by Beth O'Leary
* * *
Once Fitz and I are back at home, we compare notes. He found no clues at all, which is typical. I did tell him old ladies make the best detectives.
“You won’t mention this to Leena, will you?” I say rather worriedly. I’ve fallen into a bad habit of sharing things with Fitz. He knows an awful lot about Tod now, for instance. I had two glasses of wine and he asked such candid questions it was a little disarming. I would never usually tell anyone these sorts of personal things, not even Betsy. Perhaps it’s being down here living somebody else’s life that’s done it. Whatever the reason, it’s been quite fun.
“My lips are sealed, Mrs. C,” Fitz says. His face turns solemn. “If you suspect there’s dirt to be found on Ethan, I’m all for the digging. Leena deserves the best.”
“She does,” I say.
“And so do you, Mrs. C.”
Fitz pushes Leena’s laptop toward me across the sofa cushions. Life in Leena’s flat seems to circle around this sofa. We eat here, drink tea here; for a while, it was Martha’s office.
“Any new messages?” Fitz asks. “Oh, you’ve totally got a message from Howard, look at that smile! You are too cute.”
“Oh, shush,” I tell him. “Go and make yourself useful—the washing-up needs doing.”
“Fine, fine. I’ll leave you to your sexting.”
I haven’t a clue what that means, but I suspect it’s rude, so I shoot him a glare just in case. Fitz grins and disappears off into the kitchen, and I settle back into the sofa and read the message from Howard.
OldCountryBoy says: Hi Eileen! I just wanted to say that I’m ready to set up that website for your social club whenever you are. It’ll only take me a day when you give me the go-ahead. Xxxxx
I’d forgotten all about Howard’s offer to make us a website. I beam.
EileenCotton79 says: Thank you ever so much, Howard. What do you need to get started? Xx
I chew my lip in thought as I wait for his reply. Having a website will be very exciting, but it won’t help bring members in for the launch event. I’ve started to fret about that a little, though Fitz’s been plastering those posters all over the area. I just wonder if the people we’re after really look at the posters on the walls around here. There are so many, and most of them are about bands and activism and things. We have said on the posters that transport to the venue can be provided—Tod has offered his theater company’s tour bus, bless him—but the people we want to reach might well not get out and about enough to spot the posters to begin with.
A thought occurs. I click away from the conversation with Howard, and press Find a Match. I fill in all the boxes, but I do it a bit differently, this time. Age: 75 plus. Locations: East London, Central London. Male or female? I click both boxes.
This is rather cheeky, but it’s for a good cause. I press on the first person who appears on the list: Nancy Miller, aged seventy-eight. I click the little envelope icon to send her a message.
Dear Nancy,
I hope you don’t mind me sending you a message, but I’m setting up a club in Shoreditch for over seventies, and I wondered if you’d be interested in coming along for our grand opening this weekend …
* * *
I spend hours sending out messages. There are over a hundred people on this list. I’m very glad Fitz showed me how to “copy and paste,” otherwise this would have taken all day; as it is, my eyes hurt, and my neck is stiff from sitting here at the laptop for so long.
I begin to get replies already. Some of them are a little nasty—Take your advertising elsewhere! This isn’t the forum for this sort of thing!—and some of the men seem to be taking my invitation as an opportunity to start flirting, which I can’t be doing with—I’ve got more important business to attend to now, and none of them are a patch on Howard or Tod, anyway. But there are already a few people who sound interested in the Silver Shoreditchers’ Club. I’d love to come along, says Nancy Miller. Will there be games? asks Margaret from Hoxton.
Letitia pops around just when I’m at the end of my patience with replying to messages. She says she’s dropping around a new herbal tea she wants me to try. I invite her in to drink it with me—I suspect that was the real intention of the visit—and fill her in on my new plan to advertise our club.
“I wish I was as nifty with that thing as you are.” She nods to the laptop.
“Oh, I’m sure you could learn!” I say. “Ask Fitz, he’ll teach you.”
