‘Here we are, Gran,’ the older boy says, and I hear the Irish lilt in his voice. ‘Freda has met all the gang now, and tomorrow she’ll be out on the lake.’
Panic surges in me. I hadn’t thought about this. Can Freda swim? We never did more than paddling when I lived by the sea. They are close to the sea in Marlbury – has Ben taught her to swim?
Eve seems to read my thoughts – perhaps it is just grandmother’s telepathy or perhaps the panic shows in my face.
‘They all wear lifejackets,’ she says. ‘It’s understood.’ She looks at her grandsons. ‘Isn’t it, boys?’
They grin and nod, and I remember again what a good teacher Eve was.
‘We’ll walk you back to the hotel,’ Eve says, and as we go she says quietly, ‘You’ll need to talk to Colin tomorrow, and I’ve a plan for you to meet Dumitru – the waiter at the hotel who was supposed to be in Ruby’s boat.’
‘A plan?’
‘Well, you can’t just walk up to him and start interrogating him, can you? Even you can’t get away with that. He comes into the studio sometimes. He wants to study design here in the UK but he needs to improve his English. I’ve told him that I have a friend arriving who is an English professor and will, I am sure, be happy to give him some English lessons.’
‘And am I going to be paid for these lessons?’
‘I said it would be fine if he negotiates a discount on meals at the hotel for you.’
‘You seem to have thought of everything.’
She stops still and looks at me.
‘How can I think about anything else?’ she says.
Chapter Four
FIRST NIGHT ON THE ISLAND
Wednesday afternoon
Freda lay on her bed looking out at the view, which was just a parade of scudding clouds at this angle, and thought that this trip might not be just all right – it might actually be rather good. Fergus and Milo were amazingly nice – especially when you compared them with the boys at school. Fergus was sweet and serious. It was a pity about his name, which made her think of Fungus the Bogeyman, but he couldn’t help that. And Milo. She gave a little sigh. Milo had been so nice. He must be at least fifteen, she thought, but he hadn’t patronised her at all. He had asked her about herself and about Marlbury, and had actually seemed interested. And his accent – soft but witty, somehow, so that everything he said sounded clever. She picked up her phone. She would have liked to tell someone how she was feeling, but there was no-one she trusted enough. She put the phone down again. This was just for her.
Distracting herself, she thought about the rest of ‘the gang’ as Milo had called them. There weren’t many of them really, and the thing about them was, as Milo pointed out, they were all outsiders. None of them had grown up in Carnmere, and only one of them – Micky, whose dad owned the boatyard and the ferry that ran up and down the lake – was at school here. The two girls, Venetia and Letty, were at boarding school – somewhere posh to judge from Venetia’s accent, which was a real plum-in-the-mouth job. She was a bit older than Freda – fourteen probably, and Letty was little and just allowed to hang around with them because of Venetia. Venetia, sadly, was really pretty – long glossy hair and a golden tan and no spots – and Freda could see that all the boys liked her. So there were just the five of them – six now, with Freda – though some of Micky’s friends joined them sometimes, Milo said. The point was that Micky’s dad owned the boatyard and Venetia’s parents owned this hotel, so it was understood that the landing stage was their territory – their hanging out space. What was interesting, (and Granny would be interested certainly) was that Ruby and her sister, Grace, were part of the gang, though Grace was away at a stage school now and Ruby, as Milo had said, was ‘just gone’. He had sounded so sad when he said it, and when she plucked up the courage to ask what he thought had happened to her, he had just looked out over the lake and said, ‘Who knows?’
