A Summer to Remember Read online

  ‘Why don’t you do the garden? You’re a gardener.’ She’d turned to look at him, her head tilted much as the inquisitive robin’s had been.

  ‘Because I work full time for my landscape gardening business.’ He knew she knew that. It was as if making the polite enquiries of strangers would erase the night they’d got hot and heavy.

  Her turn to reply, ‘Oh.’ She scooped back her hair as the breeze tried to blow it into her face and she turned her gaze to the circular flower beds he’d been working on. Alice had thought it amusing to create as many circles in and around her circular house as possible. Even the garden shed was circular because Lee, besotted, had made it for her. ‘You’re doing this garden now,’ Clancy pointed out.

  ‘Because Evelyn found a boyfriend and hightailed it to live with him in Wales.’ He went on with the caretaker’s job description. ‘You’d also handle bookings. A lot come through a tourism website; they ring you with the details. A few come directly by post or phone. You sort out guests’ gripes, answer questions, solve problems and basically do whatever comes up. I’m afraid that if you’re at home, tenants and guests consider you on duty. Evelyn left the book inside the Roundhouse. I’ll show it to you.’

  ‘Book?’

  ‘The one with bookings in.’ It was a fat, dog-eared volume Evelyn had kept up-to-date and in which she’d left copious notes for her successor.

  ‘You make bookings in an actual book?’ She almost smiled. ‘There’s no booking software?’

  Slowly, he relaxed. This was it. Her sticking point. The indisputable fact he could share with her in good conscience and let it send her back to the city. He stretched his legs and crossed them at the ankle. ‘No booking software. The village is an internet “not spot” with ancient phone lines and poor-to-non-existent mobile signal. Look,’ he said, feeling magnanimous now he realised there was no way a city girl used to being permanently plugged in could exist in an environment where information technology was rendered virtually – ha, ha – useless. ‘I suppose being involved with the cottages peripherally hasn’t given you a clear picture of life in Nelson’s Bar.’

  He encompassed the row of cottages joined to the Roundhouse with a wave of his arm. ‘The rental cottages are the only real holiday homes in the entire village, though there is a B&B, which has a bar about six feet by six and, outside, a few tables with umbrellas. We have no church, no shop, no pub or coffee shop. The Norfolk Coast Path bypasses us and although north Norfolk is popular with walkers, most don’t tackle the hill climb to get up here.’ He sat back, giving her the opportunity to hum and haw, to backtrack on her intention to live in the back of beyond.

  But then Clancy’s breath left her in a long, slow, peaceful sigh. ‘Sounds perfect,’ she said.

  Chapter Two

  Clancy knew her answer had surprised Aaron from the way his brows clicked down over his eyes. ‘Seriously?’ he asked stiffly. From within the Roundhouse, a phone began to ring and he rose from the bench, disappearing indoors to answer it. Then he reappeared. ‘That was my girlfriend. She knew I was working here and I’m late to meet her.’ He paused, checking his watch. ‘I’ll come back in a couple of hours. We need to finish this conversation.’

  ‘Fine.’ Clancy wondered whether he was expecting her to think twice in his absence.

  She watched him pack the garden tools into the shed and click his fingers to his enormous dog. Every word Aaron had spoken had increased Clancy’s belief that Nelson’s Bar was exactly what she needed. He might as well have said, ‘Here’s a quiet, safe backwater where you can get your head straight. The job’s a doddle for someone with organisational skills.’

  Clancy Moss, however temporarily exhausted, thrived on challenges, and the ability to adapt had been bred into her. With engineers for parents, she’d been brought up in Belize, various parts of Africa, Dubai, Hong Kong … sometimes in company compounds or city apartments but also in remote villages. She’d attended company schools, boarding school, local schools and international schools. She’d even, at times, attended Alice’s school, and had loved the feeling of having a settled home with Alice and Aunt Sally while her parents vanished into a part of Africa considered unsuitable for their daughter. Boarding school and its dull routines and restrictions came a poor second to sharing escapades with Alice and being spoiled by her aunt.

