That Summer: A Novel (2 page)

“Why not?” he asked, adding, with casual cruelty, “It’s not as though you have anything else to do, is it?”

Julia stared at him, white lipped. “That’s not fair.”

He’d never forgiven her for not following him into medicine. Particularly because she had the grades for it. When she’d told him she was going to business school, he’d carried on as though she had suggested a fine career in pole dancing.

“Am I wrong?” he asked, and she could hear the implied
I told you so
beneath his words.

Julia bristled. “Do you know what the jobs statistics are like right now?” It wasn’t like she was just sitting flat on her ass at home. She had sent off enough résumés to paper a small home. At least, at first. Before inertia and depression had set in. “Everyone’s firing; no one’s hiring.”

“My point precisely.” Her father neatly folded the paper. “There’s no reason for you not to go to England. It’s free money, just sitting there.”

“Would anyone like more coffee?” said Helen, with a second wife’s instinct for defusing tension. “Julia, there’s skim milk in the fridge, or cream if you want it.”

Julia bared her teeth in a simulacrum of a smile. “No, I’m fine.”

She wasn’t fine. She hated that she had nowhere to go during the day and that her savings account was steadily dwindling, eaten up by the mundane necessities of living. She hated that her father was right.

Nine months of hanging around her apartment in Winnie the Pooh pajamas eating peanut butter out of the jar hadn’t done much for her. She didn’t have anything else to do, not right now. The job hunt, such as it was, could be conducted long-distance.

Even so, she disliked the casual assumption that she could just pick up and go.

“My apartment—” she began.

“We’ll keep an eye on it,” said her father. Julia caught Helen’s eye. They both knew what that meant. Helen would keep an eye on it. “It’s not going anywhere.”

“Yes, but I don’t know why you think I should,” said Julia in frustration. “My home is here.”

Her father had made very sure of that. Her UK passport had been traded in for a US one; she still had that first US passport in a drawer somewhere, a little girl with taffy-colored hair in braids and eyes made glassy by the flash of the light.

Her father snorted. “A studio?”

“That’s a junior one-bedroom, thank you very much,” said Julia tartly. “It may not be on Fifth, but I happen to be fond of it.”

Her father, like most self-made men, was big into status symbols. Like this apartment. And Helen.

Julia could still remember when they’d lived in a high-rise in Yorkville, with paper-thin walls and the smell of burnt food perpetually in the air. Her father had shed all that like it had never been. To hear him now, you would think he had always lived on Fifth, always brewed his coffee in chrome splendor, rather than a battered old plastic coffeepot that smoked when it heated.

“Well, I think it’s wonderful,” said Helen quickly. “The house, I mean. Like something out of a novel. Maybe you’ll have ghosts.”

“Great,” said Julia. “Just what I needed.”

“Isn’t there a saying about looking a gift house in the mouth?” said Helen lightly, rummaging in the cupboards. She dropped a tea bag delicately into a cup of hot water. The pungent smell of mint filled the kitchen.

“What about Greeks bearing gifts?” retorted Julia. “I don’t remember that turning out well for anybody.”

Helen gave an unexpected chuckle. “I don’t think you’ll have a house full of Trojans.” When they both looked at her, she said apologetically, “Jamie just made a diorama of it for his Latin class.”

Julia grinned reluctantly. “You mean you made the diorama?”

Helen looked apologetic. “You know how he is with glue.”

“It was Greeks in the horse, not Trojans,” Julia’s father said dismissively. He looked at Julia over his spectacles. “Don’t be a fool, Julia. Houses don’t come along every day.”

“Mom?” Jamie’s voice echoed down the hallway, cracking the tension like a marble against ice. “Moooooommmm? Have you seen my—”

Whatever he was missing was lost somewhere in the sounds of electronic explosions from the den.

“Robbie!”
barked Julia’s father. “Turn that bloody thing down!” just as Helen called, “Just a minute, Jamie!”