She got up and looked out of the window properly. The landing stage was deserted now, but she wondered if she could sketch something from memory – an impression of Milo and Micky, Venetia and Letty as she had first seen them with Fergus that afternoon. She took her sketch pad out of her bag, pulled a chair over to the window and started to draw. It didn’t need to be totally accurate, after all; she just wanted to catch the feel of what it had been like. As she worked, she let the worry that had been hovering hazily at the edge of her mind slide into focus: Milo had said that she was very welcome here but that didn’t go for her grandmother. ‘The less I see of her the better,’ he had said, and Freda realised that this must have something to do with the row Granny had had with Milo’s grandma, but she had been really startled when he had said, ‘She’s the reason my granddad had to leave Marlbury. My grandma says she ruined their lives.’ She put down her pencil and thought. Was it possible that Granny had had a thing with Milo’s granddad? The thought of it took her breath away. Granny? Really? But if so it wouldn’t be all her fault would it? She was going to have to ask her somehow but she couldn’t, at the moment, see quite how.
She was still busy drawing when her grandmother tapped on her door and then bustled in without waiting to be asked. Freda closed her sketchpad awkwardly and dropped her pencil.
‘It’s a view that shifts and changes all the time, isn’t it?’ her grandmother said, coming over to look out of her window. ‘Hard to pin down on paper.’
Freda managed a non-committal, ‘Mm,’ and hugged the closed pad to her chest. No way was Granny going to see her sketch – no way was she getting to know the gang at all, actually. She knew what she was like: in no time she would be in there, taking an interest in them all, telling them what subjects they should be taking at school, finding out about everyone’s problems, dishing out advice. Freda would pass on anything significant that she found out about Ruby, because that was the deal they had, but everything else that went on down there on the landing stage was out of bounds to Granny.
‘Well,’ her grandmother said, looking round the little room, ‘shall we put on our glad rags for dinner? I’m going to have a shower so I’ll grab the bathroom first. Dinner in half an hour?’
When she had gone, Freda hid the sketchpad under the spare blankets in the top of her wardrobe and then considered the clothes she had brought with her. Glad rags? Granny had suggested a skirt, and she had brought one, but it was denim, which probably wasn’t smart enough. Her best thing was a jumpsuit which she had chosen as her birthday present from Mum. It had a zip up the front and no sleeves and skinny legs that went just to her ankles, and the most exciting thing about it was that it was black, with just a single white rose sketched on the top. She had never had anything black before and it made her feel grown-up when she put it on, though she hadn’t actually had the courage to wear it in public yet. She got it out and looked at it. The only other things she had with her that were at all smart were some patterned trousers and a crop top, but she wasn’t sure whether crop tops would be frowned on in the restaurant. It was now or never for the jumpsuit, she decided, and once the bathroom was free, she had a wash and slipped into it. Then she pulled her curls high up onto the top of her head and twisted them into a knot. After that, she allowed herself to look in the mirror behind the wardrobe door. She struck an attitude, one hand on a hip, and surveyed the result. Too cool for school, Freda, she told herself and went next door.
Even the boost of the jumpsuit didn’t stop her from feeling intimidated by the restaurant, though. It wasn’t that she was not used to eating in restaurants. They ate out as a family sometimes, but not in this kind of place. The menu, for a start, was huge – it came in a leather cover with pages and pages of wines listed, as well as the food itself. All thoughts of being vegetarian this week had vanished since Milo had offered to take her fishing one day, so that was one complication dealt with, but the next hurdle was that the menu was mostly in French. Granny would be only too happy to translate for her, of co
urse, but she had been learning French for two years after all, and she wasn’t going to be patronised. She spotted a section headed POISSONS, thought that some people might think they were being offered poison but was confident that she would be choosing fish, and lighted on filets de sole, which would come accompanied by pommes de terre sautées, so that would be all right – for tonight, at least. She closed her menu but she thought she might try to do some private studying of it for future reference when she got the chance.
‘Decided?’ her grandmother asked, looking at her over the top of her glasses.
‘Filets de sole,’ she said, ‘please.’
‘Do you know what á la meunière means?’
‘I’m sure I shall like it whatever it means,’ she hedged.
‘It means “as made by the miller’s wife”.’
‘Really?’ This sounded improbable; some language game of Granny’s, she thought.
‘Yes. And why would that be, do you think?’