  Once she’d come to the UK for uni she’d tried to re-create that feeling of belonging. She’d thought she’d found it with Will but now … Now she’d been pushed into the painful break from Will and her colleagues – she wasn’t sure whether it was still logical to call them friends – she needed to regroup.

  OK, so, food first. Just to confirm what Aaron had said, she took out her phone. No service. So she’d just drive to Hunstanton and find a supermarket. Then she’d—

  ‘Yoohoo!’ came a creaky female voice. ‘Do you mind if I come into the garden? Hope not, because I’m in.’ The voice trembled a laugh.

  Surprised into rising and facing the direction the voice had come from, Clancy had to grab the back of the bench as her head swam anew. A short, rotund woman with a dandelion clock of white hair and a sweet smile shuffled around the house. ‘Are you are our new Evelyn? I’m Dilys, from number two. I thought I’d say hello.’ By now Dilys was standing in front of Clancy, daisy-strewn wellies peeping from beneath a rose-splashed skirt. Her eyebrows bobbed enquiringly.

  ‘I’m taking the caretaker’s job, yes.’ It was impossible not to return Dilys’s smile; it was so twinkly and warm. ‘I was just wondering where I could find a supermarket. Or furniture shops. Aaron had to rush off before he could tell me.’ She supposed she was lucky that she had money in the bank but she hadn’t really bargained for the hassle of furnishing the Roundhouse when she decided to launch herself towards Nelson’s Bar.

  Dilys’s grey eyes twinkled as she turned and let herself down stiffly onto the bench beside Clancy. ‘Furniture? I expect he’ll just bring the other stuff back. They stored it up at De Silva House – Aaron’s parents’ place – because Evelyn had her own.’

  Clancy suppressed a wriggle of hurt that Aaron hadn’t mentioned something that, clearly, would make her life easier. Evidently, he didn’t want her here. So what? She’d been unwanted by people much closer and more important to her than Aaron De Silva. Her ex-fiancé and work colleagues, for example. And with her parents it had always only been fifty-fifty.

  She shoved those negative thoughts away with a bright, ‘Was it Alice and Lee’s furniture? I’m Alice’s cousin, Clancy.’

  Dilys beamed. ‘Her cousin! How is Alice? I never hear from her.’

  ‘I think she’s OK,’ Clancy answered carefully. After jilting Lee, Alice had made no bones about preferring to be invisible to anyone at Nelson’s Bar and had wheedled unashamedly to get Clancy to represent Alice’s interest in Roundhouse Row. ‘I’m on the move all the time anyway and you’re so good at stuff. Don’t make me interact with judgy big bro Aaron, puhleeeeease, Clancee.’ Clancy had sighed and said yes. People often said yes to Alice. Maybe it was because she just seemed to expect it, but also it was her pretty smile, the swish of her stylishly cut hair, or the way she had of linking arms as if to demonstrate how much she liked you.

  And, wherever Clancy had been in the world, Alice had always sent letters, cards, messages, demands to know where Clancy was and what she was doing, requests for postcards or photos or to know when Clancy was going to come and live with them again. Whatever Alice’s faults, she and Clancy had a bond.

  These days it was Alice’s travelling the bond had to survive, rather than Clancy’s. The only time they’d seen each other in the last six years was when Aunt Sally had died suddenly four years ago. Alice had reappeared for the funeral, white-faced and red-eyed over the loss of her mother. Then she’d sold the family home in Warwickshire and vanished again, her travel fund firmly bolstered by her inheritance.

  None of this needed to be shared with Clancy’s new neighbour, so she just said, ‘Dilys, could you poi
nt me at a supermarket, please? I need supplies.’

  Dilys’s face shifted its wrinkles into a delighted grin. ‘Can I show you instead? I don’t drive any more so it’s a boon for me to get a ride into Hunstanton. Tell you what,’ she swept on. ‘How about I trade you lunch? I’ve made vegetable soup and I was just about to have some.’

  Warmth stole into Clancy’s heart at such a friendly offer. ‘What a brilliant trade. Thank you.’

  She followed her to the next-door cottage, assailed by a deliciously oniony fragrance as Dilys opened the door. ‘Welcome to number two,’ she said. ‘It’s not as big as the Roundhouse but it’s been my home since I’ve been on my own. Take a seat at the table, lovie, and I’ll dish up.’

