Chapter Three
Cosima didn’t want to slow her pace to accommodate this short woman in her appalling green coat and preposterous hat, but her upbringing overwhelmed her irritation—with being caught mid-wallow by a stranger, with the rain, with Morag’s meddling—and stopped her in her tracks.
She didn’t like standing still. Standing still meant she had to contemplate that she’d been mean for no reason. Was being mean for no reason, she mentally corrected, because she had no intention of stopping.
Even though it wasn’t Edie’s fault she’d recognized her. It would have been more strange if she hadn’t. Cosima had been in the media a great deal lately.
It would have been infuriating if she had pretended not to recognize her. Cosima hated that. Not only was it disingenuous, but it meant a stranger was acting based on their assumptions about how Cosima felt about being recognized. Without asking.
This woman had recognized her all at once, in surprise, after Cosima had shucked out of the robe she’d been wearing since yesterday evening and got herself into real clothes, tinted sunscreen, and blusher.
She put her shoulders back and spread her toes in her boots as she started walking through the rain again, slowly now, feeling her unused muscles trying to figure out if it was good to be out of her room, outside, moving, or if she’d rather be in bed with a Toffee Crisp reading one of the thrillers with cracked spines from the shelf in her room until she fell back asleep.
Her life felt suspended. Dreamlike.
Or it had, until this woman knocked on her door.
On the airplane, Cosima had hunkered down into her first-class pod by the window.
She’d accepted a soda and a dish of warmed nuts and then been overwhelmed by the sensation that the floor of the plane underneath her had dissolved, and she was suspended above the night sky, barely holding on but not falling.
On the airplane, she couldn’t remember the names of any of the board members. It was only her body, hurtling through the night sky.
She’d landed and hired a private car and gave them the address to Gregory Place.
She’d slept the entire way. When she arrived, she passed her credit card to Morag and told her that she didn’t want to be disturbed, to which Morag had said, Of course not, which was how she knew Morag knew who she was.
Then Morag took her to her room with multiple framed portraits of her mother, the plaque that said Phoebe Frank Slept Here, and Cosima was certain the innkeeper had the full picture.
For two days, she slept, refusing everything except water, heavily creamed and sugared tea that she hadn’t ordered, and then a mysterious juice Morag put on her tray that she said through the door would “build her up.”
After she drank the juice, she ventured from the room to take a bath at the end of the hall, draining the enormous tub and adding more hot water until her skin was as saturated as a newt’s.
Then she ate. And ate. She ate for two days.
Eggs, bacon, fried mushrooms, toast, grilled tomatoes, sausage, sweet buns, roast, gravy, pudding, potatoes that were clouds on the inside and crisp with heat and fat on the outside.
She took baths. She imagined she was dry ground, and the food and baths were constant rain.
She was a four-acre fungus, swelling and swelling, shooting up round, white mushrooms in the dark.
When Edie knocked on her door, it was after a week of online shopping and pacing her room.
She’d pulled down her mother’s pictures (all signed) and stacked them in the closet.
She’d silenced every notification on her phone and turned off the red numbers in the corners of the apps so she didn’t have to see them. She’d stomped around.
The anger felt good. Cosima never got to be angry in the Castle.
She wasn’t sure who or what she was angry with or about, but so far, every person and part of her life that she thought about made her angry. Phoebe. Duncan. The Castle. The construction equipment in the gardens. The stock market. PFS stockholders. California. England.
Then Edie knocked. Her hair was long, dark, and shiny.
She had a fast smile. She was nervous, but she was also there—there like a boulder in a national park.
There like air was always there to breathe.
Her selfness was so extremely, very there that Cosima became aware of her own body for the first time since the Castle.
She realized her belly was full from breakfast. She could feel how dry her skin was from so many baths.
She could smell Edie, like lemony cut grass.
She came back inside of her body in stages, until she could really hear what Edie was asking her.
To leave her room.
The last thing she became aware of was that she wore nothing but a dirty robe (easier to go to and from a hot bath if you never dressed). That was when she firmly shut her door.
“God,” Edie Whitelock panted, catching up. “You can cover a lot of ground in not a lot of steps.”
