A Nice Day Out

A Nice Day Out

written by: Steven Elvy

 

Ronnie hurried down her short garden path whilst retrieving her key from her handbag. The day had begun cool but bright; however, by late afternoon, threatening grey clouds had gradually formed, and the light drizzle had suddenly become a downpour.

Closing the door, she heard from above the familiar soft thump as Ebenezer jumped down from her bed and then majestically appeared at the top of the stairs and, sitting squarely, peered down at her imperiously. His expression showed he was not impressed.

“I know, I know,” Ronnie told him as she quickly removed her hat and raincoat and hung both on the hook above the hallway radiator. “I really did mean to be back ages ago, I promise, but what with one thing and another… Oh, I’ll tell you all about it in a bit. Now, I suppose you’re simply starving, so let me just get my slippers and we’ll get something to eat. All right?” Ebenezer blinked twice, gave a wide-mouthed yawn, and then balletically lifted a leg and began to unhurriedly lick its full length as if he were playing the flute.

“Charming,” Ronnie told him. She slowly climbed the stairs and then had to carefully manoeuvre past him at the top. “Don’t let me interrupt you,” she said as she went across the landing to her bedroom. Sitting on her bed, she slipped off her shoes and lay down flat across the duvet, staring up at the tasselled ceiling lampshade. After a few moments, she lifted her head and carefully shook it. “Oh dear, I nearly fell asleep just then. That won’t do at all, Veronica. Things to do.” After slipping on her cardigan and finding her fluffy slippers, she went back downstairs.

In the kitchen, Ebenezer was sitting with obvious impatience with his nose nearly touching the back door. Hearing her enter, he turned his head in an owl-like motion and emitted an irritable meow.

“Well, all right,” said Ronnie. “But you do realise it’s raining cats and you know what else out there.” She unfastened the top and bottom bolts and turned the key, pulling the door open a few inches. Ebenezer peered out at the heavy downpour and then up at Ronnie in an accusing manner. “I did say,” she said. She opened the door further and inclined her head partway out to gauge for herself the rain that was now falling with a vengeance and giving no sign of abating.

“Go on then. Be quick.” Without further hesitation, Ebenezer suddenly sprang forward. Ronnie watched him as he launched himself up and over the high wall of the back yard and then leaped down to the alleyway below.

She considered leaving the door ajar for him, but then decided to close it as the rain was being blown in by the wind. “You’ll just have to knock,” she said, as if he could still hear her.

“Ooh,” she said as she leaned down and picked up Ebenezer’s blue willow-patterned bowl that lay next to his igloo bed. She didn’t know why she’d started making these ‘Ooh’ and ‘Ahh’ sounds lately, whenever she had to exert herself in any way. It wasn’t as if she was in any pain, it had just become an annoying habit. She remembered her grandmother used to do the same thing, making all sorts of grunts and whistles whenever she got up from her chair. She and her sisters had laughed about the fuss she used to make, and even mum had seemed to find it amusing. Seemed a bit cruel of them all now, thinking back, but Nanny had always laughed along with them and never seemed put out by their apparent lack of sympathy.

But that was sixty or more years ago, a time when being old meant that you could and often would be reminded of it – albeit affectionately – without necessarily giving or taking offence. Very frowned on these days, of course. ‘Ageist’ was what they now condemned it as. Prejudice. Like a slur on someone’s sex or race, or religion.

Discrimination – a cardinal sin that had been the kernel of so-called humour back then. It had been a different world then, of course – not necessarily a better one.

Now, Ronnie herself was Nanny’s age. How had that happened?

She pulled open the plastic pouch and squeezed out the gloopy food onto Ebenezer’s dish. “Mmm, chicken and tuna in a rich gravy,” she read appreciatively, holding the pouch away to better focus on the wording as she wasn’t wearing her specs. “Now there’s posh.”

She walked across the lino floor and bent to put the bowl down. “Ooh,” she started to say, but then quickly admonished herself with, “No, Veronica! For goodness’ sake, don’t start that again.”

Straightening up and giving her hips a shimmy, she went back across the kitchen and then pulled several sheets of kitchen towel from the roll on the counter in readiness for the return of ‘His Highness.’ Then she again opened the back door and Ebenezer jiggled himself inside, his black fur slick and shiny and making him appear to have shrunk to half his normal size. “Come on then,” Ronnie said, tapping the countertop, and he leaped up. “I know, I know,” she told him as she listened to his moans and protests as she gently dried him off as he turned from left to right and left again. “Never mind, all snug and indoors now, eh. I’ve made you a lovely tea. Chicken and tuna with a wonderful, rich gravy, no less.” Ronnie picked him up, absently kissing the top of his still-damp head before putting him down by his bowl. “Ooh-Aah,” she said.

