Thursdays at Orange Blossom House

by Sophie Green

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

At seventy-four, cane farmer Grace Maud is feeling her age, and her isolation, and thinks the best of life may be behind her. Elsewhere in town, high school teacher Patricia has given up on her dreams of travel and adventure and has moved back home to look after her ageing parents. Meanwhile, cafe owner Dorothy is struggling to accept that she may never have the baby she and her husband so desperately want.
Each woman has an unspoken need: reconnection. And that's how they find themselves at Orange Blossom House, surrounded by perfumed rainforest, being encouraged by their lively yoga teacher Sandrine. Together, they will find courage and strength - and discover that life has much more to offer than they ever expected . . .

Release date: July 28, 2021

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 432

Sample

The house looks the same as it always has. As it looked when she was a wife here. When she was a child here, growing up in these sugar cane fields near Atherton that were once her whole world.

The house probably looked like this when her father built it, replacing the more ramshackle dwelling his own father had constructed. Given how flimsy the wooden structure is, she is regularly surprised that it hasn’t fallen down. A house on stilts, like all the other Queenslanders around here. Ridiculous, really, that such a thing should exist. But it is still here. Like her.

From this position she has a view of the cane, and the hills behind it. Emerald green they are, all year round; right now they’re the backdrop to the dark orange of the flames turning the sea of cane from green to black and brown. When she was a child Grace Maud thought the burnt fields were dead. She still wonders how nature can haul itself out of such wreckage and renew.

‘Can I get you anything, Mum?’

Tom appears in front of her, lines streaking out from the corners of his eyes, grey strands in his hat-flattened hair. He looks like he has more years on him than he ever has when she thinks about him. In her mind he’s always young. Maybe that just means she’s too old and her brain is stuck in gear somewhere around the 1970s, because he hasn’t been young since then.

‘What are you doing in here?’ she says, then sniffs the air. There’s a smell that takes her back to childhood, and flashes her forwards through her life. It’s the smell of family and familiarity, of promising futures and hopes dashed. ‘That cane’s still burning. Aren’t you meant to be watching it?’

‘Are you telling me off?’ he says, and while there’s a little of the tone of the wounded child in there she can hear mischief too. He’s always been cheeky.

‘Yes, I believe I am,’ she says. ‘You’re the boss now. You’re meant to be keeping an eye on things.’

‘Now?’ He snorts.

She knows why he’s snorting. In truth, he’s been the boss since she decided to step back nine years ago at the grand old age of sixty-five. No brothers to inherit the place after her father died – the war took care of that. No husband to help her either – she took care of that. So she’d been running it mostly on her own for a while. Then Tom said he’d leave the city and come back to help her. Luckily for him his wife, Vivien, wanted to come too. That was the only reason Grace Maud felt she could step back: Tom had someone to take care of him while he was taking care of the farm, and the business, and the workers, and everything else that comes with growing cane and burning cane and cutting cane and shipping it off to be made into sugar and molasses and all the other things that a country needs to stay sweet.

‘Grace Maud,’ says Viv as she enters the room, bending down to kiss her mother-in-law’s cheek. ‘Have you been sitting in here alone all this time? Tom didn’t tell me.’ She glares quickly at her husband. ‘I would have come to keep you company. Has he even offered you a drink? Cup of tea?’

‘Course I have,’ Tom says tersely, then his face relaxes.

Grace Maud recognises that particular quickstep: you say something mean to the one you love then remember you’re not cross with them in particular, but it’s too late to take back what you’ve said. She and Tom do it to each other as well.

‘I just haven’t got around to telling him if I want one or not,’ Grace Maud says, squeezing Viv’s hand.

Every day of her life, she’s grateful that Tom found this girl. A tall, broad-shouldered city lass who has no problem tucking her hair into a hat, pulling on her boots and rolling up her sleeves to get out there and do whatever’s necessary to keep the farm going. When Tom met her he called her the ‘New Farm princess’ because she’d barely been out of Brisbane and she liked the comforts of city life. People can change, that’s for sure. Or maybe they don’t change so much as adapt.

‘So would you? Like a drink?’ Tom says, scratching the back of his head.

She smiles at him. ‘No, thank you, love, I’m fine.’

As she’s grown older her eyesight has become less than perfect, so to her Tom looks more and more like her father and her youngest brother, Frank.

