“It’ll be fine,” Jennifer reassured her. “After all, she’s not the love ofyourlife.”
“I’m not sure that helps as much as you think it does.”
“Worst-case scenario, it’s a ‘Thanks but no thanks’ from us or from her.”
Audrey tried to accept this as fact and failed. “I don’t think it is. I think the worst-case scenario is that talking to her stirs up all kinds of things we should have just left alone and makes her life and Doris’s life and possiblymylife materially worse.”
The expression on Jennifer’s face wouldn’t have been comforting to anybody who didn’t know her very well indeed, because it was an expression that said,Your concerns are trivial and I cannot be fucked with them.It was only if you’d got closer to her than most people dared that you could see it was also saying,Therefore you shouldn’t be fucked with them either and I’ll have your back if they try to be fucked with you.
“Emily’s life is”—she gestured at their surroundings—“like this, so she’ll either be fine, or if she’s not fine it’ll be her own fucking fault. And Doris made her choices a long time ago and you don’t get to take that away from her. As for you”—Jennifer gave that twist of the lips that wasn’t quite a smile but was better in so many ways—“clearly you can take care of yourself.”
The door to the suite was opened not by its resident but by a member of the hotel staff, and Audrey couldn’t quite help but suspect that it had been arranged that way deliberately. Becauseit meant that when Audrey first saw Emily Branningham she was framed in a window, sitting in a wicker chair on a private terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. The little girl who wanted to grow up to be Rebecca de Winter had got her wish and then some.
With a studied, casual slowness, she turned her head to acknowledge her guests. Her hair was silver now, beneath her sunhat, her face lined with age. But her eyes, peering over the top of dark glasses that Audrey’s personal taste for the retro aesthetic couldn’t help but approve of, still shone like flakes of obsidian.
“Would it be unforgivably cliché of me,” she asked, “to begin,Audrey Lane, I presume.”
“Classic for a reason,” replied Audrey, crossing the floor of the suite without waiting for further invitation.
Emily Branningham’s gaze flicked to Jennifer. “And who’s this? Your assistant?”
To which Jennifer replied with an inevitable, “Fuck off.”
“She’s a TV producer,” Audrey explained. “Of—I assume you know aboutBake Expectations?”
“Not really the TV sort.” Emily Branningham waved a hand in the direction of the one free chair on the terrace. “Do feel free to sit, though you’ll have to fight over it.”
With pointed apathy, Jennifer propped herself in the arch of the French window, leaving the seat for Audrey.
“I don’t mean to pry,” asked Emily Branningham as Audrey was sitting down, “but are you two fucking? I get a vibe.”
Audrey was about to say something evasive, but Jennifer cut in with a sharp, “Yes; next question.”
And Emily Branningham smiled that smile Audrey had seen so often in her mind’s eye. “You know,” she said, “I think I might approve of you.”
Slightly concerned that things were getting offtrack and irrationally peeved that Emily Branningham seemed to be sort of flirting with her sort of girlfriend, Audrey attempted to bring things back around to the topic at hand. “TV aside,” she tried, “the reason you might have heard ofBake—”
“Oh, of course.” An expression of amused realisation blossomed across Emily’s face. “You must be in charge of that show they’re making in the bones of my family’s legacy. How interesting.”
“It pays the bills,” replied Jennifer.
A conclusion was forming rapidly behind Emily Branningham’s quick, dark eyes. “Well, well, well, so the nymph’s come back to Patchley.”
Audrey nodded.
“Now isn’t that a thing. I always thought she might. That’s the trouble with those old, dead houses. They reach out from beyond the grave and drag you down with them.”
Sensing that she might be getting somewhere, Audrey slipped her phone from out of her bag. “Sorry, do you mind if I record this?”
Emily Branningham gave her the kind of insouciant look you could only give after a near century of making a positive virtue out of carelessness. “As it suits. Now where was I?”
And after taking a moment to gather her thoughts, she continued.
June 1987
Jimmy left it to me to shut the old place down. He’d always been weak like that, sentimental. I think it was the shame that got to him in the end—the shame of losing it all. And he bloody wellshouldhave been ashamed because if you’re going to lose a fortune you should at least have the decency to lose it on something interesting. Gamble it or snort it or go off your head and spend it all building a starship out of Norwegian spruce or something.
Not Jimmy. Jimmy was just a Lloyd’s name. But that was all it took, in the end. Asbestosis hit and Lloyd’s of London was paying out hand over fist, and poor bastards like Jimmy were on the hook for more than even we could afford, and the Branninghams had never been short of a bob or two, as I’m sure you’ve worked out by now.
