Summer at the Lake (15 page)

Standing at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes for tomorrow’s lunch, behind her Ann’s mother-in-law was banging on about the terrible state of the roads. Where were the gritters? Gillian Brown wanted to know. And why hadn’t the neighbours got together to clear the roads on their development of houses? It was as slippery as an ice rink out there. A death trap.

‘Paul and I have done our best to clear our part of the road,’ Ann said, opening the fridge that was nearly as big as Floriana’s kitchen, ‘but not all the neighbours appear to be as like-minded.’

‘Community spirit just isn’t what it once was,’ declared Gillian with an exaggerated huff. ‘You young people don’t know how to pull together like our generation.’ Not much older than Mum and Dad, the woman had an annoying way of speaking that gave the impression she was a war veteran who with her bare hands had dug out survivors of the Blitz during WWII. In reality the only war she’d ever encountered was a face-off within her local choir when a new woman had tried to oust her as main soprano – it was Gillian who ousted her and the choirmaster when it was revealed the two had been cheating on their partners and sleeping together. Gillian never tired of telling the story of the successfully defeated coup.

Only halfway through peeling the mountain of potatoes, Floriana observed her sister wrestling with the main guest for tomorrow’s lunch – a comedy-sized turkey, which she had now manhandled out of the fridge in its roasting tray and dumped on the work surface with a thud. It looked big enough to feed the whole bone-idle neighbourhood, never mind the Brown clan. And why was it only the women in the kitchen? Why weren’t any of the men helping to peel all these bloody potatoes? Why did they get to hang out together in the sitting room with the kids playing on the Xbox? What kind of example did that give her niece and nephew, that cooking was strictly women’s work?

At seven years old Thomas was already remarkably efficient at telling his five-year-old sister, Clare, what to do. Only earlier, when Floriana had been reading to them on the sofa, Thomas had interrupted her and asked his sister to fetch his slippers from his bedroom upstairs. Popping her thumb out from its customary place in her mouth, Clare had dutifully slithered off Floriana’s lap, but Floriana was having none of it. ‘Fetch them yourself, lazybones,’ she’d said, nudging Thomas with an elbow.

‘But she likes doing things for me,’ he’d said, astonished at her intervention.

‘Yeah, and I like squishing lazy nephews who boss their little sisters around.’

It was an uncanny reminder of when she and Ann had been children and Ann had constantly bossed Floriana around.

Another potato peeled, and behind her Gillian was off again, asking Ann if it wasn’t time the children were in bed.

‘Perhaps you’d like to do it for me?’ Ann said, her right arm disappearing inside the turkey.

‘I thought I’d do the children’s stockings.’

‘I’ve done them already,’ Ann said, now removing her arm from the turkey with a gruesome squelching noise and, in the manner of a midwife, presenting the huge naked beast with a large bag of giblets.

Seeing a chance to escape peeling any more potatoes, Floriana said, ‘I’ll get the children ready for bed if you like.’

‘No,’ Ann said firmly, ‘the potatoes are more important. You haven’t done very many, have you?’

‘Hey, I’m going as fast as I can,’ she retaliated. ‘Now I understand why you were so keen for me to come,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘You needed a slave.’

‘What’s that?’ her sister said.

‘Nothing.’

Half an hour later, and still bristling from Ann’s assertion that the children’s stockings were sorted, Gillian – determined she wasn’t going to lose out in the ongoing power struggle – went upstairs to fetch the small presents she was adamant had to be included.

The children were no nearer going to bed – there was a great deal of high-pitched squealing coming from the sitting room – but the potatoes were now done and Floriana was about to ask for a vodka and tonic as her just reward when her sister dumped a sack of Brussels sprouts on the draining board.

‘You’re joking,’ Floriana said as Ann returned to the fridge for an equally large sack of carrots and a slightly smaller one of parsnips.

‘Do I look like I’m wearing my joker’s face?’ she said.

‘I didn’t know you had one,’ Floriana fired back, not caring that she was sounding so insubordinate.

‘Go ahead, moan all you like if it helps to get the job done any faster.’

