A Starlit Summer

by Kate Frost

  ‘This is going to be a money pit.’ Tony remained in the doorway with his arms folded. He looked at Kath. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to sell it, love?’

  ‘I’m positive. It’s been in my family for decades. It was my grandma and grandad’s before it was Aunt Vi’s. I have such lovely memories of being here as a child. I want us to be able to enjoy it; I want other people to enjoy it too, so all the more reason to get it done up and in a fit state to start renting out.’

  Jenna poked her head into the living room. It smelt stale like the windows hadn’t been opened in years. ‘It is the most amazing location for a holiday let, Dad.’

  ‘Jenna’s right. We’ll have no trouble renting it out.’

  ‘Once the bloody place is done up.’

  ‘Stop moaning; you’re going to love planning how we’re going to transform this place.’

  ‘Yeah, from blinking two hundred odd miles away.’

  The living room was sparse with a velvet armchair and a flowery two-seater sofa. The fireplace had a large stone surround with a small gas fire in front of it; Jenna hoped the original fireplace was hidden behind. Two windows looked out over the gardens at the front and the back, a sea of green framing them, overgrown shrubs blocking out both the light and most of the view.

  ‘That’ll be a lovely room once it’s done up.’ Jenna returned to the kitchen to find her dad still frowning, and her mum delving into cupboards. ‘It’s got the original slate floor too, that’s something positive, Dad.’ She tapped her foot against a dark grey slate tile.

  Tony grunted.

  She smiled. ‘I’m going to look upstairs.’

  Tony nodded and headed for the living room. Kath wiped her dusty hands down her jeans, and wrinkled her nose as she leant over the Belfast sink and fought to open the window. Jenna went up the creaky stairs that started by the kitchen and curved round, ending on a large landing with windows to the front and back of the house. Upstairs felt more spacious than downstairs. The landing, which was actually the size of a small double bedroom, was cluttered with old newspapers, an ironing board, stacks of boxes, and a large butterfly palm in a pot, its drooping leaves edged with brown. But it was lighter too as the windows were clear of foliage and not as dirty as the ones downstairs. There were two decent-sized bedrooms and a bathroom with a roll-top bath, white sink and loo, all reasonably tasteful apart from the mismatched pink and olive green swirly tiles that decorated half of the wall.

  Jenna went back on to the landing. ‘Mum!’ she called down the stairs. ‘I’ve found what needs sorting.’

  Kath took the stairs two at a time. Her face dropped at the sight of the clutter. ‘We should have hired a skip.’

  ‘That’s all right, love,’ Tony said, joining them on the landing. ‘I’m quite happy to take stuff to the tip while you two sort.’

  ~

  Fully aware of what limited time they had, they got stuck in. Kath started upstairs, going through the boxes on the landing before tackling her aunt’s bedroom. It was the best kept room in the place with a dressing table still filled with powders, lipsticks, perfume and her jewellery box. Jenna started downstairs in the kitchen, rifling through the dusty, cobwebbed cupboards. She pulled everything out and placed them in piles of things to go to the tip, things to sell, and things her mum might want to keep. The third pile remained pretty small, while the one for the tip grew as most of Aunt Vi’s kitchen equipment was either ancient or broken. There were a few gems among the rubbish, a couple of enamelled dishes and blue-rimmed cups that Jenna put to one side. As they got on with the jobs, the cottage filled with their chatter, a stark contrast, Jenna thought, to the way Aunt Vi must have lived with only herself for company.

  They carried on sorting until they were hot, tired and it became too dark to see in the dim landing light. Tony managed one trip to the tip before it closed, but he went out again later to get fish and chips, and the three of them sat in the living room, eating straight out of the paper.

  ‘It’s sad, isn’t it, thinking of Aunt Vi living here on her own.’ Kath crumpled her empty fish and chip paper. ‘We really should have made the effort to visit her.’

