‘At least she’s happy,’ Maddie whispered in her ear.
‘Manic more like,’ she whispered back, which earned her a strong stare from Alexa, who was giving them the detailed lowdown on goat behaviour.
Sofia pretended she had something in her shoe and pulled Maddie to the side, away from Alexa’s watchful gaze.
‘Char really went off on one at breakfast.’
‘Yeah, I wondered what that was about.’
‘Aside from me accusing her of fancying Dimitris she made an odd comment about Doug. Are things OK there?
‘As far as I know, but she’s not mentioned him much, has she? And she doesn’t seem to get any phone calls or messages from him. Not that I’m Mrs Popular, but on our previous trips away I often used to hear her chatting to him most evenings.’
Chatting to Adonis once a week would do her right now, thought Sofia, but this wasn’t about her.
‘There’s something weird going on. We need to get on it.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Everyone! Gather round.’
Alexa swept her arm in an arc around the farm.
‘Now we will show you how farming used to be, before modern machinery. Please make your way into the barn.’
Maddie and Sofia hung back while Charlotte rushed to the front.
‘It’s like a school trip,’ Maddie said behind her hand, ‘with Good Charlotte as our poster girl.’
‘Isn’t that a band?’
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
Crammed into a tiny timber-beamed space with a dirt floor and lots of large wooden equipment, the others had fallen silent.
Sofia tripped over a rake in the gloom and pitched forward.
‘Shit!’
Alexa raised her head.
‘So, if we’re ready at the back there.’
‘So ready.’
Sofia held back a giggle at Maddie’s reply. At school they’d been sent to the headmaster for giggling in assembly more than once, and things hadn’t moved on hugely in the following fifty years.
Charlotte had always been up the front at all school events, surrounded by her fellow senior prefects. It still rankled with Sofia that she’d never been made a prefect, although Charlotte had allowed her and Maddie to sneak into the cupboard-sized senior prefects room at breaktimes and share their one jar of Nescafé.
When she’d asked Charlotte to look into the prefect oversight, her friend had somewhat too gleefully reported back that she and Maddie were considered subversive, and it was never going to happen. Bloody cheek.
‘So, any questions?’
Sofia hadn’t listened to a word the woman had said about how the goat’s cheese was made in the olden days and what the various wooden barrels and paddles did. She was too busy worrying about Charlotte and whether Adonis could finally take a break to speak to her.
After a few queries from the American contingent about how the islanders managed to do all this without electricity and running water, and one from Charlotte about hygiene, Alexa looked around the room.
