The Love Letter by Fiona Walker Read Free Book Online

a secret weapon, of course. You know Farcombe very well indeed.’
    She nodded carefully. ‘Hector and Poppy Protheroe are old friends of the family.’
    ‘Think you can swing it?’
    Legs stared at him wide-eyed. ‘Hector is Francis’s father.’
    ‘Exactly! You two were together for years. You must be practically like a daughter to the Protheroes. You speak their language. Talk to them, Legs. Make them see what a huge benefit this could be for them. The event will be a sell out; the television coverage alone will be priceless.’
    Legs thought about Hector, six foot four of white-haired patronage and idiosyncrasy. He would love crowds flocking to his beautiful coastal retreat; he’d play his bassoon to the long queues of Ptolemy Finch fans like a busker and chat up all the prettier women. Hector was unbothered by the festival’s content apart from the music, which he selected himself. But his wife Poppy was different. Legs doubted she would allow Gordon across the threshold unless he’d paid for his own ticket.
    Then Legs thought about Francis, remembered his handsome, fallen-angel face just before he’d turned to leave their shared flat a year ago, the hurt and betrayal that pinched every muscle tight and drained his normally golden skin of colour. It had been the first time she had seen him cry since he was fourteen. And she had wept too; she sometimes still did. The sense of guilt never left, and it could still render her breathless with regret when caught unawares.
    Returning Conrad’s challenging look, Legs shook her head. ‘I won’t do it. It’s not worth trying.’
    ‘C’mon, where’s the fighting spirit I love?’ he goaded.
    ‘I’m done with fighting,’ she said wearily, thinking of all the rows, the tears and recriminations of the previous summer. ‘And I wouldn’t be welcome. Francis is living at Farcombe again now; he manages the farming side.’ She looked away, alarmed that her eyes were already itchy with impending tears. Despite his academic bent, Francis had always loved the stock-rearing and landmanagement of Farcombe, largely because it was an element in which Hector and Poppy had no interest whatsoever and didn’t interfere; it also suited his solitary nature to spend swathes of time alone on the land there, quoting Eliot and Joyce at the flock. He liked to joke that he put the culture into agriculture, which was quite witty for Francis, she remembered fondly.
    ‘At least call him,’ Conrad urged.
    ‘He won’t want to speak to me.’ The familiar Francis had long gone in her mind, replaced with one part ogre whipped up by self-justification, two parts lost soul conjured by her guilt and one part dashing blond playboy as depicted by the media who had latched onto the heir to the Protheroe fortunes in recent months, branding this son of famous, maverick businessman Hector an ‘eligible bachelor’.
    ‘Go down there for the weekend,’ Conrad was suggesting.
    ‘Are you
kidding
?’
    ‘Your family still have their holiday cottage, don’t they? Take a long break next weekend and see how the land lies.’
    The thought of Spywood Cottage brought a pang of familiar yearning, the desire to revisit it never far from the surface. But Legs knew that to go there again would cause ten times the pain stored in the photograph albums that she kept hidden in the ottoman at the foot of her bed, and which contained more than half a lifetime of shared memories sealed in their plastic pages.
    ‘My mother’s there; she spends all summer painting.’
    All the more reason to visit.’
    ‘We’re not that sort of family – she likes to …’ She drew back her lips in a pensive smile. ‘It’s complicated.’
    It was never going to be easy to casually mention the fact her mother, for all her apparent middle-class, middle-aged conservatism, liked to be naked. Lucy North wasn’t a conventional naturist and shunned shared nudity; a group ping-pong game in a seaside camp was her idea of hell. Yet