‘Katharine, though most of her friends call her Kit. She’s two years older than me, and an architect.’
‘Wow, a grown-up.’
He laughs. ‘Yes, pretty much.’
‘Are you close?’
‘We were, when we were younger. All our friends are basically the same people, hence Laurel and I. But architecture is kind of intense to qualify in, so she had less time for me, and then... you know.’ He trails off. ‘It’s hard to feel close to the person your parents expect you to match up to.’
Before she can ask anything else, the harried man at the table across the aisle turns to them. ‘Hi? Hello there. Chatty people? Can you bothpleasebe quiet?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Haf says, ‘it’s just a really important—’
‘Look, I have so much work to do and all I can hear are you two discussing your weird schemes that I don’t want to know anything about. I don’t want to know that you’re defrauding his family, or whatever it is you’re doing. Please stop beingweird and loud.’
From ahead of them, someone joins in with a meek, ‘Yeah!’
‘It’s not that weird,’ Haf protests before she can stop herself.
The man simply holds his hand up to his lips, and with the air of a teacher he simply says, ‘Shush.’
A couple of half-hearted claps sound around them, and the man returns to his work, cheeks flushed with the success of telling someone off.
Mortified, Haf and Christopher sink down in their seats. She reaches for her tablet, and wordlessly hands him an earbud. Thank goodness forPaddington 2.
Exactly one hour and forty-four minutes later, Christopher and Haf both wipe tears away and pull the headphones out from their ears. Afraid of restoking the wrath of the passengers around them, Christopher simply nods at her as if to say, ‘okay, you were right.’
Shortly after, the driver announces that the next stop will be Guildwick, which is their destination.
Once off the train, and free of the imposed silence, Haf lets out a loud yawn and stretch. ‘Thank God, I can make noise again.’
‘It’s all right if you don’t, you know,’ Christopher teases, and she kicks at the air in his direction.
‘Cheeky. Where now?’
‘We’ll get a taxi over. Everyone will be too busy to give us a lift and it’ll be quicker this way.’
The station is the expected little chocolate-box kind of place. The buildings are all built in the same stone, and the bridge is painted in a fresh lick of green paint. It’s like what she imagined the stations at home in Wales would look like if they were maintained, or if they hadn’t been knocked down in favour of weird eighties monstrosities. There isn’t even a ticket gate here, which feels quaint.
At the taxi rank outside, Christopher hauls their bags into the boot, and soon they’re off. At a traffic light, a second taxi pulls alongside, and she sees the harried-looking man from the train and hides her face behind her hair.
‘Are you ready to meet the family?’ he asks.
‘As I’ll ever be!’ She beams.
Haf’s confidence that everything will go well lasts for almost the entire ride.
Right up until the car turns off the country roads that they’ve been whizzing along and begins to trundle down a small gravelly road that Christopher casually informs her is their private drive, at the end of which she spies a large sandstone-coloured house.
Chapter Six
Aprivate drive. A tree-lined private drive, at that.
Who on earth has a private drive?
Well, Christopher’s family apparently, but still. The only private drives Haf is used to are the ones for the farmers down the lane near where she grew up, and those are private more due to risk of potentially being run over by a tractor than rich-people confidentiality.
The taxi slows to a stop before she can finish taking in not only the private drive but the enormous house looming in front of her, and oh God, they have to get out now? Can she not stay in the car with the pleasantly silent taxi driver?
