heap of pound notes, merrily burning. Her computer sat open on the table, displaying a list of bills the bank wanted her to pay at her earliest convenience. Frances had added the column again and again, but each time she’d arrived at a figure that defied the laws of arithmetic.
The nights were drawing in; the light was gone by four p.m.; misery arrived with the dusk. She couldn’t remember what it felt like to be warm. Forty years earlier, her father had fled Coventry for the California sun and never looked back. At times like this she cursed her decision to make the opposite journey.
Best not to think of her father, trapped in the big house overlooking the Pacific. She glanced out the window. One of the drunks collapsed to the ground, succumbing to a particularly vicious head-butt. Frances turned back to her numbers.
Ping. The sound was so rare that for a moment it startled her: Doorbell? Smoke detector? Then she remembered. It was the sound of an email arriving on her phone, a noise that used to drive her mad with its frequency.
Frances reached for her mobile and stopped; her breath caught. She read the message again. Then she burst out laughing, which seemed the only proper response to a job offer received by email from a crazy alcoholic. Former alcoholic , she reminded herself. It was not in her nature to be uncharitable.
The message from Augusta Price said simply, I have an adventure in mind, and I believe you are exactly the woman for the job. Would you care to join me to discuss Plan Z?
From across the street she heard police officers arrive to subdue the combatants at the Twelve Pins. Frances sat in the shadows, thinking. It was true that she had nothing left to lose. Dignity gone, job gone, romantic prospect gone, if he had ever existed at all. Stanley had fallen silent in the wake of the awards-show debacle. Sue had sent a text saying he’d gone AWOL from the newsroom. The Georgian owner had ordered Stanley’s office repainted.
In her ample spare time, Frances found herself reading about Augusta. In her story for the Advance , she’d noted how the historical record and Augusta’s had diverged, but she hadn’t realized how wide the gap actually was. She found interviews that Augusta had given over the years, and the facts of her life shifted, merged, disappeared. Charles was mentioned rarely as a child, almost never as a young man. It was like seeing a chalk drawing slowly disappear on a wet pavement. Deller appeared even less frequently. Why was Augusta so keen to erase her past and to ensure that no one added new details? Frances’s curiosity, dormant this past month, began to stir.
The room had grown dark, but she knew the contours of the little flat well enough that she didn’t need light. It had seemed depressing when she’d first moved in, hardly bigger than her childhood bedroom, with a bathroom light that sparked and fizzed every time she pulled the cord. But now that she was about to lose it the flat achieved a shabby, romantic grandeur. She got up to switch on a desk light — a vintage French jeweller’s lamp, a gift from her parents. She stood for a moment and then moved over to the bookshelf, where her fingers ran across the titles until she came to a spine printed in a particularly lurid green. She took the book down, its pages still stiff with the Post-it notes she’d scribbled when she’d gone to interview Augusta. Her thoughts scattered, pinballs bouncing and deflecting off all the possibilities. She sat down at her desk, adjusted the lamp, and opened the book:
The Shaman of Notting Hill
The moment we heard a new drug was making the rounds, we all wanted to give it a try. You have to understand, it was a more liberal age. You’d come home on the bus at four in the morning and find yourself next to a builder from Essex, in a pirate blouse, eyeliner running down his face, snogging another bloke. Things were more fluid then.
I’d had a little success on television, a few
The nights were drawing in; the light was gone by four p.m.; misery arrived with the dusk. She couldn’t remember what it felt like to be warm. Forty years earlier, her father had fled Coventry for the California sun and never looked back. At times like this she cursed her decision to make the opposite journey.
Best not to think of her father, trapped in the big house overlooking the Pacific. She glanced out the window. One of the drunks collapsed to the ground, succumbing to a particularly vicious head-butt. Frances turned back to her numbers.
Ping. The sound was so rare that for a moment it startled her: Doorbell? Smoke detector? Then she remembered. It was the sound of an email arriving on her phone, a noise that used to drive her mad with its frequency.
Frances reached for her mobile and stopped; her breath caught. She read the message again. Then she burst out laughing, which seemed the only proper response to a job offer received by email from a crazy alcoholic. Former alcoholic , she reminded herself. It was not in her nature to be uncharitable.
The message from Augusta Price said simply, I have an adventure in mind, and I believe you are exactly the woman for the job. Would you care to join me to discuss Plan Z?
From across the street she heard police officers arrive to subdue the combatants at the Twelve Pins. Frances sat in the shadows, thinking. It was true that she had nothing left to lose. Dignity gone, job gone, romantic prospect gone, if he had ever existed at all. Stanley had fallen silent in the wake of the awards-show debacle. Sue had sent a text saying he’d gone AWOL from the newsroom. The Georgian owner had ordered Stanley’s office repainted.
In her ample spare time, Frances found herself reading about Augusta. In her story for the Advance , she’d noted how the historical record and Augusta’s had diverged, but she hadn’t realized how wide the gap actually was. She found interviews that Augusta had given over the years, and the facts of her life shifted, merged, disappeared. Charles was mentioned rarely as a child, almost never as a young man. It was like seeing a chalk drawing slowly disappear on a wet pavement. Deller appeared even less frequently. Why was Augusta so keen to erase her past and to ensure that no one added new details? Frances’s curiosity, dormant this past month, began to stir.
The room had grown dark, but she knew the contours of the little flat well enough that she didn’t need light. It had seemed depressing when she’d first moved in, hardly bigger than her childhood bedroom, with a bathroom light that sparked and fizzed every time she pulled the cord. But now that she was about to lose it the flat achieved a shabby, romantic grandeur. She got up to switch on a desk light — a vintage French jeweller’s lamp, a gift from her parents. She stood for a moment and then moved over to the bookshelf, where her fingers ran across the titles until she came to a spine printed in a particularly lurid green. She took the book down, its pages still stiff with the Post-it notes she’d scribbled when she’d gone to interview Augusta. Her thoughts scattered, pinballs bouncing and deflecting off all the possibilities. She sat down at her desk, adjusted the lamp, and opened the book:
The Shaman of Notting Hill
The moment we heard a new drug was making the rounds, we all wanted to give it a try. You have to understand, it was a more liberal age. You’d come home on the bus at four in the morning and find yourself next to a builder from Essex, in a pirate blouse, eyeliner running down his face, snogging another bloke. Things were more fluid then.
I’d had a little success on television, a few
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