The Summer House Page 26

  ‘Gorse!’ she cried at last, triumphantly – and he felt quite weak with relief, as though some important corner had been turned. ‘And forsythia.’

  She spelled it for him, and he wrote obediently, although he forbore to say that forsythia was not a wild flower but a tame garden shrub. Nevertheless, his heart beat with ungovernable joy: their roles were reversed and he’d drawn her back from the edge of the abyss. But it was Dom who really saved them from their despair.

  ‘Dominic is a kind of relation,’ their mother told them. She looked uncomfortable, as though she would rather not discuss it, but Ed and Billa had been full of the news that Mrs Tregellis’s grandson had come to stay with her at her cottage down the lane.

  ‘He’s twelve,’ Billa had told her, ‘and he came all the way from Bristol on the train on his own. And he and Ed look alike. It’s so odd. Mrs Tregellis says that we’re related.’

  And that’s when their mother said, ‘Dominic is a kind of relation.’ Colour burned her cheeks a dull red, and her mouth compressed into a thin line, but they were too excited to notice much. The arrival of Dom distracted them from their grief and gave them something new to think about.

  The sharp trill of the telephone bell cuts across Ed’s thoughts. As he dries his hands and reaches for the handset the bell stops and he knows that Billa has picked up the extension. It will probably be one of her co-workers from the charity. He pours himself some more coffee and takes the Miles Davis CD from the player. He puts it away, hesitating at the shelf on which other CDs are piled, and then chooses a Dinah Washington recording.

  Billa finishes her conversation with the treasurer, replaces the handset on its stand and stares at the computer screen. The small room off the kitchen is now her office. An old pine washstand is her desk and Ed’s tuck box, which accompanied him to school, is her filing cabinet. She is amazingly untidy. Even Ed, who is not methodical, is silenced by the disorder of Billa’s office.

  ‘However did you manage when you were working?’ he asked once, awed by the magnificence of such chaos.

  ‘I had a PA and a secretary,’ she answered briefly. ‘I wasn’t paid to do the filing. I was paid to have ideas about how to raise money.’

  Pieces of paper, books, letters, are piled on the floor, on the desk, on the Lloyd Loom chair, on the deep granite windowsill. At intervals she has a tidying session.

  ‘Thank heavens so much is now done by email,’ she’d say, coming into the kitchen with her short fair hair on end and her shirtsleeves rolled up. ‘Be a duck and make me some coffee, Ed. I’m dying of thirst.’

  Now, she stares at an email about fund-raising at an event in Wadebridge and thinks about Tristan. Her first instinct is to protect Ed; her second is to talk to Dom. All her life – since her father died and her sense of security irrevocably shattered – she’s turned to Dom for advice and for comfort. Even when he was working abroad in South Africa, and after he was married, she’d write to him, sharing her woes and her joys. She feels inextricably linked to him. From the beginning it was as if their father had come back to them in the form of a boy.

  He built dams across the stream and a tree house high in the beech tree in the wood – though not too high because of Ed still being little – and showed them how to light a campfire and cook very basic meals. All that long summer – the summer after their father died – Dom was with them. He was tall and strong and inventive, and they recognized that look of his, the way he laughed, throwing back his head, the way he used his hands to describe something, shaping it out in the air. How safe they felt with him; just as if their father was back with them – but young again, and reckless and fun.

  Their mother was cool in response to their enthusiasm – and they were too conscious of her grief to want to upset her – and, anyway, Dom preferred the cosiness of his granny’s cottage and the wild countryside beyond it to the old butter factory and its grounds.

  ‘I wonder how we’ll manage now,’ Billa said to Dom as they watched Ed splashing in the quiet, deep pool behind the dam. ‘Without Daddy, I mean. Ed’s too little to be able to be in charge yet, and Mother is…’

  She hesitated, not knowing the right word for her instinctive awareness of their mother’s neediness and dependence on others; for her emotional swings between tears and laughter; her instability.

