Summer's Awakening Read Free Page A

made in Emily's favour.
    Much as she hoped that it might be a worthier motive which made him seek out his niece so soon after his arrival, and exert himself to make a good impression on her, Summer had an uncomfortable intuition that his midnight visit to Emily's bedroom had been a deliberate strategy of some benefit to himself.
    He won't win me over so easily, she thought to herself, before asking, 'How long did he stay? What did you talk about?'
    'Oh, ages... an hour at least. We talked about all sorts of things. Just imagine... it's eighteen years since he was last here. He was seventeen when he left, so that makes him thirty-five—eight years younger than Daddy.'
    'Did he tell you where he's been in the meantime?'
    Emily shook her head. 'He didn't say, but he has an American accent so perhaps he went there to seek his fortune.'
    'Or to Canada,' Summer suggested, her more prosaic turn of mind making her wonder how a youth of that age, brought up in privileged circumstances, would have managed to scrape a living in his first few years on the other side of the Atlantic.
    Deep down, at the core of her being, she was as romantic as Emily. It was she who had introduced her pupil to Bayard, the brave but gentle French knight, and more recently to Lion Gardiner, the English colonist who had played a stalwart part in America's early history and given his name to an island off the tip of Long Island,
    But the soft heart of Summer's nature was something she kept to herself, hidden by layers of reserve and a down-to-earth, practical manner. Even with Emily, she tried not to show how easily certain lines of poetry, or Kirsten Flagstad singing Wagner's Liebestod, could move her to tears. Even Tie a Yellow Ribbon could make her cry if she let it.
    'Yes, his accent could be Canadian,' Emily agreed. 'I can't tell the difference. Can you?'
    'I expect I could when I lived in America. Not now. It's years since I've spoken to any Canadians or Americans.'
    'That's rather odd—don't you think?—the fact that you're an American with an English accent, and James is an Englishman with an American or Canadian accent.'
    Summer's response was a preoccupied 'Mm'. After a thoughtful pause, she said, 'He didn't mention being married, or having children of his own, did he?'
    'No, he hardly said anything about himself. He wanted to know all about me, and what had been happening here since he went away. He knew about Daddy and Mummy.'
    Five months after the accident, Emily could speak of her parents without distress. Indeed, the nature of her relationship with them had meant that, for her, being orphaned had never been the shattering trauma which Summer had experienced at the age of ten.
    Looked after from infancy until she was eight by a nanny, and thereafter by a series of governesses, she had had much less contact with her parents than children in ordinary households. They had been like an uncle and aunt to her; not the constant, loving companions whom Summer had lost and still missed, many years later.
    'How did he know? Did he tell you?' she asked.
    'No, but he read about Granpa in the New York Times. Did you know Granpa had had two wives?'
    'I had no idea.'
    'The first one was an American, and they were divorced. James knows her—she lives in Palm Beach. Did you ever go there?'
    'No, not that I remember. Palm Beach is in Florida. We went almost everywhere else, but never to Florida.'
    Summer's father had been an artist who specialised in painting murals on the walls of rich people's houses. He had worked all over the United States and in Europe as well, and Summer had hazy memories of Paris and the Riviera.
    Looking back, it surprised her that he had never had a commission in Palm Beach, one of the wealthiest resorts in the United States. Perhaps he had painted some murals there, either before she was born or when she was too young to remember that phase of the happy, footloose life which she and her mother had lived with him.
    One of her