Chapter Fifty
Fifty
Cords
I feel my jaw tense, but he looks even more mortified than me.
‘Oh dear, I caught you in the shower,’ Betty says, grinning. ‘Still, it’s not the first time I’ve almost caught you in the buff and I doubt it’ll be the last.’
She turns to me and says, confidentially, ‘Apart from his mother, I was the first woman who ever saw him naked.’
‘Dear god, stop, please!’
‘What – it’s true! I was there at your birth. They let me cut your cord. Anyway, I knocked earlier, but you didn’t answer,’ Betty carries on, oblivious to my awkwardness.
‘I was doing my exercises, and I had my earbuds in.’
‘Never mind, I had a nice walk with Mindy.’
‘Lindy,’ he corrects her, and she gives me a little smile that suggests she knows my name perfectly well.
‘You’re feeling better, then?’ I say. ‘I mean, you don’t look quite so contagious as yesterday.’
‘I think I’m over the worst of it, yeah.’
‘Oh, you’ve already met!’ Betty says, happily, and once again I get the distinct feeling that she already knows this but is for some reason pretending she doesn’t. ‘It’ll be good for him to have a nice friend next door.’
‘Nan, please,’ he says, blushing.
‘You’re Betty’s grandson?’ I say, feeling myself pale. But she’s so friendly – weird, but friendly – and you’re the complete opposite.
‘Yes. We like to have brunch together when he’s back on the island, but he hasn’t let me come near lately, on account of his cold. I’m just here to drop off some nice breakfast soup,’ she says, rooting about in her enormous handbag.
‘Breakfast soup?’ he enquires, making a face.
‘It’s very hearty. It’ll set you up for the day, boy.’
She takes a pink Thermos out of her bag and passes it to him.
‘What’s in it?’ he asks.
‘Mushrooms mostly. Oh, this is superb. I won’t stay because you might still be contagious and yours could be “the cough that finishes me off”, but Lindy can come in and share it.’
‘I’m not actually dressed,’ I say, again.
‘Neither is he,’ Betty says, smiling at her half-naked grandson, whose real name I still don’t know.
She places her hand on my back and gives me a little push across the threshold.
‘You don’t need to worry about him being an axe murderer. He’s very tame, I assure you.’
‘Nan, seriously. Who has guests over at 8.15 a.m.?’ he says, exasperated.
‘You do,’ she says, taking a step forwards, grabbing the door handle and beginning to shut us in the hall. ‘Make friends like good neighbours.’
The door closes and we stand in the dim light of the hallway, me in my sweaty pyjamas and him in his tiny towel.
‘Excuse me,’ he says.
But for some reason that evades me, he doesn’t turn. He walks backwards, so that he’s not turning his back on me and then ducks into a side room. Is his towel really so tiny that it doesn’t cover his bottom?