best thing you can do for both your sakes is treasure the memory and then move...”

“Darling,” Kim said wearily, “no lectures. Please.” Her eyes filled with tears and she hung her head to hide it. Darling turned away again. She had opened her mouth to say something, and then thought the better of it.

“Breakfast’s ready,” was all she said a moment later when she lifted the gigantic saucepan off the stove. She could not help a little giggle. “Overkill,” she said, eyeing it humorously, “but then Jessie doesn’t seem to own something in which you can make scrambled eggs for two.”

“Larger than life,” said Kim, with an unexpected bite of sarcasm, “as usual.”

But after that the spirit seemed to leave her. She submitted meekly to Darling’s orders, laced on her hiking boots, tugged on - not without an odd pang of a queer disembodied pain - one of Peter’s crumpled peaked baseball caps, and shrugged a small day-pack over her shoulders.

The mountain was shrouded in a pall of cloud as they drove through the farmland towards it - they could only see the base of it, gathering itself into the steep flanks, and Kim thought she glimpsed a flash of something white, too bright to be cloud, peering out from amongst the mist wreathing the peak. But somewhere along the road, with the mountain squarely in front of them, in a gesture that was almost theatrical in its grandeur, something pulled aside the cloud as if it had been a stage curtain and the snow on the mountaintop blazed in the sunlight.

Darling chuckled.

“What?” said Kim, unable to tear her eyes off the mountain.

“You whimpered,” said Darling.

“I did not!”

“Don’t be so defensive. Of course you did. Everyone does. I did too when I first came here.”

Kim turned to her mother. “Just when was that?”

Darling’s hands tightened imperceptibly on the wheel, and she kept her eyes on the road ahead. “Five years ago,” she said. “Almost exactly.”

“That was just a year after Daddy...”

“Yes. Eight months.”

Kim turned her gaze back on the impossibly perfect volcanic shape of Mount Taranaki. “Widows’ peak,” she murmured.

“What was that?”

“Nothing, Darling. Nothing.”

They took a detour to warm up for their climb, through a patch of moss-hung cloud forest wreathed in damp cobwebs and breathing silver mist; fallen logs assumed fairy-tale personalities, and old trees almost opened eyes in gnarled and ancient faces. Despite herself Kim found herself enthralled by it all, to the extent that she kept on lingering beside some particularly fetching scene and making Darling either retrace her steps to come and get her or call for her from where she’d suddenly discovered yet again her daughter’s absence at her back.

But it was hard work. By the time they had returned to the parking lot and stopped off for a cup of tea in the cafeteria before they started their real climb, Kim was already exhausted, and hating her fit and trim mother.

“I don’t think this is such a good idea,” she said, contemplating the steep mountainside, now more threatening than beautiful when she was this close to it and actually expected to scale it.

“You wait,” said Darling complacently, “until you see the forest that’s up there. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

“But Darling...”

“What?”

“Did you...?”

“Did I what?”

But how was she supposed to ask that? When you first came here, did you feel Daddy around you like a cold breath of wind down the mountain - did he haunt the place for you the way Peter is doing for me right now? Did you feel closer to him here, in a place where you have never known him, than you have ever done in all the places that you shared? And did you feel the need to cling, cling, cling to his memory because if you forgot the smallest detail of him, a part of you would die too? Did you feel that this might be a place where he wanted to let go - and it was you who wanted to hang on?

“Nothing,” Kim said after a short, sharp pause. “Never mind.”

They started out through cloud forest again, but as they climbed higher the vegetation shrank around them, plants that were big trees a few dozen steps below suddenly turning into large shrubs which grew no taller than Kim herself. The paths grew more and more precipitous, with steep steps incised into the mountainside, and every now and then Kim had to stop, bend double, and wheeze harshly until she could get her breath back under control.

“If you have to stop,” Darling said, skipping back down a couple of steps like a mountain goat, “do it at a flat bit, not halfway up a climb. It’s easier to go on afterwards.”

Kim didn’t have the breath to tell her to shut up.

They stopped for lunch at a lookout spot, and Kim subsided gratefully onto a small bench crudely hewn from half a log. She sat nibbling at one of the muesli bars she had bought the day before as provender and contemplated the view below her.

“The forest,” she said, “look, Darling. It’s completely circular. It looks weird.”

“When they made the national park they just drew a circle around Mount Egmont with a pair of compasses on the map,” said Darling.

“Everything’s a circle,” Kim said, staring at the crisp edge of the park where forest ended and pasture began. Neither was giving way, not an inch, it was like watching two rival armies square off.

“Yes,” said Darling with a little sigh. “You done? Shall we?”

