Summer Of Love. Marion Lennox

and T-shirts and sweaters. He thought briefly of the lawyer and his invitation to dinner in Dublin and found himself smiling.

      Jo glanced up. ‘What?’

      ‘Is this why you said no to our lawyer’s invite? I can’t see a single little black dress.’

      ‘I don’t have a use for ’em,’ she said curtly.

      ‘You know, there’s a costume gallery here,’ he said and she stared.

      ‘A costume gallery?’

      ‘A store of the very best of what the Conaills have worn for every grand event in their history. Someone in our past has decided that clothes need to be kept as well as paintings. I found the storeroom last night. Full of mothballs and gold embroidery. So if you need to dress up...’

      She stared at him for a long moment, as if she was almost tempted—and then she gave a rueful smile and shook her head and tugged out the roll. ‘I can’t see me going out to dinner with our lawyer in gold embroidery. Can you? But if you want to see this...’ She tossed the roll on the bed and it started to uncurl on its own.

      Fascinated, he leaned over and twitched the end so the whole thing unrolled onto the white coverlet.

      And it was as much as he could do not to gasp.

      This room could almost be a servant’s room, it was so bare. It was painted white, with a faded white coverlet on the bed. There were two dingy paintings on the wall, not very good, scenes of the local mountains. They looked as if they’d been painted by a long ago Conaill, with visions of artistic ability not quite managed.

      But there was nothing ‘not quite managed’ about the tapestry on the bed. Quite simply, it lit the room.

      It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. It was colour upon colour upon colour.

      It was fire.

      Did it depict Australia’s Outback? Maybe, he thought, but if so it must be an evocation of what that could be like. This was ochre-red country, wide skies and slashes of river. There were wind-bent eucalypts with flocks of white cockatoos screeching from tree to tree... There were so many details.

      And yet not. At first he could only see what looked like burning: flames with colour streaking through, heat, dry. And then he looked closer and it coalesced into its separate parts without ever losing the sense of its whole.

      The thing was big, covering half the small bed, and it wasn’t finished. He could see bare patches with only vague pencil tracing on the canvas, but he knew instinctively that these pencil marks were ideas only, that they could change.

      For this was no paint by numbers picture. This was...

      Breathtaking.

      ‘This should be over the mantel in the great hall,’ he breathed and she glanced up at him, coloured and then bit her lip and shook her head.

      ‘Nope.’

      ‘What do you do with them?’

      ‘Give them to people I like. You can have this if you want. You pulled me out of a bog.’

      And once more she’d taken his breath away.

      ‘You just...give them away?’

      ‘What else would I do with them?’

      He was still looking at the canvas, seeing new images every time he looked. There were depths and depths and depths. ‘Keep them,’ he said softly. ‘Make them into an exhibition.’

      ‘I don’t keep stuff.’

      He hauled his attention from the canvas and stared at her. ‘Nothing?’

      ‘Well, maybe my bike.’

      ‘Where do you live?’

      ‘Where I can rent a room with good light for sewing. And where my sound system doesn’t cause a problem. I like my music loud.’ She shrugged. ‘So there’s another thing I own—a great speaker system to plug into my phone. Oh, and toothbrushes and stuff.’

      ‘I don’t get it.’ He thought suddenly of his childhood, of his mother weeping because she’d dropped a plate belonging to her own mother. There’d been tears for a ceramic thing. And yet...his focus was drawn again to the tapestry. That Jo could work so hard for this, put so much of herself in it and then give it away...

      ‘You reckon I need a shrink because I don’t own stuff?’ she asked and he shook his head.

      ‘No. Though I guess...’

      ‘I did see someone once,’ she interrupted. ‘When I was fifteen. I was a bit...wild. I got sent to a home for troublesome adolescents and they gave me a few sessions with a psychoanalyst. She hauled out a memory of me at eight, being moved on from a foster home. There was a fire engine I played with. I’d been there a couple of years so I guess I thought it was mine. When I went to pack, my foster mum told me it was a foster kid toy and I couldn’t take it. The shrink told me it was significant, but I don’t need a fire engine now. I don’t need anything.’

      He cringed for her. She’d said it blithely, as if it was no big deal, but he knew the shrink was right. This woman was wounded. ‘Jo, the money we’re both inheriting will give you security,’ he said gently. ‘No one can take your fire engine now.’

      ‘I’m over wanting fire engines.’

      ‘Really?’

      And she managed a smile at that. ‘Well, if it was a truly excellent fire engine...’

      ‘You’d consider?’

      ‘I might,’ she told him. ‘Though I might have to get myself a Harley with a trailer to carry it. Do Harleys come with trailers? I can’t see it. Meanwhile, is it lunchtime?’

      He checked his watch. ‘Past. Uh oh. We need to face Mrs O’Reilly. Jo, you’ve been more than generous. You don’t have to face her.’

      ‘I do,’ she said bluntly. ‘I don’t run away. It’s not my style.’

      * * *

      Mrs O’Reilly had made them lunch but Finn wasn’t sure how she’d done it. Her swollen face said she’d been weeping for hours.

      She placed shepherd’s pie in front of them and stood back, tried to speak and failed.

      ‘I can’t...’ she managed.

      ‘Mrs O’Reilly, there’s no need to say a thing.’ Jo reached for the pie and ladled a generous helping onto her plate. ‘Not when you’ve made me pie. But I do need dead horse.’

      ‘Dead horse?’ Finn demanded, bemused, and Jo shook her head in exasperation.

      ‘Honestly, don’t you guys know anything? First, dead horse is Australian for sauce and second, shepherd’s pie without sauce is like serving fish without chips. Pie and sauce, fish and chips, roast beef with Yorkshire pud... What sort of legacy are you leaving for future generations if you don’t know that?’

      He grinned and Mrs O’Reilly sniffed and sniffed again and then beetled for the kitchen. She returned with four different sauce bottles.

      Jo checked them out and discarded three with disgust.

      ‘There’s only one. Tomato sauce, pure, unadulterated. Anything else is a travesty. Thank you, Mrs O’Reilly, this is wonderful.’

      ‘It’s not,’ the woman stammered. ‘I was cruel to you.’

      ‘I’ve done some research into my mother over the years,’ Jo said, concentrating on drawing wiggly lines of sauce across her pie. ‘She doesn’t seem like she was good to anyone. She wasn’t even good to me and I was her daughter. I can only imagine what sort of demanding princess she was when she was living here. And Grandpa didn’t leave you provided for after all those years of service from you and your husband. I’d have been mean to me if I were you