‘In the south of France.’ I nod sagely:Of course I knew where Nîmes is.
‘No accent?’
‘Educated here, mostly. Plenty of trips back. But Dad only got one of us in the divorce and then we went back home with Mum. I was ten and Elle was eight.’
‘Wait, which one of you went with him in the divorce?’
‘Neither of us. We have a third sibling.’
‘OK. So who are they – a brother, a …’
She glides past that. ‘We stayed with Mum, and then she died a year ago, and we were doing a lot of this stuff already by then, just for fun. Plenty of nice and under-occupied places on the Mediterranean coast. And then we just thought we’d …piscineour way around for a bit, spending our limited inheritance all the way. We picked Jonny up in Paris.’ It sounds a bit glib to me, the way she puts it, but she does have a way of making things seem easy.
‘How much of this is true?’
She cocks her head, just like her sister does sometimes, and leans closer to me. Provocatively close. ‘You tell me. You’re the great deceiver.’
‘Me being able to tell whether you’re lying is hardly the point.’
‘Yeah? What is the point?’
‘I don’t …’ We really are quite close to each other now, and I lose my train of thought. ‘I don’t know what the point is.’
‘Stop talking, then.’ She leans in an inch or two further, and kisses me.
Now. I’m not going to pretend I hadn’t noticed there was something between me and Em. I’m not stupid. And I’m not going to pretend I hadn’t liked the idea, when it occurred to me. But it was still a shock. I haven’t been with anyone for a while now – notwithwith, I mean. I don’t think the occasional drunken thing at the end of a night in the pub counts. If you only go ever back to the other person’s place because you don’t want to compromise your own accommodation, and if you make sure to leave before they wake up, and if you make sure you have two specific cover stories lined up, it probably doesn’t count as a ‘relationship’.
But Rule 8 isIf the situation changes, change faster, and I do my best to adapt now.
About thirty seconds pass. If we hadn’t heard Jonny clumping down the stairs, I don’t know what would have happened next, but by the time he can see into the main room, we’re at opposite ends of the sofa, maybe slightly readjusting our clothes.
‘Any progress?’ Jonny asks. He’s changed into a T-shirt that reads:WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EURASIA.
‘Er,’ I say. ‘Yeah, some.’
‘Oh really? What?’
Em frowns at me. ‘Actually, Al’s being a bit optimistic there. We don’t have anything new.’
I remember what Jonny’s actually asking about. ‘Oh. Yeah. Er, 215 Feathers. No, there’s nothing. I’ve tried Davy’s namein connection with every species of bird. I’ve tried looking up pillow shops, bed shops. There’s a road about three miles from his flat called Horse and Feathers Lane but it doesn’t have anywhere you’d want to meet someone on it. Maybe we just go there at two fifteen tomorrow.’
‘Possible he was meeting someone at two fifteen in the morning?’
I think back to our brief encounter with Davy. I know he was a drinker, but he seemed like an in-bed-before-Newsnightkind of guy. ‘Not his style, I reckon.’
‘All right. I’m getting some tea. Anyone want some?’
Jonny goes off to the kitchen. On the back of his T-shirt are the wordsWE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA.
Em and I look at each other. I couldn’t stand up right now without making a fool of myself.
She breaks the silence. ‘I’m not going to try and blackmail you into staying again, Al. I’m really not. If you run, I won’t go to the police. But I like having you around. And I really think we can work out what happened to Davy as collateral for when things catch up with us.’ She wakes her laptop up, and the screen’s glare lights her face. ‘Maybe we can even work out what happened to that money that he mentioned before he died.’
‘Is that what you want? The money?’
‘No, Al. What I want is for my sister to be safe. She’s not built like us. We’ve always looked after each other. I got her into this piscining stuff …’
‘Interloping.’
