The House of Brides Read online

  In the end, my father bought me a stamp album. He had misinterpreted my interest in the post for a keen interest in philately. For years I diligently tore out the stamps and soaked them off the paper in a saucer filled with water, even though I had no interest in them at all. My only interest was in finding a letter from the address written on the envelope in front of me now.

  It was enough for a moment just to stare at the mystical formation of those letters.

  I took a deep breath, trying to dull my anticipation slightly. After twenty years, I had come up with more than enough scenarios for this moment. A small but meaningful outreach. A Christmas message. An offer of full-scale adoption.

  This was different, though. The letter was addressed to my mother. Did they not know she was dead?

  Listening carefully for the movements of my half sisters, I moved across into my father’s study, the door barely making a sound as it closed over the plush carpet. Dusk had moved quickly through the room, making it harder to read the words, so I took the letter to the window seat, forcing myself to sit down and breathe despite the rush of blood in my ears.

  I slowly unfolded the paper, paying close attention to the thick cream stock of it and then bringing it close to my nose. Musty, yes. But a slight smell of damp. Smoke, even. I had expected a Proustian moment—a waft of my mother’s tea rose perfume or a healthy masculine cologne—but I was disappointed; it didn’t remind me of anything apart from the fireplace in the damp beach shack we used to rent at Wilsons Prom over Easter.

  I read the letter, the first time quickly and the second time slowly, trying to find details that weren’t there.

  Dear Tessa,

  I found your photo by accident. I shouldn’t have been looking. Dad always said I’m too curious for my own good, but that’s what comes from no one ever telling me anything.

  The trouble in this place is, you go looking for answers to one question and you end up finding an entirely separate batch of secrets.

  Anyway. I found a photo of you, and you looked friendly, normal. Not like people in old photos normally look, with weird hairdos and funny jumpers.

  When I turned over the photo, it said, “Tessa, 19,” in spidery old writing, like whoever wrote it was afraid to press too hard with their Biro.

  For some reason, I had never thought of you as a real person. I mean, I knew you wrote The Book. I knew you had been gone for a long time. But I had never thought you might have been able to help us. We hadn’t really needed help before.

  Something bad has happened. There’s something wrong with my mum. Dad says someone needs to look after us, but he says we need to keep it in the family. He is going to send us to boarding school after Christmas. Even Agatha. Despite what’s happened.

  Will you come and help us? Please.

  Love, Sophia Summer (your niece)

  It was a shock to hear a young, contemporary voice from Barnsley. A voice that could belong to any of the young girls I knew—a voice that sounded like Ophelia, or Juliet. I had read The House of Brides hundreds of times. My mother’s book was a best seller when it was published and went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies before it went out of print in the late 1990s. But I hadn’t before thought what the book might mean to the people who lived at Barnsley today. That they might refer to it as The Book in the same reverential and singular way I did.

  The House of Brides was my only connection to my mother and her past, and even then, it wasn’t the most personal connection. What I knew about Barnsley House was what all the readers knew about it. And what I remembered about my mother was pretty much what they knew as well. It was more than that: my mother was the book, and the book was the reason I studied creative writing at university.

  The House of Brides went deeply into the history of Barnsley House; the women who had married into the family and brought more fame and prestige with them. They were writers and architects and socialites, women who, unusually for their time, had pushed the boundaries and found success, notoriety. Sarah Summer. Beatrice Summer. Their names were more familiar to me than those of some of my father’s living relatives. Between those women and my mother, I had a lot of pressure on me to do something special with my life.

  Most of the time I had been scouring the book for clues about my mother, fruitlessly. Counter to the modern trend of writers inserting themselves into the nonfiction narrative, she was curiously absent. I could feel her attention to detail, her swift turn of phrase, but there was nothing else of her in it, nothing apart from the familiar head shot: her hair fair and fluffy, her smile wide and nonthreatening.

  Her book was a straightforward history of Barnsley House and the women who had lived there over several generations. There were scandals, yes: suicides and secret liaisons and the obligatory gothic tropes—secret rooms, ghosts, and unexplained fires—but it was a book of history. A past typical of a country house of that era but I had always imagined Barnsley as a benign place now. Perhaps I was wrong.

  All this time I had been wanting someone from Barnsley to come looking for me. But now that someone had, I wasn’t so sure it was what I wanted after all.

  3

  Barnsley House. I typed the name in and then looked at it, listening to the sounds of the house around me, waiting for some sort of sign that it was safe to proceed. Outside, the street was quiet, apart from the occasional car door or the slam of a basketball against a backboard in our neighbour’s driveway. There was a limited amount of time before my father and Fleur came back from dinner, and I didn’t want to answer their questions about what I was doing just yet. I didn’t really know what I was doing just yet.

  Wikipedia, Great Houses of England, TripAdvisor; a raft of entries came up. I clicked on the Wikipedia link, thinking an overview would be the best place to start.

