Rose nodded. ‘Are you ever selfish?’
Madeleine smiled. ‘All the time.’ She turned for the stairs.
‘Wait, I’ll come with you. I think we need to knock on Clara’s door.’ She explained why as they headed down the stairs.
Clara let them into her room, grudgingly. The screw top from the bottle lay on the floor, a healthy measure of wine already missing from the bottle which stood on a bedside cabinet. She settled herself onto the bed, legs outstretched and crossed at her ankles, her back against the headboard.
‘We thought we might share the bottle, if that’s OK?’ Madeleine said.
Clara waved a hand at it, holding firmly onto her glass in her other. ‘Why not?’ she said.
Rose took possession of the bottle; it was a moment or two before either of them realised they hadn’t brought glasses.
‘Spur of the moment decision,’ Madeleine said, her cheeks flaming with enough colour to make Clara smile a little.
‘Use the glasses in the bathroom,’ she said.
Madeleine reappeared seconds later with two small tumblers and Rose poured.
‘Bottoms up,’ Madeleine said, taking a swig from her glass.
‘I think that’s across the corridor,’ Rose said, her words laced with a layer of something Clara had heard before when talk turned to Tania and men, something with an unsettled edge to it. It wasn’t judgement, exactly, nor was it jealousy, it seemed more deeply felt than either of those things. Rose took another large mouthful of wine and bent to refill her glass.
‘I think it’s great,’ Madeleine said, pushing a swathe of chestnut hair and fixing it behind an ear.
Rose’s expression darkened. ‘You think it’s great that she’s over there, having sex with a complete stranger?’
‘Yes. I mean, no– not when you say it like that. I didn’t mean it like that. Because I don’t think of Gull as being a complete stranger.’
‘OK. Tell me something you know about him.’
‘Um …’
‘Surname?’
‘Well …’
‘Job? How about his hometown?’
‘Nope. No idea.’
‘Family?’
‘A brother, who’s just got engaged so is clearly not a total flake. And who gets on well enough with Gull to go on holiday with him and want to have him as his best man,’ Madeleine said, with an edge of triumph in her voice. Her tone softened. ‘Come on, Rose, you can’t tell me you’re jealous.’
Clara was surprised to see Rose empty her glass in a single mouthful, then reach for the bottle again. She was the one who was supposed to be sinking the Chablis, not Rose.
‘I’m not bloody jealous, Maddy. You know I’m not. Far from it. She can have all the Gulls she likes. It’s not that.’
‘What’s the problem, then?’ Madeleine said. The way she said it gave Clara the feeling Madeleine already knew what the answer was.
‘It’s all so easy for her,’ Rose said. ‘Nothing ever seems to faze her.’
Clara frowned. She wasn’t sure she agreed with that. Tania might have had it easy in a material sense perhaps. There was no shying away from the fact that monetarily Tania would never know the same struggles as most of the population. But, in Clara’s eyes at least, Tania had paid in a different way for her financially easy ride. And she wasn’t sure Tania was as unaffected by the circumstances she found herself in as Rose liked to think. ‘Did I ever tell you what she said when I married Mike?’
Rose shook her head. ‘What do you mean?’
‘She said she was making the most of my ceremony because she wasn’t ever going to have one of her own. I told her she was being ridiculous. I was so in love with Mike, I couldn’t understand her insistence that she would never feel like that about anyone. But, Rose, you know better than most what her screwed-up family is like.’
