Free The Song of Hartgrove Hall by Natasha Solomons Page B

thought of the picnic and seeing Jack whom I haven’t seen for simply ages. And Edie. I bat her name away and swerve around a pothole. George grips the door but doesn’t tell me to slow down. It’s a ten-minute drive to the station but we make it in eight and I feel a surge of triumph.
    â€˜Do you want to go and meet them? I’ll wait with the car,’ says George.
    â€˜Righto.’
    I leap out of the car and am jogging onto the platform as their train pulls in, and I wish for a moment that I’d picked some of the cowslips sprouting on the lawn to present to Edie. It dawns on me how daft that is – as if she’s a visiting dignitary or my girl or something – and then they’re here and Jack’s thumping my back and Edie’s standing behind him, leaving space for the effusion of our reunion, and she’s even prettier than I remember in her yellow summer dress and her crooked half-smile and I almost can’t breathe.
    â€˜Hello, Fox,’ she says. ‘You can kiss me if you like.’
    I don’t. I glance at my feet and mumble, ‘Hello, Edie. Jolly nice to see you.’
    We return to the car and to my exasperation I see that George has nipped into the driver’s seat. Sneaky so and so. Jack and Edie climb into the back and, as we hurtle along the narrow lanes and I glance back, I notice how Edie slithers into Jack as we take each bend. George catches me looking and quickly I turn away.
    We park near a tumbledown mill. George and I heave the basket between us, leaving Jack and Edie to go ahead with the piles of blankets and scout a spot to sit. It’s the first hot day of the year and the ground still has the soft bounce of early summer. The grass is long and thick. A cricket ticks in steady crotchets. The river sloshes in easy curves, gnats misting the surface. Several cows watch us, bored, flicking flies with mucky tails. We halt in a field of dandelions. There are thousands upon thousands of them, constellations of vivid, sickly-yellow flowers. Jack flops down and instantly his shirt is tarnished with pollen.
    Methodically, George unpacks the picnic onto a blanket. Edie tries to help but he waves her away. We eat in lazy silence until there is nothing left, passing the bottle of hock between us. As a concession to Edie we brought glasses but we entirely forget to use them and she doesn’t complain. The hock thrums in my head and I’m still thirsty. We should have brought water to drink in this heat. Jack lies back amongst the dandelions, his hair so gold in the sunlight that the flowers look gaudy beside him.
    â€˜Lie here with me,’ he says to Edie but she shakes her head, lolling in the shade of a willow. She’s removed her stockings and I can’t help noticing that her white skin is almost translucent. There is a fine fuzz of pale hair on her legs. Jack reaches over and tickles her foot. He gazes at her with something uncomfortably like adoration. I look away.
    â€˜How old would your mother have been today?’ she asks and I’m taken aback. We come here every year on Mother’sbirthday but we never speak about her. We eat. We lark about and perhaps take a dip in the river and then we return home. I glance at George and register his surprise but he doesn’t seem to mind.
    â€˜Fifty-two,’ he says. ‘She would have been fifty-two.’
    I don’t wish to talk about Mother as that would mean I’d need to pretend to be sad. The sun is too hot and the sky is glazed in a too-flawless blue for sadness. Jack clearly feels the same.
    â€˜And how old is your mother?’ he asks Edie, propping himself up on his elbow. ‘And when does she get the pleasure of meeting me?’ he adds, turning it, as he does everything, into a joke.
    Edie smiles and digs in her bag for cigarettes but Jack continues to stare at her. It occurs to me that, beneath the teasing, he’s quite serious. He wants to