Read Online Last Guests of the Season by Sue Gee - Free Book Online Page A

jug.’
    Together they went to the back door and Robert pulled it open. Immediately there was a swift movement: the cat, who had been waiting, slunk down the stone steps and looked up at them.
    â€˜I told you she was hungry.’ Tom made eating noises. ‘Come on, puss, here you are, don’t be frightened.’
    Robert poured milk and stepped back into the doorway; he stood watching the cat’s cautious approach up the steps again, and her eager lapping. Tom, squatting beside her, knocked the saucer and reached out to stroke the staring fur.
    â€˜I really wouldn’t,’ said Robert, automatically.
    Footsteps came lightly along the passage: he turned to see Frances, in stone-coloured shorts and pale blue shirt, move towards the stairs. How had this woman, formal to the point of primness, produced this clumsy and eccentric child? He thought again of the curious expression on her face last night when she looked at Claire, and shook his head, musing, as she climbed the stairs.
    More footsteps, brisker and heavier.
    â€˜How are we getting on?’ Claire came into the kitchen, carrying a rucksack. ‘We’ll take fruit and crisps, shall we? And I’ll make up a bottle of squash.’ She looked at the unfinished bowl of washing-up, and the open door, and raised an eyebrow. Robert nodded towards Tom; she came to look.
    â€˜Oh, Tom – that mangy animal! I don’t think you should touch her.’
    â€˜If you succeed in stopping him, you’re a better man than I.’ Robert returned to the sink, hearing Tom say fiercely: ‘She’s not mangy,’ and Claire, as he had done, sigh and accept defeat.
    â€˜What about the dinghy?’ she asked, pouring concentrated squash into an empty plastic bottle.
    â€˜Do we know where the foot pump is?’
    â€˜Not exactly, but I can look.’
    â€˜Leave it,’ said Robert. He tipped up the bowl and let the water drain, with painful slowness, down the plughole. ‘There’s plenty of time. I haven’t even seen the river yet, what with drives to the airport and all that. Let’s just get down there, for God’s sake.’
    The path to the river led through maize fields, reached by walking down the hill and along the cobbled streets through the village. It was after half-past ten by the time they set out, the air hot and still, the sky without a cloud. They all wore sunhats; their sandals slapped on the stones. From the hillside the erratic church bell now rang steadily for mass; coming down the hill towards the intersection of streets they saw, ahead, one or two families walking slowly towards the main road in their Sunday best, the men and boys in open-necked white shirts and shiny flares, the women in brightly patterned frocks. Two old ladies in black, on sticks, followed slowly.
    â€˜Did you go to a service last year?’ Oliver asked Claire.
    â€˜No, never. We went inside to have a look, of course, but not to an actual service.’ She turned to look at him. He was wearing loose cotton trousers, a faded blue T-shirt and cream cotton jacket; with his Panama hat and glasses, carrying his book, he looked, she thought, like something out of Bloomsbury, the family bag of swimming things in his other hand almost as incongruous as it would have looked on Strachey, or Duncan Grant. She hadn’t given much thought to Bloomsbury for a while. It was years since she’d taught The Waves at A level, and even then, she realised, she had connected it with life at university and the kind of intensity she used to associate with Frances, not life as it had since become: pleasurably ordinary, filled with children. Brilliant, neurotic Bloomsbury had produced, as far as she could remember, few children.
    They walked past a stone wall covered in blackberry brambles.
    â€˜Why?’ she asked Oliver. ‘Would you like to go to a service?’
    â€˜Perhaps. Might be interesting, don’t you