Page 50 of Last Letter Home
‘Greg.’
‘Briony, hi,’ Greg, said, turning, his amiable, handsome face lighting up with pleasure. He kissed her tenderly on both cheeks. ‘What’ll you have to drink?’
‘One of those, please,’ she said, pointing to the pint of foaming amber that stood before him, and the red-haired elf obliged. She took a mouthful of creamy beer and felt her nervousness fall away.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Greg went on, ‘but I’ve booked us a table for eight o’clock. My lunch was a cocktail sandwich and a very tiny samosa.’
‘Not enough for a growing boy,’ she laughed. She didn’t mind that her plans for an early exit had collapsed. Really this beer was delicious. Evening sunshine sparkled through the diamond-paned windows and the beauties of an English garden beckoned. They carried their drinks out to a small round table under the willows whose branches trailed in the rippling stream.
‘You are lucky having a place here,’ she sighed. ‘It’s idyllic.’
‘The drive can be a slog, but it’s well worth it,’ he agreed. ‘I was brought up nearby.’ He named a village and when she said she hadn’t heard of it he laughed, ‘No one has. It’s about five miles away off the main road going towards Norwich, so I’ve always thought of round here as home.’
‘Didn’t you say the house where you live now had been in the family?’
‘That’s right. My great-grandfather was estate manager at the hall and the house came with the position, so his son, my grandfather, was brought up there.’
‘And you, the wealthy scion, have come and taken over the lot. That is a very modern example of the Wheel of Fortune!’
He smiled. ‘I suppose you could say that. It’s certainly odd to think that a Kelling of Westbury Hall is now a leaseholder of mine. I gather from Kemi that you’ve met old Mrs Clare.’
‘Yes, and I don’t believe she thinks of herself as beholden to you in any way.’ Briony gave Greg a look of amusement as she raised her glass to her lips.
‘No,’ he sighed. ‘She probably doesn’t.’ He rubbed his stubbled jaw in a thoughtful manner and the sunlight sparked off a gold ring he wore.
It was true that he must have done well in life to be able to buy the Hall and its park, though high finance was a blur to her. She wondered how wealthy you’d have to be. What was he – early forties, she reckoned. His shirt was crisply ironed. Everything about him was neat, well-manicured, but bruised shadows under his shrewd blue eyes, a tautness about his lined forehead, spoke of strain.
His gaze lingered on her and, self-conscious, she tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear and sat up straighter. ‘How did you go about the development at Westbury Hall?’ she asked. ‘I mean, the whole building project must have been complicated.’
‘It was,’ he agreed. He talked for some time about planning permission and raising finance, partnerships with a specialist architect and builder, their difficulties in sourcing the correct materials and finding workers with the requisite skills. Problems with damp and wet rot. To her surprise, it fascinated her. The Hall had been dilapidated and failed to attract a buyer to restore it, which is why his proposals had eventually been accepted. The whole thing had taken several years. As he spoke and showed her before-and-after photos on his phone, Briony realized how much the place meant to him, and not simply on a financial level.
‘What about your house?’ she asked. ‘Are you going to keep it as a weekend place?’
‘To be honest, I haven’t decided. I had been going to move up here with my wife, or ex-wife, I should say. Perhaps start a family. All that stuff. It didn’t work out.’
‘I see. That’s sad.’ This must be the reason for his underlying strain.
She waited in case he wished to confide, but he merely drained his glass and looked wistful, as though miles away. Their table was ready. They gathered up their things and moved indoors.
In the gloomy restaurant, candlelight flickered over crystal and silver to create an intimate setting. The waitress brought artisan rolls and tiny patterned roundels of dewy butter; poured white wine, clear and cold.
As they waited for their starter, Greg asked her about her work, the book she’d written, how she thought the changing political situation would affect her college. She did a passable impression of the pompous Head of Department who was obsessed with statistics and the bottom line, which made Greg laugh. She wondered if he often laughed, there was something guarded about the way he broke off and pressed his lips together.
It was with embarrassment that she described what had happened to her earlier in the year, how she’d been hounded on social media. He looked horrified. ‘I’ve no time for that sort of thing,’ he said. ‘I don’t do any of it myself, Twitter and Facebook and stuff.’
‘Nor do I now, except Facebook, but I never post anything.’
They were interrupted by the arrival of the first course and for a while ate quietly, she enjoying the tastes of fresh basil and creamy mozzarella delicate upon the palate. She was glad that she hadn’t splurged out how deeply the trauma of trial-by-media had affected her, unsure as she was how sympathetic he would be. There was a side of him that seemed very cut and dried. He might be of the ‘put up and shut up’ school, a way of dealing with problems she often tried herself, but which simply hadn’t worked for her this time. Instead, as their fish and chips arrived, she asked what she’d been bursting to all evening.
‘What did your father say the other day?’
He gazed at her with eyebrows raised and she stumbled on, ‘Sorry, you kindly said you’d ask him if he knew anything about my grandfather.’
‘Ah, yes, of course.’ She sensed reluctance in him and wondered privately whether he’d wanted to avoid the subject. ‘And the other guy, what was the name?’
‘Hartmann, Paul Hartmann. What did your dad say?’
‘That’s the difficulty. He asked about you, who you were, where you’d come from, and of course there wasn’t much I could tell him, except that you were a historian and were looking into some family history.’
