The taxi stopped outside the white pillars of Casa D’Or and the driver took a minute to stare up at its grandeur.
‘Great place,’ he whistled through his teeth, turning off the engine and getting out for a closer look. ‘Is this a hotel or something?’
‘It’s a house,’ said Jennifer, fumbling around in her purse for a twenty-dollar bill, feeling a suddenly flurry of nerves.
She stepped out of the taxi and waited on the front steps as the driver popped the trunk and lugged out her two heavy suitcases.
‘You have a nice day now,’ he grinned as she pushed the money into his palm, adding an extra five dollars. Taxis expected a good tip when they turned up at Casa D’Or.
Jennifer released a small sigh as her own gaze locked on the house, its tall white pillars and seven chimneys that stretched into the cloudless blue sky. As she inhaled slowly, the smell of the glorious gardens just feet away from her filled her lungs, the scent of antique roses and delphiniums as sweet as it was heady.
‘Home sweet home,’ she whispered, but as she closed her eyes, a knot of anxiety tightened in her belly.
Catching a plane to Savannah had seemed such a good idea twenty-four hours earlier. She’d had enough of New York: the city, the Hamptons, where she’d spent a weekend squashed into a three-bedroom beachfront cottage with fourteen other girls. It had not been the summer idyll she had imagined, the one that had been sold to her by her college room-mate, Amanda. Instead Manhattan had been hot and hectic, and Long Island had been no better.
She’d been lying on her camp bed, trying to ignore the smell of weed, the music and the screams of her friends flirting with the boys from the house next door, when she’d had the radical thought that she didn’t need to stay there.
A standby ticket had cost her two hundred bucks, the flight had taken just a couple of hours, and the noise and pace of the metropolis had been left behind her for the more simple life she’d never even known she craved. If only it was that easy, she thought, pushing her key into the lock and walking into the grand wood-panelled hall.
Her mother was coming down the sweeping staircase that took centre-stage in the entrance at the exact moment of her arrival.
‘Jennifer. What on earth . . . ?’ said Sylvia Wyatt, her delicate features betraying no sign of disbelief except for a slight widening of her eyes.
‘Surprise,’ grinned Jennifer, dropping her suitcases on the walnut floor, hoping to raise some reaction from her mother. She did not expect an embrace – her mother had never been anything other than brittle and cool – but as Sylvia Wyatt stood motionless at the bottom of her stairs, back straight, one hand resting on the curve of the banister, even Jennifer was surprised at the coldness of her response. If she was glad to see her recently graduated daughter back from college and the city, she certainly didn’t look it.
‘You were supposed to be in New York till the twentieth,’ she said crisply, her eyes noting the two suitcases by Jennifer’s feet.
‘I know. I just thought, why be there when I could be here . . .’
‘You could have let us know.’
‘It was a spur-of-the-moment decision,’ said Jennifer, feeling herself curl under the heat of the late Southern afternoon and her mother’s expression of being inconvenienced.
‘Your father will be pleased to see you,’ Sylvia replied finally.
‘Is he home?’
‘Just now. He’s on the terrace.’
Jennifer felt her spirits perk up. She ran through the house, past the dining room, the kitchen and the sun-filled solarium, and saw the familiar figure of her father standing on the back terrace overlooking the lake.
He turned and saw her, and his face broke into a grin and he held his arms open for her to run into.
‘What’s this?’ he laughed as they gave each other a tight hug.
‘I’m back.’
‘So I see,’ he said, pulling away and throwing his arm around her shoulder. ‘What is it? A flying visit? How long have we got you for? You know, I think we have some celebration cake left over from the Fourth of July. Sylvia, find Marion. See what treats we have for our daughter.’
‘I missed you,’ said Jennifer honestly, perching on a chair.
‘You mean Connor’s back from the Caribbean,’ he winked, taking off his panama hat.
Her boyfriend had spent the past three weeks sailing around the British Virgin Islands. It was pretty much Jennifer’s dream vacation – sailing was what had bonded her and Connor in the first place – but it was to be a boys’ trip after his graduation from Harvard, and she had not been invited.
‘Yes, he got back a couple of days ago, but that’s not why I’m here.’
‘You can admit it,’ scoffed her father. ‘These are your glory days.’