Chapter Five #2
“I can see what you mean.” Cosima didn’t know what else to say. Most of what came to mind risked swerving them into a deeper involvement than made sense while they were both guests at an inn, distracting themselves from their lives.
The storm hadn’t woken her up. It had been an anxious, throat-closing dream about Duncan weeping, accusing her of throwing him away.
Her mother wasn’t in the dream, though Cosima looked for her while Duncan was yelling.
When she woke up, she texted him for the second time since she’d come here.
The first had only been to confirm where she was staying, because she didn’t want the world looking for her.
She trusted Duncan to keep that from happening.
When she woke up from her nightmare, though, she texted to tell him that she was resting. Eating good food and taking walks. It was a scenario Duncan would approve of, though she imagined it wouldn’t be long before he tactfully asked for her return date.
Her mother’s company remained headless. The specter of the market loomed.
A small city’s worth of people depended on her to keep it aloft so they remained employed.
Even if Duncan stalled and rescheduled whatever he could for their soon-to-be-filming show, she guessed they were already losing thousands a day.
She thought of Edie’s story about her mother’s boyfriend.
How he’d left when he no longer had a reason to stay.
But Duncan wasn’t leaving. He had put something in motion that meant that he genuinely needed Cosima for years to come.
Even worse—even from here—she could sense the pressure Duncan felt to do right by Phoebe by making their gardening show and the studio it spawned successful.
Because he loved Cosima. He loved Phoebe.
Duncan’s love was easy to return. Cosima only had to follow the directions.
He’d texted back immediately to communicate his cheer that she was resting, but what he didn’t say was what Cosima heard the loudest. Nothing about the board.
The CEO appointment. Their television show.
The omissions meant Duncan knew there was something very wrong, and that he’d decided to handle the situation with care.
Cosima didn’t want to feel wrong. She didn’t want to be handled. But the points of the daggers pressed against her ribs anyway.
She had come downstairs into the lounge and watched a movie, dialing up the sound in her earphones until it was loud enough to drown out her guilt and indecision.
“Give me that.” Cosima held out her hand for the shepherdess.
Edie gave it to her. “You want to try with the hairpin?”
“No. You can tuck it in your reticule.”
Edie snorted as Cosima set the first shepherdess back on top of the piano. Then she rose and walked out of the lounge to the clear area of traffic-polished flagstones in front of the reception desk.
When the next rumble of thunder had built to a crescendo, she dropped the secret-keeping shepherdess on the floor.
The fine bone china exploded like a bomb.
“Jesus Pete, Cosima!” Edie whispered.
Cosima surveyed the destruction. “I may have miscalculated.”
“You fucking think? Morag’s going to kill us. Actually kill us. Put us in a cage, fatten us with candy, and roast us in that monster of an Aga she’s got.” Edie sighed. “I wish she’d let me use it. I would love to cycle sourdough boules through that mother.”
“I’m not worried about Morag, I just forgot I wasn’t wearing shoes or slippers, and now I’m trapped by china shards in bare feet.” She bent over and snatched up the rolled-up piece of stationery the figurine had been hiding. “I got it!”
“Don’t read it yet. Wait there while I find a dustpan and broom.
” Edie hustled past her and disappeared into the kitchen.
She reappeared with a broom and carefully swept up every speck of china, one fist gripping her pants at her hip, then pulled out a pair of Morag-knitted wool socks from her side pocket and handed them to Cosima.
“Do you think you can slide your feet into those? I think I got everything, but in case I didn’t, I’d rather you had socks.
” Edie stepped next to her. “You can hold on to my shoulder.”
Cosima placed her hand on Edie’s shoulder, balancing on one foot as she slid a sock onto the other.
She didn’t know when she’d last been offered such a simple act of caretaking.
Edie’s skin was warm through her T-shirt, round and firm with muscle.
Cosima had to surrender to the other woman so that she wouldn’t be hurt, and the simple trust plus Edie’s body under her hand, kneeling at her feet, made her ache unbearably.
She didn’t want the ache to stop. Far from it. She wanted to sink into this trust and unobligated caretaking like a hot bath. It hurt good.
Cosima switched hands on Edie’s shoulder and tugged on the second sock, her cheeks hot.
Edie set the dustpan and broom against the wall. “Now we can read it.”
By silent mutual agreement, they took the paper to the dining table and sat back down with the guest book. Cosima unrolled the stationery—the paper stiff and dry with age, but verifiably from her mother’s stationer.
