Free Flowers in the Rain & Other Stories by Rosamunde Pilcher

spring, when I was sixteen and he was twenty. I had never been in love before and it had the effect of making me, not dreamy, but intensely perceptive; so that objects, previously unnoticed, became beautiful; leaves and trees, flowers, chairs, dishes, firelight—everything was touched with the magic of a spell-binding novelty, as though I had never known any of these ordinary day-to-day things before.
    There were many picnics that spring, and swimming in the loch and tennis parties, but the best was the idleness, the casual getting to know each other. Lying on the lawn in front of the Big House, watching some person practising his casting, with a scrap of sheep wool instead of a fly to weight the line. Or walking down to the farm in the evenings to fetch the milk, or helping the farmer’s wife to bottle-feed the abandoned lamb who lived by her kitchen fireside.
    At the end of those holidays Mrs. Farquhar arranged a little party. We cleared the old billiard-room of furniture and put on the record-player, and danced reels. And Rory wore his kilt and an old khaki shirt that had belonged to his father, and showed me the steps and spun me till I was breathless. It was at the end of that evening that he kissed me, but it didn’t do much good because he was going back to London the next morning, and I could never be sure if it was a kiss of affection or a kiss of goodbye.
    After he went, I lived in a fantasy world of getting letters and phone calls from him, and having him realize that he could not live without me. But all that happened was that he started working in London, with his father’s firm, and after that he did not come back to Lachlan for Easter. If he did take a few days off in the spring, Mrs. Farquhar told me that he was going skiing, and I imagined rich and elegant girls in dashing ski-clothes and felt sick with jealousy.
    Once I stole a photograph of Rory out of an old album I found in a bookcase in Mrs. Farquhar’s library. It had come loose and fallen out of the shabby pages, so it wasn’t really stealing. I picked it up and put it in my pocket and later between the pages of my diary. I always kept it, although I never saw Rory again, and since my father died and we stopped coming to Lachlan, I had heard no news of him.
    And now Mrs. McLaren had said his name, and I remembered that young Rory, with his worn kilt and his brown face and dark hair.
    I said, “What’s he doing in America?”
    “Oh, some business or other, in New York. His father died too, you know. I think that was the start of Mrs. Farquhar getting so ill. She never lost heart, but she aged a lot.”
    “I expect Rory’s a married man now, with a string of children.”
    “No, no. Rory never married.”
    I said, lying, “I’d forgotten about Rory.”
    “Ah, you’ll have other things to think about with your nursing and your fine job.”
    We talked a little longer, and then I bought some chocolate from her and said goodbye and went out of the shop and set off in the direction of the big house. I tore the paper from the chocolate and bit off a chunk. Eaten thus, in the open air, it tasted just the way it used to.
    I’ll just go and see, I told myself. I’ll just go and ring at the door, and if the nurse sends me packing, it won’t matter.
    A woman was coming towards me down the street, carrying a shopping basket and dressed in the countrywoman’s uniform of headscarf, tweed skirt, and sleeveless quilted waistcoat in that horrible sludgy green colour.
    I can’t come all this way and not just try.
    She stopped. “Lavinia.”
    I stopped, too. It was certainly a day for being recognized. My heart sank. “Hello, Mrs. Fellows.”
    I would meet her. Stella Fellows, the one woman in the village my mother could never bring herself to like. She and her husband, who had been a lawyer, had built themselves a house in Lachlan after his retirement and had settled permanently. He was a manic fisherman and always said “Tight Lines” instead of