Where Everything Seems Double

by Penny Freedman

  She found her dusting and arranging pots. She said, ‘Hello darling,’ but she seemed distracted, and when Freda asked her what Milo and Fergus were doing she was vague. ‘I don’t know if they have plans,’ she said, while she was giving a critical look to one of her pots. ‘They were still in bed, I think, when I left.’

  Freda waited to see if she would ask if she’d like to help her, and when she didn’t she said – and she sounded pathetic to herself – ‘Granny is busy with David.’

  Eve put down the pot. ‘I would find you something to do here, darling,’ she said, ‘but it’s Sunday. It’s all sales to the tourists today. Nothing creative.’

  ‘I wondered if maybe you all went to church on Sundays,’ Freda said.

  Eve looked at her. ‘Because of being Irish?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, I suppose. But because of what Milo was wearing yesterday. I wondered why he had those clothes on holiday.’

  ‘Good observation,’ Eve said. ‘No wonder you’re a good artist. But those were Micky’s clothes, borrowed for the occasion. I was afraid the police would take Milo for an Irish ruffian if he went in in his ripped jeans.’

  So if they weren’t going to church, what were they planning? And if it didn’t include her, what was she going to do? She did her best not to sound needy. ‘No problem,’ she said. ‘It’s a good chance to do some sketching,’ but she knew her voice sounded a bit wobbly. ‘Good luck with sales,’ she added as she made for the door.

  ‘Hold on,’ Eve called. ‘Why don’t you call the boys? They may have rowing practice but they’ll be free at some point, I’m sure.’

  ‘I haven’t got their numbers. And there’s no signal here, is there?’

  ‘There’s the magic spot in the car park. Do you know about that? Here.’ She handed Freda her phone. ‘That’s Milo’s number. Put it in your phone.’ And then, as Freda was leaving, she said, ‘Sales slacken off around tea-time. If you’re at a loose end then, come back and I’ll draw you. Your granny asked me if I would.’

  Freda quite wanted to give her a hug. She was so nice. Nicer than Granny, actually, who didn’t seem to care about her at all at the moment, not since David arrived. She almost skipped along the lake to the car park, but as two bars sprang up on her phone she felt oddly nervous about ringing Milo. She felt suddenly very much only just thirteen – a pestering little girl in Milo’s eyes. But he had wanted her there yesterday, hadn’t he, when he went to the police? And he had told Venetia to lay off when she was getting at her. He was nice. She found his number and called. It rang out, and then there was his message:

  ‘This is Milo. Sorry I can’t talk at the moment. Busy doing something else. Leave me a message why don’t you?’

  Leave a message? She couldn’t. Anything she said would sound sad and whiney. She clicked off. While she was here with her phone working she thought she could ring and have a chat with her mum. She imagined her and Ben at the kitchen table with coffee and the Sunday paper and she felt her insides do an odd thing that made her realise for the first time why “homesick” was called that. She punched the number and then remembered that today was when they were flying to Ancona – Mum, Ben and Nico. They were probably on the plane right now. Sure enough Mum’s phone had the switched off message. She put her phone in her pocket and made her way out of the car park with her head down, eyes on the ground, in case anyone might think she was crying.

  Not wanting to go back to the hotel, she started to walk along the road that ran along the lakeside, in the opposite direction from the town. It wasn’t very interesting walking along the road as there were bushes between the road and the actual lakeside so there was no view, but she could see ahead where there was a break in the bushes and she thought she might be able to get nearer the water. When she reached it, she could hear voices, and when she looked through there were Granny and David standing beside an area of the bank which was marked off with yellow police tape, just like you saw on TV. And David had his arm round Granny’s shoulders as though she needed comforting, which was ridiculous. What did she need comfort for? And when was someone going to think of putting an arm round a thirteen-year-old who nobody wanted to know?

  Stepping through, she called, ‘Hi,’ quite loudly, intending to make them jump. They turned to look at her, and David called out, ‘Keep back. This is a potential crime scene,’ in a really unfriendly voice, as though she was a child or an idiot.

