Voice of the Heart
From the internationally bestselling author of A Woman of SubstanceThe story of two brilliant women and the men to whom they ransomed their hearts.With her beauty, talent, and allure, Katherine Tempest has the world at her feet. Her rise from unknown actress to Hollywood legend is one marked by dazzling performances and a carefully concealed, yet undeniably ruthless, determination to succeed.But Katherine irrevocably changes the lives of her closest friends: two men who love her and the woman who trusts her implicitly. She never looks back until she needs the one thing they alone can give her – forgiveness.
Читать Voice of the Heart онлайн беплатно
BARBARA TAYLOR BRADFORD
Voice of the Heart
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk
This paperback edition 1994
5 7 9 8 6
Previously published in paperback by Grafton 1984
Reprinted sixteen times
First published in Great Britain by Granada Publishing 1983
Copyright © Barbara Taylor Bradford 1983
Barbara Taylor Bradford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
ISBN 0 586 05848 6
Set in Plantin
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Caledonian International Book Manufacturing Ltd, Glasgow
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007395583
Version: 2017-11-16
For my husband Robert Bradford with love
‘That voice of the heart, which, Lamartine says, “alone reaches the heart”’
MARCEL PROUST
Contents
I came back because I wanted to, of my own free will. No one forced me to return. But now that I am here I want to take flight, to hide again in obscurity, to put this vast ocean between myself and this place. It bodes me no good.
As these thoughts finally took shape, assumed troubling proportions and jostled for prominence in her mind, the woman’s fine hands, lying inertly in her lap, came together in a clench so forceful that the knuckles protruded sharply through the transparent skin. But there was no other outward display of emotion. She sat as rigid as stone on the seat. Her face, pale and somewhat drawn in the murky morning light, was impassive as a mask and her gaze was fixed with unwavering intensity on the Pacific.
The sea was implacable and the colour of chalcedony on this bleak and sunless day, one that was unnaturally chilly for Southern California, even though it was December when the weather was so often inclement. The woman shivered. The dampness was beginning to seep through her trench-coat into her bones. She felt icy, and yet there was a light film of moisture on her forehead and neck and between her breasts. On an impulse she rose from the seat, her movements abrupt, and with her head bent against the wind and her hands pushed deep into her pockets she walked the length of the Santa Monica pier, which was now so entirely deserted it looked desolate, even forbidding, in its emptiness.
When she arrived at the farthermost tip where the turbulent waves lashed at the exposed underpinnings, she paused and leaned against the railing. Once again her eyes were riveted on the ocean curling out towards the dim horizon. There, on that far indistinct rim, where sea and sky merged in a smudge of limitless grey, a great liner bobbed along like a child’s toy, had been turned into an object of insignificance by the vastness of nature.
We are all like that ship, the woman said inwardly, so fragile, so inconsequential in the overall scheme of things. Although do any of us truly believe that, blinded as we are by our self-importance? In our arrogance we all think we are unique, invincible, immune to mortality and above the law of nature. But we are not, and that is the only law, inexorable and unchanging.
She blinked, as if to rid herself of these thoughts. The winter sky, curdled and ominous, was uttered with ragged ashy clouds which were slowly turning black and extinguishing the meagre light trickling along their outer edges. A storm was imminent. She ought to return to the waiting limousine and make her way back to the Bel-Air Hotel, before the rain started. But to her amazement she discovered she was unable to move. She did not want to move, for it seemed to her that only out here on this lonely pier was she able to think with a degree of clarity, to pull together her scattered and disturbing thoughts, to make sense out of the chaos in her mind.
