Read Summer in February for Free Online Page B

arrange a place of your own?’ Laura asked Gilbert. ‘You deserve one.’
    ‘Because I’m happy enough where I am. Thank you. Quite spoilt, as a matter of fact.’
    Gilbert had rooms in the hotel: a bedroom – the bed narrow but well sprung – and quite a cosy little sitting-room which, with
     the kind help of Mrs Paynter, he was beginning to furnish. For the time being it looked rather spartan, the sort of room a
     sapper officer might settle on, with a small carpet, a chair and some curtains, a small writing desk and a small chest of
     drawers. There was nothing small, though, about the views from his window.
    The wide, wide sea: from the Lizard round to Land’s End.
    The hotel itself was something of an enigma. First of all the name needs clearing up. Cliff House, built in 1870, was not
     put up as a hotel, which explained why some of the older men in The Wink still referred to it as Cliff House. Then it became
     Cliff House Temperance Hotel, then Jory’s Temperance Hotel, or Jory’s Hotel, or simply Jory’s.
    The name Jory’s was, however, anything but simple. That name introduced a range of complications because Mr and Mrs Jory ran
     rival establishments: Jory’s Hotel (let us settle for that), where Gilbert had his rooms on the first floor, was run on a
     tightish rein and with the firmest and kindest of hands by Mrs Jory. Or, as she advertised it, ‘Mrs Jessie Jory, proprietress,
     furnished apartments (bathrooms), sea view and south aspect’. Mrs Jory prided herself on providing a splendid breakfast and
     supper to which Gilbert could, and frequently did, invite guests (Joey Carter-Wood and Munnings, to name but two).
    A hundred yards or so lower down in the village was The Wink. This inn was run on the loosest possible rein by Mr Jory, or
     ‘Mr Nicholas Jory, beer retailer’. The hotel and the inn were chalk and cheese, control and indulgence, thrift and forgetfulness.
     When he was returning on his bicycle from a long day at Boskenna, Gilbert could often tell his mood by sensing towards which
     place his wheels were drawn.
    Mr and Mrs Jory were not on speaking terms. ‘As long as she do stay up there,’ Jory said with his pendulous bottom lip in
     his beer, and with his elbow on the bar, ‘and I do stay down here, it do suit. But if she do come down ’ere, I’ll be off faster
     ’n a fox and that’s a fact.’
    Marriages, marriages, Gilbert thought.
    When Jory did venture up the steep slope to the hotel inhis pony and jingle trap – he was often hired to take guests or residents in and out of Penzance for trains and shopping expeditions
     – the husband and wife did not so much as look at one another. As Bess, the pony, clip-clopped off Mrs Jory would hiss, teeth
     clamped, point her indelibly inked finger at his back and say, ‘And good riddance.’ For his part, once out of sight, Jory
     would lift his left buttock and fart. This he could do to order.
    Marriages, marriages, Gilbert thought: imagine not loving your wife, imagine not talking to her. ‘May God protect me from
     such a union,’ he said in his prayers.
    After being thrown out of his temporary lodgings in Newlyn for excesses which his landlady did not wish to discuss and which
     he could not even remember, A.J. Munnings took the damp and deserted dwelling, a sort of studio and stable, not a stone’s
     throw from the mill. He had tried to find a place in Paul and Mousehole and Trewoofe before coming by chance to Lamorna, and
     as soon as he saw the mill nearby and watched the shutter being released so that the wheel could grind, as soon as he heard
     there had been a mill of sorts working there since the fourteenth century, he knew he was, in a sense, ‘at home’. Bowered
     in trees, near a mill. Here he would stay. Head bowed, he stood in front of the millstone wheel, a huge circle of local granite;
     then raised his eyes up at the water, diverted there from the stream at the top of the valley. All this, the drowsy sound