Julia unobtrusively slipped out of her chair and went to set her cup in the sink, uncomfortable at being caught in the crosshairs of someone else’s family life. Jamie had been all of two months old when Julia had left for college; Robbie hadn’t even existed yet. They were both bright, good-natured, pleasant boys, but they’d never felt quite like hers. They were part of her father’s second life, like the blond pine table, like the blue and white dishes, like this apartment, acquired after Julia had gone off to college, a new start for a new life, a new wife, new children.

Helen cast Julia a quick apologetic smile. “I’ll be right back. There are croissants if you want one. Just help yourself. I know I don’t have to tell you that.”

Helen slipped out of the kitchen, in pursuit of Jamie’s iPod or gym shoes or the stray wing of a model plane.

Julia looked over to find her father looking at her.

“Caroline would probably buy the house off you if that’s what you want,” said her father quietly. “You wouldn’t have to go back.”

Julia leaned against the counter, the taste of cold coffee sour on her tongue. Her anger evaporated, leaving her feeling nothing but tired, tired and confused. “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t, aren’t I?” she said. “There’s no good way to deal with it.”

She didn’t understand why this unknown great-aunt would pass up the cousins on the spot for a great-niece who didn’t even remember her name. Memory stirred—fresh-cut grass and the heavy scent of flowers and the cool of water against her fingertips—and was gone again.

“Dad?” Her father looked up from the paper. Julia levered herself away from the counter, the hems of her jeans, always too long, brushing against the tiled floor. “Why would this aunt … Regina leave the house to me?”

She half-expected him to shrug, to punt the question. Instead, he folded the paper meticulously, setting it down on the side of the table, exactly aligned with the grain of the wood. “Your mother grew up in that house,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Your aunt always used to say it would be your mother’s someday.”

His eyes met Julia’s. They were gray, like hers. They had the some coloring, or had once. Her father’s hair had long since gone gray, while hers was artificially enhanced with lighter highlights. Underneath, though, it was the same pedestrian mid-brown.

Her mother’s hair had been black, her eyes a vivid blue. She was everything that was alive and lively. Until she wasn’t.

When Julia tried to remember her mother, all she could scrounge up was an image from an old picture, the colors faded with time, her mother, in a garden, a kerchief tied over her black hair, laughing up at the camera. All around her, the trees were in bloom. There was a lake or a pond somewhere in the background, just the vaguest impression of a shimmer of water.

The picture had stood on her father’s nightstand. It had gone into a drawer not long after their move to New York. Julia had never quite had the nerve to ask her father what he had done with it. Their mutual grief was a palpable silence between them.

“And I was the next best thing?” Julia hadn’t meant it to come out sounding quite so sour.

“Either that,” said her father drily, “or Regina was looking to put Caroline’s nose out of joint. There was no love lost there.”

Julia tucked her hands into the pockets of her jeans, fighting against the urge to curl into a ball like a porcupine, all defensive prickles. She missed the familiar armor of her job, that relentless whirl of work that meant she never had to think about anything she didn’t care to, pushing it aside with the excuse of being too busy.

But she wasn’t busy now, was she? And she needed the money. It had been nine months already since Sterling Bates had let her go, with crocodile tears and false condolences. They had fired her, as was their charming practice, the day before bonuses were announced, reducing her take for the year to a third of what it would otherwise have been. Her severance would run out soon, but the bills were still coming in: mortgage, health care, groceries. She had no idea what property sold for in Herne Hill, whether it had been hit anywhere as hard as the market in the United States, but either way one looked at it, it was an unexpected windfall. She’d be an idiot to turn her back on it, all because of something that had happened a quarter of a century ago.

The past is a distant country,
one of her art history professors in college had said. If Julia thought about it like that, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. The England she and her father had left didn’t exist anymore. It was gone; the house was just a house, and there was no reason to let misplaced misgivings get in the way of a tidy profit.

One month, maybe two. Surely it wouldn’t take longer than that? It would be irresponsible to sell the house without seeing it first. And it was really rather idiotic, all these years later, to still tiptoe around the topic of her mother. It had been a quarter of a century. People grieved, dealt with it, moved on.

Julia had been in England since, to London, for work. Surely this wouldn’t be all that different. This would be work, too, not some sort of sentimental pilgrimage.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said. It was the closest she could come to a concession, to admitting that she had nothing better to do.