“He’s a good man, Fitz,” Letitia says. “Has he found someone to take Martha’s room yet? He was fretting about it when we last spoke.”
I smile. Letitia’s been down in the communal area at least once a day, arranging vases of flowers, plumping cushions. These days when somebody comes through, they always stop for a chat. On Monday evening I saw Aurora and Sally down there playing cards with her. We’re trying out the tables! Aurora had said. Then: Boom! Full house! went Sally, slamming her hand down and making Letitia jump.
“Not yet,” I tell her, reaching for a biscuit. “I think he’s going to put an advert up on the Internet somewhere.”
“Well whoever it is, they’ll be lucky to live here.”
“Letitia … Have you ever thought about moving out of your flat?”
She looks horrified. “Where to?”
“Not far. Over here. To Martha’s old room.”
This is an excellent idea, if I do say so myself.
“Oh, no,” Letitia says, hiding behind her tea mug. “I couldn’t leave my flat. What about all my beautiful things! And anyway, nobody young wants to live with an old biddy like me.”
I push the last biscuit toward her. “Nonsense,” I tell her. “Though I do see your point about your lovely bric-a-brac. I mean,” I add hastily, catching her expression, “your lovely antiques.”
“I couldn’t leave the flat,” Letitia says, more firmly this time, so I don’t push the point. It’s a shame, though—she could do with the company, and I worry how she’ll cope when I’m not here to nudge her along, even if we do manage to get the Silver Shoreditchers’ Club running regularly.
Once Letitia has gone home, I nurse my empty teacup for so long the china goes cold against my palms. I can’t stop thinking about the receipt on Ethan’s hall table, the wet toothbrush in his bathroom. I know I’m inclined to jump to the conclusion that a man is unfaithful—it’s quite reasonable in the circumstances, so I don’t blame myself for it. But I need to know if it’s clouding my judgment.
I reach for my phone and dial Betsy’s number.
“Hello, love!” she says. “How’s your handsome actor?” She pronounces it ac-tor, which makes it sound even fancier.
I smile. “He’s as dashing as ever. May I ask your advice about something, Betsy?”
“Of course.”
“Leena’s boyfriend, Ethan. You must have met him when he’s been up to visit?”
“On the rare occasions, yes,” Betsy says.
“Has he not been up at the weekends?”
“One or two. I think Jackson scared him off.”
I blink, surprised. “Jackson? Jackson Greenwood?”
“He didn’t take much of a shine to your Ethan.”
“I always knew Jackson was a good judge of character,” I say darkly.
“Ooh, Ethan’s not in your good books, then?” Betsy asks.
I tell her about my findings from my trip to Ethan’s flat. Betsy inhales through her teeth. It’s the same noise she makes when she’s negotiating for something at the market in Knargill.
“It could be nothing,” she says. “Not every man is like Wade.”
“Quite a lot of them are, though.”
“Mmm, well,” Betsy says.
I’m so close to asking her about Cliff, but she’s started up again before I get the chance. This is how it always goes.
“I must say,” Betsy says, “before I knew your Leena had a man, I would’ve said she had her eye on Jackson.”
How very interesting. “What m
akes you say that?”
“She’s spent half her time here squabbling with him, the other half twiddling her hair when he’s anywhere in sight. At the last May Day Committee Meeting she barely took her eyes off him. Ooh, and speaking of May Day—she’s got a sponsor, you know.”
This is just about the only thing Betsy could have said to distract me from talk of Leena making eyes at Jackson. “A sponsor for May Day?”
“Some big law firm. Very fancy. They’re paying for almost everything, and she’s come up with all these fundraising activities, bake-sale stands and treasure hunts and raffles.”
I beam. “She’s brilliant, isn’t she?”
“Well,” Betsy says, “she certainly gets things done, I’ll give you that.”
25
Leena
For the first time, when I pick Nicola up and ask her where we’re going, she says,
“Shall we go to your house?”
I’m absurdly flattered. Nicola is one of those people whose friendship you have to win the hard way—I feel I have been Chosen.