She leaned against the counter and watched him as his little head darted backwards and forwards, a small smile on her face. He made short work of emptying his bowl and then, after giving his lips a swiping clean with his paw, he sauntered out of the kitchen heading for the living room. “Careful how you go,” she called after him. “I haven’t put any lights on in there yet.”

She giggled softly at her own silly joke and then turned her mind to what she would have to eat herself. She wasn’t particularly hungry. It had been a smashing spread they’d laid on for the buffet after the service, and she probably had had one too many mushroom vol-au-vents. Perhaps just something on toast, then. Something snacky. Cheese? Egg? Yes, a nice poached egg on toast – that and a lovely cup of tea. Just the ticket.

And then a memory slipped itself inside her mind. It was the poached egg that had done it, of course. You didn’t have to be Freud to work that out. Saturday breakfast, Tommy’s treat.

During the week, there’d be no time for lingering breakfasts together. Tommy had to be out of the house before seven to drive all the way to the factory in Hemel Hempstead for an 8am start. Ronnie hadn’t had to leave for another hour, and then she simply sauntered down to the school on the outskirts of Muswell Hill. He’d been works’ manager for a company that made valves and flanges of some kind. He had explained to her exactly what they did, but she’d not fully grasped it at the time and had never asked him to clarify it again afterwards. He’d sometimes tell her something that had happened in the factory – some items that had had to be recalled, or a particularly clever new manufacturing process they were working on – and although she really hadn’t got the foggiest idea about what he was telling her she was a sufficiently accomplished actress to be able to make all the right noises in all the right places as if she was as totally absorbed in the subject as he was.

Her Tommy had never been a particularly passionate man in many ways, but when he got onto the subject of vales and flanges, why, you’d think he’d just returned after climbing the Matterhorn or sailed homeward through turbulent seas after he’d discovered Australia. Bless him.

Ronnie quickly set to boiling some water in a large pan, cracking an egg into it, and toasting a slice of bread. While waiting for the egg to poach, she went into the living room and put the lights on. Ebenezer had made himself comfortable on the settee, looking like a little black sphinx. “I’ll be in in a minute,” she told him. “Do you want the telly on?” She pointed the remote at the screen, and the early evening news was just beginning. The headlines were a story about a well-known TV personality who was being investigated by the BBC for alleged lewd behaviour towards women, another item about a retired footballer who had embarked upon a challenge to roller skate from London to Glasgow to raise money for a children’s charity, then the aftermath and clean-up following the storms and flooding in the Somerset Downs the week before, and then lastly a couple of live reports on the latest from the ongoing wars in the Middle East and the one between Russia and Ukraine. Ronnie turned the volume down and went to fetch her supper.

“No, I was right,” she told Ebenezer a little while later as she sat beside him with the tray on her lap and her meal only half eaten. “I really wasn’t peckish at all. Oh, well.”

Ronnie loathed to waste food, but she wasn’t going to force herself to eat what she didn’t want and make herself uncomfortable. Her grandmother would have been appalled that half a poached egg would be scraped into the bin. She had been a woman who managed to make a Sunday roast morph itself into half a dozen more meals that lasted until Thursday. But then Nanny had gone all the way through two world wars, so she probably had known a thing or two about ‘make do and mend.’ She’d have probably insisted that Ronnie’s leftovers were kept for Ebenezer, Ronnie thought with a chuckle at the notion. As if!

Once the dishes had been washed, dried, and put away, Ronnie came back to Ebenezer, who then repositioned himself lying on his back in the crook of her arm – a favoured position that enabled Ronnie to gently stroke his exposed tummy while his eyes slowly closed in contentment.

The TV news was over and the weather lady was pointing to cloud and rain that was expected to continue over London and Southeast England for the rest of the week. “Oh, joy,” said Ronnie before turning the set off with the remote.