  ‘Oh, really?’ she said, with as much sarcasm as she could muster. ‘I would never have guessed. That must be what that funny yellow tape is for.’

  He looked as though he might be going to say something more friendly but her grandmother came charging in. ‘Not with your new friends, Freda?’ she asked, and it couldn’t have been clearer that she didn’t want her hanging around.

  ‘We don’t have to spend all our time together,’ Freda said. ‘We’ve all got other things to do.’ She turned to go back onto the road but stopped and called back over her shoulder. ‘Do try not to fall in the water, won’t you?’ before stepping onto the road and walking back towards the hotel.

  Back in her room, she picked up her sketchpad and pencils. She had told Eve that she was going to draw, and draw she would, but when she looked out at the lakeside it was already busy and she knew she couldn’t possibly sit sketching anywhere where people would come by and look. Even the garden would be busy by now. She could draw the view from the window but she had done that before, and it wasn’t really what interested her today. She decided that she would draw from memory instead. Scenes from yesterday: the four of them sitting on the bench outside the police station, Milo wearing Micky’s school clothes, the five of them eating their fish and chips. And if her drawings of Venetia turned out to be not that flattering, well, get over it.

  The drawings actually worked out rather well. Cool, she allowed herself to think as she surveyed them. The people were recognisable, at least, though Venetia might not have wanted to recognise herself. She was pretty but nobody looked pretty when they were being mean, did they?

  Eventually her grandmother came in (she didn’t knock on her door, of course) and said they were planning to have lunch in the garden. Her eyes went straight to Freda’s sketchbook but she quickly turned it over and put it into a random drawer which was not its real hiding place but would hold Granny up later, if she came snooping in her room.

  Over lunch – a really nice prawn open sandwich without too much mayonnaise – her grandmother tried to probe about what the boys were doing but, to be fair to David, he did try to take the conversation off in other directions, asking about the village in Italy where Ben’s parents lived, but after lunch he said he was going back to the police station, and Granny asked her if she wanted to do the crossword with her. It was a thing she normally quite liked to do, but she was pissed with Granny and didn’t feel like it. Instead she said she was going to finish Lord of the Flies, and went back to her room.

  She had been saving the last part because she wasn’t sure when she might get another book. Granny didn’t seem to be in the right mood for shopping, and wouldn’t be all the time David was here. So she had been rationing herself, but she really did want to know what was going to happen. She was beginning to change her mind about whether girls would have been kinder to each other; now she could quite imagine Venetia leading a pig hunt.

  The last chapters absorbed her completely, and she liked the ending, when the naval officer, all smart and civilised in his white uniform, couldn’t understand how a group of British boys could have behaved so badly. That felt so true. Adults didn’t understand. They had all been young, they had all known how it was when friendships and breaking friendships and being cool or being sad were the most important things, but they seemed to have forgotten – even Mum and Ben sometimes. They thought her problems with girls at school were like when she was little – like who threw sand at her in the playground at break time. They didn’t see
that someone could just diss your whole personality, could cancel you so you were nobody. She had thought Milo really liked her but now she wondered if he had just been laughing at her.

  She got up. She wasn’t going to sit and mope. It was four-thirty. She would go down and see if Eve was free to draw her. The result might be hideous, but she thought Eve would be kind.

  Eve looked tired when she found her at the studio, sitting at the little table outside, drinking a mug of tea. She looked up and smiled at her, although Freda suspected that the last thing she wanted to do was to settle down to a session of portrait sketching.

  ‘Did you sell a lot?’ she asked her.

  ‘I did.’ She put down her tea. ‘I shall have to get potting again this week. And you have come to sit for me, haven’t you?’

  Freda felt awkward. ‘Only if it’s OK,’ she said. ‘It can wait, if you’ve had a busy day.’

  ‘What a nice girl you are. Like your mum.’

  Freda blushed, pleased at the compliment, but noticing too that Eve hadn’t said ‘like your granny’.

