Brother & Sister [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE From where he sat, Steve could see right down the length of the studio. He could see across the width, too, from one stripped brick wall to the other, and then right up high, right up into the roof space v^here the seventeenth-century beams - still suggestive, somehow, of the sinuous lines of the branches and trunks they had once been - formed their crooked and purposeful patterns. He'd designed the lighting so that even in the evenings, even on the darkest days, the eye would be drawn upward, as it was in cathedrals and domes. It was comforting to look upwards, comforting and encouraging. He'd spent hours over the last eight years since the studio was finished looking upwards at those wandering beams and thinking about the trees they had once been, about the sky that was still there above them, through the roof. He liked the measurelessness of those thoughts, just as he liked this nameless, neutral time at the end of each working day, when everyone else had gone home leaving him alone to let his mind slip quietly down through all the jarring preoccupations of the previous hours and lie peacefully at the bottom of some still pool of not quite thinking. It was a running joke in the office that Steve had to be the last to leave. It was the same with the navy-blue name board above the ground-floor v^^indow: 'Steven Ross and Associates', it read, 'Designers'.