Muddy Waters by Judy Astley

serious travel. Besides, he’s more a Crown and Anchor sort,’ Stella said, peering in towards where the pointing finger indicated and seeing only a row of gleaming legs of office girls shining from the bar stools.
    â€˜Well, we’ll
have
to go in now,’ Abigail decided, shoving the door further open, ‘the barman’s grinning at me and it would be too unkind just to walk off. He’d feel rejected.’
    â€˜Considerate of you,’ Stella murmured with suspicion as she followed her inside.
    Toby was sitting by himself at a table laid for four and studying the menu intently as if he really couldn’t choose between the leek pie and lasagne. An empty beer glass sat beside him, so he’d obviously been there for some time.
    â€˜How did you know he was here? You couldn’t possibly have seen him in the dark and round this corner.’ Stella accused Abigail, who simply shrugged and smiled with a mysterious ‘who knows?’ kind of look.
    â€˜Hi Mum, I hear you’re buying lunch,’ Toby greeted her.
    Stella sat down. ‘Actually Abigail is,’ she told him. She looked round to see Abigail’s honey-coloured jacket weaving its way towards the loo at the back of the bar. What on earth was she up to, Stella wondered. ‘She arranged to meet you here then? Why didn’t she tell me, and when did you fix it up?’
    â€˜I don’t know why she didn’t say anything. Probably thought I wouldn’t come. You know how it is with us
young
people.’ He shrugged with a distinct lack of interest and ran a finger down the menu, obviously far more concerned that he should be fed. ‘This morning on the stairs she just asked me where would be good for food and I said this place and she said if I was here about one-ish I’d be OK for a free lunch.’
    â€˜Haven’t you heard, there’s no such thing,’ Stella warned quietly as Abigail returned.
    â€˜Now, isn’t this nice?’ Abigail said, sitting down and bringing with her a fresh cloud of expensive scent. She looked admiringly at Toby as he studied his empty glass with the one eye that wasn’t obscured by his hair. ‘I do envy you, Stella,’ she sighed, ‘I’m so looking forward to my boy being old enough to have grown-up lunch out with his ageing mummy. If he’d want to, that is. At the moment James and Venetia are still at the awful burger-and-chips stage.’
    â€˜So’s Toby, usually,’ Stella told her truthfully.
    â€˜In that case, it’s all the more sweet of him to turn up here and indulge us,’ said Abigail, reaching forward and patting his oil-streaked arm, at which he did not, Stella noticed with amazement, flinch. ‘I’m not your godmother or anything, am I?’ Abigail suddenly asked him, ‘I mean if I am, I expect it’ll take more than a portion of moussaka to make up for not taking you to
Peter Pan
or the circus and all that.’
    â€˜We don’t have godparents. Mum and Dad were going through their pagan phase when they had us,’ Toby told her, putting on a mock spaniel-sad face. ‘We’ve been deprived.’
    â€˜Oh, you poor boy! Stella, how dreadfully remiss of you!’
    Stella had an uncomfortable feeling she was being ganged up on in a joke she wasn’t quite seeing. ‘He does OK,’ she said, ‘he’s never gone short of the usual treats. And he was never that keen on circuses.’
    â€˜Sorry for the animals?’ Abigail asked Toby with an expression of tender sympathy. Stella felt irritated by Toby’s look of lazy satisfaction at being the centre of attention.
    â€˜No he was, and is, absolutely terrified of clowns,’ she answered for him. ‘Now, shall we eat?’
    Stella trudged home alone carrying the new dress and Adrian’s boxes of paper which she delivered to the summerhouse. ‘Abigail’s picking up your jacket from the