“You should see if Morag has one of those little personal scooters. Or a golf cart. It must take you all day to get to the post office, and this village isn’t even a mile wide.
” Cosima shoved her hands deep into the pockets of the shooting jacket she’d bought online, which Morag had delivered in its box outside her door, along with all the other boxes.
Before Cosima could feel badly for her unfair and sharp comment, Edie laughed. “Ha, ha. You know I’m not even that short? Five three. The average height of a woman in the United States is five four.”
“That’s the average,” Cosima said.
Edie’s voice was an alto’s. Those borrowed wellies were too big for her feet and too tight for her calves. When they squelched in the mud, she had to pull her boot back on where it was undoubtedly slipping off her heel. It bothered Cosima. Things that didn’t fit tended to bother her.
She stomped in a puddle.
“What do you mean, ‘That’s the average’?” Edie was good at mimicry.
Cosima took a deep breath. The outside air was so outside. “I mean, if you add together all the heights and then divide them by the number of people, you get five foot four.”
Edie laughed again. “I know what an average is. I don’t know what you mean by saying ‘that’s the average’ in an imperious tone.”
Cosima, for the first time in eleven days, felt herself want to smile.
Something about Edie’s thick dark hair with its part down the middle, concealed now by that hideous hat, and her thousands of multicolored freckles and her smirky mouth made Cosima feel like this was a person who could take on the towering wave of her meanest emotions and then tell Cosima to fuck off.
She walked a little faster to see if Edie would try to keep up.
“I meant that it takes a lot of short people and a lot of tall people to compose that average, but five four being the average does not mean there are necessarily a lot of people who are five four, nor does it mean that it’s normal you’re only an inch below this arbitrary number. ”
She snuck a look at Edie and glimpsed a dimple appearing, then disappearing from her cheek. The dimple was an affront.
“Fair. You might’ve let me have it, though.
My life at five foot three inches is hard.
For example, I look absurd in dress pants.
Like a painting of a Victorian baby that’s dressed in grown-up clothes, except the cuffs are dragging on the floor and have mud on them.
” Edie mimicked this vision, arching her back and hiking up imaginary pants, pretending to trip on a cuff. It was inane.
“What’s hard about your life?” Cosima put a snap in her question.
The so-called pants Edie wore were very tight jeans, probably stretchy.
They were absolutely correct for someone with a figure like that to wear, because why try to disguise it?
She wouldn’t. Cosima had to get pleats tailored into her real pants so it looked like there was any figure at all under her clothes, and Edie got a good ass for free.
“Well. Interesting question.” Edie tapped a finger against her lips.
They had come up to High Street, which ran along a low stone wall.
Cosima hadn’t been back to see it since she passed it in the car that had taken her to the inn.
It felt different walking beside it, seeing all the little plants shaking off the rain. “Let’s play a game.”
“No. I’ve already agreed to this walk. I won’t agree to anything else.”
Cosima did not know where her refusal came from, but snapping that “no” at Edie felt like taking off slingback stilettos at the end of a fourteen-hour day.
But she said it to the air, because she’d lost Edie. She turned around.
Edie had stopped. There was a huge orange cat sitting on the stone wall, blinking slowly.
Cosima watched as Edie made a little whispery sound, spspspsps.
The cat stood, arching its back, and then bumped its head against Edie’s hand.
She stroked the cat and scratched around its head.
The cat’s tail rose up in the air, flicking at the tip.
“Suit yourself,” Edie said, petting the cat. “But we’re staying in the same inn at the same time in a country neither of us live in, and you’ve been hiding in your room. If you don’t want Morag to keep siccing me on you, you’ll have to come out occasionally. Might as well have some fun.”
“I don’t want to have fun.” When Cosima said it, she imagined she was tipping over a table full of toys and screaming.
Edie leaned against the wall. Her hair didn’t curl in the damp.
It remained straight. The moisture caused it to separate into dozens of dark ribbons that slid against the horrific, noisy nylon of her jacket.
Her nose was red. Cosima had no way of predicting what this woman would do, but whatever she did, Cosima wanted to force the opposite until she felt like she had never been anything but a contrary hermit who snarled at the entrance of her cave.