Page 6 of Happily Ever After
‘So, you can start now.’ Lady Tanith stood up. ‘The Master will leave with me.’
‘Good,’ I muttered.
The cat gave me a stare that could have stripped paint, and Lady Tanith frowned. ‘I firmly believe,’ she said, with extreme hauteur, ‘that Oswald has come back to me, in the form of The Master.’
With that, the pair of them stalked, heads high and with regal bearing, from the room. I stuck my tongue out at their retreating backs, and began the hunt for the computer.
* * *
Dinner was… interesting. We sat in the dining room, although Lady Tanith’s demeanour rather indicated that she thought ‘The Help’ should eat alone in her room, and spooned up obviously tinned soup from a tureen in the centre of the table. After that, a doughty lady wearing a brightly coloured pinafore overall, marched in, slammed down a plate of cold meat and salad and said, ‘You’ll have to serve yourselves, I’m off home, my legs is playing up something cruel.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Compton,’ Hugo said as calmly as though she’d curtsied and served us personally.
‘I’ll be in to do her ladyship’s breakfast,’ Mrs Compton said, giving me a wicked, narrow-eyed glare, ‘but the rest of you can fend for yourselves.’
‘I am sure we shall rise to the occasion, Mrs Compton. Goodnight.’
Mrs Compton ‘harrumphed’, which I’d never heard done in real life before. And, whilst I was trying to decide whether she was more Mrs Danvers fromRebecca, or Mrs Reynolds fromPride and Prejudice, she marched out of the room and closed the door behind her with a firmness that told of a wish to slam it, but too much class to do so.
Nobody remarked on this behaviour, so I presumed it was Mrs Compton’s normal way of communicating. Hugo passed me the plate of cold meat. ‘So, you said that you lived in a converted bus, Andi?’
‘Er,’ I said, wishing that I hadn’t mentioned it. Did Hugo have to choosenowto find me interesting? ‘Yes.’
‘And your parents are television personalities?’
Now Lady Tanith raised her head. ‘You have famous parents, Andromeda?’
I gulped. ‘They have a television programme. They started out making programmes for YouTube on living in a converted bus and travelling around Britain and Europe and the show got picked up by the BBC. It’s apparently cult viewing.’ I cut my meat into tiny pieces and tried not to notice that there seemed to be a caterpillar on my salad.
‘Hm. Are they well off?’
‘Mother!’ Hugo remonstrated, but gently. ‘We don’t talk about things like that, remember? It’s déclassé.’
I poked at the caterpillar and it wandered off over the edge of my plate. Once it had gone, I ate the salad. One thing you learned from growing up with my parents, was to eat what you were given, when you were given it. They could be a little lackadaisical about meals and mealtimes when they were busy.
‘Oh, Andromeda doesn’t mind,’ Lady Tanith said, blithely. ‘The working class are always keen to discuss how much money they make.’ She folded a lettuce leaf, speared it with her fork and tucked it into her mouth in one movement, without looking at it first. I hoped my caterpillar hadn’t had friends in that salad bowl.
‘My father’ – I didn’t know quite how to go about phrasing things – ‘made a lot of money in the city. When he was younger. Then he married Mum, took very early retirement and they bought the bus. They had me and my sister, and then they started a blog about life on the road – that turned into the YouTube channel and then they got taken on by mainstream TV. They’ve gone to Montreal, to tour Canada in a Winnebago, for the new series.’
Hashtag OnTheRoad, I thought, bitterly. Hashtag LeaveYourDaughterToManage. Hashtag WhatTheBloodyHellAmIDoingHere.
‘Their loss is our gain,’ Hugo said, with an admirable attempt at levity. With a flash of horror I wondered if they were going to kidnap me and ransom me back to my parents. Should I have revealed as much as I had? Had I put myself in danger?
Then I thought of my parents being presented with a ransom demand for me, and reality cut back in again. They had probably forgotten that I’d moved out by now and any attempts to extort money for my return would be met with puzzled stares and a feature-length episode. While my parents were lovely people and undoubtedly fond of me and my sister, the alternative lifestyle they led meant that they could be somewhat vague about details, such as where I was currently living and why.
‘I didn’t go to school much.’ I thought I might as well just come out with all of it now and save the embarrassing Q&A session. ‘We moved about all the time when I was young and I never really had the chance, so I read a lot instead.’
And everything I know about life comes from books. I had to teach myself how life worked, the conventions, how to behave, from sitting for hours in local libraries. I didn’t have friends, I didn’t go to parties, because we never put down roots. I just sat, and I read.
It was beginning to dawn on me that perhaps Jane Austen, the Brontës and Daphne du Maurier hadn’t been the best preparation for life in general.
‘So, you have siblings?’ Hugo asked. He’d put his elbows on the table and was looking at me as though he was fascinated.
‘Yes, I’ve got a sister. Judith. She lives in Cornwall now with her husband and two children.’ Whom I narrowly escaped having to move in with, I didn’t add, and it was only because Jude had found the advert for this job, and you didn’t seem fussy, that saved me from that fate. Although now, I thought, looking at Lady Tanith eating a tomato with a knife and fork, and Hugo watching me as though I were some kind of scientific experiment, maybe I would have been better off moving into Jude’s granny annexe and taking a cleaning job, as my parents had suggested.
‘Andromeda and… Judith?’ Lady Tanith speared another tomato. ‘Not exactly a duo that rolls off the tongue.’
‘Mother!’
