Where Everything Seems Double, Penny Freedman [best inspirational books txt] 📗

everything. The feeling had started when Granny began talking about counter-culture. She tried to stop reaching for whatever it was and let her mind wander. She thought about Ruby, whom she had never met, but who was the centre of this strange adventure all the same. She thought about the picture of Ruby among the photos of the cast members that she had seen at the theatre, with her red hair falling to her shoulders. Did she have red hair when she was born, she wondered, and was that why her parents had called her Ruby? What had she been like? No-one in the gang had really told her that. She thought about Eve’s husband helping her with chemistry. Did she like that or was it a pain? Was he good at teaching? Milo and Fergus obviously liked him – loved him, actually – and enjoyed doing things with him. Did he make chemistry fun at all? Did she go to his house for her lessons? If so, she would bet that Eve always gave her something nice to eat and drink. Unless she was at her studio. Did Ruby miss Grace, her sister? Did she miss having someone to talk to? Was Venetia any good as a stand-in? She doubted it.

By the time they got off the ferry, her thoughts were beginning to make a kind of sense. Granny said she would try to see Dumitru for a short English lesson before lunch and Freda shut herself in her room. She needed to write things down, and the only way to do it, she decided, was by drawing a diagram. Writing it down in words would make the thoughts fly away. She had to make a picture of it. Grabbing a piece of sketching paper that was lying on her chest of drawers, she started to write, in pencil, rubbing out and improving until she had what she wanted.

 

 

Satisfied finally, she sat back and looked at it. What to do now? Should she try to talk to Granny about it? It was the obvious thing to do, but Granny wasn’t good at taking on other people’s ideas, was she? And Freda really had no actual evidence for anything. Her picture felt right to her, but that wasn’t going to be enough for Granny. She needed evidence. She looked again at what she had written and considered the question marks. Starting with them would be a good plan, and that meant she needed to talk to Dumitru.

Chapter Thirteen A SERPENT EAT MY HEART AWAY

Monday

Well, I seem to be mending bridges. Things became quite amiable between David and me yesterday, to the extent that when we rolled upstairs after a couple of after-dinner brandies it felt perfectly natural for me to go with him to his room, and this morning has seen me make the walk of shame back to my own room without any awkward encounters with over-zealous chambermaids. David is raring to get back to London, though, munching his breakfast with an eye on the time, and I need to talk to him before he goes. At some point in the night I woke with one of those moments of pure clarity that you sometimes get at the instant of waking, as though your subconscious mind has filtered all the rubbish out as you slept, and has left you with one essential nugget of truth. Actually, in my experience, this moment of truth usually involves the realisation of something crucial left undone, but this morning it reveals something that needs to be done, and David is the man to do it.

With this in mind, I propose going with him in his taxi to Penrith, and invite Freda to come along for a shopping trip afterwards. She was looking loose-endish yesterday and I shall enjoy the distraction. Under cover of some horrible music on the car radio, I give David his instructions. He balks at them of course – this is not his case, he can’t interfere, he has no authority – but he quails under my insistence and I think he will do as I ask.

In Carnmere later Freda and I find the dream bookshop – tiny and crowded, making no concessions to attracting the casual visitor with gaudy and alluring displays. The proprietor is taciturn, primed for disappointment, and I think I make his day with my prodigal purchasing. Though austere, the shop is perfectly up to date, offering all the books that were shortlisted for the Women’s Fiction prize this year. I buy The Silence of the Girls, which has been on my must-read list, and then, since I’m in the ancient Greek world, I get Circe as well. Freda has been attracted to one of those bodice-rippers disguised as history and I get it for her because she has to make her own mistakes, but I add To Kill a Mockingbird, which she will surely like, if she isn’t put off by the protagonist’s being eight years old, and Animal Farm, which she may not be ready for yet.

It is a satisfactory outing in my view but Freda grows very quiet on the homeward ferry ride and continues to be silent over lunch, served to us by a still-battered Dumitru in the hotel garden. Afterwards I offer a walk but she says she will just chill out in the garden with one of her new books and I go off on my own.

I walk up the road, past the gap in the hedge and the yellow tape beyond, until I reach the place where I can get onto the lake shore itself, and then I walk as far as I can go along the shingle, thinking about Ruby Buxton and wondering how long it will take David to follow up on my hunch, and whether I am right at all. When the pebbled shore runs out I scramble back onto the road and return to the hotel. I have been away for under an