EIGHT
A week later. La Canette, 10am
George moved the stack of files to the out tray and turned to look at the next bundle. Most of the morning had been wasted on this, and there were still several more bundles. Part of him wanted to dump the lot. Better yet, drop them in his father’s lap.
He lifted a couple of pages and read through them. The village school were behind on their rent. George frowned at the papers; how was the school expected to make moneyandteach for free? Two officials, Morris and Sweeny, were getting ready to take the school head to court. Morris and Sweeny were heartless bastards and if they got their way, the School would be forced to charge fees.
George reached for his pen and crossed out the debt, Then he added a three-year rent freeze to give them a chance to get back on their feet. What the school needed was an experienced fundraiser. He picked up his phone and fired off a message to one of his interns at the London office to do the necessaryresearch.
Time for a breather?He leaned back in his chair and for good measure put his foot on the edge of the desk and pushed, sending his chair rolling halfway across the room. It stopped level with the French doors, which were open to let in the morning breeze.
George watched the tails of the weeping willow sway slightly. Millie was sitting with his father in the white rose garden.
Strange.
The white rose garden was a secluded little spot almost hidden from the house except for this corner window.
Why would Millie take his father there? They had the run of the grounds surrounding the house where, surely, the perfect lawns and smooth paths were easier on a wheelchair.
On impulse, George grabbed some of the files and walked out of the French doors across the grass towards them.
His father was in a sunny spot with a small cashmere blanket over his legs. Millie, looking summery in a yellow floral skirt, sat on a low stone wall next to him. As she crossed smooth legs, bare to the knee, George’s mooddarkened.
Her head was bent over a book on her lap; her hair fell in a smooth curtain, screening her face. As she read, she kept tucking her hair behind her ear, but as soon as she took her hand away, it came loose again.
Something about the movement, about her head bent down over a book, a ghost of a memory, but he couldn’t quite catch it. Where had he seen her before? His father could not be trusted around women, and women could not be trusted around his father.
Millie’s voice, even measured and mellifluous, reached him as he came closer.
“Think how it wakesthe seeds
Woke, once, the clays of acold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved,are sides
Full-nerved,—still warm,—too hard to stir?
Was it for this the claygrew tall?
O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?”
And his father, who hadn’t a romantic bone in his body, was listening avidly.
George’s lips thinned. “What on earth are you reading to my father?”
Millie looked up, startled. Or was it guilt? As if surprised doing something secretive. He supposed he was glaring, but shewasacting nervous.
“Um-wiffen—rowen, I mean, sorry, I mean it’s Wilfred Owen, erm, the collected works,” sheanswered.
George turned to his father. “Since when do you like poetry?”
“Warpoetry,” his fathercorrected.
“All right. Since when do you likewarpoetry?”
“Wilfred Owen fought in France on the same front as my grandfather and his brothers. Your great-grandfather was killed in the trenches, or does family history mean nothing to you?”
