Free One Summer Night At the Ritz by Jenny Oliver Page B

her chicken club down and picked up a chip.
    ‘Oh yeah.’ He nodded. ‘Not my finest hour.’
    ‘We should probably talk about the diaries – what you want to do. Do you want to meet Martha?’
    He nodded as he chewed, ‘Yeah, I could meet her. I suppose what I don’t quite understand is why it’s you meeting me, not her or another relative.’
    ‘There are no other relatives. I don’t think.’ Annie glanced at the tray and realised that he’d ordered her a Coke as well. ‘Is this for me?’
    He nodded.
    ‘Thanks.’
    He shrugged as if it was nothing.
    But it felt strangely intimate to Jane – that he’d picked her a soft drink – like they were teenagers at a sleepover.
    She took a sharp, sugary sip that tasted of pure nostalgia. Of feet dangling in the river and Enid’s music playing. ‘I’m here because Martha didn’t want to bring it all up, I think, and I did. She said the past was always better left buried. I felt like I owed it to Enid to find everything out and then put it to bed. You know, she’d kept that government letter right with her at the cafe she worked at till she died. And the diaries – she’d buried them at the allotment.’
    Will choked a laugh on his bite of hamburger. ‘She buried them?’
    ‘Yeah!’ Jane laughed. ‘So it just shows how important it was to her. It was her secret and I loved that.’
    He looked at her and she looked away, picked up her Coke and felt a bit embarrassed for getting so excited.
    ‘Why did you love that?’ he asked, wiping his hands on a napkin and lounging back against the sofa, his arm outstretched along the back.
    ‘I don’t know? Everyone loves a mystery, don’t they?’
    ‘Clearly not Martha,’ he said.
    ‘Martha likes everything to be in its place. She doesn’t really like change and—’
    ‘And you do?’
    Jane paused for a second wondering whether to just shirk off the question or to actually tell him the truth. Where else did one open up to someone if not late at night in a sumptuous hotel room, dressed in differing versions of dressing gowns, with just the low side-lights on and the bubbles of a Coca-Cola popping next to you on the table? If anything, she wanted to talk just so there wasn’t a silence, just because his hand was dangerously close to her back and he was looking at her with half interest in her story and half like he might lean forward at any moment and kiss her and if that did happen then she felt like she was so out of practice that she’d have no idea what to do. So she said, ‘My life’s been a bit weird. There’s never been an option to, like, change or not – it just happened.’
    He didn’t ask why, as she’d assumed he would but instead said, ‘I’m terrible with change. Everything that’s happened to me has happened exactly the way it should. I’ve been programmed to like order.’
    His hand had stopped tapping against the back of the sofa and, to her horror and delight, was toying with the hood of her jumper, occasionally stopping to stroke the loose strands of her hair.
    Jane carried on as if it wasn’t happening. ‘You’d have hated my life.’
    ‘Why?’
    She shrugged, careful not to move too much in case he stopped playing with her jumper, or stopped touching her hair, frozen in uncertainty of what was happening. ‘Because it was always unpredictable. My mum was particularly unpredictable.’ She laughed when she said it but it felt like a moment when a counsellor might lean forward and say something trite about Jane using humour to overcome issues of her past. ‘That’s why I’m here, you know.’
    He wrapped a strand of hair around his finger. ‘Because your mum was unpredictable?’
    ‘Because Enid was probably the closest person I had to a conventional parent. And if you met Enid you wouldn’t really think she was conventional so I suppose that says something in itself.’
    She looked at him and he nodded, concentrating on her hair and her neck. ‘Keep going.’
    ‘I