Where Everything Seems Double

by Penny Freedman

  Dumitru is not much engaged. He goes through the motions but tomorrow he will have forgotten most of this. I am glad when he is called back to his bar duties and I can go and find David.

  Freda deigns to join us for lunch. I find her in her room, drawing. Of course she is no longer a child, eager to run and show me what she has done – I know that, but I am still a bit wounded by the haste with which she bundles her sketchpad away as soon as I come into the room. I thought I was prepared but I discover that I am not quite ready yet to find myself consigned to the adult camp, automatically Them – untrustworthy, if not hostile – so over lunch, when David says that he is going back to the police station later, I dangle an invitation to her to help me with the crossword. She doesn’t seem to be seeing her friends today – presumably they are caught up in family Sunday routines – so wouldn’t she like a bit of companionable clue-solving?

  She would not, it seems. It has suddenly become urgent for her to finish Lord of the Flies apparently, and she shuts herself in her room to engage with the boys’ final savagery. Will she get the irony of the ending, the way the naval officer – a representative of Her Majesty’s armed forces and fresh off a warship – condemns the boys for fighting and killing? I would like to discuss it with her afterwards – I think she would have interesting things to say – but if I try she will turn me down. I am too much like a teacher; I am on the wrong side.

  Chapter Twelve

  IF NOT DUFFERS

  Monday

  David was leaving. At breakfast Granny looked pissed-off, but he looked like he was already gone – back to work, back to London. All the time he was eating he was alternately looking at his watch, checking his phone and looking out of the window for his taxi. It was a toss-up, Freda thought, as to whether the taxi would arrive before Granny exploded. And then, suddenly, Granny said, ‘I’m thinking I could come with you in the taxi. I want to go into the town and one can get tired of the ferry. The taxi can drop me off on the way back. Do you want to come, Freda?’

  Freda was too taken aback to say anything but, ‘OK.’ She really did need something else to read, and Granny might be in the mood for clothes shopping as well as books, though all Freda had spotted in the way of clothes on their walk through the town on Saturday was window after window of pretty gross hill-walking-in-wet-weather gear.

  ‘Good,’ Granny said. ‘Outside in five minutes then.’

  And breathless with surprise and haste, there Freda was five minutes later, with a taxi drawing up to the hotel entrance. Her grandmother, Freda observed, was a transformed person – brushed and lipsticked and perfumed, and wearing the smart jacket she had travelled in. When the taxi driver opened the doors for them, she told Freda, commandingly, to get in the front as she and David had things to talk about, and then, as they drove away, she ordered the radio to be put on. ‘Choose your channel,’ she told the driver, ‘we don’t mind,’ and Freda could see that she just wanted the noise to cover her conversation with David. She felt awkward sitting there in the front, and it seemed rude not to be talking to the driver, but he didn’t say anything to her and she didn’t know how to start. And then text messages started pinging in on her phone as they left the communications blackspot around the hotel. Mum didn’t say much – only that they had arrived safely and everyone sent their love and she hoped Freda was having a fun time and they were all looking forward to seeing her. ‘Fun doesn’t begin to describe it’, she wrote, and was pleased with herself for being so neatly ambiguous. Then arrividerci and con amore. She waited to make sure that it had gone before she put her phone away, and then glanced over her shoulder at David and her grandmother, who had their heads together in whispered conversation. Please don’t let them start kissing, she prayed, and then began to worry about what was going to happen at the station. Please let David just get out of the car and go, she thought, envisaging the horror of sitting there while Granny and he hugged and kissed. Hoodie moment, she thought, and wished that she had brought hers with her.

  As it turned out, David did just get out. He tapped Freda on the shoulder and said, ‘Enjoy Italy,’ and then he went, without turning back. And Granny seemed quite happy with that. She just said, ‘Come and join me in the back, Freda,’ and then started talking about shopping.

