A Summer to Remember (5 page)

She’d always been made so welcome there. In the four years she’d been the Miltons’ babysitter, The Old Mill House had been like a second home. Well, a first home, if Nina was really honest with herself. She’d always been so happy there. It had been a little sanctuary away from her own home when her parents had been fighting about who should move out and what belonged to whom in the run-up to their divorce. It had been tough being an only child and Nina had been secretly jealous of the Milton family, with their three young boys and inexhaustible number of cousins, aunts and uncles who were always popping over. The house was never empty and Nina couldn’t help wondering what it would be like now. Would it still be the happy drop-in centre that she remembered – or had the boys and the cousins all found places of their own and no longer felt the need to return to the family home?

All the same, Nina thought, how comforting it must be to have a family home to come back to, even if you chose to live on the other side of the world. It was a rare thing nowadays to have your parents still together and still living in the same home where the family had been brought up, and she couldn’t help envying the Milton boys that security, because she’d never had it in her own life.

Olivia anxiously buzzed around the house like a mad wasp. She straightened the hemline of a curtain, adjusted a vase on the mantelpiece, picked a few dead leaves from her house plants and plumped a few cushions. She wanted everything to be absolutely perfect for Nina’s visit.

She hadn’t spoken to Dudley about the possibility of a new secretary – not yet – she wanted to tell Dominic first. Wouldn’t he be surprised? She couldn’t wait to see the look on his face. At least it might replace his current demeanour. He’d been a little brooding of late and she was worried about him. Olivia was used to worrying about her youngest, of course. It had always been the same, she thought, picking up a silver-framed photo of the boys.

Billy, the eldest, was the brains of the brothers, always ready with the answers for Trivial Pursuit; Alex was the playboy, and had been chasing girls as soon as he’d been able to walk. Then there was Dominic. Olivia’s finger traced the face in the photograph. A mother wasn’t supposed to have favourites, but Dominic had always had a special place in her heart; he was the introvert, the artistic one, who’d spend his evenings painting a canvas whilst his brothers would be painting the town.

Not that he’d been short of admirers. The lovely Faye had been around almost as long as there’d been a Dominic, and the relationship had been quite serious throughout their teenage years. But, since Dominic had been away at university at one end of the country and Faye had been studying horticulture at the other, they seemed to have forgotten about their burgeoning relationship. However, since Olivia had employed Faye to give their garden a makeover, she now realised that the young girl was still very much in love with her son.

Olivia’s mind drifted back to the past and some of the family occasions when, as far as she was concerned, Dominic and Faye had been Norfolk’s sweetest couple. Birthdays, Christmases, New Years and countless afternoon teas and evening suppers had always included Faye. She had been an honorary member of the Milton family and Olivia couldn’t bear the thought of her not being a part of their family’s future, which was why she was, in her own unsubtle way, trying to get Faye and her son back together again.

Dominic was having none of it, of course.

‘Mum! Just stop!’ he’d insisted. ‘It isn’t going to happen. We’ve broken up. End of story.’

‘But Dommie—’

‘And don’t call me that. I’m not a child any more.’

No, Olivia thought, he wasn’t. He was a twenty-one-year-old graduate. A young, single man who really would benefit from the love of a good woman.

But where on earth was Dominic?, Olivia wondered, as she waited for Nina to arrive. It wasn’t just Faye he was avoiding lately, but everybody.

Nina couldn’t help but smile at the reflection that greeted her. The dress she’d pulled out of the wardrobe was old but pretty, and was certainly an improvement on her jeans.

She rubbed her hands over the goose bumps on her arms, that were fast turning into goose-mountains, and rummaged around on the floor of the wardrobe for her cotton jumper. She grinned. Not exactly the height of fashion, but she was a practical girl and refused to freeze just in case she ran into an old boyfriend she didn’t even want to impress any more.

For a moment, she thought about Matt, looking at the answer phone that was telling her she had five messages from him. He wasn’t going to give up that easily, was he? The first message had been the Matt she’d fallen in love with – the charming young man who had wooed her with his words as well as his good looks.

