‘It was magical,’ agreed Indy.
She thought all about her childhood home as she drove there. Mum and Dad had bought it with some money Dad had inherited, which had driven Granny insane. Her parents tried their best never to discuss family bitterness but Indy had heard enough. Granny Robicheaux and her family had made money out of a series of launderettes but apparently had sold out when the going was good and Granny’s subsequent occupation was looking down her nose at the rest of the world.
Either way, Mum and Dad bought the Sorrento, which was painted a rich honey colour and sometimes, when the light shone a certain way, hints of a previous rosy wall colour could be seen. The big old house was a little bit Georgian, with a hint of Edwardian on one wing. A dining room and a veranda that were very California 1960s round the back – complete with several egg-shaped hanging chairs – completed the structure. Dad had had great plans to turn the old barn into apartments but the hotel took up so much time and money, that he never had.
Indy had loved the Sorrento the way it was: as a child, she’d sit in the garden under the oak tree, half hidden from the house by the white tangle of the rose bushes and play fairies with the doll’s house Dad had made her out of a tea chest. The fairies were her small collection of dolls and their clothes were sometimes rain-soaked petals, sometimes oddments of fabrics from the attics where previous owners had left old suitcases stuffed with elderly garments.
When she was older, Indy played fairies with Savannah, who mixed the flower petals in the curved hollow of a cut-down beech, and sniffed the mixtures delightedly.
Eden was never one for playing in the grounds. She had a vast network of friends and was keen to go to other people’s houses so she wouldn’t have to wipe tables or polish sideboards.
And Rory … Indy had been that much older than Rory, so it was like their childhoods hadn’t overlapped. When Rory was twelve, Indy had been eighteen, heading for nursing college, feeling grown up.
Rory, Indy thought guiltily, hadn’t had as much of the idyll in the Sorrento as she had. If her youth had been during the halcyon years, when Mum and Dad were happy and nothing could spoil it, Rory had grown up in an altogether trickier era. Phone calls from the bank, arguments about money, arguments about drinking, white-faced rows over gambling debts. Families could have totally different experiences of childhood depending on where they sat on the family tree.
Indy
It was an hour after the allotted time when Indy finally parked in front of the hotel and allowed all the feelings to flow through her. She’d grown up here. It had been home, an eccentric home, for sure. Most girls she knew hadn’t gone home from school and then had had to race to clean bedrooms because money was tight and there weren’t enough chambermaids.
‘You live in a hotel! It’s cool!’ her friends at school had said, much the way Flo had.
It was cool – sort of. Except when it wasn’t, when Mum and Dad were working every weekend, Dad charming the guests and Mum doing her swan impersonation: all fluid elegance on the surface and frantic moving parts underneath. Mum could simultaneously cook for twenty, help Eden and Savannah with their homework at the kitchen table, and dry the current au pair’s tears because Rory had just thrown a bowl of baby slop at her.
Indy knew she was like her mother because she had the same caring nature, the same calm-in-the-storm thing going on.
‘You never lose it,’ Steve had murmured to her in admiration.
‘Losing it doesn’t help,’ Indy said.
She’d just reached the front door when it opened and out came her mother, twin sisters and Vonnie.
‘Late as usual,’ she said apologetically. ‘Babies are notoriously bad with timing.’
They swarmed close to hug her.
‘What did I miss?’
‘Muslin and silk flowers, all draped. It’s going to be beautiful,’ said Vonnie breathlessly.
Indy realised that Vonnie was holding a notebook and pen, which had a purple feather at the tip. Dear Vonnie.
Eden was holding on to her phone and texting, but stopped long enough to wave at her sister. She was holding a piece of ripped-off notepaper covered with Vonnie’s distinctive purple writing.
‘It will be beautiful,’ agreed Meg.
Indy and Eden smiled at her as one.
‘Of course it will,’ said Indy.
Rory
Rory was lost in thinking about the book.
One single photograph from years ago, one of those background shots where nobody was really in focus, had changed everything. She’d been thinking about her beloved book when she’d asked Mum for some of the old Sorrento photographs. Mum had lots of boxes in the attic and Rory had braved the spiders’ webs to find them.
‘I just felt like doing some family-tree stuff,’ she’d said to her mother which had been a complete lie.
Rory had felt a smidgen of guilt because she wanted to look at the photos to remind herself of what it had all been like. Had she really had a corduroy coat in bright pink? Was there evidence of that time Eden had pushed her into the pond?
