Page 15 of Autumn at the Willow River Guesthouse
‘These’ll keep me going for ages,’ he said.
‘Do people often just give you stuff they find?’ Lily asked.
‘If they know you’re looking,’ he said. ‘Life’s all about connections, isn’t it? The more you have, the better.’
On the way home, they both agreed that Lily hadn’t exactly impressed during her first stint working on the family burger van. She promised to try harder the following day, but Pete shook his head.
‘I think we need to add a bit of variation to your life,’ he said. ‘You can take tomorrow off, and then on Monday you can help your mother in the shop.’
‘Dad … you know we’d end up needling each other,’ Lily said. ‘You know what we’re like together.’
Pete shrugged. ‘It’s been a few years.’
‘Too few, I imagine.’
Lily had spent a summer working with Sarah in the little craft shop, but her mother’s propensity to “artify” her sales technique had driven Lily nearly out of her mind. Prices were rarely advertised, and when they were Sarah would discount at random depending on how close a friend she considered the customer. Somehow, the shop still made a profit, but the unorthodox method of business had driven Lily—fresh from A stars at mathematics, physics and business studies—near out of her mind.
Pete clicked his fingers. ‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘Let me make a phone call when we get home.’
It was raining again as they reached Willow River, the large, hanging trees in the park in the valley below their house swaying in a growing wind. Lily sighed as she looked out of the window. There was something intensely nostalgic about autumn storms. When the tourists left and the town became the sole property of the local people again, when the days grew shorter and the leaves started to change … that was what made her feel at home. The summer was always just a fleeting moment. The off-season, with its long days of rain, chilly mornings, occasional crispy clear skies and dawn sunlight glinting off a garden glittering with frost … that was what felt real.
Pete went straight inside, leaving Lily to tidy up the van. By the time she had followed him in, he was sitting by the table, a coffee in front of him, wearing a wide smile.
‘I just got off the phone with Uncle Gus,’ he said. ‘You start tomorrow.’
9
Willow River Guesthouse
Uncle Gus was Lily’s dad’s older brother. Much older, in fact. Lily wasn’t exactly sure, but there was at least fifteen years between them, Pete’s arrival being something of a thrilling surprise, she remembered her late grandmother telling her. In fact, Grandma had been willing to share far too many details for Lily’s liking, even if in retrospect it made her miss the old dear even more.
‘We’d gone down to the Village Hall for a barn dance, then on the way back your grandfather started getting a little frisky.’
‘Please, stop—’
Grandma chuckled. ‘He wanted to nip into the park down there and have a private dance by the riverside. It wasn’t until we got there that I realised what kind of dance he meant….’
‘Grandma, I have to go and do my maths homework, or alternatively find some knitting needles to shove into my ears.’
Grandma, by then in her mid-eighties, had patted Lily’s knee and nearly fallen off her chair.
‘And nine months later your father appeared,’ she said, waving her arthritic hands about as though he’d literally appeared out of the air. ‘And from day one he was a little treasure. He had his off days, though. Did I ever tell you about that time he managed to undo his own nappy on the slide at playschool? He turned that orange slide brown—’
Lily smiled at the memory. It was one of the last conversations she could remember with Grandma, who had died when she was twelve. Uncle Gus had got the guesthouse, Pete her grandparents’ cottage, plus a cut of the guesthouse’s profits, she had found out years later. It was one of the reasons her parents managed to maintain such a beautiful property on two seemingly low-income jobs.
On the other hand, however, it meant they had to keep one eye on the eccentric Uncle Gus and how well the guesthouse was doing.
Built into a tree-lined hollow at the top of a gentle hill leading down to the river, Willow River Guesthouse had long been the centerpiece of the village. Pete had told her how growing up it had doubled as the local community centre before a separate one was built and had hosted everything from local weddings and funerals to parish council elections. When the great storm of 1987 had put out all the local power lines, Grandpa had fired up a couple of auxiliary generators and invited the whole village to stay. Even Lily, not yet born, had heard tales of the party that resulted, and Pete had once jokingly told her that 1988 had seen a local baby boom and a slew of shotgun marriages.
For most of its existence, however, it had been a quaint family-run hotel, just nine rooms which were rarely fully booked, and a pretty restaurant with views over the river and the railway line alongside. The railway’s closure had hit the business hard, but just as dips follow booms, booms can follow dips, and the opening of the cycle route to Exeter had restored the guesthouse to its former glory, as well as boosting its year-round trade.
Lily, dressed in jeans and a light sweater under her jacket, politely refused Pete’s offer of a lift, preferring to walk the half a mile down through the valley and up to the guesthouse’s long, paved driveway that meandered up the hill between two lines of willows which had already begun to shed some of their autumn leaves. The car park to the side was almost full, a couple of the cars blanketed in fallen leaves as though their owners had arrived and never left.
A glass conservatory pushed out from the rest of the old grey-brick building, surrounded by so many thorny roses that Sleeping Beauty’s castle might have been jealous. A narrow path led between them on one side up to a front door.
Lily opened the door and stepped inside, a little bell jingling to announce her arrival. She was greeted by the smell of nostalgia: musty carpets and dusty antiques, every wall and available surface adorned by an array of ancient artifacts that Grandpa had once made a hobby of collecting. Every room in the guesthouse was a collector’s heaven, with ancient toy cars set alongside collections of 1950s toasters, or wrought iron gilt mirrors reflecting dusty faces, train posters from the 1920s alongside war memorabilia and framed letters so faded their copperplate words were illegible. A mounted deer’s head protruded from among a cluster of rusty antique kettles hung from the ceiling, and a cupboard facing the entrance held plates and cups that hadn’t been used for their original purpose in a hundred years or more.
‘Uncle Gus? Aunt Gert?’