‘It’s never like this at Mum and Dad’s,’ Floriana grumbled, thinking she might have to review her proposed turkey lunch for Esme if it was going to involve this amount of work. There again, there would only be the three of them.

‘That’s because Mum has the luxury of time to do it all before we arrive,’ Ann said. ‘Whereas I work,’ she added self-righteously.

‘Mum’s always worked.’

‘Her current charity work of two afternoons a week doesn’t compare to the hours I put in.’

Floriana was about to say that Mum did a lot more than her two shifts at the Cancer Research shop when a voice at the kitchen door said, ‘Anything I can do to help?’

Ah, it was the man himself, Robert Brown – Ann’s idea of the dream catch for Floriana – and he was incongruously dressed in a pair of blue and green tartan trousers – or would that be trews, strictly speaking? Strictly speaking they were a tribute to thunderously bad taste. No grown man in his right mind should be seen dead in a pair, but for some reason Robert thought they were absolutely the thing to wear to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. That and a yellow-and-blue-striped rugby shirt. He swore he wasn’t colour-blind, but Floriana, who wasn’t averse to wearing some pretty odd clothes and colour combinations, had her doubts.

‘No, no, nothing you can do here, all under control,’ Ann said brightly, reverting to perfect 1950s housewife mode and straightening her Cath Kidston apron.

What?
Floriana wanted to scream at her sister, gripping the vegetable knife in her hand.
Nothing to do, are you mad? It’s like below stairs at Downton-bloody-Abbey here!

‘How about I give you a hand with those sprouts,’ Robert said, smiling genially.

‘Good idea,’ Floriana said quickly, before her sister had a chance to veto his offer of help.

He turned out to be as deftly skilled with a knife in one hand and a sprout in the other as he was as a terrier seeking out the details of Floriana’s accident. He’d touched on it earlier during the short drive from the station – he’d been the one to offer to pick her up – but now she felt as if he was really getting down to business and cross-examining her properly, grilling her on what actual forensics had been done at the crime scene. It all sounded overly melodramatic for such an insignificant accident, especially one of her own making. Though she hadn’t brought up that bit – no way was she going to admit to being distracted, that would lead to telling her sister about Seb and his getting married. Better all round that his name wasn’t mentioned.

‘I don’t have a clue about any forensics,’ she said in answer to Robert’s question. ‘I wasn’t at my most alert lying there in the road.’

‘What about the two witnesses you referred to?’

‘What about them?’

‘Presumably they gave reliable accounts of what they saw and heard? Have they been asked if they’ve remembered anything else since those original statements?’

‘They gave all the information they had at the time,’ she said tiredly, ‘but the subject hasn’t risen again between us.’

On and on the interrogation went. Question after question.

‘Did you take any photographs of your injuries?’ he asked after he’d concluded the police had probably overlooked vital pieces of evidence that would have led to tracking down the driver, such as flakes of car paint on her clothing or on the ground.

‘I can honestly say that whipping out my iPhone and taking a few snaps of my bruises and stitches was the last thing on my mind to do,’ she said. ‘But next time I’ll be sure to remember that helpful tip.’ She winced at how snarky she sounded. Robert didn’t deserve that; it was his way of being helpful. It was just so difficult to take advice from a man dressed as Rupert Bear. The sooner he found the woman of his dreams, the better, she thought. Because then, with any luck, she would sort out his dress sense.

They both reached for a sprout at the same time and as their hands touched inside the bag, their eyes met. Poor Robert as good as jumped at the contact and his face coloured. He wouldn’t have started more had she jabbed him with a taser.

‘Tell me, Floriana,’ she imagined someone saying to her, ‘when did the two of you realise you loved each other?’

Cue the ha-ha-ha laughter track. ‘Oh, it was love at first sprout.’

Christmas Day and Adam woke early to a bright and clear morning and, in an act of determined self-mastery, he resolved to bring about a fresh clarity to his mood and thinking.

By rights he should have a monumental hangover after staying up late drinking with his brother, but amazingly he didn’t. Now out of the shower and wrapped in a towel, he stood at the window of his childhood bedroom and looked down at the snowcovered garden. This had been the family home since he was six years old. He could remember the day they moved in, how he and Giles had raced around the garden and orchard in awe of its grandeur and size, so many places to hide, so many places to build dens, so many trees to climb. And fall out of, which they did with careless and happy regularity. Fortunately, they both seemed to bounce well rather than end up with anything broken.