Frank was the brother who returned from the war in 1945, but he was never strong enough to work the cane. Grace Maud doesn’t know what happened to him while he was in New Guinea – he would never speak of it. He only made it to thirty-nine. Their older brother’s name was the last word out of his mouth, and Grace Maud has always wondered if William appeared to Frank right then, as he passed between worlds. She likes to think so. It gives her hope that one of them, or both, will come for her when it’s her time.

On the mantelpiece are the other Llewellyn family photographs. Her brothers are handsome in their uniforms, and in other photos they’re rugged in their working gear, their hair plastered to their heads in the Queensland humidity. Next to them is a photo of Grace Maud and Ellie Maud. Their father thought it was a good idea to give his twin girls the same middle name, and always insisted on people using both names. It was his way of honouring his mother, he would say when anyone asked.

He didn’t point out that it annoyed his daughters no end and led to much teasing at school. And by the time the girls worked out they didn’t have to use the Maud part, it was too late and they’d grown accustomed to it. Besides, it bound them together. They were Grace Maud and Ellie Maud, the Llewellyn twins of Atherton. Even after Ellie Maud moved to Melbourne, married a Hungarian man and took his name she was still Ellie Maud. Still Grace Maud’s most beloved person.

When Tom was a baby Grace Maud would sit in this same spot, nursing him, gazing at the photos and the view. The panorama of her life and lifelines. She never tires of any of it. That’s not why she moved into town. She moved because Tom and Viv needed to have their own home, even though they said they wanted her to stay. Their daughters, Felicity and Edwina, were grown by then and living elsewhere, but they come home occasionally and Grace Maud knows the place would be too crowded with her here too.

Besides, her great-nephew, Luca, needs his own space – as Grace Maud is reminded when he ducks his head to walk in the side door and only takes a couple of strides to reach her. Ellie Maud’s husband was a giant and their grandson is six feet four.

‘GM,’ Luca says, bending in half to kiss her cheek. That’s what he’s always called her, partly because ‘Great Aunt’ doesn’t appeal to her – or ‘Aunt’, for that matter – because it has a hint of dowager about it and she’d like to think she’s not old enough for that, and also because he’s young and the young seem to enjoy adapting their elders’ names.

‘Luca, darling,’ she says. ‘Is Tom being nice to you?’ She glances at her son, who rolls his eyes.

‘Kid gloves, Mum. Like you told me.’

‘I did not!’ Grace Maud says, but her indignation is fake: she did ask Tom to go gently on Luca in his first weeks on the farm. He is helping them out, after all; it isn’t his dream to be a cane farmer. Just because university didn’t turn out to be right for him and he left after one semester, that doesn’t mean he’s going to stay with them forever. Luca has never spent more than a few days in a Far North Queensland summer, or spring, and once he realises what it’s like to live in humidity for months on end he might head for Cairns airport with nary a backwards glance.

‘It’s fine, GM,’ Luca says, grinning. His dark-brown curls fringe his face, and Grace Maud can see that his already olive skin has taken on that look of baked-in dirt that is the result of layers of suntan. ‘Uncle Tom hasn’t got me doing anything dangerous.’

‘Tom, mate,’ says Tom, who is not Luca’s uncle but his second cousin. ‘Just Tom.’

Luca nods. ‘Sorry. Forgot. Um, Tom, they’re asking for you. Something about the plough?’

‘Sure, mate. Mum, you staying for dinner?’

Grace Maud looks from her son’s expectant face to Viv’s. She knows they genuinely want her to stay, but being in this house that is no longer her home has made her more nostalgic than is good for her. It’s why she doesn’t visit often. She’s only here today because it’s the first day of burning and Tom insisted she come, as if it’s a ritual that she has to take part in every year. It’s nice that he still thinks of her as being part of the business. It’s her name on the title, so she supposes it remains her business too.

‘No, I think I’ll get back,’ she says. ‘While it’s still light.’

What she really means is: while it’s still light enough for you to not tell me that I’m too old to drive myself home. That’s been their one battleground lately: the fact she won’t give up her licence. Why should she? Not being able to drive would sentence her to a life stuck in her house, and she can’t bear the idea.

Tom looks disappointed and she’s caught off guard. She forgets, sometimes, that he loves her. It’s so easy to forget when it’s never said, even when she knows that he’s like her in that respect: they use actions, not words, to convey what they feel.

