‘Daniel, where the hell are you? Get your arse out here,’ yelled a voice from outside.
‘Shit. Gotta go.’ He gave an ‘I’m-on-my-way’ wave to Dad and the umpire out on the pitch, before squeezing my arm affectionately and heading out.
Why did he have to do that? It was only adding to my confusion.
What was going on? Was he going off Emily? No, he couldn’t be. Hadn’t he just taken her to seePhantomand they went out for sushi.
But he doesn’t like sushi.
No one likes sushi.
So that proves it. He must love her.
Chapter Fifteen
Dad won the toss and he opted to put his team into bat. I kept myself busy preparing sandwiches, laying out the plates and teacups, chatting to Mum and her cricket-widow cronies and doing my best not to let my eyes drift over the other side of the field to Daniel’s tall, lean figure.
Tea came and went, a flurry of players piling their plates high, squabbling good-naturedly over the last chocolate fingers and chattering about the game.
When they all trooped back onto the pitch, Dad’s face split with a wide grin in anticipation of unleashing his special bowler, the empty pavilion fell silent except for the rattle of teaspoons in saucers as I went around collecting all the cups.
As I was dumping them into the sink, Miriam, Daniel’s stepmother, sailed into the cricket-club kitchen with a pile of tea towels and a pair of bright red rubber gloves, ready to do battle with the dishes. What is it with that generation? They have an obsession with drying up. Surely it’s more hygienic to leave things to drain or perhaps that’s me being lazy?
‘Darling, how are you?’ she said, soundly kissing me on both cheeks. She called everyone darling. Daniel once told me it’s because she has a terrible memory for names. Sebastian, more maliciously, observed it was an upper-class affectation.
However, anything less like a county matron would be hard to imagine. With her short grey hair cut in a spiky, gamine style, she looked more like an errant pixie. Dark blue dungarees covered her short, dumpy figure and the overall look was completed by a pair of maroon Doc Martens.
‘Much easier on the bunions,’ she’d told me once.
I was surprised when she suddenly grabbed my arm and brought it up to her face, to peer at the wound. Although short-sighted she was still in denial, so never wore the prescribed glasses.
‘Nasty. Daniel told me. Unpleasant.’
Miriam shuddered. Country born and bred, the concept of a casualty department in the city was as alien to her as an episode ofDr Who.
‘Help? Want some? You all right with that arm? Wash or dry?’ Miriam wasn’t a great one for social pleasantries.
‘Wash, definitely. Thanks for these.’ I nodded at the gloves. ‘The ones here are always full of holes.’
‘Can’t bear the bloody things myself.’ She snorted like a dissatisfied horse. ‘Came free with a job lot of slug pellets or was it worming pills? Amazing thing about skin. Waterproof. You know. Marketing people, worse than estate agents. Inventing things we don’t need.’
‘Mm,’ I murmured, looking at her hands — definitely the perfect advert for rubber gloves. The people at Marigold would have paid good money to show those chapped, wrinkled fingers.
‘Gather you put some work Sebastian’s way. If you can call prancing about in a monkey suit work. Looked a picture on the news,’ she said.
‘You saw him. What, at the Bond premiere?’ I asked. ‘What channel?’ I was still talking to several TV companies, trying to get hold of some tapes of coverage of the premiere.
‘The Beeb, darling,’ she said outraged. ‘Wouldn’t watch anything else. Can’t bear the ads and George does love those David Attenborough—’
‘So you saw Sebastian on the BBC,’ I interrupted, desperate to keep her on track.
‘Yes. On the news. Looked a picture he did. Showed Daniel last night.’
I nearly dropped a cup. ‘What do you mean you showed Daniel, last night?’ I exclaimed.
She gave me a sheepish look. ‘We still use our video recorder. I know it’s terribly, terribly old-fashioned but it works, so why not? And we know how to operate it. I can’t get on with Netflix. We set it to record the news in case they showed Sebastian on the red carpet. And they did.’
‘I don’t’ believe it. I’ve been trying to get that footage all week.’