When we get to Clearwater Cottage, Arnold is weeding the front garden.
“I said I’d do that!” I tell him as I help Nicola out of the car.
“Well, you didn’t,” he points out, waving a dandelion at me. “Hello, Nicola, all right?”
I unlock the door and usher them both in. “Tea?”
It’s only when I’m waiting for the tea to brew in the pot that it occurs to me how odd it is that I don’t find this situation strange. People are often telling me how “mature” I am for twenty-nine. (Watching your sister die will do that to you, I always want to snap back.) But I’ve actually never been friends with anybody over the age of thirty before. And now I don’t even bat an eye when Arnold pops around unannounced—in fact, I look forward to it—and I’m totally delighted that Nicola has decided she likes me enough to spend the afternoon with me. It’s nice. I like how they change my perspectives, how widely our lives all vary. I’ll miss this, when I go—I’ll miss them.
There’s a knock at the door. It’s Betsy.
She looks a little crumpled. “Hello, Leena,” she says stiffly.
“Betsy! Hi! Come in! We’re just having tea,” I say. “Let me get you a cup! Can I take your coat?”
I take her coat and hang it up, mind whirring. Betsy’s not dropped around since that terrible first tea when I said all the wrong things. What’s prompted this?
“I won’t stay,” Betsy says. “I’m just here for the spare key. Eileen keeps one somewhere.”
“Oh, sure!” I say, looking around, as though the key might be lying out on the dining-room table. “Did you lock yourself out?”
“Yes,” she says.
I try to hold her gaze, but hers skits aside. She’s definitely lying.
Arnold looks back and forth between us for a moment, then gets to his feet. “Nicola, I must show you the hydrangea at the bottom of Eileen’s garden,” he says.
“The what?” Nicola says. “I don’t…”
But he’s already helping her up.
“Oh, all right,” she grumbles.
I mouth thank you at Arnold, and he gives me a small smile. Once we’re alone, I turn back to Betsy, who is opening and closing drawers in the dresser.
“Can’t Cliff let you in?” I ask her gently.
Betsy doesn’t turn around. There is a long silence.
“It was Cliff who locked me out.”
I breathe in. “Well, that’s pretty awful of him,” I say, as neutrally as I can manage. “Would you like to stay here for tonight?”
She looks around then. “Stay here?”
“Yeah. You can have my grandma’s room.”
“Oh, I…” She looks a little lost for a moment. “Thank you,” she says. “That’s very kind. But I’d rather just find the key.”
“All right,” I say, as Arnold and Nicola make their way up the garden again. “We’ll track it down, between the four of us.”
I find all sorts of things, digging around for that key. My old school satchel (how did that end up here?); a photo of my mum when she was pregnant with me, looking movie-star gorgeous; and a recipe for mud pie in Carla’s handwriting, which makes my eyes prick with tears. Carla seems to turn up all the time here in Hamleigh. She may not have lived in this village for long, but she’s part of the fabric of the place. Maybe that’s why I’ve finally been able to move forward a little while I’m here—or rather, to stop moving forward. Moving forward is my forte; it’s standing still I’m not so good at.
I fold the recipe carefully and place it back where I found it. Maybe someday when I find a treasure like this, it won’t make me tear up, it’ll make me smile.
In the end, Nicola finds the key. It is carefully labeled in Grandma’s spidery writing—Betsy’s spare—and lodged in the back of a drawer in her hall table, along with a whole collection of keys for houses we’ve all long since left: Carla’s flat in Bethnal Green, our old place in Leeds, and, much to my irritation, a bike-lock key I thought I lost approximately ten years ago. There’s also a spare key to Mum’s house, which I pinch for the rest of my time here—I’ve been using Grandma’s one, but it always seems to get stuck in the lock.
I walk Betsy back to her house. I don’t give her room to object to the idea, but I’m still surprised she lets me. I try to think what Grandma would say, and I decide she wouldn’t say much at all—she’d leave Betsy room to talk. So as we make our slow way down Middling Lane in the rain, I just hold the umbrella and wait for Betsy to feel ready.
