Jubilee Read Online Free PDF Page B

once again that child who swung on ropes and collected eggs, who fed calves and rode the pony round the paddock, who shared Jessamy’s bedroom and giggled with her after lights-out.
    Evie always greeted me with outstretched arms. My aunt, so reserved and dignified with adults, was a different woman in the presence of children. She’d show us how to do magic tricks with
cards and coins and how to make explosive mixtures of bicarbonate of soda and vinegar. She said that the house was too big for such a small family. I knew from conversations with her in the last
months of her life that my aunt had wished for more children. Sometimes, looking at her fine, straight nose and perfectly shaped forehead, I could picture her as the matriarch of some Italian
dynasty, sitting at the head of a long table and indulging her grandchildren.
    I went back downstairs to the television set and laid the DVD in a cardboard box with the photographs and the diaries I’d put aside to read. Had Evie ever intended me to see these? Perhaps
she’d have burned them if she’d known death was on the way. She’d left Jessamy’s little medal in the box, too, the last prize she’d won. I remembered my aunt twisting
the medal’s ribbon round her wrist that afternoon as we waited and waited for its owner to come back to the party.
    I took the box into the kitchen and looked at the gap on the dresser where Jessamy’s Silver Jubilee mug should have stood as part of an unbroken chain linking Queen Victoria’s
Coronation to the Golden Jubilee of Elizabeth II last year. Victoria, the two Edwards, the two Georges and Elizabeth II herself: all commemorated in this collection of china. Evie had valued
continuity even though she wasn’t much of a one for chitchat about the Royals. I can’t ever remember her expressing an opinion about the divorce of Charles and Diana, for instance.
    What should I do with these mugs? Sell them along with everything else of value that I didn’t want, I supposed. Our London flat was small and minimalist. The mugs wouldn’t work
alongside the stripped wood floors and modern art.
    Perhaps I’d just leave them here when the house was rented out. Twenty-five years was the period Evie had decided upon. If the case of Jessamy’s disappearance hadn’t been
resolved by then, I was to inherit Winter’s Copse. The house owned by the Winters for hundreds of years would pass out of the family. I picked up the newest of the mugs, the Golden Jubilee
one given to my aunt just months ago. Something rattled inside it. I pulled out a small lead knight on a horse. He’d been painted once but the colours had peeled off. Enough of the pigment
remained on his face for me to see he’d once been carefully coloured in. Lancelot. Or perhaps Galahad, who, I thought I remembered, had been the knight pure in heart who’d found the
Holy Grail.
    Evie’d never recovered her grail, her lost child. It had slipped from her grasp and remained in shadows. I replaced the mug and its contents on the shelf.
    A little cowardly part of me wondered whether Luke had been right and I should have delayed the task of tidying up her affairs, not that there was too much to do. But who else was there?
Evie’s face, still in its final repose, flashed back into my mind. I pushed the image away and swapped it with a happier one: Evie waving Luke and me off after a weekend’s visit to
Winter’s Copse.
    ‘See you next weekend,’ I’d called, throwing her a last kiss.
    ‘Drive carefully,’ she told me. I turned at the door and looked back at her. She was wearing a dark blue wool dress, a scarf pinned round the neck in the elegant manner only she
could effect and flat ballet pumps. She’d looked like Audrey Hepburn. That had only been about ten days before her death.
    When I went to the hospital after her death she was lying in a small, quiet side room, wearing that same blue dress and scarf. Evie’s heart had given up in the morning at home. I’d