  ‘It’s not like she gave you the choice though, did she? She was adamant she didn’t like visitors; not a lot you can do when someone feels so strongly.’ Tony collected the used wrappings and took them out to the kitchen.

  ‘But she only had us, no one else,’ she called after him.

  ‘Well,’ he said, returning to the living room, ‘she couldn’t have minded too much about us not forcing ourselves upon her. After all, she left this place to you.’

  ‘Well yes, but only because she didn’t have anyone else to leave it to.’

  Whatever Aunt Vi’s reasoning for being on her own, and for leaving her cottage to her niece, Jenna was pleased that she had. Despite the grubby corners, the cobwebs, the out-datedness, there was a charm about the place. It was also blissfully peaceful. Back at her London flat there was constant noise whatever time of day: cars whooshing past, the drone of a radio or TV filtering through open windows; drunken shouts late at night.

  Kath had brought bedding, so they stripped the beds, hoovered the mattresses and made them up with fresh, clean sheets, pillows and duvets. Jenna had thought her mum had been over the top packing the car with so many extra things, but lying in the clean bed, the smell of freshly laundered sheets enveloping her, she was beyond glad. Even though she kept her flat reasonably clean, it wasn’t the same as being here with the sash window wedged open, fresh country air and the scent of blossom and damp soil drifting in. The window of her bedroom back home looked out over the main road – car fumes, greasy chips from the Chinese, and her neighbour smoking pot were the less pleasant smells. Living close to London was essential for acting work, but the pull of the countryside was never far away.

  Chapter Three

  It was the peacefulness that woke Jenna the next morning. She hadn’t felt the need to draw the curtains, and had left the window open allowing cool fresh air in. No one overlooked the cottage; she didn’t know where the nearest neighbour was, but if there was another house close by it was hidden by trees.

  She’d slept in the spare bedroom, sparse apart from the bed, a chest of drawers and peeling flowery wallpaper stained from the damp. A stack of letters was piled on the wooden window seat and, warmed by the morning sun streaming in, Jenna sat and looked through them. The same spidery handwriting appeared in every one. The ink was faded and the cream paper yellowed at the edges. They were in date order though, starting from April 1940 with the last letter dated September 1941. All were addressed to ‘My dearest Vivian’ and signed off with ‘All my love, Henry’. Tucked in among them was a black and white moth-eaten photograph of a man in a soldiers’ uniform who she assumed was Henry.

  Jenna put the letters back exactly as she’d found them, unsure if she really wanted to pry into the private life of her spinster great aunt or to find out the presumably sad story of why she ended up alone.

  Breakfast was a quick bowl of cereal while they leant against the kitchen counter, and then Jenna and Kath continued to sort through Aunt Vi’s belongings. Paperwork, photograph albums or anything of particular interest, they put straight into the boot of the car to be sorted out at home. The aim of the weekend was to empty the house of everything that wasn’t to be kept, in preparation for the builders to start work. It felt weird for Jenna to go through the personal items of a woman she’d only met a couple of times. Over the day she pieced together more about her great aunt, a woman who loved crosswords and knitting, kept piles of old Radio Times, had china dogs on the shelves but didn’t have any family photos on show apart from one of her parents. Jenna bundled up the letters from the window seat and put them in the box of things for her mum to take home. It upset her to think that any chance of happiness with the Henry who wrote the letters had been short-lived.

  Tony had been proactive in contacting builders before they’d come down to Cornwall and one buil
der came by to give a quote in the morning. Another was scheduled for the afternoon. Jenna liked the way her parents were cracking on with the place. She guessed it was a less emotional job when it was a distant relative. She understood their worry about it being financially draining, but like her mum, she was pleased the place wasn’t going to be sold. She imagined coming down here for a holiday with friends once it was finished.