  It seemed only seconds before Clancy was dipping chunks of bread into thick vegetable soup and sipping tea, looking around her. Dilys’s kitchen was full of … stuff. Heaps of fabric and wool teetered, jars of buttons or bowls of beads glowed with colour.

  ‘I’m a crafter,’ Dilys explained, following Clancy’s gaze. ‘Whatever I see or find I make into something else. It used to drive my poor husband mad. Still, it doesn’t concern him, not now he’s gone.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Clancy said automatically.

  ‘I still see him of course,’ Dilys continued, slurping up a soup-sodden square of bread.

  Clancy paused. ‘Oh?’ She considered herself far too down-to-earth to believe in the supernatural but Dilys sounded so confident that she asked, ‘Where?’

  Dilys put down her spoon in her empty bowl with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘In the garden. He lives next door.’ She burst out laughing.

  Clancy laughed too, laying down her spoon, though she’d eaten only half her lunch. ‘I thought you meant he was a ghost!’

  ‘Not him.’ Dilys was still grinning. ‘We can’t share a house but we can’t do without each other completely.’

  Finishing the industrial-strength tea and feeling ten times better for food inside her and the hand of friendship Dilys seemed to have no hesitation in extending, Clancy went out to empty her car boot ready for their shopping.

  They set off for the supermarket, Dilys exclaiming over the comfort of the car’s leather interior. Clancy was instantly plunged into a host of memories of Will helping her choose the car less than a year ago. It had been a symbol of the success of IsVid and now she was glad she’d chosen to spend the money that way rather than doing something sensible like paying a chunk off the mortgage. Resolutely, she shoved the thought away. ‘I forgot to look how big the freezer at the Roundhouse is.’ She slowed the car as she turned right onto the A149 and immediately came up behind a car towing a caravan.

  ‘There’s a good, capacious freezer,’ pronounced Dilys. ‘Capacious was the answer to the nine-letter word puzzle in the paper yesterday.’

  Clancy tried not to be distracted by the energetic pinging of the phone in her pocket now they’d left the village and, presumably, picked up a signal. ‘Are you a puzzler? I like Sudoku and crosswords.’ They passed the rest of the journey amicably chatting about why cryptic crosswords were so much more fun than the ‘easy’ counterparts, which neither of them actually found easy, until they reached Hunstanton, where, entranced by the dancing blue sea on their right, Clancy had to concentrate to follow Dilys’s directions past the formal gardens and through the busy traffic to the centre of town.

  When she’d parked at Tesco’s, she stole a quick look at the alerts now showing on the screen of her phone: Tracey and Asila both asking if she was OK. After a moment’s deliberation, she tucked the phone away again because she didn’t know how to reply. Was she OK? She could’ve said, Fine except for my relationship ending and my co-directors wanting me out of the business, but as they were two of those directors it would be a) aggressive b) whiney c) pointless. It would be more fruitful to devote her time to providing herself with what she needed in order to be OK.

  As well as filling a trolley with food and household items, she discovered that seaside supermarkets sold things like wetsuits for children, buckets and spades … and airbeds. Just in case Aaron truly intended leaving her without a bed for the night, she bought a lilac-coloured one for less than a tenner and Dilys offered to lend her a duvet. She hadn’t wanted to bring constant reminders of Will in the form of things they’d shared so new bedclothes would be on her shopping list once she had a permanent bed sorted.

  It was late afternoon when they arrived back at the Roundhouse. Clancy helped Dilys into number two with her shopping and collected in return a single duvet in a bold, bright patchwork cover, then carried her own purchases indoors to join the bags and boxes she’d brought from London.

  She halted. London was no longer her home.

  The echoing emptiness of the Roundhouse seemed to catch her suddenly beneath the breastbone, the only sounds her own breathing and muted birdsong outdoors. ‘You can do this,’ she told herself aloud. ‘This is not the first time you’ve moved house and begun again.’ So she set to, dividing the shopping between fridge, freezer and cupboards. Kitchen units had been fitted along a section of the curved wall and into an island unit too. As she worked, she wished she’d asked Aaron exactly when he’d be back. Dilys probably had his landline number but there was no reply when Clancy popped out to knock on her door.

