Summer in February Read Online Free PDF

thoughts, Harold went on ahead, keen to return to his own studio,letting her stroll back at will, letting her smell the flowers or eat blackberries while she chatted to Gilbert Evans outside
     his office.
    ‘Thank you, Harold,’ she would often say back in the cottage, ‘what would I do without you?’
    ‘Get someone else to help, no doubt.’
    Harold always preferred to paint indoors. He was a slow, painstaking perfectionist, and they had worked in separate studios
     ever since the day ten years ago on York station when Laura punched out their names on one of those penny slot machines: LAURA
     KNIGHT, and then HAROLD KNIGHT. With a smile Harold took the tin strips from her hand as if that had decided the matter, two
     separate names, two separate people. He nailed one on his studio door and one on Laura’s, though Laura’s was often unused
     because her real studio was the open air.
    Everyone in Lamorna noticed how different in every way the Knights were. Laura was all fast hands and full of dash, big canvases,
     big effort, squeezing paint out of the tube, letting the pencil and brush speak before she could interrupt them; she felt
     she could run in the playground and not get touched, she was a stormy scatterbrain, she didn’t mind, she would show everyone
     her work – you could stand behind and watch, if you liked.
    Not so Harold. He was as still and white as his studio wall; he kept his paintings turned away from prying eyes and woe betide
     anyone who looked at them until he was good and ready. ‘Because we live together,’ he said to Laura, ‘we must not influence
     each other too much.’ Yes, he was a wise old bird, and there he was going up the hill in his stiff-backed way, just ahead
     of Laura, on a hot early September evening, a bonus day, a windfall day, when—
    When—
    By a gate halfway up the lane, just up from where GilbertEvans had his office, Harold could see – no, he could not yet see, but he could
hear
a very noisy crowd. For a moment he wondered if it was Gilbert and Joey Carter-Wood, but then Gilbert and Joey weren’t noisy
     types and anyway this noise was very female. Peaceful though it could be, Lamorna was also quite used to its fair share of
     noise. If it wasn’t stormy weather coming in off the Atlantic or the quarry blasting granite by day it was the artists blasting
     away at a party by night, but by any standards this was raucous, a fusillade of laughter, a real racket.
    Harold and Laura came round the bend. Standing in the centre of a circle of girls was a stranger. The girls were all laughing
     and cheering. It occurred to Harold that the joker in the middle of the pack might well be a travelling performer. They did
     have the occasional tramp in those parts, attracted perhaps by the easy pickings offered by a painting fraternity, and eccentrics
     attracted more eccentrics, but even at a glance, this loud young man was the oddest yet.
    Harold could not get past him quickly enough. Laura, however, slowed. The centre of attention had light brown hair combed
     forward with deliberate style, and her first thought was that here was the spitting image of the Robbie Burns portrait she
     had seen on her last visit to Edinburgh. He was a slim, animated figure; he was expressive with his hands, but in an entirely
     manly fashion, and his shoulders were broad.
    Could Laura take in so much at a glance? Yes she could, and more! He had slim hips, very slim hips. As for his clothes? Well,
     it had to be said, his clothes were the main point of his strangeness. You would never expect to come across such a figure
     in a Cornish lane: he wore a shepherd’s plaid suit with close-fitting trousers that belled out at the bottom – and he wore
     it with such style as if to say ‘Anddo I not look the part?’ Where on earth did this strange being come from, what was he doing here, and who were all these silly
     sycophantic girls surrounding him?
    They must, she guessed, be Stanhope Forbes’s