That was until Adam was seven years old and he climbed a tree higher than he’d ever climbed before and in a moment of boastful triumph that he’d gone further than his brother, he’d slipped and hurtled towards the ground with alarming speed. A broken femur condemned him to a month-long stay in hospital on traction. It was assuredly the most miserable period of his childhood, and had instilled in him a near pathological dislike of hospitals.

These days it was almost
de rigueur
to complain about a blighted childhood, but he couldn’t find a single fault with his – apart from his own clumsiness falling from that tree, it had been pretty much perfect. His parents had never given any indication that they were anything but happily married and he and Giles never wanted for love or encouragement.

Their mother’s death twelve years ago hit them with a shattering broadside blow that was as incomprehensible as it was unexpected. Mum had been perfectly healthy one minute and then after suffering a series of debilitating headaches, she was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. She was dead within six weeks of the diagnosis and literally faded away before their eyes, the life seeping from her as she lay in the hospital bed drifting in and out of drug-induced sleep.

Two years later their father married again. An old friend of the family whose husband had died some five years previously, and who had been at school with Mum, Joyce was an ideal match and no one was unduly surprised by their announcement to tie the knot. Unable to have children, Joyce had thrown her maternal instinct into being a fun and loving honorary aunt to Adam and his brother when they’d been little, and now she was their stepmother, and a very good one into the bargain.

It was Joyce who had been the first to ask Adam where Jesse was when he arrived yesterday.

It was unquestionably wrong of him not to have told them beforehand that he’d be coming alone, but he really hadn’t been able to face doing it over the phone. He couldn’t even face thinking about Jesse, not after the humiliating mess he’d made of Monday evening. The expression on her face after he’d kissed her was still painfully etched on his memory.

So as cowardly as it was, it had seemed so much easier, and not to say self-explanatory, to arrive on his own. Both Joyce and his father had taken the pragmatic view that a thing wasn’t over until it was over and he should just hang in there until Jesse had sorted herself out.

His brother’s response was to pour him a large tumbler of whisky and say, ‘Come on, Adam, man up!’

The subject was neatly side-stepped during dinner, probably on the grounds Dad and Joyce thought they’d said all they could say on the matter, but it was afterwards, much later, when it was just Adam and his brother still up, that Giles pressed for further details and the levels on Dad’s decanters began to drop.

‘I know you don’t want my advice,’ Giles said, ‘you never have, any more than I’ve wanted yours, but in my opinion there’s only one option open to you.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Forget about Jesse and move on.’

Adam raised his glass to his brother. ‘That’s the best advice you can offer? You, the brilliant Cambridge man with a double first in PPE. Priceless.’

‘OK, I could give you any amount of philosophical reasoning to assuage your disappointment, but you know deep down as well as I do that there isn’t a more realistic option.’

And that, thought Adam as he finished dressing and could hear the rest of the household moving about, was what he had to accept. There was no other option. Yes, he could stick to the agreement he’d made with Jesse that they were on a break, but was there any point?

He didn’t think so. Because whenever he remembered that look of utter disdain on her face after he’d kissed her, he could not imagine her ever looking at him the way she used to. That crushing moment would always be between them. So wouldn’t it be better to pre-empt matters himself and end it with Jesse?

‘
Man up!
’ Giles had said. Well maybe they were the wisest words his brother had ever spoken.

It was a long time since Esme had had any presents to open. The last one she had been given had been from Margaret; it had been a CD of Monteverdi Vespers. They were funny things, presents, you could manage quite well without them, but when an unexpected one came along, it was all the more precious and enjoyable to open.

With great restraint, Esme had waited to open the presents Floriana and Adam had given her until she had eaten her lunch of roast chicken with sage and onion stuffing, roast potatoes and petit pois with some ready-made gravy and a dollop of cranberry sauce from a jar. Too full to eat the miniature Christmas pudding she had bought from Buddy Joe’s, she had decided to save that for later.