My Cousin Io | Ch 1-3 preview

Chapter 1

The summer my cousin arrived was the summer that everything changed. Golden months that were both an ending and a beginning.

It was early June when my mother received the fateful letter. At least that was how my sister Juliet described it.

"Your aunt writes to say that Iolanthe would like to come and stay with us for a few weeks," my mother said over breakfast. We still had a Saturday morning post in those days.

My father raised his eyebrows but said nothing. He had delivered a baby in the early hours of the morning and looked tired as he drank his coffee.

We hadn't seen Iolanthe for several years. I suppose I couldn't have been more than seven or eight the last time, which made it nearly a decade ago. I remembered a visit to our late grandparents, and a blonde girl who was very smartly dressed and self-possessed. Juliet and I were all over the place in those days, climbing trees and tearing our clothes, but Io had already transitioned to being a "young lady" as they used to call it. Even from an early age she had seemed more a part of the grown-ups' world than our world.

William, my elder brother, regarded the news with some contempt. "What on earth would she want to come here for? It's hardly the Riviera." William was in the second year of medical college, following in our father's footsteps, and tended to regard our aunt and her daughter as frivolous.

In fairness we mainly received their news through various postcards, which rather gave the impression that they were always travelling and jaunting about. But Aunt Pia was an opera singer and had to travel for work. Io had just spent three years studying music and was supposed to be following in her mother's footsteps, or so we had been told.

William, who considered his planned career to be a matter of life and death and far more serious than singing, had little regard for our aunt and her way of life. "She can hardly occupy the spare room for the entire summer. What if Granny wants to come and stay?" he pointed out, referring to our paternal grandmother.

The problem was that while our house was large, we were also a very large family. There were five of us siblings, the "doctor's children" as we were always referred to. First William, then Juliet, who had just finished her A-levels. Then me, with one more year of school to go. Next came Alice, three years younger than me, and finally Toby who was ten.

My mother drew her brows together. "She could share with you two, I suppose," she suggested, looking at Juliet and me. But even as she said it, she recognised how impossible it would be. Iolanthe, sophisticated and already well-travelled by the age of twenty-two, could hardly be expected to slum it with two schoolgirls. Squeezing a third bed into our room would also be difficult. Alice, like Toby, had a small attic room so that wasn't an option either.

"We'll just have to do up the box room, then," Juliet said. She was always the practical one among us.

William glared at her. He had had designs of making that room into some kind of study for himself. Given he was away all term time in another city it hardly seemed fair of him to end up with a suite of rooms. But since he had made no progress in clearing it out so far, there had seemed to be no point complaining.

"That's settled then," our mother said. "We'll clear it out and have a lovely bonfire." She loved bonfires. She still took a childlike delight in certain eclectic things, despite being a doctor's wife and a mother of five.

"I wonder what she's like now?" Juliet said later, when we were back in our room. She stood in front of the mirror making faces at herself and pouting. She was trying to will her lips to grow fuller, since she had read in one of our magazines that "bee stung lips" were the height of fashion.