Learning by Heart Read Online Free Page B

bank. I have to see the solicitor this morning. I’ve had to find the deeds …’
    ‘This is from Italy,’ he said.
    She was half-way to the stove. Blake put the parcel on the long oak table, and sat down, rubbing his hands and glancing out of the window. ‘Coming into leaf, are we,’ he asked, ‘down there?’
    ‘Not yet,’ she murmured. ‘Soon.’ She looked at the parcel.
    ‘Did you know that the Sampsons are selling up?’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘You mean the house?’
    ‘The whole place. There was an auction sign on the fence when I came by this morning.’
    She shook her head. ‘I haven’t seen them in weeks.’
    ‘Somebody told me they were going to their daughter’s in Spain.’
    She brought the teapot and cups to the table.
    Blake watched as she poured the tea, and handed him a mug. She smiled at him. She had known him for years; known him as a round-faced boy of twelve coming up to help with harvest. Seen him married; seen him divorced. She worried about him from time to time; she wanted very much, with what she supposed was sheer nosiness, to ask if there was another woman at home for him now. He was the sort of man who needed a wife, someone waiting for him, filling his empty house, making it a home, giving him children. But Cora wasn’t used to asking such questions and he was not the kind of man to volunteer information about himself. So she watched him as he drank her tea every other day, and went on wondering.
    ‘You’re not worrying too much, I hope,’ he said, ‘about all this. About the money.’
    She raised her eyebrows.
    ‘You’ll not sell, like them?’
    Her eyes strayed again to the parcel, but she made no move to open it, or even to bring it closer to her. ‘I don’t think I have a choice,’ she told him.
    ‘But you’ve had this place a long time.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thirty years.’
    And she looked long and hard now at the brown-paper package. There was a white label on the front, covered with a printed, flowing sepia script, a company name, bearing a large postage seal in one corner, and a line of stamps.
    Blake followed her gaze and turned the parcel towards him with a fingertip. ‘Syracusa, Sicily,’ he said idly. ‘Who do you know in Sicily?’
    Thirty years.
    She had been born in Sherborne. She was a local girl, who couldn’t wait to get out of the county. It was the end of the fifties when a schoolfriend at Leweston had told her that her father was letting his house in Camden. She was asked to go, with another girl, and she had leaped at the chance. She remembered getting on to the train – the little railway station within sight of the abbey – one Saturday morning, her mother and father standing anxiously on the platform.
    ‘You’ll be careful?’ her mother had said. ‘You’ll phone us tonight?’
    ‘Yes,’ she had replied, already far away in her head, too excited to care what they were thinking or whether they were worried.
    ‘Listen to your mother,’ her father had admonished, rather half-heartedly. He often feigned disapproval, and was terribly bad at it. She saw his kindliness. She had noticed, as she slammed the train door, that her mother had taken her father’s hand surreptitiously, and tried to hide the gesture behind the folds of her skirt.
    Cora had leaned out of the window. ‘I will ring,’ she had promised, ‘and write.’
    She had sat down, after a brief wave, to watch impatiently as the countryside went past: Temple Combe, where she had spent most of her teenage years helping in a riding stables; Buckhorn Weston, where her mother’s friend had the rectory and an idyllic garden full of old English roses, and almost too full of scent. She watched as all the beautiful names blurred away – Abbas Combe, Fifehead Magdalen, Coppleridge – and the train gathered speed, great clouds of steam rushing by the windows, and they left behind Cranborne Chase and Salisbury, and wound on into ever more populated suburbs, until finally they