“No, I know that.” She looked grave. And she had a good line in grave looks, did Mrs. Loris. “But how did she—how did she startle you, exactly?”
“I just wasn’t expecting her.”
She didn’t say anything. Didn’t move. She just waited.
“I swear.”
“Very well.” She pulled up a stool of her own and sat opposite me. “And you don’t have to say anything else. But please listen.”
So I listened. Though in the end I didn’t much like what I was listening to.
“I have known Miss Emily all her life,” Mrs. Loris said, “and she has always been a girl with certain…qualities. She can be very charming and very persuasive. But if she had”—and she took a deep breath here—“if she had persuaded you into anything, youshould know that you would not be the first and that you will certainly not be the last.”
The little voice in the back of my head said it’d told me so, but the bigger voice at the front didn’t want to hear it. “She didn’t persuade me of anything,” I told her. “Honest.”
I don’t think she believed me. But she was a kind woman so she left it there. She just said, “As you say.” And then she got up to go.
Except before she did, she had one more question. Though not one she expected me to answer.
“Are you in love with her?” she asked me. “You don’t have to decide right now, just—know it will be much harder, in the end, if you are.”
Then she left me. And I sat there on my stool, thinking about what she’d said, wondering if I was.
Which was a silly thing to wonder. Because I always had been.
Sunday
Looking back over her notes, Audrey was—and this was a total pisser—starting to see Jennifer’s point. This would make a good story. It was a story that she badly wanted to tell. But it was not a story that overlapped well with the narrativesBake Expectationstended to build around its contestants. There was a reason that, when Grace Forsythe did the voice-overs explaining who everybody was she wound up saying things likeRosaline is a twenty-seven-year-old full-time mum, and her daughter Amelie loves shortbreadand notDoris is a ninety-six-year-old former car thief who once had a deeply erotically charged relationship with a rich disaster lesbian in the 1940s.
And that was total pisser number two. Because the other thing Jennifer might—and Audrey was only willing to go as far as might—have been right about was… Well. The more Doris had told her, the more likely it seemed to Audrey that things were going in a heartbreaky direction. A heartbreaky direction with deeply entrenched class inequalities and power imbalances. All of which was slightly too much to deal with in a short human-interest piece in Shropshire’s second largest regional newspaper.
Leaving that, and the fact that the story was supposed to be dead anyway, as problems for an inevitably resentful future-Audrey, present-day-Audrey went to breakfast. As she tromped towards the hotel, she was caught by a nagging sense of…not-quite-rightness. A not-quite-rightness that she was finally able to identify when she reached the sitting-down-log and realised that Doris was nowhere to be seen. Ordinarily she’d have been up early and already taking her mid-hill-climb breather, but the log was empty. The thought crept fleetingly into Audrey’s mind that if she wasn’t taking a breather, perhaps she wasn’t breathing at all.
She’d seemed fine yesterday. Maybe a little melancholy, on account of talking about her complicated ex. But not more fragile or more tired or more likely to drop dead of a heart attack than usual. Oh God. Audrey made it another half dozen paces before “dropped dead of a heart attack” settled over her mind like a damp flannel and would not de-settle. It was, in fact, settling deeper with every second that passed. She had to do something.
Turning, she pelted back down the hill and into the Lodge, where she knocked on Doris’s door. When there was no answer, she hammered on it. When there was still no answer, she tried hammering and yelling together, and when that didn’t work she dashed out of the Lodge again and sprinted up the hill.
Well, sprinted to start off with. Then jogged. Then stopped for a second because she was getting a stitch and it was a really long way and running was so much harder when you were an adult with boobs. Finally, she urgent-walked the rest of the way, hoping she’d be able to find someone at the house with a key and that the person with a key would be able to get help. And that they wouldn’t be too late.
She wasn’t too late, in the end. In fact, she arrived just in time to see Doris sitting down with a plate of bacon and eggs.
Trying not to look too betrayed and/or winded, Audrey hobbled over to her. “Hi,” she wheezed. “Didn’t see you on the hill.”
“Got moved.” Doris dipped a corner of toast into a pool of runny yolk. “Said it was an insurance thing.”
It was kind of a relief for Audrey to learn that not everything she’d tried recently had ended in abject failure. Even if it had been liability that had swayed Jennifer Hallet rather than—oh what did it matter? “I’m glad.”
“It’s nice,” agreed Doris. “Though I’m still not sure I like the fuss.”
Linda, who was sitting opposite and seeming slightly less despondent than she had the day before, gave Doris a reproving look. “It’s not a fuss. It’s just doing what’s right.”
“It can be both,” Doris pointed out.
While Doris and Linda debated the fussiness or otherwise of not requiring elderly people to climb hills, Audrey made a somewhat belated, somewhat exhausted play for the breakfast table. She was, unfortunately, really very sweaty, and while she was sure hair and makeup would be able to coversomeof her sins, she wasn’t convinced they’d get the whole multitude.
But there wasn’t much she could do about it now. And since there’d just been a brief period of time where she’d been convinced that running about like an extremely neurotic bluebottle had been necessary to save somebody’s life, she felt her priorities were in the right place.
* * *
