Summer Lies Bleeding by Nuala Casey Read Free Book Online Page A

as you walk in the front door. When Seb left Cosima she was dancing around the kitchen to ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ while her grandmother chopped the onions for the sunshine rice, her feet tapping on the linoleum floor, her bottom wiggling in time to the beat.
    It is a world away from the immaculate Dorset country house where he used to visit his own grandmother as a child. Visits there were sporadic and pained. When he was a toddler, his grandmother would only let him into the house if his parents kept him strapped into the pushchair or held tightly on their knees. Heaven forbid he should scrape the polished floor with his toys or smear chocolate on the William Morris patterned sofa. On the rare occasions when he was allowed to play on the floor, he would feel anxious and wary, looking up for approval from his parents who would be sitting miserably around his grandmother’s oak dining table, politely drinking tepid tea and nibbling tasteless, expensive cakes. He remembers his grandmother’s beady eyes watching him intently; waiting to pounce the moment his little hand came too close to an ornament or vase.
    His family is a sore subject between him and Yasmine. Coming from a loud, carefree family where anything and everything is freely discussed, his wife finds it hard to understand the lack of communication that blights Seb’s family. He has never discussed anything personal with his parents;he doesn’t know how he would even begin. The idea of hiding feelings, of burying hurt and pain had been so ingrained in him as a child that he had thought it normal. It was only when he met Yasmine that he realised it was not a sign of weakness to feel depressed, to have bad times, to be vulnerable.
    Yasmine has gone some way towards opening up communication with Seb’s parents; in fact she gets on with her father-in-law splendidly. He likes her pragmatism and boyish sense of humour; while she understands his military bluster and eye-watering bluntness. Yet his father cannot look Seb in the eye; he has never understood his artistic second child who cried at the beginning of each school term and was more at home in the art studio than on the rugby field. Even now if they find themselves alone in a room for more than a few minutes, a heavy awkward silence descends; the sound of two people who are utterly bewildered by one another. It saddens Seb, it always has, but that is the way it is, and anyway, it is the only blot on his otherwise blemish-free world.
    It is a beautiful afternoon; the sun is still hanging onto its last moments and sharp silver light streaks across the windows of the seventeenth-century terraces on Cheyne Walk as Seb crosses the Embankment and heads towards Oakley Street.
    As he walks, he plans his evening: if he can get three of the pictures up tonight then there will be time, in between meetings tomorrow, to finish off the big painting – his surprise gift for Yasmine. She has put her heart and soul into launchingthis restaurant and she deserves to be a success. When they first met, she was working as a sous chef in a little French restaurant in Waterloo. Their dates were spent walking along the South Bank in the early hours looking at the twinkly blue lights in the trees and the alien glow of the London Eye as it hovered above the river like a giant space ship. Her hours were crazy – 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. most days – but she was a hard worker and passionate about food. She was always trying out new ideas, new combinations of flavours; testing out her creations on Seb. She had even enticed him, a committed vegetarian, to eat meat with her sumptuous, slow-cooked Moroccan lamb dishes. She was never going to settle for being a sous chef, though, and soon she was ready to take on the next challenge, becoming Head Chef of a fusion brasserie on Lavender Hill.
    But it was North African cooking, the food of her ancestors, where her passions lay and as Seb’s painting career