Summer at the Lake (2 page)

In contrast, Floriana had loved her name as a young child and had never once been tempted to abbreviate it to Flora or, heaven forbid, Flo. Anyone who tried received short shrift. The exception to the rule had been Seb who had called her Florrie.

It was dark now and at the top of Parks Road she joined the Banbury Road and pictured Seb’s handwritten message. He’d written
Floriana
, not
Florrie
, and it served to emphasise how horribly distant they’d become. Even the fact that he’d sent the card to her old address and it had been forwarded to her new home underscored the gap between them.

Yet as big a shock as it was to know that Seb was actually marrying The-Oh-So-Beautiful-The-Oh-So-Perfect Imogen, the save-the-date card was an olive branch. Unless . . . unless Imogen was behind it. What if she had suggested they invite Floriana just so Imogen could show that she had won and Floriana had lost?

She turned left into the peace and quiet of North Parade Avenue, waved to Joe behind the counter in Buddy Joe’s and wondered if she was being stupidly paranoid. With the passing of two years, surely the invitation was genuine and had been sent with the right motive?

At the bottom of the road she turned right and, nearing home, she reached into her bag for her keys.

But what if Seb had done this behind Imogen’s back? What if he wanted to let bygones be bygones and be friends again with Floriana? How would Imogen feel about that?

More to the point, did Floriana want to rekindle their friendship and risk being hurt all over again?

No, she thought decisively, she couldn’t do that, and with equal decision, she stepped into the road to cross over for Church Close where she lived.

Strange, she thought sometime later – though with no real conscious understanding of the passing of time – why was she lying on this hard gritty surface, her face pressed to it painfully? And why did she feel so leaden, yet as if she were floating? How odd it felt.

Adam Strong drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. It had been a hell of a week. But at least it was ending on something of a positive note. The sale on the house in Latimer Street he had exchanged contracts on three weeks ago had gone through this afternoon and he’d just picked up the keys from the agent. He was on his way there now.

Or rather he would be if he weren’t stuck in traffic. He should have waited until tomorrow to see the house, when it wasn’t dark and when it wasn’t rush hour. It would have been better all round. But he needed to be busy, to keep himself from brooding.

The traffic lights up ahead changed and he slowly moved forward, at the same time acknowledging that the addition of a new project to his property portfolio would serve the purpose of taking his mind off Jesse.

Seven days ago – last Saturday – Jesse had informed him that she couldn’t see a future for them as a couple, that she now only viewed him as she would a brother. And how, he thought with a flash of irritation, would she know how that felt when she was one of three sisters?
Bloody hell, a brother!
Was that what she’d felt when they’d been in bed, that she was having sex with a brother?

They’d been together for nearly two years and he honestly hadn’t seen this bombshell coming. OK, he’d been working crazy long hours, so perhaps he’d been preoccupied and perhaps not quite so on the ball, but that worked both ways: she was the one who had been constantly away these last eleven months, driving round the country as a medical rep, and let’s not forget those drug company jamborees and conferences she was forever attending.

She had denied there being anyone else – that had been his first question – but he wasn’t so sure. Lying to him might be her way of believing she was sparing his feelings. But he’d have money on someone else being in the picture, some guy she’d met while away. ‘I promise you,’ she’d said, ‘there’s no one else.’

‘So why end it between us?’ he’d asked, dazed with disbelief and fighting hard to keep in check the swell of painful emotion that was threatening to spill over. ‘Whatever it is that isn’t working between us, let’s fix it.’

With tears in her eyes she’d shaken her head at that. ‘Adam, this isn’t something you can fix up like the houses you buy and sell on.’

He’d been stung by the accusation, as if he saw things so simplistically. ‘You make me sound like some kind of emotionally challenged halfwit,’ he’d said. Which he was sure he wasn’t. He knew there were complexities in every relationship and that compromises had to be made. It wasn’t as if he was a total rookie when it came to these things.