She sat quietly for a moment, recalling the events of her day, the only sound that of Ebenezer’s soft snoring. She had wanted to tell him all about the service and the buffet and the news she had received afterwards, but if he was too tuckered out to listen, she’d have to wait and give him the rundown another time. She stared down at him indulgently. He was the latest in a long line of surrogate children who had shared her and Tommy’s world over the years. The first had been a tabby they’d named Daisy. When she was a few months old and about to have her jabs, the vet had delicately informed them that Daisy was in fact not a girl but a boy, but it was too late by then, and so Daisy he always remained. They liked to imagine that the name had given him an edge out there in the rough and tumble alleyways of Muswell Hill, rather like Johnny Cash’s boy named Sue.

After Daisy, there was Peggotty (who was definitely a girl), then Pip (boy), and then Estella (all girl).

Her and Tommy had never had children – well, not the usual human sort. Ronnie remembered one time, it must have been after they’d been married for a year or two, when they’d sat down and discussed the matter. They both agreed that they would, of course, like to start a family, and they’d then decided that they ought to perhaps see the doctor and have him check each of them over, make sure all the bits were working as they should be. But by the next morning, neither of them mentioned it again, and then it had just seemed to become an unspoken taboo subject, a silent pact between them and a topic that neither was inclined to broach.

Still, in the end, it hadn’t really mattered; they’d been happy with each other – and the succession of furry bundles they had raised together.

Ronnie and Tommy got married in 1966. He was twenty-four and she was twenty-two. Ronnie had the photos from their wedding day in an album somewhere. There was mum in that tweed jacket and skirt that she only wore for special occasions, her two big sisters whose flowery patterned dresses ended halfway up their thighs, and Nanny looking uncharacteristically severe in a mid-length grey frock with a straw hat with a blue ribbon round the crown.

Tommy’s family had travelled down from Dundee, his mum and dad, and his two brothers. In the photographs, the two boys had come out looking like a right pair of bruisers, but that’s not how Ronnie remembered them at all. They’d been a bit what these days you’d perhaps describe as ‘laddish’, but there was really no harm in them, and they’d been ever so polite to her mum and Nanny.

There were dozens and dozens of photographs – they’d not hired anyone to take them so Ronnie couldn’t remember who had – but strangely very few of the actual bride and groom.
The album was tucked away in a drawer somewhere – Ronnie couldn’t remember exactly where. She hadn’t looked at the photographs for years. Browsing through old photos in the company of someone who shared a common history was one thing; looking at them in solitude – especially when all those others were no longer around – was something Ronnie was happy to do without, thank you very much.

As her mind began to idly drift back to the events of today, another thought suddenly eclipsed them, and she reached down to grab her tablet at the side of the settee. “Oh,” she said. “Shall we see if Sunetra has paid us yet for today?” Ebenezer rolled his shoulders and smacked his lips. His eyes hadn’t opened, but Ronnie took it that his silence indicated acquiescence.

Tapping the screen, she quickly found her online banking page and, bringing up her current account, she saw that a payment from the company had indeed been deposited today. “Oh, goody,” she said.

Not that the money in itself meant so much to her anymore – it was more the pleasure of seeing its seamless, clockwork-like emergence that really satisfied her. Technology – wonderful.

Money wasn’t something that particularly preoccupied Ronnie these days. She’d been collecting her private and state pensions for well over a decade now, and her coffers showed a tidy nest egg. It wasn’t so much that there was a fortune coming in, it was more that there never seemed anything very much to spend it on. She could of course go totally bonkers and buy a sports car or book herself on a world cruise, but she’d never learnt to drive and she’d got seasick that time she and Tommy had taken the ferry across to the Isle of Wight – so both of those were out.

It was funny thinking back how money – or the initial lack of it – had once played such an important part in their lives. Saving for the deposit to buy their first house, skimping to buy their first car, putting aside enough to have a week or two away somewhere in the sun each summer (package holidays in Spain mostly, but they’d also done France and Italy). It wasn’t as if they’d been hard up. Tommy had earned a good wage at the factory, which had become very good indeed by the time he’d become the work’s manager, and Ronnie had always been reasonably well paid in her teaching post. Of course, not having the expense of a family had helped: cats were cheaper to raise than children.

But nowadays she had no need to save for anything. Of course, she had Tommy and his forethoughtfulness to thank for that. He’d been the one who’d insisted on putting the money aside for their pensions, even when they were both so very young that they could barely envisage the time, so far away into the long and distant future, when they would collect them. But goodness gracious, she was grateful now.

