Cuckoo

by Anne Piper

  “Everything?”

  “Everything. Liz told me.”

  “But don’t you mind?”

  “Of course I mind. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “Oh hell.”

  “Don’t cry, Prue, please — please, darling. I haven’t got another handkerchief for one thing.”

  “If only I’d known,” I wailed. He put his arms round me again and stroked the ragged hair gently away from my forehead.

  “I’ll tell you something to cheer you up instead. Liz is going to marry that Swiss painter, and Mary and Tom are more or less reconciled, except that Mary won’t leave Paris till after some party or other next week, and Tom is furious but Mary just laughs.”

  “Oh good. Did Liz write all that to you?”

  “Yes, and she sent her love to you if I should see you. Now will you come and have lunch with us? I happen to know it’s chicken and blackberry tart. My mother always kills off some poor old hen when I come home for the weekend, and I picked the blackberries myself yesterday afternoon.”

  “Oh dear Brian … but I don’t feel like eating anything.”

  “Perhaps you will when you see it. And afterwards we could drive up to Ashdown Forest and walk along the top if you liked.”

  “And if I’m not faint from loss of blood,” I said, feeling my neck gingerly.

  “My mother can make you an elegant cravat bandage fastened with a cameo, like the black velvet ribbon your grandmother used to wear round her neck.”

  “Do you remember that?”

  “Yes, quite clearly, but nothing about you except the back of a white straw hat in church.”

  “It was a lovely hat with lifesize buttercups and cornflowers on it.”

  Brian stood up and pulled me to my feet. Then he stopped to rescue my glasses and slipped them in his pocket while I shook the poor daisies into position again. We left the churchyard hand in hand. I looked back once, pleased to see the graves neat and tidy with flowers in their buttonholes for Sunday. The yellow lime leaves would be falling soon all over my grandmother, the last in the line. I would have to remind Edith to come down and clear them away when I’d gone back to London.

  “Brian,” I stopped dead in the middle of the village. “Suppose I can’t love anyone ever again — not even you?”

  “Don’t worry, cuckoo, you will.”

  “But Brian, I feel so old and empty, you can’t imagine.”

  “You’ll get younger as the years go by. But,” he added as he opened his mother’s gate, “next time remember, Chastity begins at home.”