But he’d gone wrong somewhere along the line and missed the signs that Jesse wasn’t happy. He thought back to her birthday a few weeks ago when he’d taken her for an overnight stay at Cliveden House. She’d appeared to love everything about it, particularly the spa and the Mulberry handbag, which he’d surprised her with before dinner.

Had she known then that she was on the verge of dumping him? The question, which had spun around inside his head too often this week, caused him to take the corner too fast onto the Banbury Road and suddenly he was rammed up close and personal to the car in front. Another inch and he’d have made contact.

Keeping his distance and his speed low, he reckoned the answer to his question was yes, Jesse had known for a while she was planning to leave him. Because when he looked back to her birthday, he could remember thinking that when they’d made love that night in the hotel, she had seemed less than involved, as if she was merely going through the motions. He had thought at the time that maybe she was tired, having been on the road for most of that week.

She had been staying with a friend since the weekend but was coming back tomorrow – Saturday – to move her things out. He had told her he wouldn’t be at the house, but a part of him wanted to be there, to try and convince her that they shouldn’t throw away the last two years.

And what about all the plans they’d made? Only a fortnight ago they’d been discussing how to carve up Christmas without offending either set of parents. Not only that, they’d booked a holiday to St Lucia for next March.

How could he have got it so spectacularly wrong? Because, he supposed, self-rationalisation and the lies we tell ourselves was human nature, it guaranteed we saw only what we wanted to see.

With a weakness for over-analysing things, he stopped the direction of his thoughts. He’d gone round in enough futile circles this week trying to figure out Jesse and what precisely had gone wrong between them.

He turned into North Parade Avenue where the shop windows were attractively lit with Christmas lights. It was an area of Oxford he particularly liked and he knew that buying here was a smart move. The university owned much of the property in the neighbourhood, but Latimer Street was one of the few roads that was predominantly residential. The house he’d bought – number six – was a compact four-bedroom Victorian villa built of yellow and red brick, and it needed gutting, rewiring, replumbing – re-everything in fact – but it would be a gem when he’d finished with it. He hadn’t made up his mind yet whether he’d add it to his lettings portfolio of flats and houses, or sell it on straight away. Time would tell.

It was stupid going to see it in the dark, but ever since he’d bought his first property, it was a ritual of his to head off immediately after he’d taken possession of the keys and claim the property as his own. He would use the torch from the boot of his car and wander from room to room, confirming in his mind the plans he had in store for the house.

He’d bought his first property when he was twenty years old, borrowing an absurd amount of money from the bank to do so – those were the days when banks couldn’t dish out loans fast enough. The house had been a wreck, a tiny two-up two-down, which he’d spent six months putting right – learning on the job – and effectively camping in it before selling it on for a reasonable profit, much to his parents’ surprise. They’d been appalled when he’d dropped out of university in his second year and announced – rather grandly – that he was going to be a property developer. He might just as well have announced his desire to be a drugs dealer. He’d been glad to leave university; being mildly dyslexic, he’d found it a bit of a slog at times.

He was now thirty-seven and despite the impressive buy-to-let portfolio he now had, he very much doubted if his father had given up on the idea of him one day getting a proper job like his brother, Giles, who worked for a prestigious bank in the City. But then these days, when banks were considered as great a threat to mankind’s survival as nuclear weapons, prestigious was perhaps not the
mot juste
.

‘There are enough over-achievers in the family as it is,’ Adam had told his parents when they’d expressed their disappointment at his career choice. ‘In my special and unique way I’m bringing a level of normality to the family,’ he’d joked. To which his mother had told him he wasn’t too old, or too tall, for her to box his ears, and what, she wanted to know, did he mean by
normality
?

At the junction with Winchester Road he turned right and had just accelerated away when a dazzling glare of lights on full beam appeared in his rear-view mirror. He knew he was doing nothing wrong, but even so he slowed down – he’d been caught by an unmarked police car on the M4 for speeding two months ago and was still in the early stages of flashing-light paranoia, worrying that any vehicle on his tail was a police car sneaking up on him. To his relief the car shot out from behind him and overtook with unnecessary speed. With a shake of his head, Adam tutted self-righteously and wondered where the police were when there was somebody seriously breaking the law.