  As soon as they were dropped off in the town square, Granny said, ‘We need to collar someone and ask where the bookshop is,’ and when Freda pointed to a W.H. Smith just across from them she said, ‘A proper bookshop, Freda.’ After two failed attempts, when people just shrugged at them, they were sent off in the direction of the bus station. The shop front was so narrow that they passed it without noticing on their first attempt and had to retrace their steps. It was on a corner, completely overshadowed by the big building society next to it, and it looked like a little house front, except that the door was propped open and the small front window was crammed with books. It was tiny inside too, with shelves going up to the ceiling and two little stepladders to reach the top. It smelt, she thought, of books that had been there for a long time.

  Freda was disappointed. She was used to Waterstones at home, where books were laid out on tables in categories, and you could browse for ages. Here she supposed there must be some kind of logic to the arrangement but she couldn’t immediately see what it was, and she looked around hopelessly. Granny, though, was like a toddler in a playground, dashing from one set of shelves to another, clambering up the ladders and including the rather grumpy-looking shopkeeper in her happy smile and squeaks of delight. As Freda mooched about, not sure what she was looking for, her eye was caught by a shelf of historical fiction – all about different royal women, as far as she could see, with glamorous-looking young women in velvet dresses on their covers. As soon as she started to look through them, though, she was summoned by an imperious cry from her grandmother, poised aloft on one of the ladders. ‘Over here, Freda. Classic fiction!’ She picked one of the velvet-clad women at random and went reluctantly to join her.

  ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Granny said. ‘Have you read it?’

  Freda had not, but she had seen it in the book cupboard at school when she had been helping with an end of term clear-up, so she knew it would be coming her way at some time. She sighed. Granny had been an English teacher for years so she was bound to choose syllabus books, wasn’t she? Tentatively she held out the historical book and Granny huffed.

  ‘Her women are all too modern,’ she said, ‘but you’ll learn a bit of history, I suppose. We’ll take this and Mockingbird – oh, and Animal Farm. You should read that.’

  The cover of Animal Farm had a pig on it, and it looked like a children’s book. Granny caught her doubtful expression. ‘It’s a political allegory,’ she said.

  ‘Right,’ Freda said. ‘Awesome.’

  She wasn’t sure whether her sarcasm was lost on Granny, who now started flitting around looking at books for herself, exclaiming at her discoveries and involving the bookseller in her search. She tried to involve Freda too, but she sat down on a rung of one of the stepladders and defiantly opened A Winter Queen. When, eventually, she heard Granny say, ‘I think that’s the lot,’ she looked up to see that the bookseller was actually smiling. Maybe, she thought, lots of people came in just to say what a sweet, funny little shop it was, but didn’t actually buy anything. She took her books over to add to Granny’s pile.

  After that, they went on a search for clothes shops, but her first impression had been right – they counted eight shops selling walking gear but found nothing you could call fashion.

  ‘Home then?’ Granny said, and then darted across the road, waving Freda over. She was looking into the window of a shop selling stuff that looked as if it came from Africa – carved wooden things and bright, patterned throws, all very ethnic-looking but nothing Freda thought she would actually like to have. Granny, though, was pointing at a handwritten sign which said Clothes upstairs and she headed up a spiral staircase to a
sort of attic space full of racks of hippyish clothes, long, shapeless skirts and loose, tunic-type tops – things for fat women to wrap themselves in and try to hide their bulges. She really did hope that Granny wasn’t going to buy anything here, but she could see her looking through a rack of kaftans.

  ‘Eve and I used to wear these in the 80s,’ she called to Freda. ‘We bought them at a place called The Indoor Market in Marlbury. It’s a mobile phone shop now.’

  ‘I thought kaftans were 1970s things,’ Freda said. ‘Flower power and all that.’

  ‘They were, but we were part of the counter-culture.’

  Counter culture? That sounded as if it meant people who liked shopping, but it didn’t seem to be what Granny meant. It was always a dangerous thing to ask her to explain something because you were likely to get a lecture, but Freda was interested so she decided to risk it.