The shrubs shrank even further, degenerating into tussock and low scrub. It became apparent that they were walking a knife-edge, with the mountain falling away steeply on either side of them. They climbed up a boulder-strewn and grass-tussocked track and found themselves at the beginning of a narrow path winding on top of an ashy-looking ridge, open no-man’s-land with wind blowing straight across it with an edge to it like the teeth of a saw. There were voices in it, too, calling - Kim could hear incoherent words lost in the gusts as the wind flayed the open slope and disappeared in a vortex down the other side. She had taken a silent vow to herself that she would get to the snowline today, that she would do it if it killed her - but now she looked up and realised that the snow was higher up than she had thought, across this ridge and beyond it, and that clouds had once again veiled the mountaintop so that she couldn’t see the peak at all any more, only disembodied ghostly images of it through the wreaths of mist.

“I can’t do it,” she sobbed suddenly, something inside her breaking at the sight, at the sound of the sighing wind.

“What is it? What is it, Kim?” Darling was at her side, looking genuinely worried; Kim stood with tears streaming down her face, staring up into the invisible.

“I can’t do it... I can’t hang on and I can’t let go...”

It was not what she had been thinking a moment before, but that was what she was crying about. Knowing that she was only half a person as long as she carried the hole that Peter had left as the missing half inside of her - but knowing, also, that if she let the emptiness go and began filling it with herself she would inevitably become someone whom she would have to learn to know all over again, a stranger, someone who would bear her name and wear her face and yet someone who would no longer be the self that she had known. No longer the girl who had loved Peter, but the girl who had lost him.

And knowing, also, that she had no choice but to do it if she was to move up and out of the enchanted circle where she had lingered and held hands with the ghost of the man that she had loved.

“Cry,” said a voice beside her, which was somehow deeper and huskier than Darling’s but which was nonetheless that of her mother - full of compassion, and understanding, and pure uncompromising love. “I cried too when I came up here for the first time. This place holds your father’s memory for me.”

Kim wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Widows’ peak,” she said.

“You said that before, in the car,” said Darling.

“Look at us,” said Kim, meeting Darling’s tear-filled eyes with her own swimming gaze.

They both suddenly, unexpectedly, laughed, and then couldn’t stop, clinging to one another while the wind swirled around their knees and seemed to laugh with them. The cloud swirled higher, revealing more snow. Darling looked up.

“It may be clearing a bit. You want to try it?”

“No,” said Kim. “I’d conk out long before I reached it. I don’t have to, though. I know how it feels to go up that high. I can taste the snow from here.”

“Home, then?” Darling turned to look down the way they had come, keeping an arm around Kim’s waist. Her eyes skimmed over treetops on the lower slopes, down to the edge of the enchanted circle of forest, out over farmland and further still over a shimmering mirage of the sea. It was a wide, bright world.

They turned their back on the hidden peak, and started down towards it.

This last one… well… I told you I was hurt. Sometimes that’s all that you need to know; sometimes you don’t even need to know it, because the story I’m telling will let you know. Read between the lines, here. You are reading about a girl called Tess, but in too many ways it’s me that you will find standing there in the end, inhaling the bitter scent of moonlight.

The Bitter Scent of Moonlight

It was only late April, but the evening was a harbinger of things to come. The sky was high and winter-clear, and the air was cool, with a bite to it. Tess tugged at her light cardigan and wished she had worn her anorak after all. It was cold enough for it.

At her feet the white moonlight beginning to drift through the dusk picked out the shapes of broken shells, formed by the waves into abstract curling lines along the beach. Further away, across an expanse of damp sand reflecting the amethyst and sapphire colors of the jewel-colored sky, the Pacific Ocean was a millpond, lapping with gentle whispering sounds at the shore. A dog was barking joyfully somewhere off to her left; Tess could see someone, two someones, in dark anoraks - they’d dressed right! - throwing things into the calm ocean for the dog to fetch. Apart from them, and a young Chinese couple wandering aimlessly along the waterline, the beach was deserted.

Tess could taste winter in the wind. Winter was coming round again; the rain-slicked nights when the pavements would run with reflected yellow streetlights glimpsed from the window of Paul’s flat. The glimmer of the open fire in the background, inside the warm room. The liquid strains of Chopin. The two mugs of steaming hot chocolate on the rug, there on the floor in front of the fire, from where she had got up to pad to the window and look outside at the weather. The lamp being switched off, and then Paul’s arms coming around her from behind in the firelit darkness, his voice in her ear.

“See better,” he said. “But what are you looking at?”

“Winter,” she said, cupping the big hands folded across her belly with her own and leaning back against him.