“I suppose you’re thinking you know all about my situation, now,” she says eventually, looking straight ahead.
“No, not at all.”
“Good. Because it’s—it’s complicated.”
“I’m sure it is.”
I chew the inside of my cheek. Grandma would stay quiet. She’d leave it at that. But …
“Nobody should ever be afraid in their own home. And if you want to leave him, Betsy, everyone here in this village will have your back. Every one of them.”
We reach Betsy’s house. She pauses in front of the gate—I’m supposed to leave, that much is clear, but I’d rather stay until I see she’s safely inside.
“He’ll have calmed down by now,” Betsy says, fiddling with the key. “Off you go, Leena, you can’t be hanging around here.”
“You deserve better. And I’m not going to stop telling you that, no matter how many times you kick me out or tell me to stop hanging around,” I say, with a little smile. “I’m always here.”
“For less than a week,” Betsy points out.
“Oh, yes.” I’d genuinely forgotten for a moment that I was leaving at all. “Well, after that you’ll switch back to having the right Eileen Cotton at Clearwater Cottage again,” I say with a smile, but my stomach twists with something that feels a lot like sadness. “That’ll be even better.”
26
Eileen
Bu-bu-bu-BUH-BUH-bu-bu-bu goes Leena’s mobile phone on the café table.
“Oh, fuck, every time you get a text I think I’m about to have a heart attack,” Bee says, clutching her chest. “That is so loud.”
I intend to tell her off for swearing, but get distracted by my new message.
“Who is it this time?” Bee asks. “Old Country Boy or your sexy actor honey?”
“It’s my old neighbor,” I say, shaking my head. “He’s discovered cat videos and has been sending them my way for weeks.”
“Oh, have you shown him the one where the cat pushes the child into the swimming pool?” Bee asks, brightening. “Jaime and I watched that about six hundred times.”
“I see your daughter shares your dark sense of humor,” I say, putting my phone down again. Arnold can wait. I need the gossip from Bee. “Well? How was your third date with Mike?”
Bee shakes her head incredulously. “It was good, Eileen. He’s … well, he’s a terrible dancer, he’s definitely richer and more successful than me, a
nd he doesn’t even live in London, so he ticks almost zero of my boxes…”
“What did he say when you told him about Jaime?”
Her face softens. Ooh, I know that look.
“He said, ‘Tell me all about her.’ We talked about Jaime for like forty-five minutes straight. He didn’t flinch or freak out or edge away, he listened.”
I smile. “Now, ‘good listener’ may not have been on your list, but it was on mine.”
“He was so helpful about setting up a business too. He had loads of ideas, but in a really non-mansplainy way, you know?”
“Not really, but good,” I tell her. “Have you spoken to Leena about these new ideas?”
Bee makes a face. “I don’t want to push her—last time we spoke about B&L plans she said her confidence had taken such a knock after Carla died, she couldn’t really countenance it. I get it. I’m happy to wait until she’s ready.”
“Mmm,” I say, as the waiter brings our coffees.
Bee raises her eyebrows. “Go on. What is it you’re trying not to say?”
“You’re just not usually a waiting-around sort of woman.”
Bee stirs the foam on the top of her coffee. “I am if Leena needs it,” she says simply.
“That’s very good of you,” I say. “But even Leena needs a shove now and then. In fact, now more than ever. I’ve never heard her happier than when she’s talking about all those plans of yours, and it’s been sad, not hearing her mention them for so long. Maybe it’s just the thing she needs to keep her going.”
“Maybe,” Bee says, perking up a bit. “Maybe I’ll just … give her a little nudge again. I don’t want us to lose momentum. I do sometimes worry we’ll end up as Selmounters forever.”
“You don’t call yourselves that, do you? It sounds like the title of a smutty novel.”
“Oh, Jesus, I wish you’d not said that,” Bee says. “Now I’m going to think that every time the CEO says Selmounter. Selmounter. Oh, shit, you’re right, it does…”