Read Online Blue Bedroom and Other Stories by Rosamunde Pilcher - Free Book Online Page A

last moment, or the postman with greetings telegrams for the happy couple. But then the front door opened, and a man’s voice called out, “Anybody around?” and it was, unmistakably, the best man, William Boscawan.
    He was the last person she wanted to see. Laurie froze, silent and still as a shadow. She heard him cross the hall and open the kitchen door. “Anybody there?”
    Still soundless, she walked down into the heat of the garden and crossed the sloping lawn. The breeze caught her long, fragile skirts and blew the airy fabric against her legs, and the soles of the new sandals slipped a little on the dry grass. She reached the gate in the fuchsia hedge and nobody had called her back. She closed the gate and went on down the path to the cedar house.
    The door was unlocked. It had never been locked. She went in and smelt the fragrance of the cedar panelling, and tobacco smoke, and a whiff of the bay rum that the old man had always used on his hair. The narrow hallway was hung with photographs of the ships he had commanded. She saw his huge Burmese temple gong, and the antlers of the wildebeeste he had once shot in South Africa. She opened the door of his living room and went in, and there were the worn Persian rugs, the sagging leather chairs. It was very warm; a bluebottle buzzed against the closed windows on the opposite side of the room. She went across and undid the latch of the window and it slid aside. The stuffy abandoned room was filled with a great gust of air. Laurie stepped out onto the verandah, and the flood tide lapped at the sea wall below her feet, and the estuary was blue as the sky and dappled with sun pennies.
    *   *   *
    Laurie felt suddenly exhausted, as though, in order to get here, she had walked for miles. Grandfa’s chair stood by the telescope. She sat in it, cautiously spreading the skirts of her dress so that they should not crush. She leaned back her head and closed her eyes.
    Small sounds began impinging on her consciousness. Traffic sounds from the distant causeway, the slapping waters of the high tide, the scream of a solitary gull. She thought that if she could just sit here, alone, undisturbed, for the rest of the day … not go to the wedding, not talk to anybody …
    Somewhere a door opened. The draught this caused through the house stirred Grandfa’s heavy curtains. Laurie opened her eyes but did not move.
    The door shut again, and then footsteps came through the house. The next moment William appeared at the open window. He stepped over the sill and stood looking down at Laurie. Even in that moment of dismay, she had time to admit to herself that in his morning suit with the best man’s white carnation, he looked sensational. The stiff white collar accentuated his tan, his black hair matched the sombre coat, his shoes were gleaming. He wasn’t good-looking. He wasn’t even handsome, but his sheer masculinity, his smile, his blue and sparkling eyes added up to an attraction that was impossible to ignore.
    He said, “Hello, Laurie.”
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” she asked him. “Aren’t you meant to be supporting Andrew and getting him to the church on time?”
    William grinned. “Andrew’s as cool as a cucumber,” he told her. He went back indoors and returned with a chair which he set down and then sat in, facing Laurie, with his long legs stretched out in front of him and his hands in his trouser pockets. “But a little anxious about confetti in the suitcases. So I came over to fetch Jane’s luggage, and we’re going to hide it in some unsuspected car. He says he doesn’t mind about tin cans tied to the bumper, or even kippers hidden in the engine, but he does object to confetti being spread all over the hotel bedroom floor.”
    â€œDid you see Jane?”
    â€œNo, but your father fetched her stuff down. It was then that he realised you were nowhere