She remembered this scene, could see it vividly as though it had just been cast up into the sky by some celestial projector. It was astonishing how her mind worked, she told herself acerbically, going from the general to the specific in the time it took to blink. Winter did not only imply the season. Winter meant winter as seen from Paul’s window. What other kind of winter could there be for her? There was only one thing wrong, bringing her back to reality with a snap and sending Paul’s hands, voice, presence shredding and streaming into the night. The coldness. There was no cosy fireside behind her here on the empty beach, no hot chocolate. Not any more. This winter was not buffered. She did not have him standing there to take the wind, to protect her from the storms. This winter was her own again, not theirs.

But winter was the season of choice for both of them.

“I can’t stand this sticky heat,” Paul had said one particularly nasty, humid, Auckland summer day. He had stripped down to a pair of ancient shorts, which looked as though he had actually grown out of them some years ago; the rest of him was bare, and was still sheened with sweat.

“You look strange,” Tess had said, apparently irrelevantly.

But he had known what she meant. As usual.

“I’m not in my element,” he said.

He was a sweater man, an anorak man; he might have worn shorts on a bike, for example, but only because of the convenience - just then, dressed in nothing but a pair of sorts, he just looked... alien, as though he’d suddenly put on a dress.

He didn’t hug her, because they both recoiled from the very idea of bodily contact at those temperatures. But he did reach out to trail a finger along her collarbone where it stood revealed above the deeply scooped neckline of her summer dress.

“You aren’t either,” he said, “are you?”

There was always snow between them, and the warmth of fires, of thick socks, of mulled wine - of coming in from a cold, windblown place into a sheltered firelit room. They’d shared one winter already - they had met in the dying days of the previous autumn, and had circled each other warily for weeks before deciding to take a chance on one another. The winter, their first winter, had been incandescent. Then summer had come, and they had both turned into different people.

“I think,” Paul had said to Tess very carefully one day towards the end of February, “I need a bit of time out. I need a bit of space.”

A bell had begun to toll at the back of her mind at this. A deep, mournful one. She was not complicated about loving someone - and, simplifying his statement to the bare bedrock of meaning, she translated it into the beginning of the end. From that point the wariness she had almost lost was back in everything she did, everything she said - she’d find herself starting a gesture, reaching to touch him, and then letting her hand fall halfway there, the caress aborted in mid-motion. He never seemed to notice.

Once, he did.

It was late March; his birthday was the next day, but it fell on a Monday, and they had spent the preceding Sunday together instead. Paul was a practical soul - Tess had been astounded all over again every time he gave her flowers because she couldn’t get over how out-of-character it seemed for him to do so. When he started driving in what was entirely the wrong direction after they had had dinner on Sunday night, Tess shot him a vaguely worried look but held her peace, thinking he knew what he was doing. She left it for a while, biting down on the silence. It was only when she could bear it no longer that she roused in her seat.

“Home’s that way,” she said carefully, pointing behind them. “Where are you going?

He reached over to take her hand. “I could have been taking you to Timbuctoo,” he said with a grin, “and only now do you ask where I’m going. I love it. What did it take for you to stay so quiet for so long?”

She wanted to say, I trust you. But then, he was not a romantic. This was not the sort of thing one told him out of the blue.

He parked the car in a nearly deserted parking lot at the edge of Milford Beach and turned to her, taking her hand. “It’s full moon,” he said. “Come on, let’s have a look at the ocean.”

“Wow,” she said, staring at him.

He laughed. “Don’t look so stunned. It isn’t that unexpected, is it?”

“It’s like,” said Tess with a straight face, “going fishing for sharks and coming up with a merman.”

“Lunatic,” he said affectionately.

Tess glanced up at the full moon, allowing herself a small smile. “Oh yes,” she said. “Definitely.”

They wandered out over the deserted beach, shoes in hand, the sand cold under their feet. The silence was contagious. They didn’t speak; their shadows were dark on the ground, the moon ripe and full and golden, hanging low in the sky. After a while Tess realised that they had both stopped walking and were standing side by side staring out over the inky ocean. She shivered, suddenly, unexpectedly. It’s cold, she thought, justifying herself... and knew even as the thought crossed her mind that it was the wrong reason. She was here, totally here, on this beach in the moonlight at Paul’s side. He was somewhere else.

He must have felt the sudden weight of her gaze on him because he turned to look at her. “Hey,” he said softly. “What are you thinking?

“About you,” she said, truthfully enough. That was when she had half-reached for him, lifted her hand, the one not occupied with her shoes, and dropped it again, without touching him. She’d seen the strange gleam that had leapt into his eyes at the half-completed gesture. “And you?” she asked, looking away from the expression on his face.