She’d overheard two women talking on the bus the other day. They were both youngish, thirties they looked like, and they were loudly discussing the latest decision by the new government to scrap the universal old age pensioner winter fuel allowance. One of them was very vocal on the subject and very much against it and the other had seemed less decided on the matter. After a while, Ronnie became aware that the women had grown silent and had both slightly turned their heads to surreptitiously look at her. No doubt they were viewing her as a living embodiment of the very topic they were debating. For no possible reason, Ronnie had had a sudden feeling of guilt and shame, and she’d wanted to tell them that no, don’t look at me, I’m perfectly all right, thank you very much.

She’d heard one of the arguments against paying the allowance to every pensioner was that even Rod Stewart would be eligible for it – which always struck her as a bit of a silly comparison and, even more so, rather hard on poor old Rod, who she’d always rather liked.

So yes, it was satisfying to see that Sunetra had paid her for today, but the actual money in itself had ceased to have become of any great importance to her. Wasn’t she lucky!

But Tommy would, she imagined, have been impressed that she was still managing to earn the extra money on top of her pension – in spite of the rather bizarre way in which she was doing so.

He’d have been even more impressed by her new-fangled mastery of modern technology like emails and online banking apps.

Anything technical or mechanical had always been Tommy’s sole province. When, sometime in the late eighties, they’d taken the plunge and added a video recorder to their television rental package, it was Tommy, of course, who had taken charge.

Firstly, he had laid out the black oblong box and all its wires and connections on the living room carpet and then silently studied the manual in minute detail from beginning to end and then, having assembled it all, had amazed her by recording a programme on the BBC at the same time that they were watching something else on ITV. It was miraculous! After that, there really was no stopping the man. Soon, they had cupboards and bookshelves lined with rows and rows of videotapes containing films, documentaries, football matches, and sitcoms. They must have watched ‘The Great Escape,’ ‘The Cruel Sea,’ and every episode of ‘The Good Life’ twenty or thirty times over.

And although Ronnie had fairly quickly worked out how to operate the miracle thing herself – even mastering how to set the timer – she would never have been so cruel as to have rained on Tommy’s parade and admitted to such. It was always his baby.

They say opposites attract, and that had certainly seemed to have been the case with her and Tommy. Outwardly, he projected the archetypal epitome of the dour Scotsman, with his dark, broody looks, beetled brows, and slow way of speaking, often with monosyllabic responses, while Ronnie, in contrast, was regarded as outgoing, bubbly, and effervescent. But behind closed doors, cloistered in their little terraced house in Muswell Hill, snuggled together on their old sofa with Daisy or Estella on one of their laps, her reading a Jilly Cooper, he The Daily Express from front to back, their public personas were muted and they simply coexisted together in comfortable, loving companionship.

She had first met him at an amateur dramatics society meeting in Finchley. The drama group had only been started a month before, and so were desperate to gain new members. Ronnie had been persuaded to go along by her friend Jenny, another young teacher at the same school where Ronnie had recently begun her own teaching career. Jenny was two years her senior, one year married, and had rather taken Ronnie under her wing.

Their joining of the newly fledged drama group had swelled its membership to eight. The others were at least twenty years older than them and comprised two men and four women. The founding members of The Finchley and Whetstone Amateur Dramatics Society were Mrs Irene Davenport and her husband, Captain Davenport, whose wife always referred to in the third person simply as ‘The Captain’. He had served in the Royal Navy in the war, and the poor man had lost both an eye and an arm in the conflict, which everyone always considered rather heroically Nelsonesque of him.

Mrs Davenport (seemingly only very close friends were permitted to address her as Irene) had apparently appeared professionally – albeit provincially – in several stage productions in the thirties and forties before meeting ‘The Captain’ and forgoing a glittering career to instead become a stay-at-home devoted naval officer’s wife. There was an overall sense that now her time had come yet again.

It was a Tuesday evening, and as always, the group had met in the community centre hall in East Finchley. It was a cavernous space with a high, echoing ceiling and an underlying whiff of floor polish and disinfectant. One end of the hall was filled with stacked tables and chairs, and at the other, what appeared to be filing cabinets intermingled with sports equipment. The drama group had sat in a circle on hard wooden chairs in the centre of the remaining vast space, looking rather as if they were shipwreck survivors clinging to a raft adrift in the middle of the Atlantic.

The play they were about to begin rehearsing was a Brian Rix-type farce set in the 1920s in a baronial manor house. Mrs Davenport had assigned various parts to each of them, awarding herself one of the lead characters, that of a young American heiress visiting the UK in search of an impoverished but titled prospective husband (in spite of the fact that the role had surely been written for an actress twenty years and two stone lighter, Ronnie and Jenny were both in admiring agreement that Mrs Davenport was richly able to demonstrate her professional acting credentials in her portrayal, even pulling off an authentic-sounding Southern belle twang).

