The Last Summer by Judith Kinghorn Read Free Book Online Page B

play in a croquet match, I feigned a headache and stayed in my room.
    I was sitting on the bench by the ha-ha, my unopened journal on my lap, when he walked up to me, eight days after our fracas. It was a glorious morning with no breath of wind and I’d been sitting there for some time, looking out into the distance, listening to the hum of bumblebees on the lavender close by. Perhaps it was the aroma of the lavender, soothing my senses, making me sleepy, but I felt unusually mellow: quite at peacewith the world. And thus far I’d failed to record anything of the day in my journal.
    ‘May I sit with you?’ he asked.
    I smiled. ‘But of course,’ I replied, looking up at him from under my hat.
    He sat down next to me. ‘I need to talk to you.’ He leant forward, fiddling with his hands. ‘You see . . . you see I like you, Clarissa. You’re quite different to anyone I’ve known before, and really . . . well, I didn’t mean those things I said.’
    ‘No, of course not. And neither did—’
    ‘Please . . . please hear me out,’ he said. ‘What I was trying – trying very badly – to tell you that day was simply that I find it a little difficult, tricky, with you.’
    He turned, presumably to check my expression. I raised my eyebrows, expectantly.
    ‘What I mean is . . . you know who you are, what you are; how your life will be. It makes it hard for someone like me. Do you understand?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said, emphatically, but I had not a clue.
    ‘I’m not really worthy of your attention or interest. And I have to remind myself of this all the time. I have to remember who I am and who you are. I have to remember that we will both be moving on . . . in quite different directions.’
    He stopped there, and I waited a moment before I spoke.
    ‘Well then, let’s be friends again,’ I said, and, instinctively, I reached out and placed my hand upon his arm.
    He pulled his arm away. ‘But this is the crux; this is the problem. I’m not sure that I can be friends with you.’
    ‘Oh.’
    He ran his hands through his hair. ‘You see, I find myself . . . I find myself . . .’ he went on, falteringly, then sighed.
    ‘Tom, please. Can’t we be friends? I promise that I shan’t invite you on another walk,’ I said. And he laughed.
    ‘Yes. Yes, let’s be friends again.’ He tilted his head, looking at me sideways through a wave of almost black hair.
    ‘Good, then it’s settled, and you have nothing to fret about – and neither do I.’
    He pulled out his packet of cigarettes and lit one.
    ‘I’ve missed seeing you,’ he said, leaning forward once more. ‘You weren’t at the last croquet game, and I’ve not seen you for . . .’ he paused, ‘for a while. Are you well?’
    ‘Yes, quite well.’
    He turned to me. ‘You do look well.’
    ‘Yes, I’m very well.’
    ‘Perhaps later, if you’d like, we can take a walk – down by the lake.’
    I smiled. It wasn’t exactly begging for forgiveness, but it was enough.
    I had never known my mother to look fretful or to frown. I’d grown up with her telling me ‘girls who frown shall never wear a crown’, and it was enough, when I was small, for me to run my finger between my eyebrows to check my expression. That summer, whenever I came across my mother standing in contemplative pose, looking out through open windows, I took her hand in mine, assured her that all would be well . . . her roses would survive. But there was a new look in her eyes, the clear line of a frown between her brows, and when she smiled back at me I could see she didn’t quite believe me. At mealtimes, whenever the conversation turned to events taking place in Europe, she’d look at me and give me that same smile. Of course, I’d seen the newspapers, and I’d heard my brothers and my father talking, but the crisis unfolding on another continent was so far from Deyning, so far from our lives.
    Weeks before, the day after Henry returned home fromCambridge, the Archduke had been