  ‘I don’t know what “counter culture” means,’ she said, and for once she got a reasonably succinct reply.

  ‘It’s a set of attitudes that are against the mainstream attitudes of the time,’ Granny said. ‘And the clothes people wear often signal that.’

  ‘So what were the kaftans signalling against?’

  ‘Margaret Thatcher, in a word or two. But don’t get me started on her. Let’s just say that those of us who came of age under Thatcher and didn’t want to be Thatcher’s children – jobs in the city and anyone who isn’t out for themselves is a mug – signalled it by not wearing power suits with big shoulders, or those terrible blouses with pussy-cat bows, or pearl necklaces. God, there were a lot of pearl necklaces. They even sold shirts with little strings of fake pearls attached to their collars.’

  ‘So you wore kaftans because you preferred the 70s?’

  ‘I suppose so. I can see now what a mess the 70s were politically. It’s easy to see why the country voted for a strict headmistress figure to impose some discipline. Our kaftans were a protest, like rolling your school skirt up or pulling your tie loose.’ She pulled a blue and green kaftan off the rail. ‘I’m going to get this for Eve,’ she said, ‘a la recherche du temps perdu.’

  Freda had a vague idea what that must mean and decided not to ask more. She tried to imagine Granny and Eve as young women in their kaftans, but she couldn’t see it. What she could see was that Granny loved Eve, though how Eve felt about Granny she wasn’t sure.

  As she was paying, Granny spotted a display of patterned bandanas on the counter and pounced on them. ‘Just the thing to suppress hair that’s gone frizzy,’ she said. ‘Choose three.’

  As they left the shop and Freda was stuffing into her bag the bandanas she could not imagine ever wearing, she asked, ‘So what is the counter-culture now, Granny?’

  Her grandmother stopped in her tracks to consider the question, and a woman walking behind them skirted past with an irritated huff.

  ‘I’m not the person to ask,’ she said. ‘Counter-cultures spring up among the young. I’d say it’s Extinction Rebellion, isn’t it? Only that’s on the way to being mainstream. Everyone in the public eye is green now. We’ll all be wearing hippie clothes again soon, you mark my words. Except the kaftans will be made from recycled plastic bags.’

  Micky was not helping his father on the ferry, and Freda was not sure whether she was sorry or not. If he was going to ignore her then it was better that he wasn’t there she supposed, though she did like him and she might have liked a chance to see if he was as dead set against her as the rest of the gang seemed to be. The lake was calm and the ferry not very full, and Granny was quiet, already diving into one of the books she had bought. Freda didn’t feel like starting any of hers. Her mind felt edgy, as though there was something hovering just out of reach, and if she could just touch it it would give her an answer to everything. The feeling had started when Granny began talking about counter-culture. She tried to stop reaching for whatever it was and let her mind wander. She thought about Ruby, whom she had never met, but who was the centre of this strange adventure all the same. She thought about the picture of Ruby among the photos of the cast members that she had seen at the theatre, with her red hair falling to her shoulders. Did she have red hair when she was born, she wondered, and was that why her parents had called her Ruby? What had she been like? No-one in the gang had really told her that. She thought about Eve’s husband helping her with chemistry. Did she like that or was it a pain? Was he good at teaching? Milo and Fergus obviously liked him – loved him, actually – and enjoyed doing things with him. Did he make chemistry fun at all? Did she go to his house for her lessons? If so, she would bet that Eve always gave her something nice to eat and drink. Unless she was at her studio. Did Ruby miss Grace, her sister? Did she miss having someone to talk to? Was Venetia any good as a stand-in? She doubted it.

  By the time they got off the ferry, her thoughts were beginning to make a kind of sense. Granny said she would try to see Dumitru for a short English lesson before lunch and Freda shut herself in her room. She needed to write things down, and the only way to do it, she decided, was by drawing a diagram. Writing it down in words would make the thoughts fly away. She had to make a picture of it. Grabbing a piece of sketching paper that was lying on her chest of drawers, she started to write, in pencil, rubbing out and improving until she had what she wanted.

