I’ve filled the fridge and made you your favourite shepherd’s pie – after all that foreign food you’ve been eating, I thought you’d like something simple and English!
Your bed’s made up and I’ve put all your mail in a cupboard in your study. I reckon it’ll take you until Christmas to work your way through it!
Best wishes,
Sylvia.
P.S. Neil plans to cut the grass in a couple of days if that suits you. Oh, and he had to get the hedge trimmer fixed, the motor packed up on him.
Sylvia and Neil Finney had worked at Linston End for many years and from what Alastair could see, they had kept the house and garden in good order while he’d been away. Again he felt a stab of guilty betrayal at what he would have to share with them in the coming days. But who knew, maybe they would welcome a change.
But telling Sylvia and Neil of his plans was the least of his concerns. Explaining to his friends would be a far harder sell. He wanted to believe they would be happy for him, but he feared they might well think he was mad, that grief had tipped him over the edge. Just one of the things he had to tell them was bad enough, but the combination of the two – two bombshells – would quite possibly feel like the ultimate disloyalty to them.
He took off his leather jacket, hooked it over the back of a chair, and after filling the coffee machine with water, he retraced his steps out to the hall. He thought briefly about taking his luggage through to the utility room and the washing machine, but instead found himself drifting around the ground floor of the house, as if reacquainting himself with the rooms and their contents. With each step he took, he experienced the haunting sensation that he wasn’t alone, that Orla was here, that any minute he would turn and there she would be.Surprise!
Nowhere did this sensation hit him more forcibly than when he came to a stop in the conservatory, which he and Orla had built on to the house after Cora’s death. Apart from her studio in the garden, where she had spent so much of her time, this had been his wife’s favourite room. It had been very much her space rather than his.
Abruptly he turned on his heel and went back to the kitchen.
He poured himself a mug of black coffee, and took out his mobile phone from his jacket pocket.
Who to ring first, Simon or Danny?
ChapterTwo
‘He’s back, then?’ remarked Sorrel Wyatt, when Simon came off the phone. She was finishing the job of emptying the dishwasher, paying particular attention to lining up the handles of the mugs in the cupboard, arranging the plates so that the pattern of each one was in the same position as the one beneath it, and placing the cutlery in the drawer in neat organised piles. She hated to open the cutlery drawer and find it in disarray.
‘He flew in at the crack of dawn and is already home,’ said Simon, grinning happily. ‘He says he wants us all to go up for the weekend.’
Poor old Simon, thought Sorrel, these nine long months he’d missed Alastair like a dog misses its owner, and now that his oldest friend was home he was practically wagging his tail and running around in circles ready to go walkies.
Joined at the hipdidn’t come close when it came to describing the relationship between Simon and Alastair, and Danny too. They had been friends since being at school together and such was the strength of their friendship Sorrel, Orla and Frankie had accepted that in marrying into this trio of best buddies they had to recognise that the three men more or less came as one, a sort of BOGOF, except in this instance, it was a case of buy one, get two free, plus wives.
Even on their honeymoon, Simon had sneaked away to phone Alastair, despite promising he wouldn’t. That broken promise, as absurd as it had been for Sorrel to expect Simon to keep, had always rankled with her. It had been foolish of her, but it had been a test on her part. A test that Simon had failed.
‘I thought he wasn’t due home for another month,’ she said, going over to where her husband was leaning against the table, on which the remains of breakfast still lay, along with that morning’s partially read newspaper. Her hands moving automatically, Sorrel began tidying things away, and with an irritation that she found difficult to hide.
She would never have thought she would become one of those awful wives who complained of her husband getting under her feet when he retired, or nagged that the bulk of the domestic chores always seemed to fall to her, but she had indeed turned into that very wife.
Retirement for her had come a year before Simon’s and, after saying goodbye to her colleagues at the sixth-form college in Cambridge where she had been an administrator, she had had a full twelve months to establish herself at home, stamping her mark on the days by carving out a new routine to follow. She joined the local tennis club and threw herself into ‘local good causes’, including helping as a volunteer at Chelstead Hall, a local National Trust property. It was the kind of work women of her ilk were destined to do. Simon had not felt any such compulsion when he retired; instead he mooched about the house like a bored teenager. Alastair going off when he did had not helped matters.
‘Change of plan apparently. He wants us all there,’ Simon repeated, rubbing his hands together, and with what Sorrel imagined unkindly as another wag of his tail.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I heard you the first time.’
‘I’ll give Rachel a ring, shall I? Then Callum.’ He was effervescent with eager excitement. That’s what came of having so little to do with his time, she thought.
‘Why?’ The question was disingenuous of her. She knew exactly why.
‘Because Alastair wants to see us all; the whole gang. He has something important to tell us.’
Sorrel considered this last statement, taking her time to tease it out. ‘Is there something you’re not sharing with me?’ she asked. Was it possible that this summons to Linston End was more than just a get-together to welcome the conquering hero home? A man who was home much earlier than planned. ‘He’s not ill, is he?’
Simon gave her a startled look. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘No reason,’ she said, putting away the jars of honey and marmalade in the cupboard, turning the pots so that the labels all faced outward in the same way. She then went over to straighten the tea towels on the chrome rail of the cooker. She’d swear that behind her back Simon deliberately made them lopsided just to annoy her.
‘You never say anything without a reason,’ he said. ‘What made you think Alastair might be ill?’
