The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next 1)

“She’s been posted here,” put in my mother.

“Have you lost weight?”

“I work out.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No,” I replied. They would ask me about Landen next.

“Have you called Landen?”

“No, I haven’t. And I don’t want you to either.”

“Such a nice lad. The Toad did a fantastic review of his last book: Once Were Scoundrels. Have you read it?”

I ignored her.

“Any news from Father?—” I asked.

“He didn’t like the mauve paint in the bedroom,” said my mother. “I can’t think why you suggested it!”

Aunt Polly beckoned me closer and hissed unsubtly and very loudly in my ear:

“You’ll have to excuse your mother; she thinks your dad is mixed up with another woman!”

Mother excused herself on a lame pretext and hurriedly left the room.

I frowned.

“What kind of woman?”

“Someone he met at work—Lady Emma someone-or-other.”

I remembered the last conversation with Dad; the stuff about Nelson and the French revisionists.

“Emma Hamilton?”

My mother popped her head around the door from the kitchen.

“You know her?” she asked in an aggrieved tone.

“Not personally. I think she died in the mid-nineteenth century.”

My mother narrowed her eyes.

“That old ruse.”

She steeled herself and managed a bright smile.

“Will you stay for supper?”

I agreed, and she went to find a chicken that she could boil all the taste out of, her anger at Dad for the moment forgotten. Mycroft, the gameshow ended, shuffled into the kitchen wearing a gray zip-up cardigan and holding a copy of New Splicer magazine.

“What’s for dinner?” he asked, getting in the way. Aunt Polly looked at him as you might a spoiled child.

“Mycroft, instead of wandering around wasting your time, why don’t you waste Thursday’s and show her what you’ve been up to in your workshop?”

Mycroft looked at us both with a vacant expression. He shrugged and beckoned me toward the back door, changing his slippers for a pair of gumboots and his cardigan for a truly dreadful plaid jacket.