No Other Life (28 page)

I knelt down by the unmarked grave but not to pray. I touched the muddied earth in a useless caress as though, somehow, he would know that I had come here. I wept but my tears could not help him. There is no other life.

The little boy, Frédéric’s youngest child, stood by the mule as I came back down into the yard. He was trying to feed it a handful of grass. He looked up at me. ‘Take me for a ride,
Mon Pe
?’

I put him on the mule’s back and walked the mule around the yard. His sisters watched us from the window but did not come out.

When I went to lift him off, he cried. ‘More! More! Take me down the hill.’

‘No,
Petit
. Stay here.’

BRIAN MOORE
was born in Belfast. He emigrated to Canada in 1948 and then moved to California. He twice won the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Fiction and has been given a special award from the United States Institute of Arts and Letters. He won the Author’s Club First Novel Award for
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
The Great Victorian Collection. The Doctor’s Wife, The Colour of Blood
– winner of the Sunday Express 1988 Book of the Year – and
Lies of Silence
were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Six of his novels have been made into films –
The Luck of Ginger Coffey, Catholics, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Cold Heaven, The Statement
and
Black Robe
. Brian Moore died in 1999.

By the Same Author

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

The Feast of Lupercal

The Luck of Ginger Coffey

An Answer from Limbo

The Emperor of Ice Cream

I am Mary Dunne

Fergus

Catholics

The Great Victorian Collection

The Doctor’s Wife

The Mangan Inheritance

The Temptation of Eileen Hughes

Cold Heaven

Black Robe

The Colour of Blood

Lies of Silence

The Statement

The Magician’s Wife

First published in Great Britain 1993

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © Brian Moore 1993

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

(including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,

printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the

publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781408828915

Visit
www.bloomsbury.com
to find out more about our authors and their books

You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can
sign up for

newsletters
to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers