Summer at the Lake (7 page)

‘Euridice.’

‘And is there an Orfeo?’

He saw a flicker of surprise pass across the old lady’s face, followed by an imperceptible nod of satisfaction, as though he’d passed a test. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s just the two of us. How about you, Mr Strong, do you have a significant other?’

He decided to be honest. ‘I did until last Saturday.’

‘Oh, dear. May I ask what happened last Saturday?’

‘My girlfriend reached the decision I was too much like a brother to her.’

‘Ah, I see,’ she said after a meaningful pause. ‘The spark had gone out for her; it happens. You probably won’t think so right now, but I’d advise you to take heart, for there are worst ways for a relationship to come adrift. Had you been together for long?’

‘Long enough for me to think we might end up making a life together.’ The words out, he thought of Orfeo’s love for Euridice and the famous aria – ‘What is Life?’ – from Gluck’s opera, which his mother, a keen singer and opera buff who died twelve years ago, had often claimed was quite possibly one of the most hauntingly beautiful arias ever written. It wasn’t often he heard the piece of music, but when he did he was always reminded of her.

Whether it was the unexpected reminder of his mother, or talking about Jesse leaving him, or maybe the combination of the two, a great sadness came over him. Fighting it, he concentrated on stroking the purring cat.

‘I’m sorry,’ Miss Silcox said quietly. ‘You must be devastated. But is it really hopeless? Is there no way you can win her back?’

He swallowed and looked at his watch. ‘She’s at the house now, clearing it’ – his voice cracked – ‘clearing it of her things. And I have absolutely no idea why I’m telling you this.’

‘Well, I’m glad you did,’ Miss Silcox said briskly. ‘Bottling things up serves no purpose at all. Better to get them out.’

She rose slowly from her chair and, standing before him, put her hands together. ‘Would you care to join me for some lunch, Mr Strong, and when duly fortified you can go next door and get on with whatever it is you came to do?’

Carefully removing Euridice from his lap, he placed her on the floor and stood up as well. ‘I will if you’ll call me Adam,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘And you must call me Esme.’

Sunday dawned grey-skied and frosty.

From her bedroom window Esme looked out at the whitened garden. Perched on a bare tree branch, the bossy blackbird – the self-appointed autocrat of the walled garden – gave a flap of its wings and swooped down to the ground beneath the holly bush and pecked for fallen berries amongst the petrified leaves. From the stone bird bath, a robin watched the blackbird and, as if weighing up its chances, flew over to the holly bush to see what pickings he could find. But the blackbird was having none of it and shooed him off at once with a volley of vicious pecks.

Esme tutted. ‘Such wickedness. This cold weather really does bring out the dictator in that wretched bird.’

At her side and sitting on the dressing table, Euridice licked her paw, dabbed it delicately behind her ear, then yawned as though any uncivilised behaviour going on in the hurly-burly of the garden was quite beneath her.

Breakfast was always the same for Esme – tea and a slice of toast with marmalade followed by some fresh fruit, depending on what was in season. If she didn’t have any fresh fruit, she would have tinned; she was particularly fond of tinned pineapple. Today she took two clementines from the bowl on the dresser and sat at the table in one of the Windsor armchairs with Bach’s Sonata in G minor playing on Radio Three.

During lunch yesterday with Adam she had told him that having lived alone for so many years she was a fastidious creature of habit. In return he’d said that he never knew from one day to the next what he was going to do, that he thrived on the unpredictable nature of his work. How very alien her world here at Trinity House would be to him. Of course, it hadn’t always been like this, but as she had explained to him, gradually, with the passing of years, one adapts and learns to subsist on a sort of cheeseparing way of life, is even grateful for the solace it brings.

Breakfast eaten and tidied away, she went back upstairs to dress, thinking that as much as she relished the pleasantly ordered tranquillity of her routine, she did not find the disturbance to it since Friday evening’s twist of fate in any way disagreeable. It would naturally run its course and all would soon be just as it was before.

She opened the larger of the two mahogany wardrobes in her bedroom and pondered what to wear for her outing.

Just as Adam had suggested, she was going to pay a call on Floriana, but now that the time was upon her, she was suddenly tremendously occupied with the anxious hope that her visit would be well received. Adam, a most sincere and genuine young man, had been in no doubt that it would be, so she must try to allay her anxiety and put her trust in him. And in the gifts she would take with her: a pot of indoor cyclamen and a very small box of Champagne chocolate truffles, bought yesterday afternoon from Buddy Joe’s after Adam had left to go next door. Surely such offerings would prove her intentions were well meant?

But by the time she was dressed and had applied her make-up, her anxiety had multiplied – what if Floriana wasn’t at home? The thought of her short journey being a wasted one, of having to return to Trinity House with her gifts, pained her so abruptly, she lost her nerve and wondered if she shouldn’t forget the whole enterprise. Why not stay here and be content with her usual Sunday of listening to the radio while reading and maybe tidying the larder, a job which was long overdue? Why risk going out in the cold, especially as the pavements would probably still be covered in a treacherous layer of slippery frost just waiting to catch out a foolish old woman who should know better and stay inside?

Floriana had given herself a good talking to when she’d woken that morning. There would be no more lazing about the house in her jammies feeling sorry for herself. There would also be no more putting off a very important phone call.

Accordingly, she was now dragging herself out of bed and fully determined to tell her sister that she had her own plans for Christmas. She would tell Ann she was going to friends, not just for Christmas, but for New Year. No way was she going to let her sister bully her into spending any of the festivities with her.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it was only Ann and her husband, Paul, and their two children, but the whole Brown clan would be there – Paul’s parents, plus a stray uncle and Paul’s ultra sensible brother, Robert. Ann had some crazy notion that Robert was perfect for Floriana and that she was a fool not to appreciate how fond Robert was of her and that at her age she shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Mum and Dad never went on about her still being single, but Ann had an unhealthy fixation about it and could always be relied upon to know why her younger sister was incapable of finding a decent man. It came down to many things, but chiefly it was her ‘ridiculous dress sense’ as Ann saw it. ‘You’re not a student any more,’ she would say in exaggerated bafflement at the latest quirky outfit Floriana had put together. ‘It’s time to grow up and settle down,’ was another refrain.

Settling down implied settling in Floriana’s mind and she didn’t want that. The sad truth was, for the last two years she’d lived with the realisation that if she couldn’t have Seb, she didn’t want anyone.

She certainly didn’t want her sister’s brother-in-law. In his late thirties – going on fifty – Robert was a personal injury lawyer and in the light of her accident, which Ann had admitted yesterday on the phone she had mentioned to Robert, she could just imagine what the hot topic of conversation would be if she joined the Brown clan for Christmas.

Now dressed, she took the stairs slowly – her head still ached and if she moved too quickly she felt dizzy. The swellings on her face had gone down a bit, but the technicolor bruising was increasing. Just call me freak-face, she thought as she reached the bottom step and winced as a sharp pain shot through her hip and back. She was beginning to worry that she wouldn’t be well enough for work tomorrow. She hoped she would be; she hated letting people down. She also needed the money. But the thought of wandering round the streets of Oxford in the cold in her present state didn’t feel like the most sensible thing to do.

Making herself some breakfast, she recalled Adam’s words of caution yesterday, and his kindness. The kindness of strangers, she thought, was so much more palatable. Often benevolence from closer to home was harder to accept, mostly because it frequently came with too many strings.

Yesterday her sister had kept her promise and duly phoned to see how she was, but her main concern, apart from badgering Floriana about Christmas, was that under no circumstances was she to let on to their parents about the accident. Feeling that she was being warned – no,
lectured
– like a naughty child to do the right thing, Floriana had regretted she’d ever mentioned it to Ann.

Usually there was no problem with Christmas, because normally it was under Mum’s control and they all went home to her and Dad and Ann’s need to boss everyone about was held in check. This year Mum and Dad would be somewhere between Borneo and Vietnam on Christmas Day, on their way to Ho Chi Minh City. Mum had been unsure about being away during December – she had been all for choosing a different itinerary for a different time of the year – but in a rare moment of unyielding strong will, Dad had held firm and gone ahead and booked the cruise, saying Ann and Floriana were old enough to organise themselves in their absence. Which, of course, they were. Floriana had at once got it all perfectly planned, she and Sara would spend Christmas together, but then Sara’s family in Argentina had insisted she go back to them for the whole of December.

Plans, thought Floriana as she cautiously chewed on a piece of soft buttery toast – her jaw was still very tender – was there any point in making them? Before Seb’s card had arrived, she had planned to spend some of the weekend sorting through the storage boxes on top of her wardrobe, put there temporarily when she moved in and which had stayed there untouched ever since. But the thought of climbing onto a chair to get them down had been beyond her yesterday. Maybe later, after she’d rung her sister, she would summon the energy to face the job.

Her breakfast finished, she heard a knock at the door.

Floriana ushered her unexpected visitor in from the cold.

‘Normally I wouldn’t dream of calling unannounced,’ said Miss Silcox, ‘especially not on a Sunday.’ Her cheeks were flushed from the cold, her eyes a little watery and her words tumbled from her lips in a breathless flurry. She sounded quite different to how Floriana had remembered her, not at all the authoritative figure giving orders.

‘I would hate to be guilty of a breach of manners,’ her visitor went on, ‘but I wanted to put my mind at rest and see for myself that you really were on the mend.’

‘Seeing is believing,’ Floriana said with as much of a smile as her sore face would allow, ‘so I hope your mind is at rest now. What’s more, I’ve put away my self-pity and have officially rejoined the human race today. Yesterday I was a lazy couch potato; I didn’t do a thing. Let me take your coat.’

The coat hung up on the hook in the hall, she led her guest through to the sitting room. ‘I take it Adam passed on my message to you yesterday?’

‘Oh, yes, it was most kind of you to ask him to thank me,’ Miss Silcox said, removing the fabric cover from the basket she was carrying. ‘Very thoughtful indeed. I brought these for you, a small offering to cheer you up. But I’m delighted to see that you’re already remarkably chipper, considering what happened to you.’

‘Oh,’ cried Floriana, ‘how sweet of you. But really, I feel such a fraud. First Adam bringing me cakes and now you with chocolates and flowers; I should get run over more often.’

‘Perhaps that’s a little drastic, my dear. Where would you like the cyclamen?’

Floriana took the pot from her guest and surveyed the small room. ‘I think here on the window sill would be perfect, don’t you?’

‘You’ll have to find something for it to sit on, or it will make a terrible mess.’

‘No problem, I’ll fetch a saucer while I make us a drink. What would you like, tea or coffee? Or, seeing as it’s so cold, shall we be very indulgent and have hot chocolate to go with one of those delicious truffles you’ve brought?’

Settled with their drinks, Floriana was thinking how pleased she was that this elderly, doll-sized woman had come to see her. The more snippets of information she winkled out of the old lady – she had lived in Oxford all her adult life, had worked as a librarian at Queen’s, then an archivist at the Bodleian, and had never been married – the more Floriana itched to know. She also realised that she recognised Miss Silcox, had seen her about since moving to Church Close, very likely at the shops in North Parade.

Composed and perfectly at ease in the chair where her guest yesterday had looked anything but comfortable, Miss Silcox was dressed in a smart navy blue two-piece suit with a cream silk blouse, her stockinged legs placed neatly together at the knees and ankles and tucked to one side in a very ladylike fashion. Her patent court shoes with a two-inch heel were blue to match her outfit, along with her handbag and gloves. Her silver hair, elegantly pinned up, was surprisingly thick and luxurious for a woman of her age, which Floriana guessed was late seventies. Her eyes were blue and alert, and probably missed nothing, and were surrounded by a tracery of fine lines.

She must have been a very attractive woman when she was young, Floriana found herself thinking, mesmerised by the old lady. She watched her wipe the corners of her pearly-pink lipsticked mouth with the paper napkin from the packet Floriana had dug out from the bottom of the drawer in the kitchen – Adam had been awarded no such treatment, not even a bit of kitchen roll. But then having Miss Silcox here was a bit like having a visit from the Queen. Though what had she been thinking, giving her royal guest such a clunky old mug? It looked like a bucket in Miss Silcox’s small elegant hands – hands that were doubtless more accustomed to delicate teacups made of expensive fine bone china.