Page 48 of Happily Ever After
I gave him a hard stare. ‘Or she might just be really upset.’
‘As I said, gibbering and bloodstained. Anyway. Ethical dilemma; this is much more your territory than mine.’
‘Is it?’
‘Well, you’ve got all that “go and live with my sister, or please my parents by taking on their world” stuff, haven’t you?’ He dropped his face into his mug. ‘Or coming in with me.’
He wasn’t looking at me. Carefully not looking at me. As though he were afraid of what I might say next.
‘That’s not ethics. That’s just practicality,’ I said, trying for cheery upbeatness. ‘But I’m assuming that learning how to landscape gardens won’t involvePeppa Pigor passing an HGV driving test.’
A quick, hopeful sidelong glance came from the direction of his mug. ‘Nope. Or at least, not that I’ve noticed so far, as long as you can come to terms with a ride-on mower. Gardening can also be somewhat pig-adjacent.’
‘Well then.’
Jay smiled, a slow thoughtful smile. ‘Great. But what about these diaries? What are you going to do? Could you redact them? Tear out the pages where Oswald is at his most vicious about her? Pretend, I dunno, that there’s a particularly selective breed of worm that only eats some paper?’
I gave a deep sigh that let out a lot of the tension I’d been holding. ‘I really don’t know. I should just give them to her, of course. She’s an adult, responsible for managing her own expectations and responses. I should just hand them over, not say that I’ve read them, and let her discover what Oswald really thought, in her own time.’
‘But?’ Jay crossed his legs and his shoulder made contact with mine. It was nice.
‘Well, bloodstains, gibbering and all that. And, I feel sorry for her. I don’t know if I could bear being the person who blew her world apart. She wants to read them, to edit them for publication, even though no reader is ever going to comb through that lot to find Oswald’s motivations for his novels. She’s not going to publish them without going through them first, so I can’t even tell myself that she won’t ever see what he said.’
‘So, pretend you never found them.’
I focused on the hairy brown knee beside me. ‘She knows they’re there in the library somewhere. I can pretend to keep looking, of course, but I’ve got no idea how long I can keep it up before she fires me and brings in someone else.’ I pulled a face. ‘Someone a lot quicker on the uptake than me, who finds the hiding place. If it’s empty, Lady Tanith will draw a whole lot of conclusions that I’d rather she didn’t – like I found them and ran off with them, and if I put them back, then I’m just kicking this further down the road to make it not my responsibility.’ I sighed again. ‘I’m buggered, whatever I decide.’
Jay whistled again. ‘And now it’s my problem too, thanks for that.’
I stiffened. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think…’
‘Don’t be daft. It’s good, in a very weird and protracted kind of way. Shows you trust me.’
‘Does it?’
‘Well, you obviously realise that I’m not going to run straight to Lady Tanith or Hugo and tell them that you found the diaries, am I? That’s trust.’ Jay looked at me sideways again. ‘You really haven’t trusted many people in life, have you?’
‘There’s never been a need,’ I said briskly. ‘So, advice. What do Ido?’
‘We could run away?’ Jay suggested, half-hopefully.
‘Lady Tanith would have a case against us for breaking the terms of our employment, and don’t tell me she wouldn’t use it. Besides – besides, I don’t want to leave Hugo in the lurch. He’s all right.’ Then I thought of Hugo, in full-length satin and velvet, swinging an evening bag with no one to turn to. ‘He’s got his demons too, but he’s been nothing but kind to me. I can’t dump him and go and hide.’
‘So tell him what you’ve found. Lady Tanith is his mother, maybe this is more his responsibility than it is ours?’
I stood up, noisily pushing the chair back. ‘I’ve thought of that as well. But the boys were brought up on the story of their mother’s doomed love for Oswald. Is it fair to expose them to the fact that she has never really known what love is? With all the implications that might have for the way she’s treated them?’
‘It might explain an awful lot about life for them, though,’ Jay put in. He stood up too. ‘What’s not fair, is that this has fallen on you.’
Jay reached out. I felt my skin cool at the thought of his approaching touch, and then prickle with heat, but he reached past me and picked up his plate of toast.
‘I’m going to give it a couple of days,’ I said, not sure whether I felt disappointed or not that he hadn’t touched me. ‘Nobody knows that we found anything in there. I’ve got a bit of leeway to weigh up the pros and cons and maybe introduce the topic to Hugo.’
‘You and Hugo…’ Jay put the plate down again. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.
‘No. I thought, right at the beginning… but no, Jay.’
‘What about me? Was I in the frame at the beginning?’ He was quite close to me now, Homer Simpson’s bug eyes giving me something to focus on.
