He bent down and hugged her awkwardly.
‘You be good,’ he replied and walked out of the room.
As he left the hospital, he could feel himself clenching and unclenching his fists. He’d hated seeing her like that, obviously in pain but still so bloody brave. Hugh didn’t deserve her. But there was nothing he could do to stop the wedding. Even a smashed-up leg and a smashed-up face wasn’t deterring Alice.
Fifteen
The morning room at Peasebrook Manor was the prettiest room Emilia had ever seen. It had primrose yellow walls and pale green silk curtains and two rose velvet sofas in front of a dainty fireplace. Over it was a Victorian oil painting of a girl feeding cabbage leaves to a fat bunny rabbit. The girl, with her rosy cheeks and blonde hair, reminded Emilia of Alice.
Emilia wondered what it was like to live in the Basildons’ world. Not that hers was gritty reality – she was only too aware it was rarefied – but this was quintessential country life at its most appealing. This was the room where Sarah took tea or coffee with her guests, and wrote letters and saw to her business. She thought of the back office at the shop and resolved to make it a more pleasant place to work in. Her father had rarely spent time in there; just banished anything he didn’t want to look at into its depths. It was cold and damp and dingy. It would have to change.
Sarah came in with a tray bearing tea: a proper china teapot, and dainty cups and saucers and a milk jug and sugar bowl. And a plate of shortbread, thick with caster sugar. She laid it on the table between the sofas.
‘Milk?’ she asked, and Emilia nodded.
Sarah somehow managed to look dishevelled but devastatingly attractive. She must be in her fifties but looked far younger. She had on jeans and a faded Liberty lawn shirt and pale blue loafers. Her hair was a mixture of honey and grey that looked as if a top London hairdresser had painstakingly streaked it, but was probably the result of Sarah not having been to have her roots done for months. Her hands were red and chapped from gardening, and her nails ragged, but the most enormous diamond glimmered on her ring finger: it was so large it almost couldn’t be real, but Sarah wasn’t the type to wear costume jewellery. She wore no make-up but a dab of pink lipstick hastily applied in the downstairs loo just before she answered the door. She was the archetypal English rose.
‘I’ve just got back from visiting Alice,’ she said as she poured the tea. ‘The traffic out of Oxford was awful.’
‘How is she?’
Sarah sighed. ‘She’s in a lot of discomfort, poor thing. And of course all those painkillers make one so fuzzy. But she’s making progress.’
She sat down on the sofa opposite Emilia.
‘I asked you here because I wanted to talk to you about something your father and I had been discussing for a while.’
Emilia nodded. Sarah clasped her hands. She seemed slightly nervous, not quite meeting Emilia’s eye. She fiddled with the diamond ring. Her fingers were so slender it spun round and round.
‘We had become quite good friends, your father and I. We spoke – met – often.’ She lifted her gaze. ‘Ralph is not a great reader and it was good to have a decent conversation with someone about books. Julius was always so brilliant at recommending. He had a feeling for what I wanted to read and I don’t think there was one book he suggested that I didn’t love. Sometimes he’d make me read things because they were good for me and I always took something away from them. He widened my world …’
She drifted off, immersed in her eulogy.
‘He was extraordinary,’ she finished, and Emilia could see the glitter of tears in her navy blue eyes, as bright as the diamond on her ring.
‘I know,’ said Emilia.
For a moment, Sarah couldn’t speak. Emilia was touched. She could see how difficult Sarah was finding this. She was still astonished by how deep people’s feelings for her father ran. They still came up to her in the street or in the shop and told her how much he had meant to them.
‘I’d love to do something. To remember him by. He often talked about organising a literary festival. It was a dream of his and I’d suggested that we could do one here, at Peasebrook. We have so many rooms here that could be used. We were starting to think quite seriously about it when he became ill.’
Here, Sarah looked down at the floor. Emilia could see she was struggling.