by Rachel Hore
As though sensing she was watched, Summer’s eyes flicked open. “Auntie Jude,” she shouted. She launched herself off the trampoline and disappeared from sight, but Jude could hear her calling, “Mummy, Mummy, Auntie Jude’s here,” in the depths of the cottage.
As Jude waited for the front door to open, she admired the mass of white roses growing over the porch and the window boxes of geraniums and trailing lobelia. Her sister had a natural ability with these things. She remembered the solitary, straggling spider plant on her own kitchen windowsill in Greenwich.
“Well, aren’t you coming in then?” Claire called from the doorway. Slim, blonde and elfin pretty, Claire had a brusque way of speaking that had long been part of her armor against the world. “What the hell have you done to yourself?” she cried.
Jude looked down at her crumpled jacket and skirt. Blood was seeping out from under the plaster on her shin. “It’s a long story,” she said.
Summer ducked beneath her mother’s arm, danced out and grabbed Jude’s hand, drawing her inside. The three of them stumbled together into the tiny living room. “Will you come upstairs, Auntie Jude?” commanded Summer. “I want to show you my doll’s house. I’ve just made some pictures to go on the walls.”
“Let your poor aunt rest a moment,” Claire said, glancing again curiously at Jude’s cut. “I’ll put the kettle on, shall I? Have a shower and change, if you want.”
“I don’t mind making the tea,” Jude said tentatively, but what she meant as a genuine offer of help was, as usual, interpreted wrongly.
“I can manage, thank you,” Claire said firmly. “It’s you who’s in the wars today.”
Jude watched her push herself upright and limp into the kitchen. Although all the operations on her leg had made a difference, they had never entirely solved the original problem. After she was sixteen, Claire refused to endure any more treatment.
“Come on, Auntie Jude.” Summer ran ahead upstairs.
Claire called from the kitchen, “I put some bedding out. Find yourself a towel in the bathroom cupboard.”
“Thanks.”
With more than Claire and Summer in it, the cottage felt crowded, but Claire, who bought it two years ago, when the Star Bureau started to come into profit, had made the best of its quaintness, staining and varnishing all the beams herself and painting the lathe and plaster walls a soft China white. As Jude picked up her overnight bag and mounted the stairs she noticed something new. “These collages on the landing,” she called down, “they’re lovely. Are they from the shop?” There were two bright, almost mystical scenes of trees and stars made of bark and painted paper, the detail drawn in pen and ink.
“Do you like them?” Claire replied. “Summer’s got a friend called Darcey. Her uncle makes them. We took some for the Star Bureau and I couldn’t resist doing a deal for a couple of extra for myself.”
Summer’s room was decorated fit for a fairy-tale princess. Pale plastic stars dotted the ceiling. Jude knew they glowed green-white in the dark. Claire had painted the walls with shy woodland creatures that seemed to peep around the vertical beams with large gentle eyes. Under the eyes of a fawn, Summer sat cross-legged on the floor, playing with a painted plywood doll’s house. Jude dropped her bag on the mattress Claire had laid out and knelt down next to Summer to see properly. The house, she was astonished to realize, was an exact replica of Blacksmith’s Cottage, down to the chimneys and the window boxes.
“Look, this is me,” Summer said, showing Jude a wooden doll dressed in an outfit rather similar to the one she now wore. “And this is Mummy.” The doll wore a replica of one of Claire’s long cotton skirts and tops and tiny dangling earrings.
“And this is Pandora.” The china cat had been painted with her real-life counterpart’s exact black-and-white markings. Summer made them all dance through the doll’s house. The two dolls had jointed limbs and Summer could sit them on chairs or, in the case of the little girl, make her kneel on the floor.
“They’re amazing. Where did you get them from?” Jude asked, picking up a little kitchen chair to study it properly.
“Euan made them for me. He’s Darcey’s uncle.”
“Did he make the pictures on the staircase, too?” Jude asked. Whoever the talented Euan was, he had clearly become something of a friend.