‘I miss you so much!’ he’d told her. ‘Call me. I can’t bear not seeing you. You’re everything to me.’ Her hand had hovered dangerously over the phone. The second message was similar but his voice sounded more anxious and, by the third message, the anxiety had turned to anger.

‘Where
are
you, Nina? What’s so important in your life that you can’t call me back? Who do you think you are, anyway? You can’t do this to me. I won’t let you!’

Nina’s hands had begun to quake in the way that was all too familiar from the past when Matt’s moods turned, and she’d listened to the fifth and final message with trepidation. It had been horrible. He’d sworn, called her names, said he never wanted to see her again –
never, never, never
– and then hung up. It was a pattern that she had come to know well.

Throughout their relationship, she’d often thought that she’d prefer him to physically hit her rather than inflict so much emotional abuse on her. It might, she thought, have been less painful in the long run.

Now, looking at her reflection, she knew she’d done the right thing in breaking up with him. Friends like Janey might be shocked by the split, but they’d only ever seen one side of Matt. They never saw the other man because he was an expert at hiding him to everybody but her.

She took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to think about Matt now. He was her past, and she was determined to make the very best of the present. She grabbed her hairbrush and decided to put a bit of make-up on in the hope that it might ward off the possibility of freckles. She’d once naively thought that freckles were like spots and that you grew out of them, but hers seemed to be getting more prominent as she charged through her twenties.

She glanced at the contents of her bathroom cabinet and pulled out a likely looking tube of foundation. Oil-free, retouch-free, perfume-free, high SPF, enduring and moisturising. That was all very well, but did it prevent freckles? Nina squirted a small amount onto her fingertips and got to work, and then, finally, she was ready to go, leaving her small flat for the bus and the short ride back into her past.

Dominic hadn’t been hiding, not consciously anyway. He’d just been busy. Busy thinking. It was summer, and that usually meant that it was summer project time.

It had begun five years ago during the sixth-form holidays. He’d set himself the challenge to create some huge canvas; some monstrously large painting that would occupy the whole length of the summer holidays. The last two efforts had even impressed his parents enough into hanging them in their hallway where they accosted unsuspecting visitors.

The first had been a view of the mill house from across the river, but its primitive style suggested more of a great white palace standing at the top of Niagara Falls. It was stunning, and any visitors who hadn’t seen it before were shocked into instant silence.

‘That’s one of Dominic’s,’ Olivia would explain with the pride peculiar to mothers. She’d then hand them a thick embossed card with her son’s details on, which she’d had made up in the hope of creating an initial customer list.

The other canvas was of Burgh Castle out on the Norfolk coast; a hauntingly isolated place with great icy flint walls that stretched to infinity. The foreground, which was dominated by the castle’s walls, was spiky, and shown in great flashes of white paint, but the distance softened into pale reed beds, gentle as feathers, and a windmill could just be spied, extending its sails into the vast sky.

This year though, Dominic was steering away from landscapes. He was after something special, something a little more human. After all, it was his parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and he wanted to create something special for them. He also had his mind on his own future, teaming up with a group of his artist friends to put on an exhibition at the end of August at a gallery they were hiring in Norwich’s Tombland – a beautiful part of the city where medieval buildings jostled with Georgian ones, and tourists congregated along the cobbled streets in wide-eyed wonder. Dominic only hoped that wallets as well as eyes would be wide open when the time came for their show, and that such exposure would help him to get his name out there.

He also had another goal to fulfil – to get a London gallery to take him on. He’d had interest from a number of galleries around the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts, whose owners had fallen under the spell of his large breezy canvases that captured the East Anglian light so perfectly, but Dominic was ambitious and wouldn’t rest until his paintings were hanging in the capital. He’d been making approaches on the quiet, keeping the rejections a secret from his friends and family, and trying desperately to remain optimistic whilst jostling for attention in an overcrowded field.

