Page 19 of The Perfect Guests
She gives this suggestion some consideration. “Maybe.”
“I’ll try not to startle you so much, next time.”
“You’d better not.”
His laugh is gentle, like the breeze in the reeds. “It was nice to meet you, girl-who-isn’t-lost.”
She stares at him for a moment, drinking in his features, memorizing them to pore over later. Then she turns away and hurries on, without looking back.
Beth
July 1988
Itugged at the neckline of the blue dress and frowned down at my salad. Leonora and Markus had barely eaten any of their own lunch either; they were too busy exchanging uncharacteristically snappy words across the dining table. I wished with all my might that Nina would skip down the stairs and interrupt the meal by announcing she was fully recovered and ready to meet her grandfather. But instead, I had to listen to her parents bicker while my skin itched and sweated under the uncomfortable fabric. I longed for the afternoon’s visit to be over.
“We should sit outside, actually,” Markus said. “Dad always liked the garden here...”
“We are—sitting—in the drawing room.” Leonora enunciated each word with painstaking clarity. “And your father hated the garden, I remember you saying. And Beth can’t exactly play her violin outside, can she?”
“Can’t she?” Markus sounded genuinely nonplussed. I jabbed my fork into a slice of cucumber and kept my gaze lowered.
“Of course she can’t,” Leonora said. “Stop trying to change everything at the last minute. We stick to the plan.”
Markus’s cutlery clattered onto his plate, and he held up his hands. “Okay, okay.”
“Unless you’re having second thoughts?” Leonora’s tone was icy.
“Of course not.” Markus’s prompt reply seemed to mollify her slightly.
She turned her attention to me.
“So,Nina, let’s run through it again, shall we? What do you like doing in your spare time?”
I straightened in my seat. “I like reading. Drawing. Anything to do with animals.”
“And?”
“Oh, and playing my violin.” I kept forgetting this part, since it wasn’t true of the real Nina, but when I’d queried it with Leonora, she’d dismissed the question with a quick frown and a shake of her head.
Leonora scrutinized me now. “You will sound a bit more convincing when he’s here, won’t you?”
I met her gaze sheepishly. “Yes, I’ll try.”
They rose to clear the table then, and I peeked at my watch. Markus’s father was due at three; I still had an hour and a half stuck in these silly plaits and this horrible dress, and all to trick a grumpy old man. I’d go along with it for Leonora and Markus’s sake, but it seemed a daft sort of game to me.
***
The Rolls-Royce was late. Only by a few minutes, but Leonora and I had been peering through the drawing room window for a quarterof an hour by then, and her tension was contagious. It made me wonder exactly what she was afraid Markus’s father would do if he found out his planned meeting with his granddaughter had been thwarted—by a sickness bug, of all things. He must be a desperately unreasonable person, I thought. I had no memories of my own grandparents, but in the photos of them taken with me as a baby, they looked to be kind, caring people. I hoped this so-called little game with Nina’s grandfather wasn’t going to turn into an ordeal.
All the more reason to play my part properly, I decided.
“Here he comes,” Leonora said, and Markus sprang from the armchair he’d been pretending to relax in and marched out to the hall. A moment later, I heard the front door open. By the time the car came to a halt on the gravel, Markus was waiting on the bottom step. He held up a hand to the chauffeur and went forward to swing his father’s door open himself.
I’d been expecting someone older, but Markus’s father didn’t look even sixty. He was just as tall as his son, and he had a thick thatch of white-blond hair that added at least another inch to his height. He unfolded himself from the car, and his expression when he turned to the house was severe. Leonora snatched me back from the window, out of sight.
“We’d better go and greet him,” she whispered, and when I saw the way her trembling fingers fluttered to her throat, I felt a wave of sympathy for her. She wasfrightenedof this man—it shocked me to discover an adult could feel this way. What on earth could he have done to her to make her fear him this much, and yet agree to let him visit?
In the hall, we came face-to-face with Markus and his father. The older man’s gaze locked onto mine, and his stare was so piercing, I was convinced he could see right through my eyeballs and into my brain. Heat flared to my cheeks. Could he read what I was thinking?I hadn’t said a word to him yet, but what if he already sensed I was an impostor? I glanced at Markus and then at Leonora, but neither of them met my eye.
