A woman who was new to the sewing class was having a classic meltdown moment. Frankie had seen it many times before, and it amazed her that people could get so het up over the simplest of things. If they could fall apart over sewing a couple of squares of cotton together, what were they like with the really important things in life? How would they cope if they were in her shoes, anxious at every turn that her husband might suffer another heart attack?
‘This is hopeless!’ the woman cried, yanking the fabric out from under the sewing machine needle and flinging it aside. ‘If you’d explained it to me better I wouldn’t be in this muddle.’
At the unfairness of the accusation, not to say the inaccuracy of it, Frankie was close to telling the rude woman to pull herself together, and that if she’d paid more attention to the instructions Frankie had so patiently given to the group, she wouldn’t be in this absurd state. But no, the woman had deemed it more important to fiddle with her mobile phone throughout Frankie’s sewing machine demonstration. Honestly, it never failed to surprise Frankie how many women signed up for her beginner’s patchwork classes only to behave like an ill-disciplined child, or be just plain flaky and fall apart at the seams. No pun intended.
‘I know it can seem a bit confusing at first,’ she said, pulling up a chair to sit next to the annoying woman, ‘but it just takes a little practice and you’ll soon get the hang of it. Let me show you again what to do.’
An hour later, and while the class was packing away their efforts of the day, the shop door opened and Sorrel came in. ‘Time for a coffee?’ she asked.
‘Five minutes and I’ll be with you.’
Settled at a table with their drinks in the nearby coffee shop, Frankie told Sorrel about Tess Moran’s visit yesterday afternoon and how relieved she was that Danny had been exonerated.
‘I hope he’ll receive a letter of apology,’ Sorrel remarked. She took a sip of her coffee. ‘Did you really have no idea that Danny was secretly visiting Woodside?’
‘Goodness,’ Frankie said with a frown, ‘secretlymakes it sound deliberately duplicitous what he was doing, as though he was being unfaithful.’
With a small shrug, Sorrel said, ‘You have to admit, it was quite odd what he was doing, sneaking off behind your back. Don’t you worry what else he might be hiding from you?’
The thought had crossed Frankie’s mind, but there was no way on earth she would admit that to Sorrel – not after she’d just used the wordssneaking off, implying that Danny was up to no good. ‘Of course not,’ she said, pleasantly, ‘his visiting Mrs Maudsley was a singular act of secrecy, and, I might say, a great kindness on his part. He just didn’t want me to think he was getting too attached to the old lady.’
‘But how can you be so sure there isn’t anything else he’s keeping from you? You’ve said before how he bottles things up.’
‘Bottling up is different.’
‘Is it?’
‘What about you and Simon,’ Frankie said, growing tired of Sorrel’s insinuations, ‘do you have secrets from each other?’
‘Oh, plenty! I find it’s the simplest way.’
Frankie had never really understood Simon and Sorrel’s marriage, but then was it ever possible to understand another couple’s relationship, even when you’d known them for so many years?
‘I’d be surprised if there existed a marriage that didn’t have secrets,’ Sorrel said. ‘Look at Orla and Alastair; they must have kept hundreds of things from each other. And from the rest of us too.’
With the feeling that Sorrel had a point she wanted to make, Frankie said, ‘What sort of things?’
‘I think we can safely agree that all was not well between them, but that’s obvious now, isn’t it?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Come on, Frankie, despite being our very own Pollyanna, you must have sussed that Orla was driving Alastair to the edge of his sanity. Another push and he’d have ended up as crazy as she was.’
‘Orla wasn’t crazy.’
‘You can dress it up however you want, but the bottom line is, she wasn’t normal. She wasn’t like us.’
‘Admittedly she was highly strung,’ Frankie said, instinctively wanting to defend Orla, ‘but she couldn’t help how she—’
‘Highly strung be damned!’ interrupted Sorrel. ‘When are we ever going to stop making excuses for her appalling behaviour? She was a calculating cat who knew exactly what she was doing at all times.’
Frankie was shocked at the vitriol coming at her across the table from Sorrel. ‘I know the two of you often didn’t see eye to eye with each other,’ she said, choosing her words with care, ‘but I didn’t realise you felt so strongly about Orla.’
Her hands smoothing out a wrinkle in the gingham tablecloth, Sorrel sighed. ‘To be honest, it’s a relief, finally, to be able to say exactly what I think. All these years I’ve had to keep my mouth shut for fear of being shunned.’
‘That’s an odd way of putting it,shunned.’
‘Not to me it isn’t.’ Then, as though warming to her subject, as if she had literally been waiting a very long time to air her innermost thoughts – hersecretthoughts – Sorrel said, ‘If I’m not right about Orla driving Alastair to the edge, why do you think he got rid of all her things?’