“Mmm,” Summer replied vaguely, lost in her game. “Now you go to sleep,” she told the little girl doll, laying her on the bed in the replica princess bedroom. “Or you won’t enjoy school tomorrow because you’ll be too tired. Sweet dreams, my darling!”
Remembering what Claire had told her, that Summer’s dreams were anything but sweet, Jude reached out a hand and stroked the girl’s hair. Should she say something? But now Summer had moved the Mummy doll downstairs and was making her feed the cat. The moment had passed.
* * *
“Have you ever been inside Starbrough Hall?” Jude, now changed into jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt, was watching her sister make supper.
Her sister, stirring a pan of risotto, shook her head. “No, just glimpsed it from the road. What did you say you’re doing there?”
“I’m valuing a collection of books and scientific instruments. They once belonged to an amateur astronomer. Look, I’ll do that.” She took the saucepan for the broccoli side dish from Claire to fill from the tap.
“Thanks,” Claire muttered. “So is it valuable, this stuff?”
“Some of it, yes,” said Jude, placing the pan on the stove. “But it’s really interesting, too. This man, Anthony Wickham, he lived at the end of the eighteenth century and I think he built the folly in the forest. He used it for stargazing. And when I went to see Gran last night, she mentioned the folly, too. So that’s how I got myself in such a mess just now. I thought I’d go and look for it. Have you seen it?”
“I nearly went with Mum once, but we didn’t quite make it. It’s a ruin, people say. Did you find it?”
“Yes, eventually, and it doesn’t look like a ruin. I found a footpath and thought it would be straightforward, but then some idiot started shooting right near me and I panicked and ran.”
“You have to be careful about that,” Claire said, frowning. “They must be killing foxes or rabbits or something; the pheasant season hasn’t started yet. I hate it when it does—those poor birds, it’s barbaric. But at least most people involved act responsibly.”
“Not whoever it was today. Anyway, I found the folly, but I didn’t have a chance to get a proper look. There was a dead deer caught in barbed wire. Someone had shot it. And this man appeared and since he was holding a shovel I put two and two together. I got quite cross, actually, but then he was quite unpleasant.” Jude stopped, and tried to remember. “Oh dear, it was a bit embarrassing. I assumed it was he who’d wounded the deer and perhaps I was wrong. He said he’d put it out of its misery. Told me it was private property and practically frogmarched me off his land.”
Claire laughed. “It’s like I said. You can’t go nosing anywhere you like round here. You city types, you think everything’s laid out for you.”
“I’m not a city type.”
“Yes, you are! Look at you. Going for a country ramble in a posh suit and stockings. Bossing some poor landowner who’s merely going about his business. You’re like that couple who’ve moved into the barn conversion down the road and complain about the smell of the farmer’s fertilizer.”
“You’ve just said yourself the pheasant shooting is barbaric.”
“I know, and I wouldn’t do it myself, but the land wouldn’t be managed or the pheasants bred in the first place if people didn’t want to go shooting. People from the cities don’t see all that. And the government doesn’t care about the countryside because there aren’t votes for them there.” Claire banged a lid onto the simmering broccoli.
Why do we always argue about something? Jude thought, bemused. How did we get onto politics? She sighed and changed tack.
“Going back to the folly. Has Gran ever talked abo
ut it to you?”
“No, why? What did she say to you?”
“Something about someone she met in the forest there as a child.”
Claire tasted the risotto, frowned, and added a dollop of butter. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“Where’s the gamekeeper’s cottage? Any idea?”
“That? You must have passed it on the road from the Hall. On the left just before you go up the hill. I know who lives there. It’s Euan, actually, the man who made those pictures.”
“The house at the bottom of the hill.” That was what the man by the folly said. Well, there could be other houses, but she hadn’t noticed any. “That might have been him I met,” she said. “Euan. I think he was the man at the folly. Big? Curly dark hair. Quite suntanned.”
