The Last Days of Summer: The best feel-good summer read for 2017. Sophie Pembroke

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СКАЧАТЬ Edward said, making his way up the stairs, lugging the case alongside him.

      I looked to Isabelle for confirmation. “I know,” she said. “We were surprised too. But he’s been here over a year, now.” And no one had mentioned him to me – not even Nathaniel. Which said more about how far I’d run away than the seven hours it had taken me to get back by train that day.

      Edward reached the top of the stairs and paused, obviously waiting for me to follow. I looked at him with a new appreciation. The last assistant Nathaniel had hired, six months before I left for the wilds of Scotland, had lasted approximately a fortnight before falling down those very stairs in his hurry to get away from Rosewood. Granddad did not work well with assistants.

      “Well, okay then.” Picking up my handbag, I turned back to Isabelle. “Do I really have to sleep in the Yellow Room?”

      “It has a lovely view of the Rose Garden, darling.”

      “But all the roses are in here!” I waved an arm at the overflowing buckets of blooms.

      “Don’t be melodramatic, dear. There are plenty of roses left. We’re only using the yellow ones, anyway.” She plucked a few leaves from the bottom of a rose stem and added the flower to the bucket. “Besides, these are just for the house displays. The florist is doing the stands and centrepieces outside.”

      That sounded like an awful lot of flowers. “But the Yellow Room’s all… yellow.” There was a muffled snort of laughter from the top of the stairs, and I mentally glared at Edward, wondering what it was about Rosewood that made me thirteen again. “Never mind. I’ll go get freshened up, and maybe by the time I get back my parents will have found their way home.”

      “Perhaps. Kia…” Isabelle paused, as if trying to decide whether to speak again or not. Finally, she said, “Did your grandfather say particularly why he wanted you to come back?”

      I blinked in surprise. “It’s a family occasion. I assume he wanted us all here.”

      Isabelle gave a sharp nod, and turned back to her buckets of roses. “Of course.”

      Confused, I turned to follow Edward. But I couldn’t help wondering what Isabelle thought Nathaniel was up to this time.

      “There you go, then,” Edward said, placing my bags on the window-seat. “I’ll leave you to settle in.”

      I nodded, gazing around at the sunshine walls and golden blankets, wondering how many guests had visited twice, after being put to stay in the Yellow Room.

      Probably all of them – at least any that had been invited back. A weekend at Rosewood had been a highly sought-after ticket, back in the day. Well, according to Isabelle, anyway.

      “Actually,” I said, trying to sound decisive, rather than just unsettled, “I think I might go and find Great-Aunt Therese. It must be almost time for her afternoon tea.” Never mind that I’d spent seven hours on various trains and really could do with a shower; first, I needed to feel home again. And after that very lacklustre welcome from Isabelle, I knew I wasn’t going to find that feeling in the Yellow Room. At least Great-Aunt Therese might be pleased to see me.

      Assam tea and a Victoria Sandwich in Therese’s cottage garden were more familiar to me than even my attic bedroom. Nathaniel had moved his younger sister into the cottage on the edge of Rosewood’s gardens as soon as her husband died, the year I was born, when she was only forty-one. Almost every afternoon that I had spent at Rosewood since had always paused for tea with Therese at half past three, first with my mum and Ellie, and later just the two of us.

      Edward shrugged indifferently. “I’ll come with you, then. May as well see if she’s finished collecting leaves for your grandmother. Pre-empt being sent.”

      “If you’re Granddad’s assistant, why aren’t you assisting him rather than Grandma?” I asked, as we trotted out into the sunlight. It felt odd to be at Rosewood with a stranger – especially one who seemed far more at home than I did.

      “He’s having one of his Great British Writer days. Doesn’t like anyone hovering, in case it disturbs his flow.” Which might explain why Edward had lasted longer than the other assistants. A keen sense of when to get lost.

      “So you’re just making yourself useful until he needs you again?”

      “Got to earn my keep somehow.” Edward gave me a quick smile as he turned off the drive and onto the long, rambling path that led, eventually, to Therese’s cottage.

      He didn’t seem inclined to any further conversation, and I found my attention drawn instead to the familiar sights along the way – the huge magnolia that overhung the path, the strange fountain statue that Isabelle had found on holiday in France one year and had shipped back, the wild flower patch my mother planted which, over the course of a few summers, overtook almost a whole lawn.

      As we reached the bend in the main path that led down to the abandoned ruin of the old stables and Therese’s tiny cottage, my great-aunt appeared in the distance. Therese was unmistakable with her 1950s silhouette of full skirt and tight cardigan even when, as now, her arms were full of eucalyptus leaves.

      Edward squinted up into the sun, the light bleaching his sandy hair even paler. “This looks like another of those ‘earn my keep’ moments,” he said. “Isabelle will only send me back for them later, anyway.” He jogged away down the path to relieve Therese of her leafy burden. He had a point; Isabelle never came down to Therese’s cottage if she could send someone else. In fact, I didn’t think I’d ever seen her there. “I’ll take these up to the house for you, Mrs Williams,” I heard Edward say. “Save you the trouble, since I’m heading back anyway. Besides, you’ve got a visitor.”

      Therese’s pale blue eyes widened and her red lips pursed as I came close, and I wondered what changes she saw in me. But then she smiled, and I was eighteen again, home from university as a surprise one weekend, folded into her expensively perfumed embrace and thoroughly kissed, leaving lipstick marks on my cheeks. Therese was an anachronism, a throwback to a decade she’d only just been born for, with her fifties costumes and curled and pinned hair. But she was a part of Rosewood for me, every bit as much as Isabelle’s cocktails before dinner and Nathaniel’s stories.

      “It’s so good to have you home,” she said, leading me inside, and I blinked away unexpected tears as I realised just how much I had missed her. At least someone was pleased to see me.

      Therese’s cottage was as I had left it, filled with knick-knacks and jugs full of sweet peas and dishes laden with glass bead necklaces. The only difference, as far as I could see, was the vast collection of clothes that hung from every hook and corner and ledge in the lounge. And the hallway. And running up the stairs. Dresses and skirts and blouses and coats and handbags, with gloves and scarves and tops and shoes spilling out from old steamer trunks, stacked carelessly against the walls.

      Therese had always been a bit of a clothes horse, but this was taking things to extremes, even for her.

      I peered into the lounge from the hallway, and saw that in amongst all the accessories, my favourite photo of her still sat on the mantelpiece. Therese, aged nineteen, pale and pouting in black-and-white with crisply waving hair surrounding challenging pale eyes. It must have been taken in the tail end of the sixties, I’d worked out once, but Therese looked like a screen siren from thirties Hollywood. It was one of a very few photos I’d seen of Therese out of her fifties costume, and even that was out of sync with the rest of the world СКАЧАТЬ