Where Everything Seems Double by Penny Freedman (popular romance novels .txt) 📕

the UK but he needs to improve his English. I’ve told him that I have a friend arriving who is an English professor and will, I am sure, be happy to give him some English lessons.’

‘And am I going to be paid for these lessons?’

‘I said it would be fine if he negotiates a discount on meals at the hotel for you.’

‘You seem to have thought of everything.’

She stops still and looks at me.

‘How can I think about anything else?’ she says.

Chapter Four FIRST NIGHT ON THE ISLAND

Wednesday afternoon

Freda lay on her bed looking out at the view, which was just a parade of scudding clouds at this angle, and thought that this trip might not be just all right – it might actually be rather good. Fergus and Milo were amazingly nice – especially when you compared them with the boys at school. Fergus was sweet and serious. It was a pity about his name, which made her think of Fungus the Bogeyman, but he couldn’t help that. And Milo. She gave a little sigh. Milo had been so nice. He must be at least fifteen, she thought, but he hadn’t patronised her at all. He had asked her about herself and about Marlbury, and had actually seemed interested. And his accent – soft but witty, somehow, so that everything he said sounded clever. She picked up her phone. She would have liked to tell someone how she was feeling, but there was no-one she trusted enough. She put the phone down again. This was just for her.

Distracting herself, she thought about the rest of ‘the gang’ as Milo had called them. There weren’t many of them really, and the thing about them was, as Milo pointed out, they were all outsiders. None of them had grown up in Carnmere, and only one of them – Micky, whose dad owned the boatyard and the ferry that ran up and down the lake – was at school here. The two girls, Venetia and Letty, were at boarding school – somewhere posh to judge from Venetia’s accent, which was a real plum-in-the-mouth job. She was a bit older than Freda – fourteen probably, and Letty was little and just allowed to hang around with them because of Venetia. Venetia, sadly, was really pretty – long glossy hair and a golden tan and no spots – and Freda could see that all the boys liked her. So there were just the five of them – six now, with Freda – though some of Micky’s friends joined them sometimes, Milo said. The point was that Micky’s dad owned the boatyard and Venetia’s parents owned this hotel, so it was understood that the landing stage was their territory – their hanging out space. What was interesting, (and Granny would be interested certainly) was that Ruby and her sister, Grace, were part of the gang, though Grace was away at a stage school now and Ruby, as Milo had said, was ‘just gone’. He had sounded so sad when he said it, and when she plucked up the courage to ask what he thought had happened to her, he had just looked out over the lake and said, ‘Who knows?’

She got up and looked out of the window properly. The landing stage was deserted now, but she wondered if she could sketch something from memory – an impression of Milo and Micky, Venetia and Letty as she had first seen them with Fergus that afternoon. She took her sketch pad out of her bag, pulled a chair over to the window and started to draw. It didn’t need to be totally accurate, after all; she just wanted to catch the feel of what it had been like. As she worked, she let the worry that had been hovering hazily at the edge of her mind slide into focus: Milo had said that she was very welcome here but that didn’t go for her grandmother. ‘The less I see of her the better,’ he had said, and Freda realised that this must have something to do with the row Granny had had with Milo’s grandma, but she had been really startled when he had said, ‘She’s the reason my granddad had to leave Marlbury. My grandma says she ruined their lives.’ She put down her pencil and thought. Was it possible that Granny had had a thing with Milo’s granddad? The thought of it took her breath away. Granny? Really? But if so it wouldn’t be all her fault would it? She was going to have to ask her somehow but she couldn’t, at the moment, see quite how.

She was still busy drawing when her grandmother tapped on her door and then bustled in without waiting to be asked. Freda closed her sketchpad awkwardly and dropped her pencil.

‘It’s a view that shifts and changes all the time, isn’t it?’ her grandmother said, coming over to look out of her window. ‘Hard to pin down on paper.’

Freda managed a non-committal, ‘Mm,’ and hugged the closed pad to her chest. No way was Granny going to see her sketch – no way was she getting to know the gang at all, actually. She knew what she was like: in no time she would be in there, taking an interest in them all, telling them what subjects they should be taking at school, finding out about everyone’s problems, dishing out advice. Freda would pass on anything significant that she found out about Ruby, because that was the deal they had, but everything else that went on down there on the landing stage was out of bounds to Granny.

‘Well,’ her grandmother said, looking round the little room, ‘shall we put on our glad rags for dinner? I’m going to have a shower so I’ll grab the bathroom first. Dinner in half an hour?’

When she had gone, Freda hid the sketchpad under the spare blankets in the top of her wardrobe and then considered the clothes she had brought with her.