  OK. Back to the Roundhouse. She walked a slow circle around the ground floor, remembering how Alice and Lee had set the space out in segments: sofas, a coffee table and footstools beside the panelling screen; then a circular dining table with chairs, and the space beneath the stairs filled with oak and glass cabinets built by Lee.

  Next, she trod up the wooden staircase to the three wedge-shaped bedrooms and two bathrooms on the first floor. All three bedrooms were carpeted so it felt less echoey. In the master bedroom she stood on tiptoe to catch glimpses of a hazy blue-grey sea between trees and houses. Woolly white clouds dotted a paintbox-blue sky. Nelson’s Bar was high above the waves on its headland but she remembered Alice showing her the way down to a small beach.

  She turned to survey the master bedroom without much enthusiasm. It had been Alice and Lee’s. Across the landing, the second bedroom’s view was of the lane and the house across the road. She turned and strode up the next flight of stairs to the loft, where she’d slept on her only visit, opening the door with a teeny-tiny – but welcome – sense of familiarity.

  The space she walked into was conical with room to stand straight only in the middle or by the window dormers. Beyond the rooftops, she could see the sea from one window and the pinewoods from the other. She stood for a long time, gazing over the village. Gardens and trees between the houses. The peaceful sound of seagulls and the occasional car engine.

  The sun lit the room, danced on the distant sea and warmed her heart.

  Feeling something approaching enthusiasm, she ran downstairs for the airbed and duvet. By the time the bed was inflated she was red-faced and puffing, but she smiled as she cast the patchwork quilt over it.

  Her temporary bed in her new room and new home. So there was no real furniture! Nobody who really knew her would think she’d be put off by a little thing like that.

  Chapter Three

  In the morning, Aaron’s conscience prodded him awake ridiculously early, considering it was Sunday.

  He hadn’t meant to leave Clancy Moss alone in an unfurnished house yesterday.

  He’d met Genevieve at his end-terrace flint cottage in Potato Hall Row on the edge of the village near the cliffs, and found her worrying aloud about where to go while builders repaired her own cottage. It was a tricky subject. He was all too aware that she was fishing to move in with him and he was beginning to resent it. They might have been together for a year or so but he liked his life in Nelson’s Bar as it was. He was content with his own company, creating gardens, soil between his fingers, the scent of grass on the air, blossom in spring, crinkling leaves and the promise of frost when autumn came. Nature’s glorious, ever-changing landscape. OK, he didn’t have much of a relat
ionship history – serial monogamy interspersed with happy singledom – maybe his brother’s public dumping had had something to do with that.

  But that was his choice.

  As it happened, while he’d been trying hard not to tackle the issue of where Genevieve was going to spend the months the builder needed to underpin her house, Aaron’s mum Yvonne had telephoned. ‘Aunt Norma’s broken her ankle on a day trip to King’s Lynn, and bumped her head. She’s got to stay in hospital overnight. Your dad’s on shift at the hotel—’

  Knowing his mother’s car control in times of stress, Aaron immediately offered, ‘I’ll drive you.’ His great-aunt had looked after him and Lee a lot when they were little so Yvonne could work. He’d apologised to Genevieve and was soon driving his mother out of the village, noticing the absence of Clancy’s car outside the Roundhouse and sparing a moment to wonder whether she’d decided to head home to London already.

  He had little opportunity to examine his reaction to that possibility during the hassly fifty-minute journey as Yvonne alternately worried aloud about her aunt and reproved him for the disreputable interior of his double-cab pickup, littered with notes, plans of gardens and empty crisp packets.

  Once at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, they found Aunt Norma had concussion. Queasy and quiet, she looked unlike her usual noisy, feisty self. Yvonne croaked, ‘Oh, Auntie! You poor thing!’ and became quite tearful.

  They stayed on, requesting information of nurses and buying Aunt Norma magazines from the hospital shop. Her normally bright eyes were closed against queasiness and she didn’t tease anyone or ask awkward questions, so they knew she had to be feeling pretty rubbish.