Wickham Hall, Part 2 Read Online Free PDF Page A

dropped his brush instantly and came running after me. ‘Swift by name, and all that. Come on, then, let’s see if we can track down this photographer between us.’
    â€˜Can’t you do that by yourself?’ I tutted, thinking of my to-do list.
    â€˜Yes,’ said Ben, nudging me with his elbow. ‘But where’s the fun in that?’
    I grinned at him, shaking my head in despair. ‘True.’
    Ben dived straight into the pile of back issues of the
Wickham and Hoxley News
that I’d brought in and within seconds there were sheets of newspaper spread out over his desk.
    â€˜I can’t believe it, you’ve even got the Festival issue from 1984, the first year Mum and Dad were here,’ he said, flicking through them. ‘How did you find them?’
    I shrugged, as though having copies of thirty-year-old newspapers was the most normal thing in the world. ‘They were just lying around at home.’
    â€˜They’re yours?’ Ben frowned.
    â€˜Not exactly . . .’ I was trying to conjure up a reply that didn’t make me look odd when my phone rang. I grabbed it gratefully and mouthed an apology to him.
    It was a call from a coach operator confirming details of a coach tour for the next day. I scribbled some notes and rang off. Ben was engrossed in the
Wickham and Hoxley News
, laughing to himself, reading out snatches of headlines and holding up pictures of big eighties perms for me to see.
    I whizzed off a quick internal email to Nikki, Jenny and Jim to let them know the details of the coach party. I confirmed their time of arrival, lunch and departure and I booked in Nikki’s garden tour, hoping that by the time I’d finished, Ben would have forgotten what he was going to ask me.
    I was feeling a bit less stressed about Mum’s hoarding now that she had finally admitted that that’s what it was, but it didn’t stop me being embarrassed about it. Ben had grown up in an Elizabethan manor house; I couldn’t even begin to explain to him what it had been like growing up in Weaver’s Cottage.
    Having an untidy house hadn’t bothered me at all when I was small. All families are the same, I’d thought: stacks of mail in the hall, a pile of washing on a chair, an assortment of things at the foot of the stairs waiting to be taken up. There never seemed to be enough room for things but I didn’t notice anything different about my home.
    I must have been about twelve when I realized Mum’s piles of stuff weren’t normal. I saw it on the faces of friends when they came round. The way they eyed each other as they inched past a stack of newspapers in the narrow hallway; the way they turned in slow circles in our living room, looking for a place to sit.
    â€˜Let’s go up to my room!’ I’d suggest, knowing that at least there they wouldn’t be able to find fault with the clean surfaces, the lack of ‘stuff’ and the collection of posters, symmetrically Blu-tacked to the walls. But the damage had been done and after a while friends stopped coming round, or I stopped asking them, I can’t remember now.
    Mum kept everything, although paper was her weakness: newspapers, magazines, all sorts of literature, but anything to do with Wickham Hall was special. Now I knew that she had had an affair with a mystery man there, that part sort of made sense. But I’d already revealed far more than I should have done to Ben thanks to my faux pas in Joop on Sunday; I certainly didn’t want to explain why my mother had kept every brochure and newspaper with a mention of the Summer Festival in it since 1984—
    â€˜Look at this,’ cried Ben triumphantly, breaking into my thoughts.
    He was holding up a double-page spread of photographs taken at Wickham. I went round to his side of the desk to read it over his shoulder.
    â€˜Wickham Hall Summer Festival 1989. And it’s part of a four-page supplement.