But his relief was quickly replaced with an innate and reactive bolt of alarm. It was what his driving instructor had taught him and which he’d never forgotten – good intuitive drivers have an unconscious sense of danger being only seconds away and are perpetually on full alert for acts of arbitrary madness, because it’s the unexpected that gets you killed. And something unexpected was happening up ahead: the driver who had overtaken him had simultaneously hit the brakes and swerved erratically before speeding off.

It was then, in the light cast from the street lamp, that Adam saw an elderly woman hastening towards the unmistakable shape of a body lying in the road.

Esme Silcox had lived in North Oxford for over sixty years and during that time she had seen plenty of changes, along with a veritable kaleidoscope of human life.

So when she snapped her handbag shut and pulled on her kid leather gloves and Joe showed her to the door, as he invariably did when the shop wasn’t busy, it was a gesture she not only appreciated but which made her think of days gone by.

To look at Joe one wouldn’t expect such old-fashioned courtesy. With his shaven head and multiple piercings and curious tattoos, he looked every inch the type of man one might choose to cross the road to avoid. But Esme knew better: one simply didn’t live in a place like Oxford without learning that a book should never be judged by its cover.

‘You take it carefully,’ Joe said in his velvety-smooth voice while towering over her. ‘It’s dark out there now. And don’t forget, anytime you want, we’d be happy to take an order over the phone and deliver your shopping to you. Just give us a tinkle, that’s all you have to do.’

Had he not spoken with such a genuinely considerate tone, she might have felt patronised, but she didn’t. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘that’s very kind of you. I shall bear the offer in mind.’

Out on the street, with her shopping bag in one hand and her handbag hooked over her forearm, she set off in the cold evening air with a brisk determined step. At least in her head it was a brisk determined step, but given that she was eighty-two years of age, it was likely that she was being somewhat optimistic about the speed with which she was able to move.

Away from the shops and restaurants and at the junction with Winchester Road, she turned right, waited for a succession of cars to pass, then crossed over, taking care in the dark not to miss her footing when she reached the pavement on the other side. This time last year her only remaining close friend had popped out for some crumpets for tea and had slipped on an icy pavement. Poor Margaret, she had suffered the ignominy of being taken to hospital by ambulance with a broken hip and a fractured elbow and by the time she was deemed fit enough to be discharged she had lost all confidence and had gone downhill rapidly. By Easter she was dead. It happened all the time: a trivial accident and then that was that.

Perhaps if the weather did turn particularly inclement in the coming weeks, she would take Joe up on his offer and have him deliver her shopping. The previous owner of the shop had never been so thoughtful. Quite the contrary. He’d been a ghastly man, rude and bad-tempered, he’d thought nothing of arguing with his customers and snapping at anyone, particularly students, who had the temerity to touch anything. Earlier in the summer he had tried to dupe Esme. He’d called her a liar, that she had given him a ten-pound note and not the twenty as she knew perfectly well she had. The wicked man had accused her of being gaga and not knowing what she was doing. When she threatened to call the police, he backed down and handed over the correct amount of change to her. It was a month later, at the beginning of September when, without warning, the shop was stripped bare and a To Let sign went up.

Joe and Buddy arrived in October along with their attractive wicker baskets of fresh produce – bread, eggs, fresh fruit and vegetables and a delicious line in pies, pasties and cakes. They stocked all manner of organic and Fair Trade items as well as cheese, ham, salami, and olives and recently freshly made sandwiches and baguettes had been introduced, with the day’s specials written on a blackboard behind the counter. Home-made soup was now being considered, so Joe had just informed Esme. She hoped their enthusiasm and enterprise would be richly rewarded with a steady flow of loyal custom. Certainly they provided everything she needed.