Learning by Heart by Elizabeth Cooke Page A

under her nose, peering into the yard.
    And she didn’t want people.
    ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she murmured. And then, ‘I must replant the trees.’
    ‘Or there is the other option we discussed,’ Miss Miles said. ‘To sell everything, land, farmhouse, barn.’
    ‘I can’t,’ Cora said, recovering a little. ‘The terms of the will.’
    Richard’s will lay among the documents in front of them. She could look at it more calmly now: the first time, it had been terrible – she hadn’t seen it since the funeral.
    Richard had made it clear that the land and the house passed to her as an indivisible unit. When she died, it was to go to Zeph – to Persephone, my darling daughter and only child – and to her children. It wasn’t to be parcelled out, cut into pieces.
    ‘I’m sure that Mr Ward would have understood,’ Miss Miles said. ‘There would certainly be a legal way out.’
    ‘From the terms of the will?’
    ‘Yes. Would you like me to put it in writing to you?’
    ‘I’m not sure …’
    ‘Just to set out the various options, and how they might be achieved.’
    ‘All right,’ Cora agreed.
    Miss Miles had given her a patient smile. ‘I’m afraid that simply doing nothing is no longer among the options,’ she had said quietly.
    Richard had bought the farm in the spring of 1975. London retreated, with everything she had known and done there. For that, at least, she was glad.
    It was the reason she had come home: to obscure London. To obliterate it. To erase it from her life.
    She had met David Menzies the following Saturday, as she had promised.
    It had been an unusually frantic week at work: Bisley had secured a new writer and a book that excited him and, on Thursday morning, the book had been accepted by a literary publishing house. There had been all sorts of talk about it being nominated for an award. Such was the luminosity of this young author, a man of twenty-one who had recently come down from Oxford with a first. It was a curious and clever little book about the history of common objects, and she had never seen Bisley so animated. She had been taken to lunch on Thursday and Friday, first with the author and then with his newly acquired editor. Bisley had introduced Cora as his ‘right hand’ and she had felt that her world had moved on a little. She could keep up with the conversations and the gossip; they laughed at her jokes; she understood some of the literary allusions.
    So, when Menzies rang her on the Friday afternoon, she answered with a new sense of worth, of having some of the past week’s glamour. That day Bisley had remarked, as she brushed her hair before lunch, ‘Cora, you look quite reasonable today.’ He had winked at her as she smiled at him.
    ‘May I cook for you?’ David Menzies asked her, over the phone.
    She was gazing out on to the street and the patch of green square they could just glimpse from the window. It was hot, and a faint trace of autumn hung in the air the leaves of the trees were turning dry and brittle under summer’s assault.
    She didn’t think twice about it: she was still euphoric from the week’s events. ‘Yes,’ she said.
    He gave her his address, somewhere different from the workshop.
    ‘Is that where you live?’ she asked, puzzled.
    ‘It’s a friend’s flat,’ he said. ‘He’s gone away until Christmas. It doesn’t smell so much as the other place.’ He laughed.
    ‘Shall I bring anything?’
    ‘Just yourself,’ he said.
    It was a smart part of town, just behind Cheyne Walk. Unfortunately, the block of flats where David’s friend lived wasn’t as attractive as those that faced the river and the Embankment; but, nevertheless, it was Chelsea.
    He answered the door with an apron tied round his waist, and a glass in his hand. ‘Champagne,’ he said, and gave it to her.
    She took the glass on the doorstep. ‘You might have let me get over the threshold.’
    He opened the door wide, and waved her in.
    She was charmed. She