The Sound of Broken Glass by Deborah Crombie Page B

looked even younger then.
    Andy had found an old strap for the Höfner at a charity shop on Westow Hill, and although he thought he probably looked a right prat wearing it sitting down, he did it anyway. It made him feel more like a real guitar player. While he and Nadine drank their lemonade, he played little snippets for her. New chords, a bit of a picking pattern. Never a whole song—that would have been totally naff.
    She listened, and then they’d talk. That’s how he’d learned that she liked history, and that she didn’t know much about Crystal Palace.
    â€œWasn’t it just taken down in Hyde Park and put up again here, on Sydenham Hill?” she asked now.
    â€œNo, look,” he protested, pulling carefully folded papers from the back pocket of his jeans. He’d made copies at the library of some of the old black-and-white photos in the reference books. Smoothing them out, he handed them to Nadine and she took them, studying the pictures intently. That was one of the things he liked about her. She listened, and she looked at things, really looked, not just glancing at something and saying, “Oh, that’s nice, dear,” like most adults. Or his mum.
    Not that he could think about her being anything like his mum. His mum was thirty-five, and he couldn’t imagine Nadine being nearly that old, even though he knew she’d been married. But when he’d got up the nerve to ask her, she’d just laughed, and told him not to be cheeky.
    Pointing at the top photo, he said, “It was bigger than the original Crystal Palace, the one they built in Hyde Park.”
    â€œYou’ve been swotting,” she said. “It was for the Great Exhibition, wasn’t it? The original one. In—”
    â€œIn 1851. But when they rebuilt it, it had twice as much glass as the first one. And it took twenty-three months to build,” he ventured, glancing at her to see if she looked bored. “It was 1,608 feet long, 315 feet wide, and 108 feet high.”
    A little crease appeared between Nadine’s brows as she frowned. The bridge of her nose was slightly pink and there was a dusting of freckles across it. Even Andy, with his fair coloring, had gone brown as a nut in the past few weeks.
    â€œI thought they just took it down and put it back up again,” she said. “Like one of those conservatory kits people buy for their gardens, only bigger.” She was teasing him a bit, he could tell by the tone of her voice, but he liked it. “Did you learn all that in school?” she asked.
    â€œNo.” When she waited for him to say more, he made a G chord on the neck of the Höfner and ran his thumb over the strings ever so lightly. “The library,” he admitted, a little reluctantly. Then, having confessed, he owned up to worse. “I like it there.”
    â€œHmm. I like libraries, too.” She smiled, and from her voice he could tell she meant it. “They’re quiet,” she added. “And nobody bothers you.”
    He relaxed, feeling that she understood, but he still couldn’t bring himself to tell her that it was the one place he felt free from the worry about his mother. They never talked about personal things—he didn’t even know where Nadine worked—and he somehow sensed that there were boundaries he shouldn’t cross.
    Nadine turned to the second photo, this one of the palace’s interior, showing the great arched dome filled with fountains and pools, statues, even trees. She traced the pool in the photo with a fingertip, then said softly, “‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree: where Alph, the sacred river, ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to the sunless sea.’”
    A cloud passed over the sun and Andy felt a cooler breath of air lift the damp hair on his forehead. “What is that? Did you make it up?”
    â€œNo, it’s Coleridge. You