‘Thank you for having me,’ she says, pushing herself up from the chair with great effort. She sits too much these days and it’s made getting up more difficult than it should be. All those years of riding horses when she was younger have made for stiff hips now, and they complain as she half-waddles towards her handbag.

Tom, Viv and Luca follow her down the stairs to her car.

‘See you, Mum.’ Tom bends and kisses her on the cheek, then Viv does the same.

‘GM,’ Luca says as he wraps his long arms around her. She squeezes him briefly then turns and lowers herself into the driver’s seat.

The air is heavy with the cane smoke and she looks towards the fields that are on fire. No matter how many times she sees it, she wonders at the majesty and brutality of it: growing those verdant crops then setting them ablaze to prepare them for cutting.

She’s seen that pattern in her own life: allowing something to grow, then doing something dramatic to pare it back. Or to destroy it. Perhaps it suggests that she’s heartless. Or perhaps it’s all she knows. After a childhood spent observing the pattern, it’s in her blood and her marrow and the very gristle of her. She has known for a long time now that the way we grow up leaves an imprint on us that is both profound and invisible. Our own individual system of ley lines. And she has spent her lifetime wondering if all we do is follow those lines without knowing why, our course plotted before we are even conscious of it.

‘Pat, have you seen the sugar?’

Patricia winces as, yet again, Gordon calls her by the nickname she can’t stand. Pat is something you do to a dog. Or something you call a boozy old bloke at the local pub who stopped being Patrick when he left school.

‘No, Gordon, I haven’t,’ she says, smiling with the bottom half of her face but not with her eyes. Never with her eyes if she’s smiling in Gordon’s direction. She’s learnt – as have all the other women who work here, from the cleaner to the secretary in the admin office to the French teacher, even a senior English teacher like Patricia – that he takes a real smile as an invitation to familiarity. But if they don’t smile, he tells them they’re stuck-up – and as he’s the school principal they can’t afford to not be on his good side. Which he knows.

‘I’m sure you used it at lunchtime,’ Gordon says, standing a little too close.

She takes a step sideways.

‘Lunchtime was a long time ago,’ she trills, wondering if he watches her making tea so that he knows when she has sugar. ‘I think I saw Dennis having a cuppa not long ago.’

She doesn’t want to dob in the PE teacher but she’s also desperate for Gordon to leave her alone so she can depart. Honestly, she has no idea why he keeps trying to crack onto her, apart from the fact that he tries to crack onto every human with XX chromosomes who looks within reasonable reach of legal age. He’s quite persistent with her, though, and has been ever since he started here a year ago.

The first day she met him he’d looked at her feet, shod in her favourite flat, brown work shoes, then at her face and said, ‘Please don’t tell me you’re a woman in sensible shoes. Because that’d be no fun.’ He’d winked slowly, as if she was supposed to know what he meant.

She didn’t, but she’s since found out: he wanted to know if she was a lesbian. Apparently that’s what ‘woman in sensible shoes’ was code for, although she’s never heard the phrase before or since.

At the time she had laughed nervously and said, ‘Well, I am wearing sensible shoes, so …’ Which was her version of fighting fire with fire.

‘Dennis!’ Gordon bellows now across the staffroom. ‘Where’s the bloody sugar?’

Patricia mouths sorry in Dennis’s direction, but she knows he understands. The female teachers regularly use him as a means of deflecting Gordon’s attention because Dennis is half a foot taller than Gordon, which seems to keep the older man in line.

Dennis nods in a resigned fashion and stands up to his full height. ‘Dunno, Gordon,’ he booms. ‘Let’s look together.’

Patricia exhales, then jumps as she feels a tap on her shoulder.

‘Sorry!’ squeaks Marjorie, the science teacher who joined them at the start of the year. ‘Didn’t mean to scare you.’

‘That’s okay,’ Patricia says, but as she turns her head to talk to Marjorie she feels a twinge running down the side of her neck and towards her shoulder. That same twinge she’s had for a few weeks now. It started after she helped her father into the car and he had suddenly gripped her shoulder, pulling her into a twist.

‘What is it?’ Marjorie says, looking concerned.

‘Nothing. Just a … It’s nothing.’ Patricia doesn’t need to share her woes. Maybe because if she started, she might not stop.

