Swallowtail Summer by Erica James

Author:Erica James [James, Erica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409173786
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2019-02-12T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Five

Back from the station, and following a relaxing day of being alone on the river with Valentina and sharing his love of the Broads with her, Alastair left her to show Nikolai and Irina upstairs to their rooms.

It was strange hearing Valentina conversing with her stepchildren in their native tongue. The challenge of learning Russian, as well as brushing up on his rusty schoolboy French, was another of the many new things Alastair planned to do. He saw his future as being as diametrically opposite to his past as was possible.

But for now he had a more pressing and potentially more difficult challenge on his hands, that of bringing about a truce with Simon. To make that happen, he was determined to do his utmost to keep things fun and light-hearted this evening. With Nikolai and Irina here, along with Laura and her son from the Mill, he hoped for a livelier and more diverse atmosphere, and less opportunity for Simon, or anyone else for that matter, to hark back with nostalgic longing to days gone by, and in the process exclude Valentina.

He’d anticipated a few hurdles to cross when introducing Valentina to his friends, but he hadn’t expected the level of hostility Simon was displaying. He also hadn’t expected to feel that, to a degree, they had all been living in the past, wanting to relive it at the slightest chance. Even the children had a tendency to dwell on the past. At their age shouldn’t they be looking forwards to the future, not looking back? Or was he judging his friends unfairly; was there nothing wrong with a fondness for nostalgia? Surely that was one of the pleasures of their gathering here at Linston End?

Alone in the kitchen while everybody else was upstairs changing, Alastair savoured the appetising smell of lasagne cooking on a low heat in the oven, along with some kind of Moroccan vegetable bake, which Sylvia had suggested she make in case any of the guests were vegetarian. A large covered bowl of salad was on the worktop, along with some garlic bread and a selection of canapés, which he’d been instructed to put in the oven once the guests were all present. Sylvia’s written instructions were Sellotaped to the fridge. It wasn’t that she went out of her way to treat him as a child, or a hopeless man who didn’t know his way round his own kitchen, it was just her way of being thorough. She had treated Orla in exactly the same manner and it had infuriated her, driving her to disregard any directive with deliberate wilfulness. Alastair suspected that Valentina might react similarly.

Was it overly simplistic to say that in general, women didn’t like being told what to do by another woman? Or was it only a certain type of woman? Orla and Sorrel could never take an instruction from each other; they’d always had to assert themselves to get one over the other. And Sorrel had done a fair

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