  It was typical March weather; a cluster of dark clouds filled the sky early in the day and short sharp showers dumped heavy rainfall, yet by the afternoon the grey clouds had dispersed and high white clouds with pockets of blue allowed sunshine through. Hot and dusty, Jenna escaped to explore the garden. The drive was to one side of the cottage and the garden surrounded the other three sides. There was a smaller area to the front, with the raised lawn surrounded by borders that she’d briefly seen when they’d arrived. A weed-filled path meandered from the front lawn around the side of the house to a much larger area of overgrown lawn at the back. It was hard to see where the garden ended. The edges were shaded by trees, enough to warrant calling it a wood. Where the garden did eventually end, it was edged by a weathered wooden fence with a view across fields to patches of woodland. Was that the sea in the distance? Jenna tried to make out if the blue was sea or sky, thinking how amazing it would be if it really was a sea view, however far away. A cottage in Cornwall with a partial sea view. How lucky had Great Aunt Vi been to live here. Jenna turned back and looked at the wild garden through the trees. Had her great aunt ever really appreciated the place or spent any time out in the garden? It was evident that she hadn’t recently. It was sad to think she’d been on her own for so long. There was a battered picnic table on the overgrown lawn at the front, but she didn’t imagine a ninety-two-year-old lady struggling up the steps and through the long grass to sit out there even on a beautifully sunny summer’s day.

  Jenna wandered back through the wooded depths of the garden. Once the grass was cut and the foliage among the trees was thinned out, it would not only open up the garden and make it spacious, but it would draw the eye to the woodland. It was a fairy-tale setting. Jenna imagined summer parties outside, bunting strung through the trees, the lawn filled with people, and barbecue smoke drifting into the air.

  Tyres crunched on the drive and Jenna caught sight of ‘Harrison & Son Builders’ in grey and red on the side of a van. She headed back round to the front of the cottage to find her mum and continue sorting through the kitchen cupboards.

  Jenna caught snippets of the conversation as her dad gave the builder a tour of the cottage, starting upstairs.

  ‘If you want work to start over the summer, it will mostly be my son working on it as I’ll be busy on another job,’ the builder said. ‘But a place like this we can squeeze you in...’

  ‘What if it’s a two-man job like the kitchen?’

  Their footsteps clumped downstairs and Jenna looked up from the kitchen cupboard she was emptying at a tall, broad, tanned man with greying hair emerging into the room with her dad.

  ‘I’ll be available for bigger jobs when more than one person is needed, like the roof for starters. We have an electrician we work with and we can do everything from the windows, gutting the kitchen, plastering the walls, fitting a new kitchen... whatever needs doing.’

  ‘That sounds great; we want this place up and running as soon as possible.’

  ‘Money pit otherwise, isn’t it?’ The builder shook Tony’s hand. ‘I’ll get you a comprehensive quote by tomorrow, then we can take it from there.’

  Tony walked him out of the cottage and Jenna watched them go past the front window. A car door slammed, an engine started and then silence returned as the van drove away.

  ‘I like the sound of them,’ Tony said, re-joining Jenna in the kitchen. ‘How are you and your mum getting on?’

  ‘Okay. I just had a little break. Have you seen the garden? It’s loads bigger than I thought. It’ll be amazing once it’s been tamed.’

  Kath joined them in the kitchen with flushed cheeks and a duster in her hand. ‘I think we might have to come up another weekend and finish sorting a few things out. But we’re getting there.’

  ~

  The cottage played on Jenna’s mind long after she got back home. Everything about it felt special: the location, its setting, the promise of what it would be like given enough love and attention – and money of course. Although the cottage was never a place she’d spent any time at as a child, unlike her mum, it was somewhere she wanted to return to.

  But the call of London and work drew her back into city life. Jobs trickled in, confirming for Jenna what she loved about being an actor, the variety of things she got to do. One day she found herself as part of a select group of walk-on actors on a period film in a private mansion just off the M25; the next day she was off to central London for a casting in an indie film; the following week she was on a train to Cardiff to stay overnight with a friend before a two-day shoot on Casualty playing a young woman who’d been beaten up by her boyfriend. Despite the early call times, the long days, and often a lot of waiting around, Jenna could hardly call her job boring; she rarely knew what she’d be doing from one week to the next, something she thrived on. She knew her parents didn’t understand how she could be comfortable with the unpredictability of work, along with often not knowing the location of the shoot until the evening before, but Jenna craved the excitement and flexibility. She’d never had an office job in her life and she was going to keep it that way.

