Master of the House

‘Is your mum still a cleaner? Do you still live in a caravan?’

This was why I hadn’t wanted to sit with them. They had been part of the group who’d called me ‘gyppo’ and ‘trailer t

rash’. Why the hell Jamila had been, and stayed, friendly with them was unfathomable to me. I knew they’d called her racist names behind her back too. But apparently they worked at the same school as her now, and perhaps she thought they’d grown-up.

‘Mum runs her own business now,’ I said. ‘And as for me, I’m living at Willingham Hall.’

Oops.

I shouldn’t have said that. But the goading look in their eyes had been too much.

They stared at each other.

‘Are you joking?’ said the other one, Maxine.

‘No.’ I turned to the menu for refuge and inspected it with a brow whose furrow clearly hinted they should lay off.

‘Willingham Hall?’ Kylie repeated. ‘I thought that’d been taken over by someone dodgy. Is it you? Oh, my God! What’s happening up there? I’ve heard so many rumours.’

‘No, I’m not the person who’s leased it. I don’t know who that is.’

‘What,’ said Maxine sceptically, ‘you live there but you don’t know who with?’

‘I can hardly tell you, can I, whatever I know,’ I replied smartly. ‘Not unless I want it all over the playgrounds of Fossey Bassett.’

‘Sorry I spoke,’ said Kylie.

‘Apology accepted,’ I said. Suddenly I wasn’t at all hungry.

I put my handbag on the table, opened it and reached in for my phone. Only the first thing that came out wasn’t my phone. It was the little pack of ben-wa balls Joss made me carry about always so he could call me at random times of day and order me to insert them. It was his way of keeping my mind on him during the working week, when my hours were unpredictable and he didn’t know when he’d see me again.

‘That’s a pretty box,’ cried Maxine, swiping it up so the balls inside jingled. She had it open before I could stop her. ‘Oh, my God, what are these?’ She took them out, laid them in her palm and waved it about so they made their mellifluous chiming sounds. ‘What are they for?’

Kylie’s dirty laugh told me she knew.

I snatched them back and stuffed them in my handbag, but that horse had bolted.

‘I heard a rumour,’ said another diner, seated beside Maxine, ‘that you were seeing Lord Lethbridge. The new one, I mean, not the dead one.’

‘She just told us she’d moved into the Hall,’ said Kylie, nodding vigorously. ‘So are you shagging him? He’s fit, he is. I would.’

‘Did he give you those ball things?’ asked Maxine, cottoning on at last to what they were. ‘Is he a pervert? I bet he is. He looks it.’

I stood, cast a look of desperate apology along the board to Jamila and fled to the cloakroom.

* * *

Joss arrived to pick me up within ten minutes.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, gauging from my expression that I had a confession to make.

‘If we weren’t the gossip of the county before, we are now,’ I said. ‘Thanks to those bloody silver ball things of yours.’

‘What? You weren’t wearing them, surely?’ He laughed, his eyes bright at the thought.

‘Of course not. But they fell out of my bag. Cue wild speculation.’

‘Not that wild,’ he remarked. ‘Pretty accurate, probably. But you fled the scene? Not like you, Lu. You normally brazen things out.’