That Summer: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

off her brow with the back of one hand. Up ahead she could see a small commercial oasis, the striped awnings of shops a welcome break in the otherwise unbroken residential terrain.
    Shouldn’t she be at the house by now? Number 28, the solicitor’s letter had said. What he hadn’t bothered to specify was that the numbers on the hill ran backward, highest to lowest, with the hundreds down in the shallows by the train station and the PizzaExpress. Up and up the road ran, past Victorian terraced houses, recently refurbished, if the smell of paint was anything to go by. That boded well for real-estate values in the area, if not for Julia’s calves, which were protesting the unexpected exercise.
    She probably could have used some of the past six months of idleness to reacquaint herself with the gym. But in the beginning, she had just assumed this was all temporary. After all, she’d made the responsible choice out of college; she’d turned her back on the chimera of grad school and gone, instead, lemming-like, into consulting. She hadn’t been quite sure what consultants actually did, other than fly around and look harried and important, but it paid well and, more to the point, it was about as far as she could get from med school.
    From McKinsey it had been easy to stumble along the well-trodden track from consulting to business school, and from business school to a position as an equity research analyst at one of the big banks.
    Telecom didn’t precisely consume her soul—all right, if she was being honest, half the time it bored her silly—but there was a certain kick to being one of the few women in a man’s world. She’d proved that she could play with the boys.
    There was a time when that had mattered to her. Right now, she wasn’t quite sure why. Either way, it had brought her where she was now. Kind of ironic that after all these years, after all her work, all her degrees, here she was, back in England, unemployed, alone.
    So much for doing everything right.
    Julia bumped her suitcase past a restaurant, a dry cleaner, a grocery store. Good to know there was somewhere to get sustenance around here; the bottom of the hill was a long way down and she didn’t have a car. There was even a wine shop, suitably Yuppie-fied, to go with the newly refurbished Victorian brick houses, and a real-estate agent, with tantalizingly touched-up pictures of glossy wood floors and souped-up washing machines in the windows.
    Number 28 was just across the way.
    Julia’s steps slowed as she approached. She wouldn’t have known it but for the numbers on the gateposts, 26 on one side, 28 on the other. The house took up two plots, although it was hard to tell if there even was a house back there. The trees had grown thick in the yard, blocking whatever lay beyond. In the bright sunshine the yard lay in shade, the light crowded out by the thickly clustering trees.
    Julia rested her computer bag on top of one of the gateposts, the one that said “26,” the “6” listing slightly to the side where a nail had come loose. There was no actual gate, just a four-foot gap between the gateposts. The wall was brick, modern, and ugly. It looked as though it had been thrown up merely to serve as a nominal barrier, a sign to the uninvited to keep out.
    Not that it was needed. The close-grown trees, the general air of dilapidation and decay, were deterrent enough. The houses on either side seemed very far away. It was hard to tell how far the plot went back. Some ways, she guessed. She could just make out the chimney pots above the trees, four of them. Ahead of her, a walk twisted its way to what she presumed was the house, the bricks cracked and overgrown.
    Julia had a sudden image of that same path in autumn, red and orange leaves slick under her feet, as she hopped from brick to brick in a complicated pattern of her own devising. There was someone holding on to her hand; she knew that even though all her attention was focused on the pattern of