  Eve said, ‘I tell you what, I am tired but I would like to draw you, so if you can fetch my sketchpad from inside, I’ll just sit here with you and do a little sketch. How does that sound?’

  ‘Great. Where will I find your pad?’

  ‘In the back. On the desk.’

  Freda found the sketchpad easily but couldn’t resist lingering, looking at the sketches tacked to the walls, at the tools and brushes and the massive wheel. When she got back, Eve was not alone. Milo was there, and Eve had stood up and was having a quiet, serious conversation with him. When they saw Freda they stepped apart. Milo said, ‘Had a good day, Freda?’ but before she could answer he said, ‘Sorry, Gran. Must run. See you later.’ And he was gone.

  Eve and Freda watched him go off at a run towards the ferry – or the hotel – or Venetia’s house. Then Eve said, ‘Boys. What would you do with them?’

  It wasn’t meant as a real question, she knew, but she found herself saying, ‘I don’t know. I think I don’t know anything really.’

  Eve put an arm round her. ‘Oh yes you do. You know plenty. But you’ve been landed in a very tricky situation here and nobody is behaving very well. Because we’re all worried and scared. Frankly, if Gina had any sense she would put you on the first plane to Italy and send you back to your family.’

  ‘I’m going next week,’ Freda said. ‘I’ve got my ticket.’

  ‘A lot can happen in a week. But come on, sit down, and let’s see what you look like.’

  At first Freda didn’t know what to do with her face, but Eve started to talk about how she learnt to do portraits – about the life drawing classes at art school and the terrifying man who taught them, and would rip their drawings up and yell ‘cartoon’ or ‘sentimental trash’ or ‘not fit for Enid Blyton’, and it was so funny and interesting that she forgot to worry about her face. After a while Eve stopped talking and was concentrating hard on what she was doing, and Freda’s mind wandered to what Eve had said earlier, about everyone being worried and scared and nobody behaving well. It didn’t excuse Granny, who had nothing to be scared of – except, she supposed, that she was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to help Eve and her husband, and that the police would arrest him. But now, actually, Milo was more under suspicion, wasn’t he? And maybe that’s what she meant – why he wasn’t being nice to her any more. He was scared, though he wouldn’t admit it because a boy could never admit to that, and it made him scared of her, because David had come, and he was the police, and he was afraid of what Freda might say about him. Maybe it wasn’t Venetia’s fault that Milo didn’t want to see her. Maybe Venetia thought she was looking out for Milo.

  It was all such a tangle and she really wanted to be out of it. She had had fun for a couple of days but now she wished she was going to Italy tomorrow. She wasn’t looking forward to what was coming.

  When Eve said, ‘Do you want to have a look?’ she was startled out of her thoughts, and must have looked alarmed, because Eve laughed and said, ‘It’s not as bad as all that. Remember, though, it won’t be like the picture you see in the mirror – not only because it’s just a sketch but because in the mirror your image is reversed, and we are none of us completely symmetrical.’

  ‘OK,’ Freda said, and took a deep breath as Eve slid the pad across to her.

  It was all right, actually. She would have known it was her, and Eve had made her look quite grown-up. In fact, it was quite flattering – her eyebrows were darker, for one thing, instead of being nearly invisible like they really were, and her ears weren’t as big as she thought they were.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely. I shall give it to my mum.’

  ‘Oh, really? I think your granny wanted it.’

  ‘Well she doesn’t deserve it,’ Freda said. She looked at the sketch again. ‘Do I really look as sad as that?’ she asked.

  ‘This afternoon you do, but I don’t expect you do usually.’

  ‘No.’

  Getting up, she went round to give Eve a hug. It was awkward as Eve was sitting down, but she turned round and held her hand in both of hers.

  ‘You’re a lovely girl,’ she said. ‘Things will sort themselves out. And remember nothing is your fault.’

