Jubilee Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘Sorting out the house will be cathartic. And when I come home again you’ll find me a changed woman. No more weeping. No more hormones. I shall redecorate our bedroom and book an exotic
holiday for us. And I’ll reinvigorate my business. Clients will come flooding in.’
    He’d looked down at the suitcase he was carrying to the car for me. ‘I’m worried it’ll all be too much for you.’
    ‘No.’ I took the suitcase. ‘I can manage.’
    ‘I don’t doubt that.’ He sounded sad.
    ‘You know what I’m like: I need to keep busy.’ I patted my jeans pocket to make sure I’d got paracetamol with me. At least I didn’t have to worry about taking
painkillers now.
    ‘Are you sure you’re OK to drive?’
    ‘It’s been twelve hours since my last drink.’ My head gave a rebuking throb.
    ‘I didn’t mean the alcohol.’
    I knew he didn’t.
    ‘Do you really have to do this now, Rachel? Couldn’t it wait?’
    ‘I need to start clearing the house.’ I picked up my suitcase. ‘And plan the funeral now we can go ahead.’
    ‘You could plan it from here. You don’t need to be in Oxfordshire to make phone calls.’
    My hand tightened on the handle and I laid the case in the car boot. ‘There’s the dog. I need to find a home for him. I need to talk to letting agents. I need . . .’
    I need to be at Winter’s Copse, I wanted to say. I need to feel my aunt and cousin are close by. Even if they’re both dead. I need to come to terms with the shock of Evie’s
death, so sudden, so unexpected. Perhaps something of Evie will still linger in the house. Perhaps there will be answers.
    ‘Don’t stay too long,’ he said, gently. ‘We need to make plans, contact the clinic—’
    ‘No.’ The word took me by surprise. ‘No more clinics. We need to move on, plan our lives round something different.’ The cross-London rush to the clinic for daily blood
tests. The nasal sprays that made me retch. The injections I had to administer at home. The sense of failure, growing stronger every day so that it had started to affect every part of my life. I
could barely write some simple copy for an advertisement which I could once have dashed off. ‘All the embryos are gone, anyway.’
    ‘We could try to—’
    I held up a hand. ‘I can’t bear the thought of producing more. It makes me feel like a brood mare.’ I sounded brattish but Luke just nodded and closed the boot.
    ‘Perhaps it’s wise to leave things.’
    And as soon as he said this I felt my emotions rush in an opposite direction. I’d wanted him to try and persuade me it was worth trying again.
    I pushed the stop button and ejected the disk. Evie had gone to all the trouble of having this home movie transferred to a DVD just before Christmas. I knew this because
I’d found the receipt from the computer company in Wantage that had carried out the transfer for her.
    She’d placed the DVD in her desk with her will and details of her solicitor and of various insurance policies and other papers I hadn’t yet had time to examine. Evie had meant this
footage of her daughter to be seen in the case of her death, probably by me as I, along with her solicitor, was an executor and had the task of clearing out Winter’s Copse and selling
everything that couldn’t be rented out along with the property itself.
    She could never have expected death to come so suddenly, though. Cardiomyopathy, the post-mortem had revealed, a condition I’d had to look up on the internet. Inflamed heart muscles. Evie
had never mentioned heart trouble to me. Perhaps she hadn’t realized. It seemed unfair that a woman who still tramped up and down the hill and maintained a huge garden with barely a
moment’s breathlessness had suffered such catastrophic heart trouble. Luke had raised his eyebrows over the post-mortem results, too. ‘Your aunt seemed one of the healthiest people we
know. Perhaps the strain of not knowing what had happened to Jessamy had worn her down. But