I shrugged. “I don’t know. God?”
“Generations of never paying for anything we don’t have to. Come on, quickly.”
She darted away then, into the dark, and I followed after her half certain I was going to get nabbed and sent to prison for skipping a movie ticket, but nobody spotted us and nobody cared. She took me through this little service door, what I reckon the pianist used back when pictures was silent, and we slipped into some seats what nobody wanted and nobody would see.
“What film is it?” I asked her as the lights was going down.
“New Hitchcock,” she told me. “Rebecca.”
I’d heard of Hitchcock, of course. Everyone had heard ofHitchcock. Never heard ofRebecca. Not then I hadn’t anyway. Now—well, now I’ve had it on tape and DVD and them Blu-rays, what was big for a while. My grandson set me up with that Amazon thing, and I’ve got it on there and all.
It’s a good film. One of the best I reckon. Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier and that. And it brings back memories.
Emily didn’t take her eyes off the screen the whole time. But she held my hand, and I didn’t take my eyes off her.
After the show we grabbed some bread and some cheese from a shop in Taplow and Emily drove us out to a field not far from Patchley. We lay next to each other on the grass and ripped chunks off the loaf and fed them to each other.
“He kills her in the book, you know,” Emily told me.
“That seems a bit rough. They’ve only just got married.”
She laughed again. “Not the girl, nymph. Rebecca. But you’re not allowed to kill your wife in a movie so she had to kill herself.”
“Oh.” I chewed on a piece of cheese and gave it a think. “Good film, though.”
Emily was lying right beside me, her head next to mine. Our hair was all spilling together in the grass. “One day,” she said to the sky, or maybe to me, “I’m going to have a life like that.”
“What, marry a rich man with a dead wife?”
And she laughed at me. Of course she laughed at me. “Not like the girl—poor silly thing who doesn’t even get her own name. No, when I grow up I’m going to beRebecca.”
“And get shot?”
I felt her nodding where her head was touching mine. “Go where I want. Do what I want. Love who I want. Die how I want.”
“You’re so—I dunno. Why’re you talking about dying?”
“Morbid.”
“You what?”
She shifted, rolling around and coming to her knees so she was kneeling over me, looking down. “The word for somebody who is fixated with dark things. With death and dying and the like. It’smorbid.”
“Then you’re morbid.”
And there was the laugh again. “I thought I should be. I believe it looks rather well on me.”
“You’re daft.”
That didn’t please her. “I’m not daft. I’m actually rather precocious.”
She tore a piece of bread from the loaf and worked it between her fingers. Crumbs from its crust were drifting down onto me like little brown snowflakes.
“We should have bought some honey,” she said, not really to me. “I’m in the mood for something sweet.”
I propped myself up on my elbows and tried to shrug, but it was hard with my weight all funny. “What we’ve got’s good enough.”
“I suppose it is,” she said.
