Her smile grew warm at my flattery. ‘Seems like it, sometimes.’ She looked to the window. ‘Is Susan not back yet?’
‘Not yet, no.’
‘Oh, well. One can’t rush a decision like that.’
I decided that made a good opening for what I’d wanted to ask her. ‘Aunt Claire?’
‘Yes, darling?’
‘When you met Uncle George … I mean, it must have been a change for you, to move here. And not only geographically. You were changing your whole way of life, taking on Mark and Susan and everything. How did you … that is, when someone is making that big a decision, how … ?’
‘How do you know it’s the right one to make?’ She was watching me kindly. ‘Are you asking on Susan’s behalf, or your own?’
Before I could answer, a door somewhere opened and closed and the sure tread of footsteps approached from the back of the hall, and we turned to the doorway as Oliver entered the front room.
On cue, from the small knowing smile on Claire’s face. She greeted him with, ‘Didn’t we get rid of you once today?’
He’d changed his clothes at least, although the jeans and T-shirt he now wore weren’t that much less revealing than the biking shorts. ‘I’ve just had a delivery that I thought might interest Eva,’ he explained, and held a small wrapped packet up to show us. ‘Mark said I should come right in.’ He looked around the room. ‘Is Susan not back yet?’
Claire answered as I had done, ‘Not yet, no.’
Oliver lifted an eyebrow. ‘You don’t think she’ll actually marry him, do you? I mean, he’s a nice enough bloke, Nigel, but he’s not right for her. I could have told her that, first time I met him. They’re chalk and cheese, aren’t they?’ He sauntered across for a look at the book I was holding. ‘What’s that?’
I angled the cover to show him.
He read out the title: ‘The Wife’s Guide for Keeping a Garden and House?’
‘Newly revised in …’ I flipped to the title page, briefly consulting the date, ‘1692.’
‘That would explain why it’s falling to pieces, then.’
‘Only the binding. The pages are fine.’
He looked at the page I’d been reading. ‘“For Making a Stirabout”? What’s that?’
‘A stew, sort of.’
‘Ah. And it doesn’t concern you at all that the next item down is “A Cure Against Vomiting”?’
I cast a dry look up over my shoulder. ‘It’s meant to be a full instruction book for housewives. Home remedies, recipes, how to do laundry and clean things.’ All useful, I thought, for a young woman setting up house at the end of the seventeenth century. Or for a woman who found herself thrust back in time to the start of the eighteenth.
Oliver said, ‘If you’re wanting to read something, try this instead.’ And he gave me the packet.
As I took it from his hands I felt the quick touch of excitement and I knew what it must be before I’d even got the wrapper off and seen the book inside, bound in smooth leather with faded gilt letters that spelt out the title: A Life Before the Wind. Jack Butler’s diary. ‘Oh, Oliver! Wherever did you find it?’
‘I have sources.’
And he must have had to pay them well. The book was an original edition, from the look of it. ‘You’d really let me borrow this?’
‘I wouldn’t, no,’ he told me, and then smiled at my reaction. ‘You’re to keep it. It’s a gift.’
I shook my head. ‘I’ll buy it from you.’
‘Sorry, no. A gift’s a gift,’ he said. ‘You’re stuck with it.’
I would have argued further if I hadn’t been distracted by the sound of tyres on gravel from the drive outside. All three of us fell silent while we listened, waiting.
One car door banged shut. And then the tyres rolled off again.
When Susan came to join us, she was on her own.
‘I’ve told him no.’ She stood within the doorway, looking tired. ‘Our lives are just too different, it would never work.’ Her weariness seemed more pronounced as she glanced round the room. ‘Mark’s in the gardens, I expect? I’ll go and hunt him down and let him know, so he’ll stop worrying.’
Oliver stepped forwards, not the charmer any more but the dependable old friend who could be leant on in a crisis. ‘You don’t need to hunt him down, I know exactly where he is. Come on, I’ll take you to him.’
When they’d gone, I looked at Claire and noticed her expression, and I said, ‘You’re not surprised.’
‘No. Nigel wasn’t the right man for her.’
‘Because the gap between them was too great?’
She shook her head. ‘Because it wasn’t meant to be.’ Her eyes were wise. ‘Every relationship has its own obstacles, darling. And as you said, your Uncle George and I had our share of them. As would you, if you were to meet someone here.’ From her smile I assumed she meant Oliver. ‘There would be practical choices you’d have to make. Where you’d live, that sort of thing. Where you’d work. And there’d be differences in lifestyle that might take some getting used to. It’s one thing to spend a summer at Trelowarth, or let a cottage for awhile, and quite another to live all year in Polgelly,’ she said knowingly. ‘The social structure here is … well, you’d find it rather different from America, I’m sure. It’s never easy, changing how you live.’