But he couldn’t think about it just now, not on an empty stomach. He’d been walking around the fields for what seemed like hours in search of inspiration, resulting in only a few brief sketches, and his hunger had made him gravitate towards the mill where he was sure there’d be something tasty to cook.

For a moment, he thought about Nina and the foolishness of his wild goose chase around Norwich the day before. He couldn’t help feeling sad that he’d never see her again, but there were other things to think about right now.

Crossing the old brick and flint bridge, he gazed up at the three-storey mill house and smiled. The sight of the imposing white house never failed to fill him with joy, and he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. It was a characteristic of so many of his friends, too. Sure, university had beckoned, sending him away, and gap years with travels across Himalayan mountains and South American deserts had enticed many of his friends, but Norfolk had a strange pull on a person and, one by one, each of them had returned.

For an artist, it was a hard place to beat, with the lucidity of its light and the domineering sky. There was always something new to see. A field, for example, would be an arctic-white wilderness one minute and a green paradise the next, and a hedgerow would be a bristly tangle of thorns one season and a perfect lacy froth of flowers soon after. Each season was a gift and Dominic never stopped feeling grateful for that.

He glanced up into the chaste blue sky. Even his brothers Alex and Billy weren’t immune to the charm of the place and both would be spending more time at the mill now that the summer was here. Long weekends would be taken away from their lives in London and, of course, they would both be back for the big party in August.

Dominic shook his head as he thought about his brothers. Alex would never admit to it, but he loved the mill as much as anyone. The only thing was, he loved the city just as much and got the heady thrill he needed from the bright lights and night-long parties that his new job in advertising allowed him. Still, Dominic saw the look of pure contentment on his brother’s face whenever he returned home to sink into the sofa and be waited on hand and foot by their mum.

And Billy? At twenty-four, Billy was only three years Dominic’s senior, but he seemed to have lived a lifetime in that age gap and had a worldly wise look about him that made him seem much older than he was. He’d been working in London as a pilot, but he was spending more time in the Norfolk countryside and Dominic had a suspicion that he might be thinking about moving out of the city. Still, Billy played his cards pretty close to his chest and usually stayed with friends in the next village when he came back to Norfolk because he liked being able to come and go without the well-intentioned interference of their mother, so they never really got to the bottom of things with him.

At least, Dominic thought, he was here and he had no plans on packing up and leaving. The furthest he ever got was the North Norfolk coast or the great stretches of water in the Broads. There, he would stand away from the crowds, his paintbrush in his hand as he silently surveyed the scene around him.

He smiled. It was an artist’s lot to live on the outskirts of society, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

The bus dropped Nina off at the end of the lane. She’d nearly missed her stop, not quite recognising the bend in the road and the avenue of trees after so many years. She breathed in the warm June air and rolled the arms of her jumper up above her elbows as she began walking down the potholed lane that would take her to The Old Mill House.

It was beautiful. A perfect little corner of Norfolk, tucked away from prying eyes. Everything was so still and quiet, too, after the noise of the city, and Nina listened to the hum of insects as she walked, each footfall audible as she crossed the road.

White campion was growing on the verges, their flowers luminous amongst the deep green of the grass and, as she walked by a little cottage to her left, she noticed the great towers of hollyhocks shooting skywards, their blooms yet to open.

Nina took her time, looking about her as she walked and humming lightly. This is what summers were about, she thought. Not sweating it out in some paperwork prison with a boss that didn’t appreciate you.

For a moment, she flung her arms out wide as if she were about to fly, but thought better of it when she heard a tractor in the field on the other side of the hedge, and continued walking.

In all her years of babysitting, she hadn’t realised that the house was set so far back from the road because she’d always been chauffeured there and back by Mr Milton, and her first glimpse of it made her gasp. The first thing to catch her eye was the driveway packed with cars. It looked like the parking lot of a sales garage. Perhaps the Miltons had visitors, she thought, or perhaps they were the boys’ cars. She looked at each one in turn, half-recognising the white Volkswagen from the incident at the traffic lights. At least that meant someone was at home.