  Wood pigeons cooed comfortably amongst the high leafy canopy that dappled their camp with trembling patterns of sunlight and shade; tall foxgloves clung in the stony crevices of the old footbridge that spanned the stream where tiny fish darted in the clear brown shallows.

  ‘My father’s dead, too,’ Dom said. ‘I never knew him. He was in the navy in the war and he got killed when I was very small.’

  And here again was another wonderful coincidence. ‘Our father was in the navy, too,’ she said. ‘He might have been killed but he was only injured. That’s why he died, though. It was the injury and then he had a heart attack. I don’t know what Mother will do without him.’

  She didn’t mention her own overwhelming sense of loss and pain.

  ‘My mother works,’ Dom said. ‘She’s working now. That’s why I’ve come on my own. She says I’m old enough now.’

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ Billa said. ‘We both are. And we’re glad you’re a relation.’

  He looked at her then, his face serious. ‘Funny, though, isn’t it?’ he murmured, and she felt a little shock of fear – and excitement. He was so familiar, yet a stranger. She wanted to touch him, to be close to him always.

  Now, on an impulse, Billa picks up the telephone and presses buttons.

  ‘Dominic Blake here.’ Dom’s voice, cool, impersonal, calms her at once.

  ‘It’s me, Dom. I was just wondering if I could come down and see you in the morning.’

  ‘Billa. Yes, of course. Everything OK?’

  ‘Yes. Well…’

  ‘You don’t sound too certain.’

  ‘No. The thing is,’ instinctively she lowers her voice, ‘we’ve had a postcard from Tristan.’

  ‘Tristan?’

  ‘Yes. Weird, isn’t it, after all these years?’

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘That’s the whole point. It just says that he might come down and see us.’

  In the silence she can imagine Dom’s face: that concentrated, thoughtful expression that narrows his brown eyes; his thick hair, black and grey badger-streaked like Ed’s, flopping forward; his straight brows drawn into a frowning line.

  ‘What does Ed say?’

  ‘I haven’t told him. I didn’t want to worry him.’

  She hears the tolerant, amused snorting sound with which Dom acknowledges her ingrained sense of responsibility for Ed’s wellbeing.

  ‘You assume there’s something to worry about, then?’

  ‘Don’t you? Fifty years of silence and then a postcard. How did he know we’d both still be here?’

  ‘What’s the postmark?’

  ‘Paris. Is Tilly with you?’

  ‘Yes. We’ve just finished supper.’

  ‘Will she be there tomorrow morning?’

  ‘She should be gone by about ten.’

  ‘I’ll come down about eleven.’

  ‘OK.’

  Billa sighs with relief. As she puts the phone back on its rest, she can hear Dinah Washington singing ‘It Could Happen to You’. She passes through the kitchen to the hall where Ed is piling logs on the fire whilst Bear lies in his favourite place across the cool slates by the front door. Billa watches them, filled with overwhelming affection for them both.

  Tomorrow she will talk to Dom: all will be well.

  From POSTCARDS FROM THE PAST © 2015 by Marcia Willett. All rights reserved.

  Also by Marcia Willett

  The Way We Were

  Echoes of the Dance

  The Birdcage

  The Children’s Hour

  A Week in Winter

  A Summer in the Country

  Second Time Around

&n
bsp; The Courtyard

  A Friend of the Family

  First Friends

  About the Author

  Marcia Willett’s early life was devoted to the ballet, but her dreams of becoming a ballerina ended when she grew out of the classical proportions required. She had always loved books, and a family crisis made her take up a new career as a novelist – a decision she has never regretted. She lives in a beautiful and wild part of Devon.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE SUMMER HOUSE. Copyright © 2010 by Marcia Willett.

  All rights reserved.

  For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth

  Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS. An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.stmartins.com

  First published in Great Britain by TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS,

  a Random House Group Company

  eISBN 9781250015037

  First eBook Edition : May 2012

  First U.S. Edition: June 2012