“That was a beautiful thing you did,” I said. Sunny shook his head.
“She’d do the same for me.”
I grabbed his hand and wove my fingers through his.
“Why was she collecting cigarette butts?”
“Tobacco’s expensive. Her pension’s worth bugger all. She’s just doing what she needs to do to make ends meet.”
Forty years scrubbing bodily fluids off buses, and Rosie had to spend her hard-earned retirement diving into ashtrays for fag ends? How was this kind of thing allowed to happen in Britain? This was like something from the developing world, the kind of scandal Mummy exposes onCompass Pointall the time.
“She’s had a tough life,” Sunny said. “My housemates and I sort of keep an eye on her. She’s salt of the earth. She reminds me of my nanna. I enjoy her company.”
We found ourselves by the Tube station.
“Do you want to see where I live?” Sunny asked. I turned to face him. “It’s in the other direction, but it’s not far.”
Part of me wanted to, very much. Another part of me had somewhere else it needed to be.
“I need to go to the hospital. I want to check in on Uncle Ben. Then I need to write this review.”
Sunny nodded and squeezed my hands in his. Then we kissed, right there in the street, beneath the Underground sign.
Chapter39
Ludo
Wilhelmina Post:Fabulous review, Ludo. Congratulations! We’ll make a theatre critic out of you yet. W xxxxxx
Sunny Miller:Morning, you clever boy. Awesome to come across your sexy face in the arts section this morning. Read it as soon as my boner went down. Great stuff, babe. I bet Uncle Ben is proud. xx.
Wilhelmina Post:PS. Saw Benny yesterday. Missed you by a couple of hours. Smuggled in the cigs. I’m way ahead of you on brownie points. As I left, a rather dashing male nurse was wheeling him up to the roof for a smoke! The man is an ICON. W xxxxxx
Uncle Ben:Congratulations on your first published review, dear boy! How does it feel? I read it in the early morning sunshine, in a blissful cloud of smoke, on the hospital roof, with my new friend Theodore, who claims to come from Ghana but I’m convinced is the Farnese Atlas come to life. Shoulders the size of my head. Hope to leave hospital Wednesday. May pop a hip so I can hang out with Atlas a little longer. If I succeed, please bring more cheroots. Much love, etc xxxxx
* * *
I read my review over breakfast. The subs hadn’t cut too much, although one or two of the jokes had been trimmed. I stared at my photo at the top of my review. My name had never been so far back in the paper, yet I couldn’t remember feeling so proud to see it in print. Hands down, it trumped scoring the front page with the nuclear power plant story.
Father breezed through the kitchen with his briefcase in hand.
“Are you coming in with me, or are you catching the Tube?”
Parliament was now in recess for the coronation of King George VII, so I was working from the office in the City rather than the parliamentary bureau in Westminster.
“I’ll bum a lift, if that’s OK?”
I folded the paper and put it on the pile with all the others. Every front page was dominated by the impending coronation. No big news was going to happen this week. Or, if it did, no one was going to be paying any attention to it. This was good news. It bought Sunny and me time to investigate the nuclear power plant deal. I threw my work satchel over my shoulder and followed my father out the door.
Five minutes later we both had our faces buried in our phones as the black cab dashed down Haverstock Hill towards central London. I was replying to texts. Father was doing whatever it was that editors did at eight o’clock in the morning. Putting the fear of God into one of his reporters, probably. As we stopped and started through Camden, Father suddenly put his phone down.
“Is it serious with Sunny Miller, then?”
This was new territory for us. I could not have been more shocked if he’d asked me which Jonas brother I thought was the cutest (Joe, obviously). I wasn’t sure how to answer. I wasn’t sure what kind of answer he was looking for.
“I don’t know,” I said, finally.
“I mean it looked reasonably—and I might say, Ludo, rather publicly—like it wasquiteserious the other night.”