Her father nodded, slowly. “Strange … After all this time…” His eyes looked past her, towards the half-open door of the den, where the shadows of Robbie’s electronic monsters could be seen playing out against the wall. “Your aunt always said your mother was the only true heir to the family legacy.”

Julia cocked her head. “What does that mean?”

Her father looked back at her, his lips twisting wryly. “I have no idea. No idea at all.”

TWO

Cornwall, 1839

“Are you quite certain, my love?” Despite the mildness of the day, Imogen’s father had two blankets tucked around him, the edges overlapping, trailing onto the gravel and moist dirt below his bench. “I wouldn’t want you to feel rushed or constrained by—”

“No,” said Imogen quickly, heading off her father’s words. She hated it when he spoke of death. Yes, he might be a little frail, the winter had been hard, but it was spring now, or almost spring, and he would get better, he would. “I don’t feel the least bit constrained.”

On this first warm day of March, Imogen had brought her father out to his favorite spot in the garden, in the little wilderness next to the rectory. She had hoped it would make him feel more like himself again, put some color back in his cheeks.

Not so very far away, she could hear the faint and omnipresent roar of the sea and smell the salt tang in the air. Penhallow was a small village. Officially, the inhabitants made their living by fishing, but if the sea sometimes swept up a bounty in the form of bottles and lengths of silk the local authorities turned a blind eye. Imogen and her father had lived in Penhallow for nearly as long as she could remember. This garden, with its paths lined by crushed shells, the well-worn arbor with the stone bench below, had been her haven since she was old enough to evade her nurse’s eye.

Imogen knew this village in her blood, in her bones, even though she and her father were, in local parlance, foreigners still. She had had the run of the village from the time she was old enough to walk. She remembered nothing of the world they had left behind, the parish in Gloucestershire, the houses of her cousins. She knew, because she had been told, that her father’s older brother was a baronet, Sir William Hadley of Hadley Hall, and that her father had been meant to have the living on that estate. She knew also, from the curl of her father’s lip when he spoke of his brother, that he found the loss of his companionship no great burden.

It was her mother’s health that had driven them from Gloucestershire to Cornwall. Sea air was meant to be good for frail constitutions, so, when Imogen was just old enough to toddle, her father had found this parish in Cornwall, a small parish, far from anything the world deemed fashionable. The sea air hadn’t had the promised effect on her mother’s health, but they had stayed in Cornwall all the same, in this pleasant, sleepy village with the smell of the sea in the air.

It might, perhaps, have been a little bit lonely, but Imogen had never wanted for occupation. As soon as she was old enough to read, she had helped her father with his studies, marveling over the tiny figures painted into illuminated letters, careful not to rip manuscripts gone frail and brittle with age. By the time she was six, she could read the cramped Latin hands of late-medieval scribes as easily as she could the printed pages in her primers. There had been no question of her going to the village school—she was the daughter of the vicar, of a different order than the village children—so her father had taught her himself, making geography and history come alive with his tales of tormented kings and defiant queens, of knights and ladies and impossible quests.

It wasn’t all knights and ladies and fantasy. All of the responsibilities of the lady of the parish had quickly devolved to her. The villagers came to her father for spiritual consolation, but it was Imogen who tended to their more practical needs, bringing soups and jellies to the poor, reading to the elderly, making sure they had enough wood for the winter.

Through the shrubbery, just down the hill, lay the church where her father preached every Sunday, or had preached, before the cough had settled in his chest and his lungs. Hard by the little village church, in the shadow of the steeple, she could see the grim shapes of tombstones, one after the other.

A touch of sun, Imogen told herself staunchly, that was all that was needed. Warm weather and good food and her father would be right as rain again.

“Truly,” Imogen said, tucking in a corner of the blanket next to her father. “I want to marry Arthur—Mr. Grantham.”

She stammered a bit over the name. It was so new still. She wanted to hug it to herself, to whisper his name in private, to marvel over it like a bit of sea glass found on the beach, something rich and strange and rare.