Marjorie nods. ‘Aches and pains,’ she says knowingly. ‘It’s all that marking. Bending over the papers.’ She makes a claw out of her right hand. ‘My hand gets so tight! I feel like my fingers will never straighten!’

Her high-pitched laugh makes Patricia jump again, although she should be used to it by now. Marjorie can often be heard before she’s seen, no matter where she is in the school. Patricia wonders if the laugh is covering for something. No one can be that genuinely ebullient all the time.

Now Marjorie is poking her in the arm and nodding again. ‘I went to this class. Amazing stretches. Yoga. You should try it! We could go together!’

‘Yoga?’ Patricia has heard the term but thought it was something to do with The Beatles visiting India.

‘There’s a teacher – Sandrine. She’s French. She has a class on Saturday mornings. It used to be in the Presbo church hall.’

Patricia blinks, wondering what her Presbyterian mother would think of that particular nickname. Probably nothing, actually, given that her mother’s fine brain is starting to disintegrate at the edges, and sometimes in the middle.

‘But now it’s in this amazing little house,’ Marjorie continues. ‘Orange Blossom House. She likes orange blossom orchids. That’s what she told us. She’s really lovely!’ Marjorie frowns. ‘And sometimes a bit mean. But yoga’s really good for you. The stretches are really deep. And there’s breathing.’

‘Breathing?’ Why would anyone need to learn breathing when we’re all breathing all the time anyway?

‘I know, it sounds funny! But it’s great. Trust me.’ Marjorie sighs. ‘It really helps me cope, you know?’

Patricia knows she should ask Marjorie what she’s coping with – in her experience no one drops a word like that into conversation without wanting to be asked about it – but Gordon reappears, triumphantly bearing the sugar.

‘Found it!’ he says redundantly.

‘Wonderful,’ Patricia offers. ‘We’ll give Dennis a medal.’

She glances in Dennis’s direction and he gives her a half salute and a friendly smile as he walks out the door.

‘I’ll leave you to your hot beverage, Gordon,’ Patricia says. She’s confident that Marjorie will also leave him to it, because she knows not to be alone with him.

‘You don’t want one?’ He looks slightly wounded.

‘I have a tonne of marking,’ Patricia says, hoping her uncharacteristic use of emphasis will convince him that she’s far too busy to stay. The truth is that she has no marking today, but Gordon wouldn’t know that because he doesn’t care about the teachers’ workloads.

‘Me too!’ Marjorie says, almost sprinting to her handbag and hoisting it onto her shoulder.

They trot out the door and along the long corridor, only slowing their pace when they reach the street. Patricia’s red Ford station wagon is parked under a pathetic tree that offers hardly any shade against the clear blue Queensland sky. Even in winter it’s best to avoid leaving your car in sunlight all day if you don’t want your fingers burnt on the steering wheel, but she was running late this morning and it was the best she could get.

‘Oh,’ Marjorie says, making a face. ‘You got the bad spot.’ Her olive-green Toyota is parked beside abundant foliage.

‘Someone has to,’ Patricia says cheerfully. She doesn’t want to tell Marjorie why she was late. None of her colleagues knows that she lives in her parents’ home – the house she grew up in – because those parents need looking after, and of course the unmarried daughter was the obvious choice.

Patricia’s two brothers have wives and children, which means their roles are now husband, father and provider. Son is no longer on the list. Not in the way it counts when their parents need it to count. Patricia’s sister also has her own family and obligations that make her too busy to visit much, and she lives in another state anyway.

Patricia isn’t bitter about it. Just slightly resentful. And weary. Between her father’s physical ailments – of the sort that ageing people usually have, but which require regular attention nonetheless – and her mother’s fading mental capacity, she feels like she’s on alert the whole time. Which is probably how her sister, Annette, feels with her children. Patricia wouldn’t know. She doesn’t have children, and there’s never been a glimmer of a chance of them.

‘That’s what you get for being too smart,’ her mother once told her. ‘It never does a woman good to be too smart for a man.’

Not that Patricia’s resentful about that. It’s life. She knows it. A person just has to make the best of their lot. That’s what she tells herself every day, and she tries to do it with love. Her parents are her lot, and she loves them. They don’t necessarily understand her, or she them. They’re not her friends. But they’re the only set of parents she has and she’s not ungrateful for them.

