“Whistled like a sheep farmer!” said Mari. “The draft could blow-dry your hair from the other side of the room.”
“I suppose he thought these would be warmer,” said Annie.
“Oh, they’re that all right,” said Mari. “It’s like being sealed in a Tupperware! The boy is terrified I’ll catch pneumonia. That’s what killed my sister, you see, his mum.”
“Well, then it’s understandable he’d want to keep you warm,” said Annie.
“Fuss fuss fuss,” was Mari’s reply.
One of the shelves was taken up with framed photographs, different sizes and shapes, huddled together and fighting for space. A picture of Mari—a few years younger—looking up adoringly at a gray-haired man.
Dotted among pictures of Mari and her husband were images of a dark-haired child, grinning widely throughout a pictorial history of his life: from buckets and spades and Spider-Man trunks, to a twenty-something cradling a bundle of pink, to a man in his forties, arm strapped proudly around a young girl in a graduation cap. Mari saw her looking and smiled.
“That’s my John,” she said. “He was always a bonny chappie. Handsome devil, don’t you think?”
Annie smiled. He wasn’t her cup of tea; a bit too rugged-looking for her tastes. But there was something about his cocky grin against his dark hair and beard that made her want to smile back at the image. He was not at all what she would have imagined from his snooty e-mail.
“He seems very nice,” said Annie, in what she hoped was the appropriate response.
Mari nodded briskly as one does when a correct answer has been made, and she walked out of the sitting room; Annie followed her into a narrow hallway. Directly opposite the sitting room was the kitchen, and farther down the corridor were two more doors. The one next to the kitchen was slightly open and gave Annie a glimpse of an avocado-colored bathroom sink. By process of elimination, then, the door on the other side, next to the sitting room, must be the bedroom.
* * *
—
By now the kettle in the kitchen had begun to whistle feverishly. Mari lifted it off the hob and poured the boiling water into the waiting teapot, which she then covered with a knitted rainbow tea cozy. The kitchen overlooked the garden. It was small but perfectly functional. The cupboards had been painted a pale green and there was a little curtain in a ditsy floral fabric strung between the two cupboards on either side of the boxy butler sink. Like the sitting room, the walls above the lower units were shelved and covered in a hotchpotch of mismatched crockery, cookbooks, and different-sized jam jars filled with herbs and spices and stacked like an old apothecary.
The tiles were straight out of the 1970s: bright orange sunflowers and yellow daisies on beige and biscuit backgrounds. But what really held Annie’s attention was the black range oven, which hummed in the corner. Mari saw her looking.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” she said. “As you may imagine, we don’t have mains gas here, so this little beauty heats the house and hot water as well as cooking dinner. It’s oil-fueled; you probably saw the tank outside? John makes sure she’s serviced every year, and a winter’s supply of oil will be delivered next month, so even if we go into an ice age you’ll be snug as a bug till spring.”
“Wow,” said Annie. “I’ve never cooked on a range before.”
“Do you cook much?” asked Mari.
“I’m a chef,” said Annie. “Was a chef.”
Was she still a chef? Did it still count if you weren’t cooking for a living? Now what was she?
A hand brushed her arm and broke her reverie.
“Are you okay, hen?” asked Mari. “I lost you for a wee moment there!”
“Oh, crumbs! Yes, sorry,” said Annie. “It just occurred to me, I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with my life.”
Mari handed Annie a mug of strong tea and offered up the sugar bowl, which Annie declined.
“Then it seems to me,” said Mari, “that this position is just what you need. A little hiatus from the business of normality to get your head straight.”
Mari ushered Annie back into the sitting room and bade her to sit on the sofa, while she took the armchair.
“Now, why don’t you tell me what it is that has brought you here?”
It was a strange sort of interview. Mari asked a series of leading questions, which Annie found herself only too willing to answer. She told Mari about the restaurant and Alex and Peter and invariably—suffering as she was at the moment with some sort of oversharing virus—about Max’s affairs, and table nine, and the Keep Calm and Carry On cushion that hadn’t covered her usurper’s perfect young breasts.