Freda was beginning to feel like one of her grandmother’s students.
‘I have no idea,’ she said, in a way that she hoped implied that she had no interest either.
‘Well, if I tell you that the sole fillets are just dipped in flour and fried in butter with a squeeze of lemon,’ her grandmother said, ‘does that help?’
‘The flour, I suppose,’ Freda hazarded, ‘from the miller.’
‘Possibly.’ She eyed Freda over her glasses again, looking distinctly professorial. ‘But the point is, it’s very simple. The miller and his wife stand for ordinary people. This is simple home cooking, not haute cuisine.’
‘We don’t have sole at home,’ she objected. ‘It’s really expensive.’
‘It probably didn’t use to be, before the stocks were depleted.’
Feeling that this conversation had gone as far as it could before it became boring, Freda put down her menu firmly and sat back in her chair, but Granny, she saw, was just getting into her stride.
‘And pommes de terre sautées’, she said. ‘Jumped potatoes. Why “jumped”?’
‘I think you’re going to tell me,’ Freda said.
‘Think about how you cook them. You toss them about in a frying pan, don’t you?’
‘Do you?’ Freda asked. ‘We have oven chips at home.’
She was rescued from the language tutorial by a waiter, who took their order – Granny was having duck – and returned with their drinks. Freda would really have liked a coke, but thought that might be frowned on, so she settled for elderflower pressé, while Granny had a large glass of red wine. They had decided not to have starters, in order to leave room for pudding, but starters of a sort came anyway. The waiter arrived with plates on which nestled two tiny tartlets for each of them.
‘An amuse-bouche’, he said, ‘with Chef’s compliments.’
One of the tartlets had a tiny egg in it. Freda put it in her mouth.
‘Nice?’ her grandmother asked.
‘My mouth is quite amused,’ Freda said.
The sole, when it arrived, was delicious. It had capers sprinkled on it, which Granny hadn’t mentioned, but that was all right. The duck looked very pink and rather uncooked to Freda, but Granny seemed to like it, and they ate happily. When they had ordered desserts – a berry sorbet for Granny, tarte tatin for Freda – and Granny’s wine glass was empty, Freda decided that this was the moment to ask about the mystery of Milo’s granddad. You couldn’t beat about the bush with Granny, so she said, ‘Can I ask you something, Granny?’
‘Ask away.’
‘It sounds weird to say it, but did you once have a thing with Fergus’s and Milo’s granddad?’
‘A thing?’ Granny’s face had gone very tight-looking.
‘A relationship?’
‘A relationship? The only relationship I had with Colin Fletcher was that he was my doctor and my best friend’s husband, Freda. But I don’t think that was what you meant, was it? What have Fergus and Milo been saying to you?’
This was not going well. Freda swallowed. ‘Milo said that you ruined their lives,’ she mumbled, ‘and I could only think—’
‘Or not think!’ her grandmother snapped. Her face had gone very red but she was at least managing to keep her voice down. ‘No, Colin and I never had an affair of any kind, and – and you will have to take my word for it – I did not ruin their lives. Colin managed that all on his own. It just suits them to blame me. I’m not going to tell you what happened – that’s their business – but you will have to decide whether you would rather believe them or me.’
She looked so angry, so different from the way she had ever looked before, that Freda panicked.
‘I didn’t mean…’ she said. ‘There’s no need to…’ and then she grabbed the room key, which was lying on the table, jumped up, almost knocking her chair over, and ran out of the room.
Upstairs, she wrestled with the heavy key in the door of their suite and was about to slam it behind her when she saw the notice that hung on the handle inside. Please clean this room it said on one side, and Do not disturb on the other. She took it and hung it on the door that led into her own room with the Do not disturb side in clear view.
