“No.”
“And you were married?” Audrey nods at Kate’s hand. “The groove in your finger there.”
Kate opens, then shuts her mouth. Audrey’s well over ninety and wears glasses, for Christ’s sake. How did she even notice?
“You know—” Kate begins, but Audrey dismisses her with a wave.
“You don’t need to justify it to me,” she says. “I’m sure I’ll learn the whole sorry tale in due course.”
Kate leans back, offended. “How do you know it’s a sorry tale?”
Audrey lifts her coffee. “Have you ever heard a cheery story of divorce and heartbreak? It’s always a sorry tale. I was going to ask you what a young woman like you is doing abandoning the hustle and bustle of London to come up here to work at a sleepy old guesthouse, but I think the divorce is responsible for the career change, too, isn’t it?”
The weight of Audrey’s assumptions quashes Kate’s appetite. She came here to escape the past, but Audrey is intent on bringing it up. Is this her way of driving Kate away? She doesn’t need to put up with this, despite her longing to learn more about her parents.
“Listen, you clearly don’t want me here, so I’ll just go.”
She stacks her fork and knife onto her plate with a clatter, pushes her chair back, and leaves the dining room without another word. In the sitting room, Ozzie is cozied up with the tiny Sophie, his body curled around hers like a chocolate doughnut. He opens one bleary eye at Kate’s approach.
“Well, at least one of them is friendly, yeah?”
There’s a smattering at the large bay window and she glances up to see that the rain has started up again. She breathes a curse. She doesn’t drive in the rain—not anymore. She’ll have to wait it out. In the meantime, she stomps up the stairs to repack.
What a disaster, she thinks, heaving her suitcase onto the bed. Just like everything I do, apparently.
Except, to be fair, she isn’t the problem this time. It’s Audrey, who can’t even manage a civilized conversation over breakfast. Tears prick at Kate’s eyes, and she growls at them.
“Why are you crying?” she whispers aloud as she wrenches open the dresser drawers. “She’s just a bitter old crank. It’s nothing to do with you.”
She pauses for a moment with a stack of trousers in her hands and takes a deep breath at the sight of the sofa across from her, recalling the image of her mum sitting there. Audrey must have been very different then, for her parents to have had such a pleasant experience here. Something must have happened in the interim to make her so aggressive and hurtful. But that’s not Kate’s problem. She would have liked to stay longer, linger a little with her parents’ memories, maybe learn something of them from Audrey, a snapshot of their lives before she was born. But that’s clearly not possible.
She shakes her head. She’d started to want this. She’d felt something akin to hope, an unfamiliar sensation warming her cold, pessimistic mind. But she’ll have to write this off as a failure, tell Adam she needs to move back into their place. She wipes at the tears, stuffs the trousers into the suitcase. She’ll need to ring the shipping company straightaway and tell them not to collect those remaining boxes.
She’s in the bathroom retrieving her toiletry bag when there’s a smart rap on her door.
“Yes?” she calls, a curt clip.
Audrey pushes the door open. “May I come in?”
“I’m busy. I’m packing.”
“I shouldn’t have said what I did about your life being a sorry tale,” Audrey says in her gravelly voice. “I saw your ring finger and…” She seems incapable of completing the half apology. Kate comes to the bathroom door. Audrey’s jaw is set, with determination or embarrassment or both, Kate can’t tell. “The truth is, as much as it severely irks me to admit it, Sue is correct. I do need some assistance. If the time has come where I can’t open my own Marmite jars, it would be foolish to pretend otherwise.”
“Yeah. Your fingers have a sorry tale, too, don’t they?” Kate snaps.
Audrey lifts her chin and the air between them thickens like curdled milk.
“I’m sorry,” Kate mutters. “I didn’t—”
“If you are fortunate enough to live to my age, Miss Mercer, you will understand how loss of independence can weigh on a person. The only thing worse than aging is the alternative.” Audrey takes a few steps into the room. “You must forgive me for my pointed questions. But I am uncomfortable with secretive roommates.” Her eyes flicker over to Kate’s suitcase. “You know, I ended up here when I had nowhere else to go. No place to call home.”
Kate’s throat tightens a little.
“May I ask why you chose the Oakwood?” Audrey asks.
Kate chews the inside of her cheek. “My parents stayed here once. Years ago now.”
“You came here because your parents stayed here once?”
“I told you my mum was dead, but my dad is too. They died in February. And I’m trying to… retrace their steps. To feel like I’m there with them.” She explains how she stumbled across the job advert after googling the Oakwood.
“And your marriage has ended, so you needed somewhere to run. And you ran here?”
Kate doesn’t fancy her trauma being summed up so indifferently, like a statement on the weather or the score of a football game. But she nods, because it’s still the truth.
Audrey’s cold grey eyes melt a degree. “This place was, and continues to be, one of solace and purpose for me. Perhaps it could be for you too. You’re fiery, like I was.”
Kate has never in her life been described as fiery, and she warms a little to the praise.
Audrey straightens and fixes Kate with another pointed look. “Well, then. Now that we’ve each lain down our swords, let’s go have another cup of coffee and try again, shall we?”
Chapter 7
Audrey
BERLIN, GERMANY | NOVEMBER 1938