“I’ve a hard day tomorrow,” he said. It was almost apologetic - out here in the moonlight, alone with her, he had been betrayed into admitting his thoughts had been drifting. Into that “space” he’d said he needed.

Something acid and sharp stung Tess’s nostrils at his words, a bitter, cold scent that had not been there a moment before. She almost looked around to try and see what it was - but they were on a clean patch of beach, with not even a strand of rotting seaweed to account for it. There was nothing around them but air, water and moonlight.

She knew the familiar smells of night air and of the sea. That which she could now sense curling around her was neither, was something strange, unknown, unearthly. This was the scent of moonlight. There was more than one - the moon had different perfumes. Had he said something else, anything but the distant, cold words that he had uttered, the white light might have smelled sweet and poignant, like honeysuckle - or metallic and harsh and jagged, a newly honed cutting edge. This was something else. Bitterness was a taste, not a scent, but bitterness was the only thing she could pin on the odd, delicate fragrance that described it completely. She could just about taste it, where the moonlight fell white on her lips - she did taste it when Paul bent to brush her mouth with his.

“Home?” he asked.

Tess nodded, dropping her eyes. The moonlight shimmered on the dark water, turning parts of it into streams of silver and mercury. It was painfully beautiful. She found her sight blurring with unexpected tears.

She could recall it precisely now, still, that light odd fragrance of the moonlit night. It came curling in from the moon to the ocean, touching her as though with gentle fingers, stirring memories. Stirring Paul’s voice.

“It’s better,” he had said, and the words floated like ghosts on the empty beach. “It’s better this way. I don’t think I can be the rock that you are looking for,”

But you were, Tess thought, her hands jammed tight into the pockets of her cardigan. It was my needs that we were talking about... my decision if you could meet them. Not yours. And you were my rock.

But he was not there, and her own words, unspoken, unborn, mingled with the ghostly echoes of Paul’s voice that shimmered like the broken shells at her feet in the silver glow and the bitter scent of moonlight.

What Reviewers Say

Midnight at Spanish Gardens: "Alexander's language is lovely and poetic...the imagery is beautiful, the setting is compelling...But it's the characters that drive this story, in all of their imperfection, in all of their passion or disconnection or feeling of failure." - Alana Abbott, Flames Rising

The Secrets of Jin-shei: "Vivid and involving'... both an exotic journey into the imagination, and a graceful exploration of the heart." - SF Site

Changer of Days: "Powerful characters and a powerful setting help to deliver what I am thrilled to say is a great bloody book." - Altair

Gift of the Unmage: "This latest book seems as if it is going to be your standard coming-of-age magician tale, but then you realize it is so much more. It is philosophy, it is science fiction, and it is beautiful." - Kelly A. Ohlert

Other books by Alma Alexander

Dolphin's Daughter and Other Stories (Macmillan, UK, 1995)

Houses in Africa (David Ling, New Zealand, 1995)

Letters from the Fire (Harper Collins New Zealand, 1999)

Secrets of Jin Shei (HarperCollins, USA, 2004/2005)

The Hidden Queen (Eos, USA, 2005)

Changer of Days (Eos, USA, 2005)

Embers of Heaven (HarperCollins , UK, 2006)

Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax, (Kos Books 2010)

2012: Midnight at Spanish Gardens (Sky Warrior Publishing 2011)

WORLDWEAVERS Series

1) Gift of the Unmage (HarperCollins, USA, 2007)

2) Spellspam (HarperCollins, USA, 2008)

3) Cybermage (Harpercollins, USA, 2009)

Alexander Triads

Once Upon a Fairytale, Kos Books 2011

Cat Tales, Kos Books, 2011

Haunted, Kos Books 2011

Weight of Worlds, Los Books 2012

Contact Alma Alexander

Website: http://www.AlmaAlexander.com/

Blog: http://anghara.livejournal.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlmaAlexander

Email: angharakirhama@gmail.com

About the Author

Alma Alexander was born on the banks of an ancient river in a country which no longer exists.

She began telling stories as a child and never stopped. To date, Alma has written close to three million words in more than a dozen published books.

Her novel, The Secrets of Jin-shei, has been published in 14 languages in more than a score of countries. Her popular Young Adult Worldweavers series features New World magic and a heroine who is as American as Harry Potter is British.

The woman underneath the author likes books, embroidery, music ranging from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" to Dvorak's New World Symphony, animals, coffee, chocolate, snow, velvet -- and, in people, kindness, intelligence and an off-the-wall sense of humor.

She is a punaholic, a chronic worrier, sentimental and passionate. She is married to a man who wooed her over the Internet and lured her to America, where she is currently owned by two cats.