  Satisfied finally, she sat back and looked at it. What to do now? Should she try to talk to Granny about it? It was the obvious thing to do, but Granny wasn’t good at taking on other people’s ideas, was she? And Freda really had no actual evidence for anything. Her picture felt right to her, but that wasn’t going to be enough for Granny. She needed evidence. She looked again at what she had written and considered the question marks. Starting with them would be a good plan, and that meant she needed to talk to Dumitru.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A SERPENT EAT MY HEART AWAY

  Monday

  Well, I seem to be mending bridges. Things became quite amiable between David and me yesterday, to the extent that when we rolled upstairs after a couple of after-dinner brandies it felt perfectly natural for me to go with him to his room, and this morning has seen me make the walk of shame back to my own room without any awkward encounters with over-zealous chambermaids. David is raring to get back to London, though, munching his breakfast with an eye on the time, and I need to talk to him before he goes. At some point in the night I woke with one of those moments of pure clarity that you sometimes get at the instant of waking, as though your subconscious mind has filtered all the rubbish out as you slept, and has left you with one essential nugget of truth. Actually, in my experience, this moment of truth usually involves the realisation of something crucial left undone, but this morning it reveals something that needs to be done, and David is the man to do it.

  With this in mind, I propose going with him in his taxi to Penrith, and invite Freda to come along for a shopping trip afterwards. She was looking loose-endish yesterday and I shall enjoy the distraction. Under cover of some horrible music on the car radio, I give David his instructions. He balks at them of course – this is not his case, he can’t interfere, he has no authority – but he quails under my insistence and I think he will do as I ask.

  In Carnmere later Freda and I find the dream bookshop – tiny and crowded, making no concessions to attracting the casual visitor with gaudy and alluring displays. The proprietor is taciturn, primed for disappointment, and I think I make his day with my prodigal purchasing. Though austere, the shop is perfectly up to date, offering all the books that were shortlisted for the Women’s Fiction prize this year. I buy The Silence of the Girls, which has been on my must-read list, and then, since I’m in the ancient Greek world, I get Circe as well. Freda has been attracted to one of those bodice-rippers disguised as history and I get it for her because she has to make her own mistakes, but I add To Kill a Mockingbird, which she will surely like, if she isn’t put off by the protagonist’s being eight years old, an
d Animal Farm, which she may not be ready for yet.

  It is a satisfactory outing in my view but Freda grows very quiet on the homeward ferry ride and continues to be silent over lunch, served to us by a still-battered Dumitru in the hotel garden. Afterwards I offer a walk but she says she will just chill out in the garden with one of her new books and I go off on my own.

  I walk up the road, past the gap in the hedge and the yellow tape beyond, until I reach the place where I can get onto the lake shore itself, and then I walk as far as I can go along the shingle, thinking about Ruby Buxton and wondering how long it will take David to follow up on my hunch, and whether I am right at all. When the pebbled shore runs out I scramble back onto the road and return to the hotel. I have been away for under an hour and expect to find Freda in the garden, but she is not. I check at reception and find that she has not collected our key. Out with the gang, I think, and go down to the jetty to look for them there. I go back to reception because I realise that I didn’t ask if she had left a message for me. She hasn’t. I go to the car park sweet spot in case she is somewhere where she has been able to send a text, though I know really that my phone would have picked up a text when I was on the lake shore, away from the looming hill behind the hotel. There is no message. I try phoning her and it rings out.

  All this while my brain has been sending me calming messages – this has happened before, there is no need to panic, she is not a baby, there will be a rational explanation. Irrationally, I go up to our room, convinced somehow that she has been there and left a message for me, but the room is immaculate and untouched since it was cleaned this morning. I drink some water and take long, calming breaths. If she is not here then she has gone somewhere with the gang. She would not have gone off on her own, would she? So I have to find out where they are and Eve will know, won’t she?