“It sounds like Euan,” went on Claire, regarding her sister with a watchful expression.
“But he’s not the landowner, is he? The man who made the doll’s house? Really?”
“I don’t know what land he owns, but it’s definitely Euan who lives in Gamekeeper’s Cottage, and he definitely looks how you’ve described. He’s become great friends with Summer. He came to the shop with the pictures at half-term, when Summer happened to be there. He had Darcey with him. She’s in Summer’s class. Summer’s been over to play there. And once he took them out for the day. I invited him around here for supper to say thank you, and then last week he turned up out of the blue with the doll’s house. He had made one for Darcey apparently, and Summer was cheeky enough to ask for one, too. You know how persuasive she can be. He’s a really nice guy.”
“Is he?” Jude said doubtfully, thinking of her argument with him.
“Yes. He probably didn’t like you accusing him of stuff.”
“I did have a reason … I was shocked, that’s all. Oh hell, have I made a fool of myself?”
“I expect he’ll forgive you.”
Claire seemed very supportive of Euan. Jude smiled and said, “So, married, is he?”
“No, divorced, I think. But don’t go thinking anything,” Claire said, prickly as a chestnut burr. Close as one, too.
Jude put up her hands in mock defense. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” she said.
* * *
It was a long time since there had been a man in Claire’s life. “I’m too independent. I frighten them off,” she’d confessed a year or two ago after a couple of glasses of wine. Her relationships had often been short and fiery. Jude had seen her go in too deep, too quickly with a man and then, before you knew it, she would be practically throwing saucepans at him, and he’d be on his way. In all honesty, no one knew who Summer’s father was. Claire had always refused to tell.
“That pop singer she met at the arts center,” was their mother’s belief, though Claire had never admitted it, but Jude thought she could be right. Jon, was his name. He’d had a mop of curly yellow hair and Summer’s large, dreamy blue eyes. Claire brought him to Christmas lunch at their mother’s because he’d fallen out with his dad. It was the first Christmas since the girls’ father had died, and they were finding it difficult enough to be jolly as it was. Jon had arrived late and Claire hardly spoke to him the whole time; he kept going outside to smoke odd-smelling roll-ups and then he’d left early. “Without even saying a proper thank you,” Valerie whispered angrily to Jude and Mark that evening over the washing-up. Valerie and Claire had a row about it and Claire had stomped up to bed and slammed the door, as she used to when she was fifteen. “You can never say anything to her without her flying off the handle,” Valerie said bitterly.
After that Christmas, Jon made no further appearance, and a few weeks later, when Jude rang her sister and asked tentatively about him she said, “Oh, him,” dismissively. It was a couple of months after this that she announced with a kind of grim delight that she was pregnant.
Having Summer made Claire suddenly grow up.
“How do you think Summer is?” Claire asked her now as she placed plates in the oven to warm. Jude couldn’t see her face, but she heard a note of anxiety under her casual tone. She didn’t think it an overstatement to say that Claire would die for Summer.
Once the baby came, it was plain to all that Claire had discovered a purpose in life. She’d given up her job at the vintage-clothes stall on the market and started up her own business with her friend Linda; she had saved for a deposit and bought this dear little house, which she’d decorated so beautifully. “Summer seems her usual happy self to me,” Jude replied.
“She is, most of the time,” Claire said, opening the fridge. “That’s what’s so strange. If the bad dreams are because of stress, then she certainly doesn’t show it in other ways.”
“When did the dreams start?” Jude asked.
“About a month ago,” Claire explained. “At half-term. Not every night. About one in three, though.”
“Do you know, they sound rather like the ones I used to have when I was little.”
“Really? I’d almost forgotten about those,” her sister said. “That’s why I asked to move into my own bedroom. You, moaning and groaning in your sleep. When did they stop?”
Jude shrugged. “I don’t remember. I suppose I grew out of them.” She didn’t mention the one she’d had recently; it seemed to be a one-off.