“It says, ‘Look, Listen, and Love.’” Cosima let the paper go on the table, where it rolled back up. “So helpful. Thanks, Mother.”
“Wait, though.” Edie put her hand on Cosima’s forearm. “My brain is doing something.”
“What is it doing? Don’t break it.”
“Shh.” Edie closed her eyes.
“Should I get another cup of tea? Will this take a while?”
Edie opened her eyes. “Now is not the time for our charming banter. I actually have to focus when an unformed thought wiggles its way in. Be quiet before it wiggles back out and I start thinking about frosting recipes.”
As Cosima waited, she looked for more constellations on Edie’s face, visually tracing a path from a tiny moon-shaped scar above the corner of her left eye to a trio of freckles on her cheekbone, then discovering a pale freckle that surrounded another darker freckle like a miniature Saturn. Then Edie opened her eyes.
“I got it! Come on.” She jumped out of the dining room chair and ran back toward the lounge, Cosima following in the slippery wool socks.
Instead of going all the way into the lounge, Edie took the hallway next to the stairs, behind the reception desk, and led Cosima into what Morag called “the library.” It was a medium-sized room that opened to the garden.
Its walls were lined with unremarkable bookshelves housing hundreds of paperbacks.
Edie stood on a stool to skim her finger down a row of titles.
She tipped a book off the shelf. Cosima caught a glimpse of a couple, the woman wearing a voluminous pink gown.
“Look, Listen, and Love! It’s the title of a Barbara Cartland novel! ”
“I’m not reading that,” Cosima said. “It’s already almost four in the morning.”
Edie flipped through the pages with her thumb before turning the book spine-side-up and shaking it. Another piece of Phoebe’s yellow stationery fluttered out. “We don’t have to!”
“How did you know about that book?” She bent down to pick up the paper.
“Cosima, god love you, but I told you my phone’s bricked, Morag doesn’t have TV or the internet, I don’t have money for a train pass, and I’ve been here ten days.
Walking in the rain and memorizing this library have been my primary pastimes, other than fantasizing about cooking in Morag’s kitchen or looking for her furniture polish. ”
Cosima was chagrined. “Right. Of course. Lucky us, in this case.”
“What does it say?” Edie sat down on a love seat with mauve and baby-blue stripes. Cosima could have taken the rocking chair across from her, but she didn’t. She sat on the other side of the love seat and held up the note so Edie could see it, too.
When Cosima read it, she couldn’t help her fond huff of laughter. Her mother must have been so pleased with herself when she wrote this clue. “It says, ‘Rosemare.’”
Edie’s brow wrinkled. “Do you know what that means?”
“I do. My mother was the kind of person that loved the meanings behind names—the literal meanings, the cultural ones, the stories. If you met her, it wasn’t unusual for her to translate your name or tell you something about it. Like ‘Whitelock.’ It refers to a white field or meadow.”
“I’ve read that somewhere. What does ‘Rosemare’ mean?”
“Literally, it just means ‘a pink mare’ or a pink horse. The wallpaper in my room is pink, with rows of prancing horses.”
“I have been dying to see your room.” Edie surged to her feet, then fumbled for a hold on her sweatpants, whose attempted escape revealed three inches of purple cotton underwear patterned all over with tiny white hearts.
Cosima averted her eyes as she got up. “You could’ve asked,” she said, following Edie from the room.
“I could’ve asked the resident Hollywood depressive to have a look at her giant suite?” When Edie reached the stairs, she stopped and turned around. “Yeah? When? Should I have had my meals sent up to your room so we could chat over them together for a change in scenery?”
“Fair, but remember, my mother’s dead.”
And then Cosima couldn’t believe she’d said it. Said it like that. Like a little jab in a bout of what Edie called their “charming banter.”
Frozen in place, Edie put her hand over her mouth, and—maybe because she’d been studying Edie’s face at close range—Cosima understood she was holding back laughter.
That was what made Cosima laugh. It felt strange enough to her throat and chest that she mainly choked, but then Edie was giggling madly, and it turned out her genuine laughter was infectious, so Cosima laughed more while Edie shushed them and laughed, and they stumbled up the stairs bent double.
Cosima flung open the door to her room. It must have been nice once. The large bed was flanked by original Lane dressers and a small dining set centered on quite a lovely ivory cut-pile wool rug that needed cleaning.