Mrs. Laschamp smiled. “No, dear,” she said. “It’s completely inedible. I give it to the cats.”
“So what do you eat?” I said.
She gave me a resigned look.
I said, “You’ve got vegetables in the pantry.”
“I grow those.”
“You could make a vegetable soup.”
The old woman raised her small red hands and held them aloft in the air. They fluttered like prayer flags.
“Jazz hands,” she said. A smile rolled over her face like a wave through quiet water, lifting the edges of her mouth.
I said, “I can probably make soup.”
“Well, then,” she said, “if you did that, we could both have soup.”
All right, then, I thought, first I’ll make some soup. Then I’ll go.
***
I made a sort of minestrone, adding dried pasta for bulk. It took a while to clean and chop the vegetables, to sauté them in oil, then to heat the whole thing through. Mrs. Laschamp sat at the table and talked to me. She told me her husband, Ted, had died five years before. She told me she’d been born in Germany, then she’d moved to France when she was a small girl, then she’d returned to Germany, which, she said, had not been a good time to go back. She’d come to England after the war.
Later we sat in the garden together. I told her about the book I was reading. She said it sounded very good, and perhaps I would be so kind as to read it for her? She loved a good story, but her eyes weren’t so good anymore.
I said, “I can if you want, but there’s a bit in the bedroom you might not like, and sometimes she uses the f word.”
“Darling girl,” Mrs. Laschamp said, “I wasn’t born yesterday.”
So then I started The Handmaid’s Tale again, from the start.
We ate the soup in the late afternoon, and she told me it was the best one she’d ever had.
I thought I’d better do the washing-up and clean the kitchen before I went. After that we sat in the sitting room and watched a little TV. She gave me a toffee from a box she kept under the sofa.
“I’m not really meant to have them,” she said. “I have to hide them from Ted’s niece.”
Maybe, I thought, I’ll just stay one more night, then I’ll go. I didn’t want to appear rude. I hadn’t finished reading her the book.
***
I was better prepared for visitors after that. The next day, and in the following days, as soon as I heard a car in the drive, I disappeared up the back stairs and lay flat on the carpet of the landing until the woman in the plastic apron had finished and gone again. I never had to wait very long. Five minutes, max.
And we got into a bit of a routine, Mrs. Laschamp and me. I cooked. I read her the book. Then I read her other books. I cleared the veg patch and pulled up hundreds of potatoes. She taught me how to prep things for freezing and bottling. We talked. Her mind worked in interesting ways, and I liked that. It was a bit like a radio being tuned, moving between the stations. One moment she’d be talking about one thing, then she’d stop, and when she began again she might be on a completely different wave length. Sometimes she spoke to me in other languages. I’d studied French at school, so I was okay with that, but when she spoke in German I’d just nod and smile until she switched back into English.
In the evenings we watched TV. Mrs. Laschamp especially liked nature programs and World in Action, but, on my fifth evening there, we watched the news. I was the second item. I felt the insides of my ears prickling. I kept very still on the sofa, looking straight ahead, not looking at Mrs. Laschamp at all. Mrs. Laschamp kept her eyes on the TV too.
Busted, I thought.
A photo of me filled the screen while the newsreader introduced the piece. It had been taken at the start of the summer, when I’d had long hair and a fringe that covered my eyes. The blood was rushing in my ears so loud it was almost impossible to hear. The theory was that I’d been abducted. They named my town, my school, my road. They showed a photo of a white van. They said a forty-six-year-old man was helping them with their inquiries.
A forty-six-year-old man? Who was that, then? My father was in his fifties.
They’d find me soon enough, just as soon as they worked out I’d run away. Or perhaps the woman in the plastic apron might spot something was out of place first, realize there was an impostor in the house, perhaps someone holding the old lady hostage. I imagined helicopters overhead, searchlights trained on the house, armed police bursting in through the door shouting Clear and then shooting me in the head before they bundled the old lady off to safety.
At the end of the news, Mrs. Laschamp switched off the TV. I waited for her to say something. She opened her mouth and sighed. She shook her head. She gave me a long searching look.
“Would you care for a toffee?” she said.
***
It took another three days for the police to visit the house. They arrived when the Apron was delivering the lunch, so I was already upstairs.
There were two voices, a man’s and a woman’s. I strained my ears to hear.
The policewoman spoke first. “It’s just routine. We’re speaking to all the neighbors. People are convinced they haven’t seen anything and then we show them a photo and—hey, presto—it all comes flooding back.”
“This one?” Mrs. Laschamp said.
There was a long silence.
“Laika Martenwood. Laburnum House.”
“I see.”
The Apron joined them at the door. “Dreadful business that,” she said. “I thought you had someone in custody.”
