Page 51 of Finding Love at Roseford Blooms
Lizzie was sure she didn’t imagine the spreading colour in Simon’s cheeks as the woman spoke. As reality dawned. ‘Come on, Simon,’ she said quickly. ‘Shall we get that drink?’
‘Yes, Jago,’ Simon said, finally, and his voice sounded dangerously quiet. ‘I’d do what your wife says, if I were you.’
If Jago was unsettled by the juxtaposition of his wife and the brother of the woman he’d spent the night with at the wedding, he didn’t show it. He gave Simon a broad smile. ‘They always know best, don’t they?’ he said. ‘Some other time, then, Lord Treloar.’
Jago and his wife moved away from them, and Lizzie tried to wriggle her hand out of Simon’s, but it was clenched so tightly she had to settle for pulling him away towards the bar. ‘Come on,’ she said firmly. ‘Let’s get that drink.’ She was relieved when he followed her.
They grabbed a couple more glasses of Prosecco, and then Lizzie turned to Simon. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
Simon shook his head. ‘Not here. Not right now.’ He took a gulp of his wine. ‘But let’s just say if murder was legal, Jago McAvoy wouldn’t be left standing.’
Lizzie’s brow furrowed. ‘I know he was a twat to you, but is it really that bad?’
Simon looked down at her, and for a second his demeanour was so alien to the amiable man she felt she was getting to know that Lizzie felt a shard of unease worrying at her heart. How much did shereallyknow about him, after all?
‘I’m sorry,’ Simon said, and in that moment he looked like himself again. ‘I’ll explain it all, I promise, but I kind of need to get through this evening first.’ They walked over to the side of the hall, where there was a display of old photographs on fabric-lined portable boards. Lizzie, who was always fascinated by such things, couldn’t help but be drawn to them. They ranged from copies of photographs from the turn of the last century, up to the most recent crop of Cross Dean graduates, and as Lizzie’s eyes scanned them, she began to catch sight of a few familiar names.
‘Is that your dad?’ she asked Simon as he stood by her side. The display seemed to distract his attention, and Lizzie relaxed a little when she saw him smile.
‘Yup,’ Simon replied as they both spent a long moment staring at the figure in the back of one photograph. It was a shot of a group of older students, dressed in Combined Cadet Force uniforms, looking solemnly into the camera. ‘Thank god they’d mostly phased out the CCF training by the time I left so no one else had to go through it.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Lizzie teased as they followed the timeline to the period when Simon had been at the school ‘I think the military uniform kind of suits you!’ Much like the photograph of Simon’s father and his contemporaries, this one was a shot of another group of young men, around seventeen years old, dressed in stiff army attire and staring into the camera. Lizzie had no trouble in finding Simon in the picture. Despite the time lapse of twenty-one years, he was instantly recognisable.
‘I can’t say the training suited me,’ Simon said quietly. ‘But thankfully that’s all in the past now.’
Eager to trace further back into Simon’s history, knowing that a fair few generations of Treloars had attended Cross Dean, Lizzie followed the timeline backwards. There, in the turn of the last century’s intake, was a picture of someone who made her catch her breath.
‘That’s Edmund Treloar, your great-great-uncle, isn’t it?’ she asked. The serious-looking boy in the photograph stared back at her.
Simon nodded. ‘Yes. He rather took to the uniform, and enlisted into the Somerset Fusiliers straight out of school. As you know, he was killed on the Western Front a couple of years afterwards, along with most of that cohort.’
Lizzie was struck, once again, by the long line that Simon came from. It was one thing to see it at Roseford Hall, but another to see how those kinds of networks operated in the outside world. No wonder he was having worries about how he fitted into that history.
Noticing that Simon still seemed on guard and out of sorts, Lizzie suggested they get some air. ‘Why don’t you show me around while it’s quiet? I’d love to see a bit more of it.’
Simon smiled down at her and then popped his glass on a nearby table. ‘Why not? I’m hoping I’ll never have to come back here again, so I might as well take one last look.’ She had the almost tangible sense that he was pulling himself together as he said it, in order to paper over the cracks that the encounter with Jago had created, and, to a great extent, the fissures that being here had reawakened.
They headed outside into the humid summer night. All around them were the outlines of buildings fronting onto the central quad of the school. They reared up like implacable watchmen, timeless, stoic and full of history and experience, not just Simon’s, but those of the generations of students who had come before and after him.
‘It’s really rather beautiful when you put aside the hideous memories,’ Simon said quietly. Lizzie wanted to hear a light note in his voice, but couldn’t quite find it.
‘Was it that bad?’ Lizzie asked.
Simon gave a hollow laugh. ‘Some of the time I was asleep.’
And it was then that Lizzie understood exactly why Simon had been so gentle and careful with her that night he’d unknowingly rescued her from that awful stunt at that party. He’d seen, in her, something he recognised in himself. It hadn’t merely been an act of kindness; it had been an acknowledgement of a shared experience.
‘So, unlike you-know-who, you won’t be sending your children here, then?’
Simon, who had been gazing up at the spire of the school’s chapel, which formed the fourth side of the quad, turned back to her. His eyes were glistening in the moonlight, and he shook his head. ‘Never,’ he said quietly. ‘I wouldn’t put any child of mine through what I went through here.’ He tried to turn away from her, clearly embarrassed about showing so much vulnerability, but she caught his arm.
‘It’s all right, Simon,’ Lizzie said gently. ‘You saved me once. Let me do the same for you now.’ She drew him into her arms, holding him close for a long moment. She could feel him trembling, and she knew he was trying to get himself back under control, struggling not to break down in the face of so many memories.
Eventually, they broke apart, and to her surprise, Simon was smiling.
‘Thank you,’ he said softly. ‘Thank you for coming here, and for holding my hand. It means a lot to me.’
Lizzie smiled back at him. ‘Any time.’
