Summerwater by Sarah Moss (top 10 motivational books .txt) 📕

beloved. He pushes down the plunger on the cafetière – it’s not worth having a proper coffee machine here – and carries it and an inelegantly large earthenware mug to the table by his chair. He wrestles with the lock, slides back the French window, lets in the day. It’s cold, she’ll say, can we shut that door, meaning why did you open it, you know I don’t like a draught, but for now he can sit here and feel that he is both indoors and out, breathing wind and weather from a nice velvet armchair with his coffee. He pours, from higher than necessary, admires the shape of the falling liquid and the steam curling from it, an indoor imitation of the mist between the trees. The scent rises, a blend he chose as his favourite after working his way along the shelf in the new deli by the station at home – good sign, that shop opening, property prices holding up – and now buys in small bags, freshly roasted.

You have to expect rain here but not usually like this. Raining stair rods, his dad would have said. There’ll be flooding down the road at this rate. It’s not Scottish rain, more tropical, not that he’s been or ever wanted to go anywhere tropical, insects and parasites, gastroenteritis, Melissa back from that trip exactly as he predicted, sunburnt and underweight and running a mysterious fever. It’ll surely ease off later, the weather. It was always the saving grace of being here when the children were young, the one thing you knew about the weather was that it wouldn’t last. There’d be a dry patch most days, and if there wasn’t, that was what the rain-suits and wellies were for, and in later years the wetsuits and kayaks. His kayak is still under the veranda, resting in the long grass. Might have squirrels nesting in it, but he could get it out if he wanted to, that plastic stuff doesn’t rot or corrode, though he hasn’t seen the life jackets for years. They probably don’t deteriorate either, don’t they wash up on beaches years and years later, along with trainers and plastic bottles? He takes another sip, and there’s that lass renting what was the Pollocks’ place running as if from a bear. Taken her top off, surely she must be cold and really, at her age – he used to have to have a chaperone, sometimes, to examine women wearing more than that, once the Indians started moving out to the suburbs. You’d be surprised, what’s often under those burqas and veils and what-have-you, no wonder they get self-conscious. He leans forward to check there really isn’t anyone after the lass though he knows she goes jogging most days. He’d not have liked Mary doing that, out on her own at all hours in that Lycra, especially with the things in her ears, wouldn’t even know if someone was coming up behind her, and what about her children, who looks after them while she’s wearing out her joints, pounding down that hill in her underwear? She looks to be laughing as she runs, not even paying attention to where she is, as if the loch and the hills are no more than a giant gym. The park’s not what it used to be when they bought the cabin, doesn’t attract the same kind of person. They bought it off-plan, while there were still trees tall in the airspace now occupied by the lodges. You do realise, Mary said, we just spent half your dad’s legacy on a drawing of something that doesn’t even exist yet? But the old man would have liked it, his son the doctor with a house in Bearsden and a lodge in the Trossachs, kids at the good schools. Still, they should probably have seen what was coming, sold up when Duncan and Maggie left, it wasn’t the same after that even while the Pollocks hung on. They did have parties, back in the day, he’ll admit that, of course they did. Summer nights, bonfire on the beach, sausages on sticks, a swirl of children up too late and the grown-ups sitting on the shore until dusk became dawn. Hogmanay, even, when there wasn’t too much snow to get cars up the road and sometimes when there was, one winter he remembers Mary and the kids getting out and standing under the trees while he gunned that old red Ford up the hill and made it too. But that was different, everyone got together, it wasn’t just one lot keeping everyone else up all night and in the early days the music was real, Duncan on his fiddle and there was a piper, wasn’t there, could there have been? He’s sure he remembers a piper, at least once or twice, hearing it the way it should be, over the water. Even five or ten years ago, you’d never had anything like those Romanians these last two nights, the odd French or German plates on a car in summer but the folk renting knew how to behave. And there weren’t all the cyclists and horrible jet skis like amplified mosquitoes and the fell-runners in the skin-tight neon. Not that they didn’t use to climb the hills themselves, even must be two years ago now, three maybe, up the Ben when Marcus came for the weekend and there was blazing sun and brave folk swimming all along the shore, but hill-walking’s not running, there’s time to look and listen. Wild flowers, birdsong, Mary usually knew the names. He could still make it up there, for sure. Well, probably. Who’d want to try, in this weather? More coffee.

He watches the rain. He listens to it running on the roof, to the drumming on the southern windows and the tinkle from the gutter and drainpipe. In Japan, Mary says Melissa told her, there are gardens designed to sing in the rain, with bamboo pipes at different heights over