‘Not helping.’ But I pushed at the door to reveal Isobel sitting on the tattered sofa with the kettle on the camping stove, like an impoverished duchess hosting a couple of wandering peasants.
Hello. Nice to see you both together. Well, nice to see you not creeping about in the trees.
Isobel pointed at Ross.
You could have introduced yourself.
‘I did explain why he couldn’t,’ I said apologetically.
‘I can’t be seen to be unduly influencing you,’ Ross said in a very matter-of-fact way, not as though he were meeting her for the first time. ‘You might call the police.’
I’m mute. What did you think I’d do, hold up a very big sign?
Isobel raised her eyebrows.
‘Good point. But you could have reported me, and none of that sort of thing looks good to a TV crew who just want lots of housebuilding drama. Before you know it you’re a red-top headline and competing with disgracedEastEndersactors and rubbish football managers. This is supposed to be a programme about the design and building of sustainable homes, notLove Island.’
Isobel silently looked from Ross to me and back again. Her eyebrows hadn’t come down.
‘Well, yes, I suppose they do want some drama, but not the “contestant forcibly evicts elderly lady and throws her out into the snow” sort,’ he conceded.
Isobel’s eyebrows went up further and she scribbled so quickly that the paper tore.
ELDERLY???
There was a moment of awkward silence, broken only by the sound outside the window of the birds making that glass marble on metal sound. It reminded me of Tilly dropping those diamonds onto the silver tray. ‘I hope Tilly didn’t lose any of your stones the other day,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t stay and help pick them all up, but she needed a wee and you can’t wait at her age.’
Isobel wrote slightly more slowly this time.
You can’t wait at mine. It’s no fun being, apparently, elderly.
‘Sorry,’ Ross said, and we shuffled further into the room. ‘Obviously I don’t know how old you are. It’s a perception thing, you see.’
She went on, ignoring him.
And the diamonds are all back in their bag. Your daughter was very careful.
‘Thing is’ – Ross sat down on one of the rickety old dining chairs which were ranked along the walls as though a ball’s worth of chaperones were expected to make an appearance – ‘if you’ve got diamonds, why are you here? Why not go somewhere else? You could sell them and buy yourself a few acres of Scottish wilderness, nice little croft, keep the birds.’
Isobel straightened away from the table, her pen dipping between her fingers. She looked haughty but slightly secretive; it was a look I was used to from Tilly, when she’d found something she knew she was not meant to have.
My diamonds were a gift from my father. All I have left. I will not sell them.
Wilful poverty, David had called it, I remembered with a jolt. When people had investments they wouldn’t touch and would rather live a penurious life as they scrimped and saved and failed to pay the electricity bill. As though raiding the family bank account was some kind of admission of failure, they’d live in large houses with holes in the roof rather than sell off some farmland to pay for repairs. They called it ‘keeping the estate together for the next generation.’
He’d mixed with that type of person a lot. I, who had only the vaguest notion of how the landed gentry lived, thought it was rather sweet: women wearing their mother’s ancient Aquascutum raincoats and men driving forty-year-old Bentleys. Faded grandeur. Isobel’s grandeur was so faded it was barely legible. And she had no family, so why was she saving the diamonds?
Isobel answered my unspoken question.
I had a difficult childhood. I’ve been a wanderer all my life.
‘Really? I’ve hardly ever been out of Yorkshire.’ Ross shifted his chair, scooting it across the floor to be closer to Isobel. ‘We didn’t do holidays when I was young, well, my mum didn’t. The best she could do was camping, and that’s not a holiday, it’s being at home only with thinner walls and more uncomfortable beds.’
He and Isobel both looked at me now.
You’re not from Yorkshire. How did you end up here?
Ross scooted his chair even closer. He’d hunched over inside that workmanlike black coat and had his elbows on his knees as though he really wanted to hear my answer.
