Second Time Around by Marcia Willett Read Free Book Online Page A

TRAY down the two flights of stairs and set it on the wooden draining board. She felt frightened and lonely; what would happen to her with Mathilda gone? She stared at the blackberries and suddenly remembered the flesh fly. With an exclamation of disgust she heaved the whole lot into the pedal bin and, sitting down at the table, put her head in her hands. She tried to imagine Mathilda’s descendants arriving at the cove; going all over the house with an eye to its value, laughing at its old-fashioned kitchen and deciding to turn the house and cottage—not to mention the boathouse—into a kind of holiday park. In her mind’s eye she could see it; the house split up into letting units; the cottage frizzed and powdered into the kind of twee ‘fisherman’s cott’ one saw in the glossy brochures. The boathouse with its huge attic room where Professor Rainbird had once worked would be ideal for keeping sailing dinghies and sailboards, as well as a launch—but not Mathilda’s old boat—for trips along the coast. She could imagine children on the small stone pier and the cove resounding to their shouts. Even the long winding drive would no doubt be laid down to tarmac and proper garages built into the cliffs behind the house where the Morris now lived in solitary splendour.
    Isobel wiped away a tear or two and sighed. Whatever happened would have to be faced. Perhaps she could raise the money to buy the cottage … Perhaps Mathilda might be right when she said that, after all, there might be no one left to inherit.

Five
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    TESSA RAINBIRD SAT AT the small table in the little back bedroom of a house in Shepherd’s Bush. This had been her home almost ever since her parents and small brother had been gassed to death when a volcano erupted in the Cameroons where her father was working as a petrochemical consultant. At the time Tessa had been at her school in England but even now, eleven years on, she suffered nightmares in which she was desperately trying to save her adored baby brother. Sometimes the nightmare took the form of wreckage, amongst which she crawled whilst explosions and screams reverberated about her. At other times the nightmare had that well-known quality of helplessness: her legs refused to run, her voice died in her throat, and she was unable to warn her brother or her parents or rescue them from their terrible fate.
    Her mother’s second cousin had stepped into the breach when Tessa’s paternal grandmother died two years after the accident. Tessa’s father was an only child but her mother, whose parents were dead, had a sister in New Zealand who had offered to care for Tessa. Tessa could barely remember her aunt and dreaded leaving England and the friends she had made at school who had been so kind to her during these years. At last it was decided that she should stay on at her boarding school and go to Cousin Pauline in the holidays. She was already elderly; a quiet, gentle woman who watched a great deal of television and was no companion for a thirteen-year-old. Gradually
Tessa began to accept more of the invitations to stay for the holidays which issued from her friends, and spent very little time at the terraced house in Cobbold Road. She knew that Cousin Pauline had taken her out of duty rather than love and, though she was grateful, Tessa knew that her presence was not an advantage except as a pair of young legs and hands to help with the household tasks.
    When Rachel Anderson arrived at the school on the south coast the two girls took to each other at once. Rachel, a warm-hearted, eager girl, was horrified at Tessa’s tragic history whilst Tessa was immediately drawn to the family to whom Rachel belonged. Her father was a naval officer, her mother a natural homemaker—wherever she was posted with her husband—and the small twins were the same age that Tessa’s brother, Timmy, would have been had he lived. As for Sebastian …