Illegal Action

49

The view of the lake had not changed for a hundred years (when the last of the woodland had been felled), and Letitia Cottingham had been alive for eighty-six of them. This morning as she took her small constitutional around the box hedge of the terrace, she wondered vaguely who all these people were flitting in and out of her house.

Perhaps they would have a party. That would be nice, like her childhood again, those days before the war when Thomas, her brother, would bring friends all the way from Cambridge to stay. The house was filled with laughing voices then, and they played lawn tennis and swam just down there, next to the boathouse. In the evenings there was dancing, and she was allowed to stay up and watch from the stairs.

But it had all ended with the war. The locals had been unhappy when Thomas had enlisted in the British Army—some of their mutterings had been positively pro-German. But even they had shown sympathy after that bleak morning when the postman had cycled up the drive, carrying the telegram announcing Thomas’s death at El Alamein.

Her parents had never recovered; both were dead within five years. And so the place had come down to her—plain Letitia Cottingham, whom nobody had wanted to marry until she had inherited the estate. She’d had her revenge, saying no to half a dozen suitors after that, and though she had never made a success of the place—selling off parcels of land every few years—she was still here. The roof leaked so badly there were buckets in the attic; the sash windows were rotten to the core; woodworm and rot in the floorboards meant that half the bedrooms were uninhabitable; but the fact was, the house was still Letitia’s. They would have to carry her out with her boots on.

The new carer was nice. Better than the last one who’d come from Dublin and seemed to hate the countryside. What was this girl’s name? Svetlana? Something like that. From one of those countries in Eastern Europe everyone used to complain about. She was such a gentle girl, even if her English wasn’t very good. Her friends were nice as well, though those foreign men who’d been the week before were rather brusque. And that unpleasant woman. Still, it was good to have life in the old place again.