The Last Days of Summer: The best feel-good summer read for 2017. Sophie Pembroke
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warm. Sorting through the clothes I’d brought with me, I realised that the office wear I’d filled my Perth wardrobe with just didn’t fit in at Rosewood. Maybe, if I could find my belongings, there’d be some more suitable clothes there.
Eventually, I settled on a pair of jeans that usually got worn with stilettos, so hung over the ends of my bare feet, and a lace and silk camisole that only normally saw the light of day through a slightly-too-sheer work cardigan I’d somehow neglected to pack. It would do until I found something else, anyway. Fixing my hair back from my face, I set out to investigate the attic.
The obvious place to start was my old room, tucked under the eaves of the house, up in the attic, so I climbed the rickety wooden staircase at the end of the corridor and knocked lightly on Caro’s door. There was no response, so I slowly turned the handle and pushed the door open, wincing at the awful creaking it made.
Luckily it didn’t matter, since Caroline was already up and out. “Probably ghost-hunting,” I muttered, glancing around the room. The walls and the furniture were the same, as was the bright pink radiator I’d insisted on, installed against the only full-height wall. The other walls sloped downwards to the low window and window seat, familiar pink pillows still stacked along the wooden bench.
But there was no sign of anything else that belonged to me. The brush set on the dressing table, the clothes hung over the back of the chair, the books on the bookcases, even the pictures on the wall – none of them were mine. I shut the door behind me.
There was a large storage area just along the hallway, which I remembered as dusty, stuffy and full of rotting cardboard boxes. Of course that was where they’d have stashed my stuff.
The door was unlocked, and as I pulled it towards me a rush of hot, stale air hit my lungs. With one last deep breath, I headed in, leaving the door open behind me in the hope of ventilation.
The attic was much as I remembered, and I tripped over piles of messily rolled rugs and faded cushions on my way through the box maze. On the far side of the space there was a window, and I made my way towards it, hoping it hadn’t been painted shut.
It hadn’t, and the morning air breezing in over the gardens was cool and fresh. Beating dust out of a large floor cushion, I settled down at the base of the window, and started pulling likely looking boxes towards me. As I pulled out books and pictures, the musty smell of damp paper rose up from the prematurely yellowed and crinkled pages.
Every box I looked in awakened waves of memory I hadn’t even been aware I was suppressing. A storybook Nathaniel wrote me for my eighth birthday; a pair of absurdly expensive pink heels I’d bought with my first student loan and never really worn, because they didn’t fit with the agreed student uniform of jeans and slobby jumpers; postcards of Devon from Ellie and Greg’s first holiday away together; a wire-bound copy of a series of fantastical short stories I’d written for a creative writing course as part of my degree, taking their starting points from my childhood at Rosewood. A hundred wonderful things I’d forgotten all about.
And, shoved down the side of a box of musty paperbacks, a stack of unopened letters, addressed to Ellie, in my handwriting. Still bruised from my awkward welcome home, I couldn’t quite bring myself to open them yet. I had a horrible feeling the letters somehow wouldn’t say what I knew I’d been trying to articulate. Instead, I turned to my stories.
In the warmth of the attic, with dusty cushions at my back, I settled in and lost myself in my own tales – wincing at jarring turns of phrase, but smiling when I found something I’d forgotten, something true and real from my childhood.
I hadn’t fully remembered, for example, that each tale took a turn for the imaginary, somewhere around the second page. Forgotten that my own life hadn’t been exciting enough for me, even then. That I’d needed to pretend there was something more.
I was so engrossed in the pieces of my past, I failed to notice that my hiding place had been discovered until Nathaniel’s voice interrupted me from the doorway. “What are you reading?”
Smiling up at him, I waved the poorly printed manuscript. “Stories from a lifetime ago,” I explained, as he came closer, settling himself on a cushion opposite me. “Just some stuff I wrote for a writing class, once.”
“And here was me thinking you might be hiding,” he said, his smile a little too knowing. “Anything else worth reading in there?”
I shoved my letters to Ellie further down inside the box, and pulled out one of the birthday storybooks. The golden inked lettering on the front read The Garden Ghost. “You wrote this for me for my eighteenth, I think.” I glanced through the pages before handing it over. “The story’s a little different from the one you told Caroline last night.”
In my book, the daughter had fallen pregnant, shaming the family, but refusing to speak the name of her lover. She died in childbirth, and it was only once the child made dead flowers bloom, several years later, that John Harrow discovered the truth about his daughter and the apprentice. Which was the real story? Or were they both just figments of Nathaniel’s imagination? I knew better than to ask. To my grandfather, truth and fiction were almost the same thing, there to be intertwined to make the best story.
I worried, sometimes, that I’d inherited that trait, only without using it to write the kind of books that won awards.
Nathaniel flicked through the book with a chuckle. “Caro’s still a little young for some stories.”
Watching him reread his own words, I remembered something that had been bothering me. “Why didn’t you tell me that you had a new assistant?”
Nathaniel looked up. “Edward? Didn’t I?” He shrugged. “No idea. I suppose that I was always more interested in what you were up to, whenever you called.”
Which was very unlike my grandfather. Nathaniel always wanted to talk about the trials and tribulations of life at Rosewood; a new assistant would normally be prime fodder.
Suddenly, I wondered what other secrets he’d been keeping, what else I’d missed. Staying in touch with Rosewood only by phone or the odd email with Dad, I’d been left out of all the day-to-day events, the little things that tied the family together – and excluded me. I’d called home, once a week on a Sunday, and spoken with Mum and Dad, with Caro, and Therese, sometimes, if she was there. Occasionally I’d shared a few words with Isabelle, too, but not often. That, at least, made more sense now. Whatever Ellie had told her about what happened, it had been enough to dig a rift between me and my grandmother that couldn’t be crossed by phone.
I’d never spoken to Ellie, of course.
Nathaniel had tended to call me, erratically, as he thought of it. Sometimes we’d talk for hours, others just for a few moments. But I’d never felt that gulf between us that I’d felt with Isabelle, or even the slight distance that had grown between me and my parents, by virtue of the miles separating us, if nothing else. I’d thought my relationship with Nathaniel was unchanging and unchangeable.
But he hadn’t told me about Edward. Why? What else had he kept from me? What else had I been left out of, by being away?
And would I ever be able to catch up?
Nathaniel reached out and selected another of the storybooks he’d written for me – the one he’d presented to me on my tenth birthday, whispering in my ear that the Forest Maiden of the title was really me. I’d held that secret close to my heart all year, I remembered, waiting for my next story. They were all about me, really, I came to realise, much later.
“How many of these did I write for you?” he asked, flicking through the pages.
“One a year until my twenty-first birthday.” Just five years ago. At the bottom of the pile was the board book he’d created for my first birthday, full of brightly coloured pictures of things you might find around Rosewood, each with a little rhyme after them.
“I always hoped you’d start writing your own,” he said, still staring at the words on the page. “You had such an imagination… I always thought you’d