The Decision Read Free Page B

so afraid of losing her that he could refuse her nothing; and when she spoke longingly of a ‘fine house, created precisely for me’ young Becket got his commission and created a breathtaking place, not large, set against the grand houses of its day (a mere ten bedrooms, and only three receiving rooms), but very beautiful with its glorious south front ‘greeting the morning sun’ as Lady Anne described it in her journal, with its classical pillars, its gently curving steps, its wide terrace, its exquisite orangery, set some five hundred yards from the house; ‘It is just for me,’ she went on, ‘created to suit my beauty as my darling says.’
    Her darling (presumably Jonathan Becket, rather than Sir Ralph) went on to serve her with a wonderful park behind the house and a small sloping grass sward to the front of it; most of the park had now been sold, leaving only ten acres for the present-day incumbents and as protection against the ever-present threat of building development in its immediate vicinity.
    The house was christened Summer Court; it was to be largely a summer residence, for Sir Ralph liked the bustle of Bath for much of the time, and she saw herself holding her own small court there; the name was contracted to a single word by one of her more modest descendants.
    It was hugely uncomfortable; always at least five decades behind with its modernisation, impossible to heat satisfactorily. When Eliza arrived for her first term as a boarder at Heathfield, she was astonished at the other girls’ complaints about the cold dormitories, the draughty study bedrooms, the ‘dribbly’ showers. It seemed the height of luxury to her, accustomed as she was to waking to ice on the inside of her windows and a four-inch bath deemed disgracefully wasteful. But she adored the house. It had stayed with the Cunninghames through ten generations; Sarah’s mother, the last Lady Cunninghame, had been the first in the line to fail to produce an heir. She had produced only one child, and that was Sarah.
    Mercifully – as Sarah saw it – there were no other claimants to the house: no cousins, no male uncles even. And thus it was that Sarah’s father, the ninth baronet, had been forced, his signature dragging with dreadful reluctance across the paper, to entail it to her. Or rather, to her and her husband. It was better than selling it, which was the only other option. And Sarah did love it.
    ‘Never let it go’ had been his last words to her; and she promised. It was owned by a trust, and they were merely its tenants for life; it was slowly bankrupting them. But keeping it was what mattered and the children loved it as much as she did; Summercourt was their treasure and their home, it was where everything important happened.
    Charles, brought up from his earliest years to regard it as his legacy, would roam its woods and fields as a child, pretending to be the son of Lady Anne; as he grew older, he took it very seriously, acquainting himself with such country pursuits as hunting and shooting, as befitted the heir to such a gem. The fact that the estate was far too small to support anything more than rabbit shooting and a few pheasants didn’t apparently trouble him; but Eliza once overheard two of the fellow undergraduates he’d invited down for a few days discussing ‘Charles’s Brideshead fantasies’ and that they’d expected something ten times its size, ‘Drives and lodges, that sort of thing.’
    There was no proper drive even, only a rather pretty tree-lined avenue up from the village, and certainly no lodges. The house had no privacy from the front, which the family rather liked; it had been designed to stand as part of the village. But the charming stone cottages, pretty Norman church, medieval duck pond and seventeenth-century inn that had set the house off so prettily in 1755 and lain at its feet (another of Lady Anne’s fanciful phrases) had become extended by a sprawling growth of mock-Tudor bungalows to one