Page 5 of Preaching to the Choir

She froze, rabbit in the headlamps, waiting for the other shoe, or possibly big stompy boot, to drop, and he grinned like a fistful of Byrons. “Which makes you honestly the most interesting person in this room.”

The tension sagged again and someone was offering her a selection of round slices of sausage-style things over her shoulder. She took this as cover enough to look at the other tables.

At the far end, perpendicular to the other two tables, was the senior branch of the service. A dozen old men and women, creased and silver-haired but tucking into their food with gusto. Tanned and fit in a way that had none of the leather-and-cartilage look Elena was used to, of old people with money enough for regular gym access. The sort of look sexagenarian congressional candidates and celebrities paid for, here deployed effortlessly for no audience at all. They weren’t talking much. One read a pinkish newspaper, another was dictating something to one of the staff.

The third table held the intervening generation. She saw Ross’s father there, and Uncle Jas as well, and even that didn’t jog her memory. It wasn’t until her eye passed on and met the shock of the next woman’s gaze that it all came back. The woman who had been one of the pall-bearers. The woman she’d recognised. From Ross’s photos, true, but from the journals and literature too. Neera Enderbough, the geneticist, the biochemist, the middle-aged-but-still-enfant-terrible of pharmaceuticals research. She’d been in the running for a Nobel Prize, they said, for her cancer work, but she’d turned them down. Didn’t have time for that kind of showboating.

Did have time for skulduggery involving getting rid of weirdly contorted bodies.

Elena blinked. Something of her remembrance communicated itself through that grappling gaze, and Neera leant over to Jas and murmured something. He looked up too, and then Gilchrist beside him, and for a moment all three were pinning her like a moth in a case.

“What do you say?” Ross nudged her and she started, and the three older Enderboughs were talking again, as though they hadn’t been staring into her very soul a moment before.

“Say to whatnow?” she asked, feeling guilty. What did I see, that I wasn’t supposed to?

“The pool here,” Will said, “is all right. I mean it’s basically okay, is what I’m saying. I don’t want to oversell it, but Mel and I were thinking we’d give it a go. I mean it’s either that or tennis and I for one cannot bloody abide tennis. I brought some really penging VR stuff but it turns out that when some monks built this place in the sixteenth century they somehow forgot about Wi-Fi.”

“You’re a thug. And a beast,” said Melissa vaguely.

Elena wasn’t sure about the pool, but Ross hadn’t reverted to just making decisions for her and was waiting for her to decide. At which point a shadow fell over them both, and Gilchrist Enderbough loomed behind their chairs like the spectre of death.

“I see Miss Mendes has joined us for breakfast,” he observed, in what would have been very quiet tones if only everyone else hadn’t gone completely silent.

“And is staying,” Ross said. “I mean—” And he had a hand gripping the table-edge as though he was about to leap to his feet. As though he and his dad were going to have it out right here while Will and Melissa and the rest stared on in horror. Except Gilchrist just said, “Of course she is,” which robbed Ross’s sails of all the wind he’d been husbanding. Elena actually heard the breath go out of him.

“We wouldn’t dream of turning her away,” the older man said, and the word now somehow communicated itself from him direct to Elena without reaching anyone else’s ears. She actually expected him to add something like, I hope she had a restful night, or indicate in some other way that she was in, now. In because she’d seen the body, and even under a sheet it was too much knowledge to let just saunter out of the door and into the wide world beyond. But Gil Enderbough didn’t need to say a word. They understood each other perfectly.

“Well, then…” Ross wavered, as his father returned to the other table. “Pool, then? Pool, after all?”

Do your family…?

Is there anything you want to tell me, about your family?

Was there anyone missing, at breakfast?

Human sacrifice much, your family?

Ross… About your family…

At the pool, lounging more than swimming. It was in a big greenhouse with a cast-iron frame, red paint flaking slightly. The actual pool itself, heated water tangy with chlorine, presumably hadn’t been installed by sixteenth-century monks. A fringe of greenhouse occupation still remained, about the edges, giving the whole business a rainforest air. I’m an American, get me out of here. Green tendrils twining and crawling their way up the glass, attacking the metal, spreading hand-sized leaves against the wan early-year sun.

“So you’re a doctor,” William drawled. He’d done a dozen lengths of the half-size pool and was on a lounger now, glistening. His body was spare: not athletic, not scrawny. The romantic hair was even more so, after a ducking. “At least Ross got that right.”

Melissa, on the other side, snorted. Elena had been braced for her to be catwalk-thin but what was on display looked mostly lean muscle. She fenced for Oxford, apparently, and wanted to go into military intelligence, except that wasn’t the done thing amongst the Enderboughs.

“Fucking doctors and lawyers and politicians,” she declared, loud enough that a couple of the older generation on the far side of the pool glowered over their papers at her. “Not even the army or the clergy are good enough for the sainted Enderboughs.”

Elena was quietly delighted that Melissa lacked all of Ross’s ingrained reluctance to swear.

“And what are you, then?” she asked William.

“Well,” he said, looking romantically sheepish. “Lawyer. Studying anyway. Oxford, and a pupillage lined up. I mean…” He shrugged.

Ross hauled himself out of the pool then, shaking like a dog. “M’learnéd,” he said to Will, and received a “M’learnéd friend,” in return, and then they had to explain how Will’s dad had made them argue court cases against each other back when they were something stupidly young, all miniature gowns and wigs and the antiquated language, and the one in-joke had stuck.

So, your family…

So last night I saw…