‘The Captain’ she had cast as the eligible but hapless love interest (which seemed at the very least highly dubious and a role he would have been unlikely to have been typecast in in any other company, even before any bits of him were missing).

The play had a cast of twelve characters in all, which required doubling up for most of the players. Ronnie was portraying both the ingenue younger sister to ‘The Captain’ and also the cockney chambermaid.

The other male in the company was a portly man in his fifties named Cyril who attempted to hide his obvious jitters by making between scenes corny and increasingly off-colour jokes until Mrs Davenport – rather unnecessarily cruelly, or so Ronnie thought – had brought him to heel with a few sharp words about the need for him to regain his concentration and project some professionalism.

Cyril had three parts in the farce: the family solicitor, the postman, and the gamekeeper. It would really only have been due to his change of costume for each part that any audience would have been able to distinguish one from the other, because Cyril spoke all of his lines, regardless of character, in his same flat North London accent. To his credit, he had initially attempted a sort of country yokel enunciation in his portrayal of the gamekeeper, until his rendition began to include so many unscripted ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ that he was eventually sounding more and more like Robert Newton playing Long John Silver. Mrs Davenport had needed to intercede and bring him back down to earth by loudly telling him he was “Giving it too much” and to “Tone it down, Cyril – really quite a lot.”

By the third week of rehearsals – with most of the actors still eons away from ever learning any of their lines, bumping into each other and determinedly clinging hold of their scripts as if they were lifebelts – The Finchley and Whetstone Amateur Dramatics Society’s numbers were suddenly swelled to ten with the unexpected but welcome arrival of two young men who had appeared in their midst.

The first to introduce himself was Adam Lambert, a tall, gangly fellow who bore a striking resemblance to the film star Stewart Granger and appeared to possess the same level of charm underpinned by bloody-minded self-confidence.

Adam had explained that he had “Done a bit of acting” when he was doing his national service. Ronnie could see how the other women – including Mrs Davenport and Jenny – were immediately smitten by him. In the blink of an eye, Mrs Davenport had relieved Cyril of the role of the family solicitor, which Adam then began to read with all the required gravitas and aplomb.

But Ronnie’s eyes were not on Adam, despite his manly charms; her attention had immediately been grabbed by his dark, quiet, softly spoken friend with the liquid brown eyes, eyes she felt she could dive into and happily swim away in.

Tommy was persuaded after some reluctance to take on the role of the postman, thus whittling down Cyril’s contribution to just that of the gamekeeper, his accent once again threatening to traverse the shores of Britain from Norfolk to Cornwall and with a touch of Southern Irish brogue thrown in for good measure.

Ronnie and Tommy remained members of the drama society for the next five years, until it ceased abruptly due to ‘The Captain’s’ ailing health and Mrs Davenport’s need to nurse him in his final days.

In all, the society put on six plays and four pantomimes in those five years; however, Tommy resolutely refused to ever tread the boards again, instead becoming invaluable as their stage manager, building innumerable sets, rigging the lighting and sound effects, and sourcing any necessary props.

Mrs Davenport didn’t appear on stage in their last two productions, instead concentrating on producing and directing.

Adam Lambert became the group’s leading light and, a few years later, became a professional actor, with appearances on television in The Bill and London’s Burning.

Ebenezer was slowly becoming awake, stretching himself, the pin-like claws of his back leg unleashing and then digging into Ronnie’s thigh, thus wakening her from her own drowsy reverie. “Ow! Ow!” she said, gently unhooking him. He blinked his eyes at her innocently.

Now that she had his full attention, Ronnie proceeded to tell Ebenezer all about her assignment that day, starting with the briefing meeting her and the others had attended with Sunetra, then the church service, and then the buffet at the local pub that had followed.

“Yes, of course it was sad,” she said. “They always are. There’s no getting away from that. Somebody has gone, so there’s bound to be some tears shed.”

Her Tommy had been gone nearly fifteen years now. He’d just managed to get to retirement age, had enjoyed a couple of months of never again having to get up at the crack of dawn to make his way to Hemel Hempstead, was just starting to adjust to a new normal, and then – poof! – that was it, he was no more.

His funeral was a desultory affair – there was no other way of describing it. Half a dozen people attended the mid-morning service and then stayed for a couple of hours afterwards at the Rising Sun to eat a sandwich and drink a glass of sherry. Ronnie was back home by two o’clock.