She expected that once she was in her own room she would want to cry but found, when she was there, that she didn’t want to after all. Was this what it was to be thirteen? Was she actually becoming grown-up? She sat down on the bed and considered how she felt. Well, cross mostly. A bit cross with herself for jumping to the wrong conclusion, but mainly cross with the adults – all of them – for their messy secrets which they couldn’t keep to themselves. OK if they didn’t want their grandchildren to know about them, but then why not just shut up about it all and not say mysterious things like ‘she ruined our lives’? Either it was private adult stuff or not. And to be fair to Granny, she hadn’t talked about it at all. Freda had known that something must have happened between her and Eve, because she said that Eve had been her best friend, but she had never heard her mention her before, so that was weird. And now the two of them wanted their grandchildren to be friends but there was all this ill-feeling swirling around which made it pretty difficult.
She went over to the window and sat looking out at the lake as the colour drained away from it in the dusk. She wondered about apologising to Granny. It was a bit childish, jumping up and running off like that, and this could be such a nice holiday if they got on with each other like they usually did. She didn’t even really mind Granny’s lectures over the menu. On the other hand, there had been no need to be so – so fierce to her. It wasn’t as though Freda had accused her or blamed her. She had just asked a question. She wasn’t sure yet that it was her job to apologise.
She heard her grandmother come into the room next door and hoped that she would get the message when she saw the Do not disturb notice. She could think about it, and they would see in the morning who would say sorry first.
The gang
Chapter Five
IS ALL OUR COMPANY HERE?
Thursday
Of course, it is entirely my fault. I know it the moment Freda runs out. She didn’t ask to be caught up in the Gray/Fletcher/Flynn psychodrama of blame, guilt and resentment and what was the child to do, given odd scraps and hints, but to try to make sense of them? I wait just long enough for her to collect herself and then head upstairs. Apart from anything else, Freda has a bit of a history of taking off when people piss her off, and I can’t risk her running out into the night to catch last trains back to Kent. When I get to our rooms, I find that she has not, at least, locked me out, but she has made pointed use of the Do not disturb notice. So very Freda – she has style, I must say. Warned off barging in, I write her a note. Brevity, I decide, is best. I write:
‘Sorry I was a cross old bat
Love you
Granny’
And then, under the influence
of my large glass of Beaujolais, I draw her a very bad picture of a very cross bat, push it under her door and go off to have a long and penitent bath.
In the bath, I reflect that my lapse and apology have created a serious shift in our power dynamic; Freda will now be calling the shots for the rest of this trip, I fear, and between her and Eve I shall be a feather for every wind that blows, like poor, mad, old King Lear.
I ponder on this uncomfortable prospect and start to wonder whether I can persuade David to come up for a day or two and be bossed around. Could I lure him with the dual prospect of excellent walking and my delightful self and then smuggle him into the search for Ruby Buxton? It is a comforting thought to take to bed with me.
I am woken in the morning by Freda coming into my room. She has clearly decided to forgive me.
‘Morning, Gran,’ she says as she tugs open the heavy curtains and reveals the day. And really, who could hold a grudge on this sort of day? The clouds waft, the ripples on the lake sparkle, the wild flowers glow and the birds do their thing as though it has all been primped and polished for a tourist photo.
‘Morning, darling,’ I say, taking the message that no further discussion of yesterday’s contretemps is needed. ‘Did you make any plans for today with Fergus and Milo?’
‘Nope,’ she says. ‘They’ve got a practice for a rowing race this morning, so I thought I’d hang out with you.’
‘Excellent.’
I have already had a text from Eve, summoning me to a meeting with Ruby’s parents this morning, so I’m not quite sure how we’re going to manage this, but I seem to be in other people’s hands so they can sort it out.
We breakfast heartily, I on pancakes and maple syrup, Freda on a full English (though I advise against the black pudding) and then go down to meet Eve at her studio. The air still has the freshness of early morning as we skirt the lake and tourists are not yet about. We are aware of controlled shouting coming from the water, and as we watch two racing crews come toiling up the lake, exhorted from the bank by a man with a megaphone.
Where Everything Seems Double Page 4