As she turns to put her key in her car door she feels that twinge in her neck again, and gasps.

‘Bye, Marjorie,’ she says quickly, wanting to get in the car and hide her pain. Except Marjorie is looking at her with sympathy, so clearly that didn’t work.

‘I think you should come to that yoga class with me,’ she says, and this time her tone is firm. ‘Seriously.’

‘Okay,’ Patricia says, still wincing with pain, because in that moment she can’t think of an excuse and maybe, just maybe, it will help her with that twinge.

Marjorie nods slowly. ‘Good. I’ll give you the details tomorrow.’

‘Thanks, bye.’ Patricia hops into the car, closes the door and immediately winds down the window to let the heat escape.

Knowing she can’t touch the steering wheel for a few minutes, she sits and waves to Marjorie as she departs. Then, gingerly, she puts the key in the ignition, lightly touches the steering wheel, and drives off to deal with whatever is waiting for her at home.

The café door is shut after the last of the customers and Dorothy wants nothing more than to pull out one of the chairs and collapse into it. Maybe Frederick could bring her a nice glass of wine. Or not. She’s not meant to be drinking alcohol. The doctor told her that if she wants to give herself the best chance of holding a pregnancy she should eliminate a few things. Like wine. And coffee. And cigarettes. All the things she likes.

‘Will that really help?’ she’d asked him, wondering how she was meant to manage the stress of all this without her indulgences to fall back on.

‘It won’t harm,’ he’d said, peering over half-moon glasses. ‘And given that you’ve had three miscarriages it’s advisable to do something different, don’t you think? You’re old to be trying to have a baby. Thirty-four is, well …’ More peering. ‘Not youn-g.’ He enunciated the ‘g’ as if it was a separate syllable. For emphasis, of course.

What would you know? she’d wanted to say to him. You’ll never get pregnant. You don’t know what this feels like.

Nobody knows what this feels like. Dorothy hasn’t met any woman who’s had one miscarriage, let alone three. When she enquired – as gently as possible – if it’d ever happened to any of the women she knows well enough to ask, they all said, ‘Of course not!’ So she’s the defective breeder. Four years of trying, three babies lost.

She feels Frederick’s hands on her shoulders, kneading the knots that have been there for longer than she’s been trying to become a mother. His willingness to massage her shoulders wasn’t the main reason she married him, but it was a factor.

‘You carry the weight of the world here,’ he had told her once, and she couldn’t disagree. Dorothy tends to worry about things – worrying is, as her mother says, her natural habitat – and the worries take up residence in her body, to make room for new worries in her mind. If she understood better how all that works, she might be inclined to think that because she’s so full of worries there’s no room for a baby. But that’s nonsense.

‘You’re being irrational, Dorothy.’ That’s what the same doctor had told her when she mentioned that she was feeling overwhelmed by her life: running the café, paying the bills, managing the housework, all the things she has to do as well as trying to get a pregnancy to last longer than a few weeks. So overwhelmed that she felt like she could never be a good mother, so maybe it was just as well that she wasn’t any kind of mother.

And that’s what she tells herself every day now, when the worries start: You’re being irrational, Dorothy. It doesn’t really work, though.

‘That was a busy day, my darling,’ Frederick says as he continues to massage her shoulders, his strong fingers causing pain, just the way she likes it. She wants to feel that something has moved. Changed.

‘Mmm,’ she says, closing her eyes and leaning back towards him. ‘Where did all those people come from?’

A large tour group had appeared just before midday, saying they’d heard there was proper German food to be had here. They’d asked her name and immediately said, ‘But you must be a Dorothea, not a Dorothy.’

She’d wondered how they knew. Her family had moved to Cairns from Germany when she was a child and she was sure there were no traces of her German accent left. Of course, her thick blonde plait makes her look like a poster child for the Third Reich – something she has wrestled with – but it’s her natural hair colour so she is loath to change it. Maybe the tourists were just guessing. It made her feel uneasy, though.

Dorothy likes to think of herself as a proper Aussie. Her parents left their country and their past and the Second World War behind when they came here, wanting their children to be Australians, not Germans. Australia had its problems, but they didn’t include two wars being fought on its soil. Then she had to go and marry a German.