“Perhaps it’s a normal phase with Summer, then.”
The thought seemed to reassure Claire.
“Will you allow me to lay the table?” asked Jude.
“Yes, of course. There’s a cloth in the top drawer. Pass me that bowl of broccoli, will you? Can you call Summer?”
* * *
“Mum rang last night,” Claire said, when they sat down to eat. “Finally. It’s incredibly hot out there, apparently. I mean really hot, nearly a hundred. The air-conditioning isn’t working and the builders have bungled the plumbing, so they’re staying with friends while Douglas sorts it out.”
“Poor Mum,” said Jude.
“Lucky Mum,” Claire replied sardonically. “Remember, she has good old Douglas.”
Jude grinned. After years of helpless widowhood, their mother took up Latin American dancing and met a new life partner. Douglas Hopkirk, retired actuary, was in some ways like their father—calm, practical, reassuring. “But he’s so dull,” Jude remembered Claire complaining to her after they’d first been introduced to him. “Nobody these days dresses like David Niven or says ‘Righto’ and drinks Cinzano. No wonder his wife went off.”
“After thirty years of marriage,” Jude had replied. “He must have had something going for him. He’s very nice, actually. As long as you don’t ask him about golf. He can bore for England about handicaps.”
“Or his tortoises. He went on to me half the evening about his wretched tortoises,” Claire had added with feeling.
“What have they done with the tortoises?” Jude wondered now. “Can you take them on a plane?”
“They’re with his daughter, but he’s planning to get them to Spain somehow and breed from them. I already know more than anyone would ever want to know about their mating habits, thank you.”
“What do the tortoises do?” asked Summer, who’d been picking the mushrooms out of her risotto and piling them on a spare tablespoon.
“They, er, have to try quite hard to make baby tortoises,” Jude said quickly.
“Harder than people?”
“Sometimes it’s hard with people,” she said, with feeling.
“Auntie Jude, if you want a baby you need a man to be a daddy.” Summer was too young to remember Mark.
“Eat up your risotto, Summer,” Claire murmured.
“Yes, I do, Summer. But it’s not that easy finding one,” Jude replied.
Summer regarded her with a serious expression, then said, “I wish I could find one for you.”
“Thank you. That’s very sweet.” Jude and Claire exchanged glances of suppressed amusement.
Claire, gathering up the plates, remarked to her daughter, “If you develop a matchmaking talent, s
weetheart, you’ll always be able to earn your living.”
* * *
After supper Jude spent an hour on her laptop, studying the depressing monthly figures Inigo had e-mailed her and writing reassuring messages to the head of department. She promised to come into the office early on Monday and explained excitedly about the Starbrough collection.
When she’d finished, which she reckoned would be early afternoon, since it would be Saturday and Claire would be at the shop, she’d collect Summer from her friend’s house and take her somewhere. The beach was the most popular idea, if the weather held.
She was just about to close down her laptop when she remembered Cecelia, whose help she needed with the astronomical instruments. She found the address and opened a new e-mail.
Hi, Cecelia,
I’m so sorry I haven’t been in touch. I wonder where you are now—Cambridge, still? It would be great to meet and catch up, but I also need to ask your professional advice. When would be a good time? I’m going on holiday at the end of next week, but if there’s the tiniest chance you’re about before then that would be fantastic. Dinner one evening or a drink?
Much love,
Jude
Jude awoke, disoriented, in pitch darkness. The moaning that had woken her came again. Summer. Jude pushed herself up dizzily from the mattress and stumbled over in the direction of the noise. Now she could pick out her niece’s face in the moonlight that leached under the curtains. Summer’s eyes were closed but her expression was anguished. “Maman, Maman,” she whispered, “where are you? Maman!” The last word was louder. She stirred and woke with a cry.
Jude sat on the edge of the bed, stroking Summer’s hair and whispering, “It’s all right, it’s all right, darling. It’s only a dream. You’re all right. Auntie Jude’s here.”