The Last Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

afternoon. Did I wish to accompany her?
    ‘Would you mind if I didn’t today? I’m quite lost in my book . . . and determined to finish it this afternoon.’
    I sat down at the table next to her.
    ‘Very well, but I think you should stay inside, out of the sun. And please do something with your hair, Clarissa,’ she said, and then she rose to her feet and left the room.
    I was relieved she appeared so preoccupied, and I presumed she must be tired, for she’d returned home from London very late the previous evening. I’d been in my bed, reading, but when I’d heard her arrive back I’d gone to see her, in her dressing room. She’d been in one of her dreamy moods, and told me that she’d seen the most beautiful painting she’d ever seen in her life,
at a gallery in London
.
    ‘But I thought you went to a horticultural exhibition . . .’
    ‘Oh . . . no,’ she said, turning to me ‘I left Broughton to do that. I met Venetia and we went to a gallery . . . and then out to dinner.’
    Later that day, as I watched her disappear down the driveway, I thought how remarkably brave and independent she was. Unwavering and indefatigable in her commitment to her many causes, she was happy to travel about the locality on her own in the dogcart; visiting people, delivering food parcels – eggs, butter, fruit and vegetables and produce from the farm – ministering to those sick and needy, and attending to her many and various charitable causes. There seemed to be an inexhaustible list of charities with which she was affiliated, from the NSPCC to the League of Pity and the Mothers’ Union; she attended drawing-room meetings, and sat on the council of the Primrose League, in my mind something to do with gardening: her one true passion.
    Mama was obsessed with her garden, and not only in summer, but all year round. There was
always
something to be done, always something requiring her attention. In early summer her roses and peonies, in particular, inevitably scooped her a fewfirst prizes at local flower shows. But sometimes she travelled further afield – to more out-of-the-way places, in order to exhibit a vividly coloured orchid from the hothouse, or a new hybrid tea rose. She’d return from these trips with a ribbon or rosette, reinvigorated, and quite obviously elated.
    I wondered if I’d be like Mama one day: as poised and controlled, as elegant. She seemed to me to inhabit an aura of ineffable loveliness, gliding about the place in a cloud of tuberose, exuding a soporific maternal balm upon our senses. Taller than most other women, she held her head high, for good posture and manners were, she said, the surest and most important indicator of character. She abhorred raised voices, or aggression of any kind, and had no time for wanton displays of emotion, or – what she deemed – self-indulgent outbursts.
    Papa often said that when he looked at me he saw
the perfect vision
of my mother. And I never quite knew what he meant by that. For how could anyone be more perfect than Mama? But I was like her, in appearance, at least: I had her colouring, eyes and hair. And, as I’d grown up, others had inevitably commented:
Ah, yes, Edina’s daughter through and through. Quite uncanny . . .
    As a child, I’d basked in that air of perpetual calm enveloping her, mesmerised by her beauty, the luminosity of her pale skin against her dark chestnut hair, the way she sometimes closed her eyes as she spoke. In the evenings – whenever she and Papa were at home – she’d come to the night nursery and I’d gaze up at her as she read to me: her dark blue eyes following the words on the page; her perfect lips moving with mellifluous sound. She was to me the stuff of fairy tales, the embodiment of all that was good and fine.
    The granddaughter of the diplomat and financier, Sir Montague Vincent, my mother’s formative years had been divided between the palatial drawing rooms of London and her grandfather’s vast estate in Hampshire.