At the time she had been too numb and raw to give much consideration to the dismal attendance at the funeral, but later, when she was able to think about it more clearly, she realised it wasn’t really surprising. Of her family, there was only one sister left, and she had emigrated to Canada twenty-five years ago. They exchanged Christmas cards and spoke on the phone each New Year’s day, but as the decades had passed, there was less and less that still linked them. Of Tommy’s two brothers, they had barely heard from either after their wedding in ’66; the four hundred and sixty miles between Dundee and Muswell Hill may as well have been a million.

Tommy had never been a particularly gregarious man – quite the opposite, in fact. Over the years, she had come to know the names of the various people he worked with at the factory, but Ronnie had never met any of them. One time he let slip about the factory’s Christmas get-together at a hotel in Hemel Hempstead, but when she had asked why they weren’t going themselves, he had told her it wasn’t something they would enjoy.

They had made some friends over the years of course, particularly in the drama society with Irene, ‘The Captain,’ Cyril, and Adam, but once that had finished, even that small coterie quickly evaporated. For a while, they had socialised with Jenny and her husband, visiting each other’s homes for the occasional supper party, but after Jenny had given birth to her first child and then decided not to return to teaching, even the rare enjoyment of those sporadic events had become less and less and eventually fizzled out altogether.

When Ronnie had retired from her teaching job – two years before Tommy, not in the least looking forward to doing so – it had brought home to her how insular their lives together had become. Without the diversion of the pupils and her fellow teachers to look forward to, Ronnie had spent the first few weeks of her retirement rattling around the house, wandering from room to room, loneliness enfolding her like a cloak, waiting for the relief of when Tommy would get home from the factory.

To give herself something to do, to break the monotony, she had volunteered to work part-time in the local Oxfam shop, but when she had been asked to work on the odd Saturday, Tommy had complained that they only got two days a week together as it was, and so she’d stopped.

Over the past decade and more, Ronnie had reconciled to a life of quiet solitude. There were still people in the local area that she knew, people she would exchange good mornings and good afternoons with when passing on the street, people she may chitchat to when queuing in the butchers or see and nod to in the library. But none of those people really knew her or anything about her, or she knew them. Her world had shrunk to this little terraced house where she and Tommy had lived for so many years with their succession of surrogates. Now there were just the two of them, just her and Ebenezer.

So, when she saw the advert that Sunetra had put in the local paper, Ronnie’s interest had been piqued; she’d made contact by email and they arranged to meet at the agency’s offices in Crouch End.

Initially, Ronnie was still sceptical, regarding the whole concept of professional mourners as something macabre and peculiar – ghoulish even. But Sunetra had explained that, on the contrary, they provided bereaved loved ones with an important service, particularly where a close family member has passed away and there were few relatives or friends to attend their final parting. She told her that the agency always takes a full brief and relays this to the mourners prior to the event, that they will have as much or as little involvement in the funeral service as requested, that they will be quiet or talkative, sombre or cheery to fit the direct wishes of each client.

Sunetra then asked Ronnie about her own background, and she explained that she had been an English teacher for over forty years, and also about her involvement in amateur dramatics in her youth.

“Oh, Veronica, you sound perfect,” Sunetra had told her. So, Ronnie had given it a go.

Over the past few months, she had attended ten funeral services, five receptions, and two wakes, appropriately conducting herself with wet-eyed sadness, stoical fortitude, or gay, lively involvement as each occasion required.

“And the reason I was so late getting back this afternoon was because Sunetra buttonholed me just as I was about to leave,” she told Ebenezer, excitement rising in her tone. He had fully awoken now and was sitting squarely on her lap, facing her, his head inclined upward so they were eyeball to eyeball, a sure sign that he was in full listening mode. “She asked me if I wanted to do some film extra work. Apparently, the agency is providing a dozen people as extras for a film with Benedict Cumberbatch, a period thing I believe, and there’s a day’s shooting in Friary Park on Friday week. It will be an early start and a long day, Sunetra said. She’s laying on transport to pick us all up and drive us there at the crack of dawn for costume fittings and makeup.”

Ebenezer’s head gave a slight jerk, indicating he was impressed. “Oh, I don’t know if Benedict will even be there himself,” she continued airily, “and even if he is I might not actually see him. But no matter – it sounds like it might be a bit of fun. Anyway, if nothing else, it should be a nice day out.”