Page 103 of Gifted & Talented

Then Jamie’s voice came back to her.Whoever takes over Wrenfare is fucked, full stop. Nobody’s steering that ship to safety.

Oh, she thought. Oh, I see, Dad.

“Bye, Christopher,” Meredith said without thinking, and abruptly ended the call.

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The call that Arthur had received while he was on the phone with Eilidh was, as I mentioned earlier, a call from Gillian, his wife. Interestingly, she did not address the matter of eternal darkness, perhaps because she hadn’t noticed yet, given the position of the Wren family home beneath a thick canopy of trees.

“I just want you to know I’m really sorry,” she said. “That will make sense later. I was just sitting here thinking how sorry I am, and I wanted you to know.”

“Okay,” said Arthur agreeably, with prodigious amounts of unspoken confusion. Typically he didn’t ask when Gillian did confusing things, as he found the more straightforward course of action in any situation was to trust her implicitly, with the leisure of blind faith.

But then, a little bit later, just as I was pulling into the car port at his father’s house, Arthur received another call, this one from Lady Philippa.

“Is this Arthur Wren?” said a garbled voice.

“Pip?” said Arthur. “Is that you?”

“Can you hear me?”

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Yes, hi, who is this?”

“Is this Arthur Wren?”

“Yes, who is—”

“This is—”

“Sorry, keep going—”

“Right, okay, well my name is Jack, I’m staying at the Four Seasons—”

“Four Seasons? Which Four Seasons?”

“The one in San Francisco? Anyway, the woman who was just taken away, her phone was on the ground, so I thought I’d call her emergency contact—”

“What happened to Philippa?” asked Arthur, thinking with a sudden flash of discomfort about the mysterious apology call he’d just received from Gillian.

“Well, I think she’s…” Jack from the Four Seasons suddenly became very reticent. “My wife and I debated for ages about what to say to you. I wanted to text you, but she said a text message would be insanely upsetting to receive—”

“Is Philippa okay?” asked Arthur, looking at me. I was pretending not to listen but I was obviouslyriveted.

“Noooooooooot exactly,” said Jack from the Four Seasons. “I mean… nooooooooot really.”

Which was certainly one way of delivering the news that Philippa Villiers-DeMagnon was dead.

58

You see, what had happened was that Philippa never actually left the city. I can only speculate as to her thought process here, but having spoken to all the parties involved except for Philippa, what I’ve gathered is that she assumed Arthur and/or Yves would eventually come after her, so she decided to go to the nicest hotel in San Francisco to have a little spa day and relax. She was on the phone with her credit card company at the time she was stepping out of the cab, arguing with them about how they needed to lift the hold on her account, because yes, she was out of the country, and the airport charges for Sour Patch Kids and Vitaminwater were definitely her. I’m not sure what they said back, because none of the witnesses to her accident were paying attention to anything except the slightly bitchy sound of her voice (RIP).

As you know, total darkness fell suddenly. So suddenly that the driver on Pine didn’t see a woman stepping furiously out of her cab, so busy was he staring at the sky, wondering if this was the end. Ironically, the only person whowasn’twondering if it was the end of the world was Philippa herself, for which it actually was the end. Which is funny, if you think about it, if only because in these types of situations, all you can really do is laugh.

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