Summertime by Raffaella Barker

is transparent. I drum my fingers on the table and wait to hear what she has to say. She blinks, piously, several times and says, ‘We’ve decided it’s best to have the party at your house because the garden is flatter than this one for the tent. We told Giles, when we came over to look and you were out somewhere. He must have forgotten to pass it on. It’ll be such fun for you, darling, and it’ll look so pretty.’
    Desmond rushes over, hurling himself down on one knee, his eyes drooping meekly, hands clasping mine.
    â€˜Oh please, most wonderful sister, don’t say no. I meant to ask you, I kept meaning to ask you, and suddenly it mattered too much, and I couldn’t risk asking you in case you said no.’
    I swat him away impatiently. ‘Oh God, please don’t touch me. I need to think. I can’t believe you did this, you two, it’s so unscrupulous.’ My mother simpers, attempting a look of innocence and extreme scrupulousness and managing only to look cross-eyed. I am utterly pole-axed by the nerve of them, but also obscurely flattered. My own wedding, without the bother of being the bride. Cannot make out whether this is a good thing or not, but the bite and the fight have been knocked out of me.
    â€˜Oh, well, I suppose it’s too late to do anything, so I haven’t any choice. The invitations are all printed, and you’ve even sent some already, haven’t you?’ My mother nods, head on one side, doing her meek look. I shall get some form of reprisal. I must. I have achieved all the H surnames on the list, and am looking forward to I, which only contains one person, a mysterious-sounding ‘Incie Wincie I-Boy’, who lives ‘c/o White City Greyhound Stadium’, when there is a knock on the door and the Reverend Trevor Heel slithers in past a cacophony of barking, licking dogs. He, unlike any of the canines, is wearing a collar, and it peeps crisply above his grey flannel shirt.
    â€˜Good morning my dears, good morning,’ he beams, patting dogs and sniffing as if to get his bearings in the noisy, smoky kitchen. He is a big fan of my mother, and has brought her a piece of the WookeyHole as a memento of his recent visit there. Of course my mother uses his arrival as an opportunity to get the sherry out, and the pair of them lean on the rail of the smoke-blackened Rayburn, chatting and dodging the extended limbs and tails of sleeping cats and drying washing festooned on the rack above.
    The new master of Crumbly has agreed to let the church hold the biannual car boot sale there this year,’ says Reverend Heel, sipping his sherry as elegantly as a man can when it is presented in a half-pint beer mug. ‘He’s a chap called Sale, Hedley Sale. He was old Peter Crumb’s nearest relation, some sort of nephew, I understand. You may have met him, Venetia, he’s your neighbour more than ours, really, isn’t he?’ and Rev. Trev dimples at me and pats a wisp of his grey hair back down across his brow. He continues, ‘I’m glad to see the place alive again, although no one seems to know if he’ll be living here full-time or not. He may go back to America to continue teaching. It’s a shame he can’t do it here.’
    â€˜What does he teach?’ asks my mother, more interested in whether there’s any more sherry now that Desmond and I have helped ourselves, than in the man who owns all the fields and woodland we like to walk in.
    â€˜I think he teaches Latin and Greek at an Americanuniversity,’ said the Vicar, ‘I’m not sure which one. But certainly it’s the classics. Your subject, Araminta, if I remember rightly.’ He throws a twinkling glance towards my mother, positively roguish except that he waves an arm as well, and becomes entangled in a trailing and ragged towel from the rack above him, and somehow gets the end in his mouth. Desmond and I exchange a look.