  The dreary wet days of March gave way to spring and sunshine, fresh days with patchy blue sky, more blossom on the trees, and the distant promise of summer. Jenna worked as much as possible, always saying yes to jobs passed to her by her agent and putting herself forward for castings as often as she could. The one thing that frustrated her about the bit-parts she was getting was the thought that she could have had a steady job on a major movie, if it wasn’t for Heidi. At least Heidi being tied up with filming meant that Jenna avoided having to see her.

  ~

  Jenna gritted her teeth as she waited for the Tube doors to slide open, praying it wouldn’t be packed and she’d have to stand jammed against someone’s smelly armpit. She breathed a sigh of relief as she found an empty seat opposite a woman reading House & Home. It had been a long day with a 5am call time, an hour in costume and make-up to be turned into a character who looked the worse for wear after a night out in central London. She’d spent the day filming in a grubby back alley behind restaurants in Soho. She’d endured take after take of being chased along the lane and slammed against a bin by an actor called Harry who was lovely and polite in real life, but was playing a thug called Jay in the scene. Her shoulders ached from being grabbed and Harry had apologised profusely after each take. Despite that, it was one of those days that was immensely enjoyable because she got to actually act and be a part of a pivotal scene and story, plus Harry, with his chiselled jaw, bright blue eyes and muscles, was easy on the eye. But it was physically exhausting and not at all glamorous, and made Jenna fume at the thought of Heidi and what an amazing time she would most certainly be having.

  Jenna yawned, rubbed her eyes and hugged her bag. The make-up artists had done their best to remove the dirt and fake blood that had been smeared down the side of her face, but she was longing for a shower to fully remove it. She definitely still had some in her hair. A hot shower and something to eat before falling into bed, alone but with thoughts of Harry playing over and over, was what she craved.

  The image on the front cover of House & Home was of a country cottage kitchen, all cream units and a central island with a wooden work surface, purple rhododendrons in a vase and dried herbs hanging from a mint-green rack beneath a wall unit. It took Jenna back to Aunt Vi’s cottage and what the kitchen could look like once its old-fashioned units were transformed into a smart new cream kitchen to offset the delicious dark grey of the original slate floor.

  The Tube pulled into the station. More commuters piled on; a
smart-suited shiny-shoed man with a briefcase sat down with a thump next to her. Maybe Jenna would buy a copy of House & Home on her way home; it could be her bedtime reading, imagining what the cottage could become. The builders had already been booked, her dad had been quite happy with the father and son team he’d spoken to when they’d been in Cornwall, but there was no harm in Jenna coming up with some ideas. After all, once the place was done up she hoped she’d at least be able to spend a bit of time down there, perhaps with someone special. A blue-eyed, tanned and toned actor like Harry would do rather nicely.

  ~

  Jenna got off the Tube and emerged from the Underground into dusk. She wrapped her chunky knit cardigan tighter and set off down the road. Her phone beeped. Two missed calls, all while she’d been on the Underground and from her agent too. She listened to her voicemail.

  ‘Jenna, call me back as soon as you can. Thanks, hun.’

  Jenna quickened her pace. It was late and she’d be lucky if she made it home before it got dark. She’d had an insanely long day, and the last thing she wanted to think about was more work. Part of her was too nervous to phone Beth back in case she had a last minute job lined up for tomorrow. She shouldn’t have that attitude, she knew, but she was dog-tired and the thought of another early start and a long day of shooting made her feel even too tired to tackle the ten-minute walk home.

  At a crossing she phoned her agent back.

  ‘Jenna, hun. Sorry to phone you late, I know you’ve been working all day. I hear it went well, they were super impressed with you.’