Back in England an Indian summer lay in wait, each day a hot, sultry package encased in the freshness of dawn and dusk. Unattended for four weeks and fed by rain, the garden at Ashley House had swelled to the point where the house itself seemed to be sinking among the tidal waves of verdure and colour that surrounded it. Butterflies and insects bobbed lazily at the full fat flowers, splayed among the beds and bushes like the basking populace of a crowded beach, all heedless of the shortening days and the occasional tugging breeze that warned of change.
Serena, tracing the particularly busy traffic of bees to a crack in the lintel above the front door, thought of calling Sid, or a pest-control company from the Yellow Pages but didn’t have the heart. The weather would turn eventually and the bees would die. They were living on borrowed time, on borrowed hope, clinging to the coat-tails of summer, just as she, Charlie and Ed were clinging to the feel-good shreds of the holiday and the new, desperate hope about the paternity test. Change, and reaction to it, would be forced upon them all soon enough. She only wished she knew where it would lead. The natural world might have its patterns, its enviable seasonal grand design, but she was losing faith in the notion that the existence of humans could relate to anything so comfortingly certain.