My Name is Michael Sibley
A Novel
Chapter 1
Sometimes it had been hard work, but I had succeeded, and now indeed I was on top of the world. I had a good job, a market for my spare-time writing, a small private income, and I had Kate. I had her safely now, and she had me, and the future belonged to us to carve as we wished.
Some people can go through life alone, and they do not mind; in fact, they revel in their own self-sufficiency; others need a human refuge to whom they can fly in trouble, or simply somebody to whom they can return at night after the stresses of the day's work. Poor Ackersley, the assistant housemaster, had been like that, and Geoffries, the Lascar seaman, and so was Kate. Kate, so shy and sensitive, was the last person in the world to be by herself.
Yet it had fallen to her to spend a great deal of her life alone. There had been one brief and passionate interlude, I gathered, with a young man in one of the offices in which she had worked, and then there had been nothing; nothing and nobody until I came along, and I, who began by being sorry for her, ended by loving her. It wa ... read full excerpt from My Name Is Michael Sibley ebook
