Folly Ditch: A Helen Oddfellow literary mystery (Helen Oddfellow Mystery Book 4) by Anna Sayburn Lane

Author:Anna Sayburn Lane [Sayburn Lane, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent
Published: 2022-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 28

Helen felt sure the whole family knew exactly why she didn’t arrive till ten minutes after the dinner gong, face bare of make-up and her hair still damp from the shower.

It had been nice. Better than nice, good. She’d worried she might have forgotten how, but Gus was pleasingly ardent, if conventional. That was OK. Helen was quite conventional about these things herself.

Somehow Gus managed to look cool and relaxed, smiling at her across the drawing room as she gulped down a gin and tonic before dinner. At least Crispin would be cheering her on, she thought.

Helen realised her velvet trouser suit was both too glamorous and not conventional enough. Lady Maria, clad in a well-cut dark green wool dress which displayed a dramatic ruby necklace, looked at her in surprise, then declared her outfit ‘very original’. Helen didn’t think that was a compliment.

Charlotta, who didn’t seem to have changed her clothes, avoided looking at Helen at all. She monopolised her brother, reminiscing about childhood holidays in the Black Forest, laughing extravagantly at everything he said. Helen was left with Charlotta’s sons, typical teenagers with baggy jeans who were inseparable from their phones even at the dinner table. The elder, Hans-Karl, deigned to lift his eyes long enough to answer her questions. He was studying science and languages at boarding school, he said in precise but accented English. He planned to move to England and enrol in Sandhurst after school. There was no point in university. There was no point in studying literature or history. He would become an officer, then later a politician like his father, or a diplomat.

He might struggle with diplomacy, thought Helen, bristling at his lordly sense of entitlement and his dismissal of the main interests of her life.

The dining room was gloomy and formal. Helen was almost relieved that Lady Maria’s exquisite taste had lapses into heavy Victorian gothic. The panelled walls were lined with dark oil paintings, bloody hunting scenes featuring dead deer and partridges mixed in with more portraits of ancestors, all men and all looking stern. She could barely move her heavy mahogany chair, uncomfortable with carving that dug into her back.

Gus grinned at her across the gleaming table. ‘Hope you like venison,’ he said. Helen took her eyes off the painting of a butchered stag that hung opposite her and swallowed. ‘It’s the best meat, ecologically. They live natural lives and need to be culled. It’s very lean and healthy.’

‘Sounds lovely,’ she said. She supposed it was too late to pretend to be vegetarian. She turned to Charlotta, seated on her left, determined to take some part in the conversation. ‘Hans-Karl was telling me he would like to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a politician,’ she said. ‘Has your husband been involved in politics for long?’

She caught a flicker of unease from Gus across the table.

‘For most of his life,’ said Charlotta. ‘He was a representative for the CDU for many years, until he began to have serious misgivings about its direction after the Syria crisis.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.