  As she walked back to the hotel, she realised how dark the sky had become, the storm clouds that had been forecast rolling in off the hills, and by the time she got to the jetty heavy drops of rain started to fall. She pushed her sketch up under her t-shirt and held it there with her arms crossed as she ran as fast as she could across the road and up the drive. Back in her room, she flattened the paper out. It was a bit battered but that didn’t altogether matter. It looked like she felt, she thought, as she sat at her window and watched the rain beating against it.

  My granny’s boyfriend

  Chapter Eleven

  AND THOUGH SHE BE BUT LITTLE SHE IS FIERCE

  Sunday

  I am not at my best this morning. I slept badly and have a headache. I can only pick at breakfast, which makes my mood worse when I consider how much this is costing me. David, on the other hand, is very chipper, engaging Freda in bright conversation and chomping his way through the full Cumbrian breakfast, black pudding and all. He is keen to look at the possible crime scene on the lakeside and deigns to agree to my joining him. Freda, I assume, will be off somewhere with the gang.

  David and I wait until the ferry has been and gone, and then I take him out onto the jetty to show him the theatre opposite and the small boats tied up in front of the boatyard. I describe the interval extravaganza with the floating fairies and invite him to imagine the scene. Then we walk along to the area marked off by police tape. The boat is no longer there – removed for forensic examination – so all there is to see is an area of grass. We stop at a gap in the bushes that screen the lake from the road, which interests David.

  ‘That’s not a newly-made gap,’ he says. ‘It looks as though the boat was moored there deliberately for access to the road.’

  ‘Which fits bunk, abduction or crime and escape.’ I say.

  ‘Yes.’

  We go through and stand just outside the taped-off area. I have seen crime scenes before: tape across the doors of a college library, where a student had been killed; tape across the drive of a country house where a teenage girl had died; tape flapping in the wind on a desolate area of beach where I myself had found a body; broken fragments of tape clinging to the railings of a Bloomsbury basement where a young woman had been strangled. I ought to be hardened to it, but this morning it gets under my skin. Is this all we know about what happened to Ruby Buxton? Is this the best the police can do – come out and wrap tape round a patch of grass that just might have been the scene of her death?

  I turn to David. ‘If they think this is the place, and they – and you – think she’s dead, why haven�
�t they dragged the bloody lake?’ I demand. ‘Her parents have a right to know, don’t they?’

  Surprisingly, he puts an arm round me. ‘If there’s a body in there, it will come to the surface soon. Dragging a lake is hugely expensive. They are still looking – following other lines. It’s a question of where to put their resources. You’d rather they were still looking for a live girl, wouldn’t you?’

  I don’t have an answer but I do like the feel of his arm round me, and I am about to lean into it when a voice calls, ‘Hi!’ and there is Freda standing in the gap by the road. Not only has she interrupted us but she is extremely sarky – a proper Year Nine this morning. She soon flounces off but she has broken the moment and we go back to the hotel for coffee, and for me to have another session with Dumitru.

  His face is looking worse, if anything, this morning; the bruising has come out and he looks grey and preoccupied. I take the risk of a head-on approach.

  ‘There’s something the matter, Dumitru, isn’t there? Not just your face. You’re not with me. Do you want to tell me what it is?’

  He looks at me, but his eyes are blank. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Just learning. No talking.’

  He shakes his head vigorously as he says this but stops and closes his eyes.

  ‘You’ve got a headache, haven’t you?’ I ask, and don’t wait for an answer. ‘We need to work on your spelling, but you don’t look in a fit state for reading and writing.’

  I wish I had the flash cards I promised but I’ve been too busy to get Freda onto those – and she’s not in the mood to be helpful anyway.

  ‘Wait here a moment,’ I say, and I hurry off to the hotel lounge, where I grab a fistful of smart headed notepaper from a desk in the window, and a couple of felt pens from a basket of children’s toys. Then, back at our garden table, I improvise on-the-spot flash cards, giving him a series of aphonetic words to pronounce. Knife, know, knot and kneel we do, and then thought, through and though, taught, and laugh, and vague, league and tongue. I don’t go into homophones; the delights of right and write, there and their, hole and whole, and by and buy, and all their friends. They can wait for another day.