To add to her annoyance, the waiter simply grinned like a half-wit and turned to look at Jenna. ‘Hiya,’ he said, ‘I think your friend is under the misapprehension that I’m your waiter. Pity the poor devil who is, I don’t see him getting much of a tip. Bad evening?’
‘You could say that,’ said Jenna, her face flushed red and looking as hideously wrong-footed as Rachel was now beginning to feel.
‘I’ll have a word with the manager,’ he said, ‘who just happens to be a friend of the family.’
‘No, please don’t do that,’ said Jenna, ‘it hasn’t been that bad.’
‘Are you sure?’ He glanced at Rachel. ‘What about you, do you want to make an official complaint? Plainly something has riled you.’
Rachel shook her head, wondering who this decidedly good-looking guy was, and who apparently knew Jenna. ‘I’m sorry for speaking to you the way I did. That was rude of me.’
‘I’ve been on the receiving end of worse, I assure you.’
Was it her imagination, but did he shoot Jenna a sidelong glance as he said that, and did Jenna actually flinch? Interesting. Her curiosity roused, Rachel said, ‘Are you here alone?’
His face brightened and his gaze rested on the empty chair at their table. ‘As a matter of fact I am.’
‘You could join us if you want,’ Rachel said, warming to him, ‘and then I could buy you a drink by way of apology.’ To Rachel’s delight, Jenna’s eyes widened and she looked livid.
‘I thought you wanted the bill so we could go?’ she said.
‘I’ve changed my mind. Sit down,’ Rachel said to the source of Jenna’s obvious discomfort. ‘My name’s Rachel,’ she added, giving him the benefit of a wide smile that showed off her immaculate whitened teeth.
‘Pleased to meet you, Rachel. I’m Blake, I work at Heart-to-Heart with Jenna.’
Aha! Now it was starting to make sense. ‘So you’re Blake?’
‘You’ve heard of me?’
‘Oh yes, Jenna never stops talking about you.’
‘Really?’
‘She’s exaggerating,’ said Jenna, flashing Rachel a look that could fell a tree. ‘She does that a lot.’
‘So you’re good friends, then?’ he asked.
‘We go way back, right to being babies,’ Rachel said with a laugh. ‘Our parents are old friends.’
‘Ergo,you’reold friends. That’s nice. Continuity has a lot going for it. So how’s that boyfriend of yours, Jenna?’
‘What boyfriend?’ asked Rachel.
‘The one I saw Jenna with last week,’ he responded. To Jenna, he said, ‘That was quite some smooch the pair of you had going on.’
All agog, her eyebrows reaching for the rafters, Rachel looked at Jenna. This she had to hear. A boyfriend Jenna had been keeping from her? Was that why she had been behaving so weirdly?
Chapter Nineteen
Since retiring, Sorrel had dispensed with the services of their cleaner, a woman who had never done the job entirely to her satisfaction. The only reason the woman had been kept on for as long as she had was because she could be relied upon to show up every week, and a job half done on a regular basis was better than not done at all.
Now, on this wet Wednesday morning, as Sorrel waged war on the mess Simon had made after tipping the cafetière into the sink and flinging coffee grounds everywhere, Sorrel thought of Danny and the mess he’d got himself into.
She didn’t believe for a minute what he’d been accused of; he simply wasn’t that kind of a man. You only had to look at him to know that. With his honest and trustworthy face that radiated compassion and concern, together with his gentle manner, Sorrel had always thought he should have been a doctor. Or a doctor from a bygone era when they had time to listen to their patients and offer sympathy along with a handwritten prescription.
Danny’s secret visits to Woodside Care Home had come as a surprise to Sorrel. She didn’t think him capable of keeping anything from Frankie. And vice versa. She had assumed they were one of those couples who shared every detail of what they got up to, their every thought even. Clearly that wasn’t the case. Or was this a recent thing of Danny’s, to act so out of character by sneaking off behind Frankie’s back to visit an old lady? It was all very odd.
Danny wasn’t the only one to be behaving oddly. Just look at Alastair. Did he have any idea how ludicrous he was making himself look? Or how ill-timed, not to say in poor taste, it was to announce he had fallen in love so soon after Orla’s death? Didn’t he care what people would think? But then it wouldn’t be the first time he had acted with such an appalling lack of sensitivity. Nobody knew better than Sorrel just how insensitive he could be.
