You’re wonderful.’
He nods briefly again at me. ‘Lovely to see you, Natasha.’ Mary Beth raises her hand, and they are gone.
Louisa stares after them. ‘Oh, dear,’ she says, and her eyes are ful of tears.
I go to her, put my arm round her. ‘You’l see him soon,’ I say stupidly.
‘I won’t,’ she says, her smile sad. ‘He never comes back any more. Especial y now Mummy and Dad are dead, you know.’
I nod. Their mother, Pamela, was Granny’s sister, a rather starchy old lady. She died about seven years ago, her husband before that. They’d come to Summercove, not as much as Louisa, but they were there.
Louisa’s face creases. ‘He only came back this time for me. Darling Jeremy.’ A tear rol s down her cheek. ‘Oh – oh, this is awful,’ she says.
My arm is stil around her. It feels weird. Louisa is the mumsy, organised one. Seeing her cry for the first time is wrong. like everything else today.
‘Oh, Louisa, I’m sorry,’ I say. Her head is bowed and she is properly crying now, tears flowing easily down her crumpled face. She looks up at me then, and almost flinches. And then she blinks.
‘No, I’m sorry, Natasha dear,’ she says, moving away, so that my hand fal s to my side again. She presses the Bowler Hat’s arm. He kisses her on the head, briefly, tenderly and pul s her against him, and she looks up at him, grateful y happy. I watch them with interest – I see the Bowler Hat so rarely, and any interaction between long- standing couples is fascinating to me at the moment. I turn away, to pick up some more crisps from behind me.
‘She looks so like her, doesn’t she?’ Louisa says, her voice stil a bit wobbly. ‘I’d forgotten.’
‘Cecily,’ says the Bowler Hat, slowly, not troubling to keep his voice low. ‘Yes, she does. You’re right.’
No one ever mentions Cecily. It’s like a bul et fired into the conversation.
Perhaps I would have pretended not to hear Louisa, but the Bowler Hat’s voice is loud. ‘I look like Cecily?’ I say, turning back with a bottle in my hand.
Louisa is facing her husband, plucking at a piece of fluff on his jacket. He meets her gaze, briefly, and then looks back into his drink again. I can’t decide if he’s uncomfortable, or simply tired. They ignore me, it’s as if they’re in a world of their own. ‘She gave you your name,’ Louisa says.
‘Don’t you remember?’
He nods, his chin sunk onto his chest, I can’t see his face. ‘Yes. She did, didn’t she?’
I close the gap between us, by reaching forward and fil ing the Bowler Hat’s glass, and they both look up at me. ‘I didn’t know that,’ I say. I’ve never real y thought about it, strange to say. That’s just how he’s always been referred to. ‘Real y, that’s how you got the name?’
He nods and switches his wine glass to his other hand. There are smeary finger marks on the glass. He pul s at his col ar.
‘Yes,’ he says, and he smiles. ‘You know my brother Guy?’ I nod. ‘He and I came here for the summer, that was the first time I met the rest of the family. 1962?’ He turns to his wife, and for a second he is younger, his craggy strong face unlined, his colourless hair blond again, a stil handsome, strapping young man.
‘’63,’ she says quickly. ‘’63.’
‘Of course. Profumo – the trial had just started when we arrived.’ He smiles. ‘Yes! We got the train from London. Read about it on the way down. And after we’d arrived, Cecily took one look at me and said I looked like I should be wearing a bowler hat, not shorts. She could be very funny.’ He shakes his head. ‘Tragic. So sad.’ He is silent, Louisa is looking down at the floor.
I never hear them talk about when they were younger, probably because of Cecily. Never heard anything about the summers down here when they were children. It’s hard, now, to believe they hung out together for weeks on end, had picnics, swam together, lay in the sun. Sure, there’s the odd photo, and the odd reference – ‘That was the year Archie broke his arm, wasn’t it?’ But that’s it. Louisa comes – came – for a week to Summercove every year with the children, that’s how I know them better, but the Bowler Hat never real y came, he’d stay up in London, working.
Mum and I would sometimes be down here for Christmas, but not often. Mostly it was at home, or with Archie and Sameena in Ealing. We didn’t make jol y family visits to Tunbridge Wel s, and I don’t recal Mum ever entertaining Louisa and the Bowler Hat to dinner in our tiny damp Hammersmith abode. They don’t socialise, when I think about it. They’re so different now and there’s no intimacy between them al . And apart from that photo of Cecily that Granny had and I saw only once I know nothing else about her. Cecily simply doesn’t come up. What happened doesn’t come up.
So the three of us stare at each other, unsure how to proceed: we’ve gone down a conversational dead end.
‘Natasha’s right, though,’ the Bowler Hat suddenly says, unbending. ‘It was like paradise, Summercove. So laid-back and free. That day we arrived, Guy and I, and you were lying out on the lawn in those great tight-fitting black trousers, remember?’ He smiles, wolfishly. ‘Yes, we were young then.’
‘Frank,’ Louisa says, through gritted teeth. ‘That wasn’t me. My shorts ripped, remember? That was bloody Miranda.’
‘Your memory, dear,’ Bowler Hat says. ‘Incredible. Hah.’ He looks around him airily.
‘Is Guy here? I haven’t seen him yet,’ I say hastily. ‘Though it’s been so long, I don’t know if I’d recognise him.’
‘Oh, you would,’ says Louisa. ‘He was at Julius’s wedding. Guy!’ she cal s. ‘Guy!’
Last year, Julius married a Russian girl, a trader he’d met through work. He was thirty-seven, she was twenty- three. It was a smart hotel in central London, in a huge room with gold panel ing on the wal s, and red-faced, huge-handed Julius and a stick-thin beautiful young woman in acres of tul e posing for endless photos. They had a