Frederick had been travelling around Australia, a backpacker with strong, tanned German legs and a rough beard. He’d stopped in Cairns because he wanted to see the Daintree Rainforest. Instead, he’d seen Dorothy wiping tables in a little café with a view of the water and, he told her later, he knew he wasn’t going to travel any further. ‘I found home,’ he’d said.

She hadn’t understood that, really, because she didn’t know how a person could feel like home. But once they married she did. Frederick belongs with her, and she belongs with him. In the whole wide world, they managed to find each other. He is the one thing she doesn’t worry about, because she knows she loves him and he loves her.

‘You haven’t been sleeping very well, have you?’ he murmurs as he digs his thumb into the persistent knot near her right shoulder blade.

‘How do you know?’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘I can feel it when you wake.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, because she doesn’t want to inconvenience him.

‘There is nothing to be sorry for. But I don’t want you to lie awake worrying the way you do.’

‘How do you know I’m worrying?’ she says, trying to keep her voice light. ‘Perhaps I’m going over a Mozart piano concerto in my mind.’

‘That Austrian!’ Frederick teases. ‘I don’t believe it.’

It’s their ongoing joke: Mozart versus Beethoven, and why Mozart can never be considered superior because of his nationality.

‘Believe it, Liebling.’ Dorothy may have left her accent behind, but marriage to Frederick has brought her back to her mother tongue. She sighs, more heavily than she meant to.

Frederick’s hands still. ‘I know you’re worrying about whether or not you want to try again.’

‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘No,’ he says firmly. ‘I want whatever you want.’

She knows that’s not true. Even before they married he’d talked about the children they would have, and always with excitement. He’s done well to hide how upset he’s been that he’s not yet a father, and she knows he’s done it to protect her. It would be better, though, if he were honest – because when she believes he’s hiding things from her, it’s just one more thing to worry about.

‘I believe you,’ she says, even though she doesn’t.

What she really wants, she supposes, is for the doctor to tell her whether she can or can’t have children. Telling her to stay hopeful, to keep trying, to not give up – these are all platitudes rather than useful statements. Dorothy can handle a concrete truth, if only she were given it. If only she could give it to herself.

Frederick pats her lightly. ‘Come. I will make you some lunch.’

Lunch at four o’clock is what they’re used to by now, because they can’t eat until all their customers no longer wish to.

‘Thank you,’ she says, picking up his hand and kissing it, before she pushes herself up from the chair.

Tom pushes a ledger book across the table. ‘Do you mind taking a look at these, Mum?’

It’s the same kind of ledger book Grace Maud used, which wasn’t much updated from the kind her father used. Figures remain the same no matter where they’re written, so there was never a good reason to change the sort of stationery they used to record them.

The accounting books have always been kept in the old dresser that flanks one side of the dining room; Grace Maud’s grandfather commissioned the piece from a local furniture maker, and through four generations there has never been a reason to get rid of it. Aside from a few dents and scratches, it has trustily stood sentinel over the dining table, which is not the same piece Grace Maud grew up with. Once it became clear she was only going to have one child and no husband, there was no point keeping a table meant for a much larger family.

The sitting room, too, has changed its permutation of furniture to accommodate the ebb and flow of inhabitants in the house. Viv wanted to remove her daughters’ favourite chairs when they removed themselves to Brisbane but the girls protested. So they’re still clumped together next to an old couch covered in a damask material that has never been suitable for the climate but which Viv loved at first sight.

‘You know the business well enough by now to not need my help, surely?’ Grace Maud says as she peers at the ledger, her tone indicating that she’s gently teasing him.

‘Yeah, well …’ He scratches behind his left ear; he’s been doing that since he was a little boy when something concerns him. ‘You know I wasn’t that good at maths at school.’

She nods, although it isn’t true. She nods because he wants her to endorse the line he’s been telling himself all these years, and sometimes a mother has to do what makes her child happy instead of correcting misinformation. Besides, his lack of belief in his mathematical ability has never stopped him being interested in how the business of running the farm works, although Grace Maud knows that Viv helps him with the bookkeeping. Which means Viv should be sitting at this table instead of washing up the plates they used for lunch, as Grace Maud can hear her doing in the kitchen.

‘Vivien, would you like to join us?’ she calls. ‘You probably know more about these numbers than both of us put together.’

Tom looks tense.

‘Did I say the wrong thing?’ Grace Maud murmurs.

‘No – just … I didn’t want her to think I thought she’d made a m