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

‘Good practice for the race,’ he said, and he was smiling again. Watching him as he moved to and fro with the rhythm of his rowing, Freda thought that she had ignored him rather because Milo was more exciting, but he was really rather good-looking – and actually rather nice.

The ferry

Chapter Nine ARE WE ALL MET?

Saturday

It is not a good way to start the day, the arrival of a hyper-excited teenager at your breakfast table, breathless with secret knowledge, and then the choppy ferry ride endangering the digestion of a stack of pancakes. By mid-morning I am frazzled and wish I had stopped for a restorative coffee before taking the ferry back to the hotel. However, I have things to do. I must see Dumitru for our usual morning session, and I must make arrangements for David’s stay.

I see now that I was not thinking clearly when I pressed David to come up here. I imagined just slotting him in to the vacant space in my king-size bed, but I realise now, as we make our way back up the lake and I have the fresh breeze and quite a bit of spray in my face to wake me up, that this will not do. After the four-month sabbatical in our relationship, I can hardly be sure whether David will want to be in my bed – or, indeed, whether I will be keen to have him there. The potential for awkwardness is considerable, and then there is Freda. Even supposing we feel like it, how could David and I possibly be comfortable in bed together with Freda just the other side of a door? And then there’s all the awkwardness with the bathroom and all of us edging round each other. I can only too easily compose Freda’s side of the dialogue with her new friends: My gran’s boyfriend… cringe-making… sooo gross…

It won’t do. I consider briefly whether Freda and I could share the bed and put David in the little room, but I don’t think Freda would find that any more acceptable. Time was there was nothing she liked more than to get into my bed with me but those days are long gone. There is nothing for it but to see if there is another room for David, and if the signals are right we shall have to skulk between one another’s rooms in the middle of the night as I remember doing on premarital visits to my in-laws back in the day.

I am startled from remembrance of things past by the chirpy arrival of a text:

‘On train arr Penrith 11.30. Hiring car. Eta 12.30.’

There is no sign-off and no xxs. Thinking about it, I don’t believe David has ever done xxs, but a ‘Looking forward to seeing you’ or even just a ‘See you soon’ would have been nice.

I sprint off the ferry, put my head into the bar to tell Dumitru I’ll be with him in a moment, and go to reception. At least in requesting another room for David I don’t need to misrepresent our relationship by using the dreaded word, ‘partner’, so I say briskly that a colleague of mine is in the area and would like to stay for a couple of nights. I like ‘colleague’ – business-like, free of implications sexual or emotional, and more or less true as far as the purpose of this weekend is concerned. The receptionist – a swarthy, unsmiling man I have not encountered before – frowns at his screen and scrolls and taps before saying that all he can offer is a deluxe room with very good views on the third floor. Judging by the sparsely populated breakfast tables this morning, I don’t believe this for a moment, but I don’t quibble. David can afford it, and I am beginning to think that I won’t need to worry about the inconvenience of padding up flights of stairs in my slippers for nocturnal congress.

Dumitru is ready with a cappuccino for me when I go into the bar, but I notice now that he is not looking good. He has a black eye, a split lip and the grey pallor of a man in pain.

‘Do you want to tell me what happened to you?’ I ask.

He makes a poor attempt at feigning incomprehension, and when I gesture at the face mumbles that he hit it on a door.

‘Ah, these doors,’ I say. ‘Don’t they just spring out and get us?’

He looks slightly puzzled but I think he gets my tone. I size up his injuries while appearing to be devoting myself to my cappuccino. Someone has beaten him up – I can almost see the knuckle marks in the bruises on his face – but he is not going to tell me about it so I concentrate instead on phrasal verbs. This is a bit punitive, I know, for a student who looks as though he has an extremely bad headache, and he begins to look very pale as we work our way through such delights as the multiple meanings of ‘take in’ and the differences between ‘pass on’ and ‘pass by’.

When I think he has had enough, I give him some homework, go up to our room to brush my hair and put on some lipstick, and then seat myself in one of the window bays in the bar to watch out for David.

I don’t have long to wait, although it takes me a moment or two to marry my mental picture of the David I am waiting for with the man I see striding up the drive. It’s not that he has aged so much in the past months – I’m pretty sure the grey at his temples was beginning to show then and his face didn’t any longer qualify as boyish. No, what has happened is that I have been time travelling back to an earlier episode when, marooned in foreign territory and out of my depth in a murder