  Barnsley House

  Barnsley House, also known as Barnsley House Hotel, is situated in a unique geographical location at the tip of two coves on the rugged coast of England’s West Country. Continuously the family seat of the Summer family for over two hundred years, it passed to the ownership of Maximilian Summer in 1987 and is run as a country house hotel with the Michelin-starred restaurant The Summer Room. The garden is supposed to have been designed by Hugo Bostock, but there is no known documentation of this, and it is considered by most historians to be too far south of Bostock’s usual area and thus most likely derivative.

  The house, then known as Barnslaigh, first appears on maps in the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century it was the site of a small ferry point in a line that ran in the summer months between the villages dotted along that coastline. The water was notoriously rough, and the ferry service now runs only in the warmest months. Consequently, the land and the small manor house were sold off to a local farmer, Montgomery Summer, who was expanding his already substantial landholdings. Summer built the house that stands there today.

  Unusually for the time, Barnsley was built in stone brought in from the Cotswolds, and as a consequence the house is striking, and unique in the area. The gardens, which in their heyday were overseen by eighteen full-time gardeners and ground staff, have been restored and updated in recent years to their former glory by the current incumbent.

  Barnsley House has a long and colourful history and is known locally as “The House of Brides,” in reference to the best-selling book by the same name, written by Tessa Summer. The book’s title refers to the distinctive character of Barnsley’s chatelaines over the years. Although the house has come close to sale a number of times, it has always been these enterprising and resourceful women who have saved the estate from passing from family hands.

  The first and most notable “bride” was Elspeth Summer, who convinced her husband to build her the aptly named Summer House on an island just offshore from the main house. Elspeth was a complete hermit, and refused to accompany her husband on his travels abroad. He brought her back a collection of unusual plants from all over the world and she had great success in establishing an almo
st tropical garden on the site. Her love of white wine from France was well known, and she attempted to start a vineyard on the island to grow the grapes to make her own. This project failed in the adverse conditions, but the island was renamed Minerva Island by the family after a rare grape varietal from France (minervae). Still known by that name, it is private but open to tour groups during the summer months.

  Elspeth’s daughter-in-law, Sarah Summer, unusually for the time, accompanied her husband on many of his travels, and developed a keen interest in architecture. Inspired by their grand tours, she controversially oversaw the transformation of the nearby Anglican chapel of St. John’s in Minton to an almost exact replica of a tiny Italian church she had visited in Tuscany.

  Much later, in the early twentieth century, Barnsley House was the home of the famous writer Gertrude Summer, one of the last American heiresses—who married the then owner and brought with her an American fortune. She used the house as a backdrop for her crime fiction, lampooning the British upper class who refused to accept her into their inner circle. In the process Barnsley House became almost as well known as her books, the sales from which, along with her inheritance, propped up the estate for years. The marriage ended amid claims of infidelity, and Gertrude moved farther along the coast, where she would live for the rest of her life.

  The house fell into disrepair after the Second World War, in which it had gained some notoriety as a training ground for intelligence officers. It had a brief resurgence under the ownership of Maximilian Summer (senior) and his wife Beatrice, who became known for their wild house parties during a time when most other country houses were being sold and entertaining as a whole was being scaled back. The notorious and short-lived Barnsley Festival was both founded and then folded under their watch.

  By the time the current owner, Max Summer, inherited from his father Maximilian, the house was decrepit and the debts were piling up. Together with his wife, Daphne Summer, Max Summer has reinvigorated Barnsley House as a luxury country house hotel.

  Most of this I already knew, or had a vague knowledge of. There was no mention of anything untoward happening lately, despite what Sophia mentioned in her letter.

  I assumed Sophia was Max and Daphne’s daughter. There was no mention of any children on the Wikipedia page, so I quickly clicked on the link for Daphne Summer. It directed me towards an article from the Daily Telegraph from July, and I read it hungrily, eager to find something written about Daphne from an outsider’s point of view.

  For the longest time, I had cared about nothing except myself. Or to be more specific, what other people thought of me. My entire existence was based around projecting an image of my lifestyle, and if something wasn’t on Instagram, then in my mind it hadn’t happened. I had missed a lot. The real world. Friends. Family. Common decency.

  It felt good to be thinking about something else.

  4

  The Summer Sunshine

  by Kelly O’Hara

  Somehow you get the feeling that Daphne Summer—celebrity chef, newspaper columnist, and cookbook author—doesn’t like the spotlight. In fact, she seems to positively hate it. If she could let the food speak for itself, she would, she says.

  Unlike other chefs of our time, she doesn’t have an urgent need to reinvent the wheel, or change the way our nation eats; she just wants to make good food, and she wants to make it using ingredients from close to home. Oh, and she wants the rest of us to do that too.

  Even this desire is punctuated by her characteristic self-deprecating cackle, and as we sit in the garden outside her eponymously named restaurant Summer House, she blows her fringe out of her eyes and says, “Well, maybe I do want to change the way people eat after all.” She is on a break between a hectic lunch service packed with day-trippers and local diners, who she says are her mainstay, and a full house expecting dinner that evening. On the lawn in front of us, her three children frolic, the picture of health and happiness, only calling to their mother to watch the occasional handstand or cartwheel.

