Rosaline gave a laugh which she hoped communicated “I am mildly amused” rather than “I am trying too hard.” “Who are you going to ask? That tree? The sheep?”
“I’m afraid I only took Sheep to GCSE, and the only phrase I can remember is ‘Where is the bathroom?’”
“Okay.” She had to ask. “What’s Sheep for ‘Where is the bathroom?’”
He had the grace to look . . . not to put too fine a point on it . . . sheepish. “I think it’s ‘Where is the baaathroom?’”
“You are really lucky I’m secretly into dad jokes.”
There was a measuring pause. “Hi, Secretly into Dad Jokes. I’m Alain.”
“Okay,” Rosaline told him, “I might have put too much emphasis on the into and not enough emphasis on the secretly.”
“Don’t worry. Jokes aside, I’m not ready to go full dad quite yet.”
This time Rosaline’s laugh was ever so slightly more forced. She was kind of used to most people her age, or even a little bit older, talking about parenthood like it was part of this unimaginable future you’d get around to once you got careers and relationships and your own dreams figured out. Which made it slightly awkward to come back with “Actually, I’ve been doing that for nearly a decade.”
Their country lane took them across a cattle grid and onto a subtly different country lane, which led onto another. And it was across a field from country lane number three that they finally spotted signs of human habitation. Well, apart from all of the things that were technically signs of human habitation but were so countryish that they barely counted, like the hedgerows, the little stiles over rickety fences, and the acres upon acres of grass.
Alain shaded his eyes against the gleam of the setting sun. “Is that a farmhouse? Tell me that’s a farmhouse.”
“Or a secret military base, and either way there’ll be someone we can ask for directions.”
“If it’s a secret base, won’t they just shoot us?”
She shrugged. “They might do that if it’s a farm.”
“I actually live in the countryside and I’ve been shot by farmers far less often than you might imagine. Shall we go and say hello?”
“Okay, but if I wind up full of buckshot, you’re picking the pellets out.”
“And if I wind up full of buckshot?”
“Then I’m using you as a diversion and running for the road.”
He gave her an arch look. “You’re a cold woman, Rosaline-um-Palmer.”
“Not half as cold as I’d be if I was shot dead by an irate landowner.”
Since the alternative was wandering aimlessly or admitting to people who’d be making important decisions about their future they were a gigantic liability, they decided to risk approaching the farmhouse-slash-military-base. This, as it turned out, took longer than they’d anticipated because fields were like the Tardis: much bigger once you got into them.
“You know,” remarked Alain, “I’m very glad you’re here. This would have been incredibly dull on my own.”
“So you’re saying I’m better company than literally nobody?”
His mouth turned up wryly. “If it helps, I can think of some people who would be worse company than literally nobody. I went to a university friend’s wedding last year, and honestly, I’d have been surprised if the bride’s family had read a book between them. I got stuck talking to one of their many peripheral cousins, and I swear, the man thought grammar was a nickname for an elderly relative.”
It surprised a laugh out of Rosaline—one of the conspiratorial, slightly guilty laughs that you were pretty sure was at somebody’s expense but were also pretty sure was at the expense of somebody you didn’t like. And who, perhaps more to the point, wouldn’t like you either. “Weddings are the worst. Unless two of your friends are getting married, half the people in the room are people you’d never choose to hang out with. And half the rest just happen to be related to someone you would.”
“In defence of matrimony, I have been to some lovely weddings. I think the problem with this one wasn’t the institution. It was the company.” He gave a heavy sigh. “No sooner had I got rid of Cretin A when the bride’s father grabbed hold of me and spent ten minutes trying to engage me in conversation about which of the waitresses he or I would like to, and I quote, ‘give one.’”
“Urgh”—Rosaline gave an involuntary shudder—“I can’t stand men like that.”
“Neither can most reasonable people. Then again—and I hate to say this—I think they do sometimes get quite a lot of encouragement. The bride herself was very much”—Alain paused, as if unable to find words to express the horrors he was trying to describe—“let’s say that between the fake tan, the fake breasts, and the fake nails I wasn’t entirely sure if my friend was marrying a person he’d met at work or something he’d run off on a 3-D printer.”
Again, she shouldn’t have laughed. Again, she sort of did. And again, she felt guilty for it. Lauren had serious—and honestly, correct—opinions about the way society had gone from judging women for failing to live up to unrealistic beauty standards to judging them for both failing and succeeding. Except, in that moment, it seemed harmlessly liberating to share someone else’s judgement of a stranger instead of being judged herself.
They turned through a gap in the hedgerow and made their way up a dirt track towards a sprawling but well-maintained farmhouse. In the yard at the front, a woman with a flat cap was doing something incomprehensible to a tractor.
“Well then,” Alain whispered. “Let’s see if we get shot.”
They did not, in fact, get shot. Instead, the farmer confirmed that there was no reasonable way to get to Tapworth that evening, offering to put them up for the night and run them along to Patchley House in the morning. Spending a night in the middle of nowhere with a man she’d just met wasn’t something that Rosaline was exactly wild about, but assuming the BBC had vetted Alain as closely as it had vetted her, there was a better than reasonable chance he wasn’t a serial killer.
“Of course I’ll take the floor,” he was saying. “Or if it would make you more comfortable, I can ask our host if she wouldn’t mind me using her sofa instead.”
Rosaline was sitting on the edge of a crisply made double bed in the little room beneath the eaves that had been all the farmer had available. She’d fired off a quick text to Lauren to explain about the train drama and that she wouldn’t be able to call until tomorrow, and she was now waiting to see if she had enough reception for the message to actually send. When it finally did, she looked up. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable on the sofa?”
“Not really.” He gave a slightly self-deprecating smile. “My feet would probably hang off the end.”
So they split the generous supply of pillows and blankets, Rosaline rolling up on one side of the bed, and Alain constructing a makeshift mattress on the floor.
“What a strange day,” offered Alain after a predicably awkward pause.
“Just a bit,” she agreed. “Are you sure you’re okay down there?”