  Her Australian accent, barely recognizable on her television program, is stronger in real life, and she says if not for Max Summer, who she romantically met and married within a week in the late nineties, she would be back in the Sydney she still misses. Lucky for us she did meet him, because the food I’ve just eaten in the Summer House was like nothing else I’ve experienced in this part of the world.

  The flavours are delicate without being fussy, and it seems as if the ingredients have had very little done to them, which usually means a very great deal has been done. The provenance of each dish is listed on the handwritten menu: the seafood comes from local fishermen, whose tiny vessels I could watch bobbing in the cove as I ate; the lamb from the farm attached to Barnsley House, and also run by the Summer family for generations; and the herbs which enliven every dish are picked the same morning from the extensive kitchen gardens bordering the house, where Daphne has invited us to wander as we chat.

  Not formally trained, Daphne learned her skills at the high-end restaurants that used to be attached to every five-star hotel in London. At first, as a young and poor Aussie backpacker, she washed dishes, and then she worked her way up through the kitchen, finally cooking under some of the more well-known enfants terribles of the nineties restaurant scene. It was outside one of these kitchens that she met her husband.

  Sneaking out for a post-shift cigarette, she ran into Max, who was doing the same, trying to escape from an unsuccessful date in the dining room.

  As we talk, Daphne frequently interrupts to point out things in her garden. “It’s a far cry from the old veggie patch I grew up with,” she says, gathering broad beans into an enamel colander along the way. “My dad worked at the bank, but he loved his garden, and he had a small plot for vegetables. Nothing like this, though: half the time we had enormous gluts of silverbeet and rhubarb and the rest of the time the snails got to things before we could. It made me realize, though, just how much work goes into growing one carrot, so now, as a cook, I make certain I treat that carrot with some respect.”

  Daphne seems to make a point of never calling herself a chef, instead referring to herself as a cook. Despite the awards she has received, she says she still feels more comfortable with it that way. “I’m not a chef. I’m just someone who loves food, and wants to share it with as many people as possible. There’s only so much my family can eat, so it became a job. That’s all.” It’s a typical remark from this humble woman, whose cookbook My Summer House was one of the best selling of the last year.

  Still striking in her mid-forties, I imagine she must have been quite a stunner when she met Max. When I mention this, the cackle comes again, before she fixes me with a beady eye. “Max likes signs of great character, and deplores weakness. Too often a pretty face can be misinterpreted as either.” She refuses to elaborate, instead refilling my glass of rosé as we arrive back on the terrace.

  And what of the rumours that a problem with alcohol shut down production of her first series last year? She only occasionally sips wine, and she chooses her words carefully. “It’s a common thing in this industry. The stress of service, combined with the blissful relief of a drink afterwards, and one can trigger the other. There was an incident, and it was blown completely out of proportion. I’ve cut back since then, but for me, as a cook, a meal without wine is no meal at all.”

  The remote location of Barnsley House, set on a spectacular coastline above a series of rocky beaches, is greatly appealing to the people who come here to escape the world. Its end-of-the-earth charm is nice to visit, but living here must be lonely. Daphne doesn’t think so, though. “I could stay here forever. People are always asking me to come up to London, to consult on this one or cook at this thing, but I’m happy here. I have everything I need.”

  With that, she bites the end off a broad bean and spits it out in the garden, squeezing out the glorious green buds within for me to examine. “You see? What else could I want?” She’s right: Barnsley House is as cl
ose to paradise as you can get.

  For more information, visit barnsleyhousehotel.co.uk. The author was a guest of the West Country Tourist Board.

  I was sitting thinking about what I had just read when I heard a car pull up out front. Hurriedly, I erased my search history and closed down the tabs. From the window I could see my father getting out of the Uber, smiling at the driver, and then holding the door open for Fleur. His smile quickly disappeared as he caught sight of his car parked under the tree. Even from the house, I could see that the sticky sap he so despised had already made a mess of his roof, and I immediately regretted my impulsive decision to leave the car there.

  My father, who had helped me through the last year. He had supported me when everyone else in the world was calling me a liar, and rightfully so. He had moved heaven and earth to get me a job with some old friends, a job in which, if I was really honest, I’d be lucky to see out the three-month probation.

  Something told me that tonight was not the time to bring up the letter; in fact, my deepest instinct was not to mention it at all.

  On an impulse—what else?—I dashed back to my father’s desk and opened the small safe underneath the chair. The code, despite everything, was my mother’s birthday. It always had been. I just hadn’t had to use it before.

  Nineteen sixty-eight. The Summer of Love. Student protests in Paris. And my mother, landing on the earth, in the middle of nowhere. Barnsley House. I wondered if her life might have turned out differently had she been born somewhere else.

  It was dark inside the safe, and I was in too much of a rush to turn the light on. My father and Fleur were on the front steps now.

  “How hard is it to put the car in the garage?”