Nicci French - What to do When Someone Dies

Frances walked across the room towards me, reading aloud as she did so.

‘Jugged hare,’ she said. ‘Lobster. This is hopeless. We might as well be cooking larks’ tongues.’

‘You just want little things that have an old-fashioned look to them,’ I said. ‘Quail’s eggs. Bits of bacon. Dumplings. Scallops.’

I clicked on the message.

‘Who are you?’ it read.

I clicked ‘reply’ and quickly typed. ‘I’m Jackie, as you can see. Have I got the wrong address? Who are you?’

I highlighted and underlined the last word: ‘Who are you?’ I pressed send.

‘That sounds right,’ said Frances. ‘We can just put Ye Olde English garnishes on the plates. Bits of parchment. Branches of rosemary. Little ruffs. We can hang some tapestries and garlands on the wall. Pickled walnuts,’ she added, warming to the subject. ‘Medlars. Quinces. The problem is, people won’t know what they are.’

‘It’ll give the staff something to talk about,’ I said. ‘In fake Elizabethan language, of course. “Odds bodkins”. You know.’

There was a ping from Milena’s computer. A message from ‘gonefishing’.

‘Who are you?’ it said, same as before. I pressed reply again.

‘Don’t understand,’ I typed. ‘Did you get my last message? Have I got the wrong address? Could you give me your name?’ I pressed send.

I waited one minute, two, but there was no response.

Meanwhile Frances was flicking through another book. ‘Did they have oysters in Elizabethan times?’ she asked.

‘I think so.’

‘I’m a bit wary of shellfish. You don’t want to poison a roomful of lawyers.’

My attention drifted away and I suddenly heard Frances’s voice raised, as if she was trying to rouse me from sleep.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hear what you were saying. I was trying to sort something out in my head.’

She looked at me with concern. ‘Are you all right? You’re rather pale.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Maybe a bit tired.’

Frances fussed over me as if she was my granny. She felt my brow with her thin, cool hand. She made me coffee and even asked if I’d like a touch of brandy in it. ‘Now, that might be the thing for the end of the party,’ she said. ‘Did they have coffee in Elizabethan times? They must have had brandy.’

Reluctantly I left my desk and we thumbed through the cookbooks for ideas. We discussed goujons of sole, devilled whitebait, creamed mushrooms and smoked eel, baby tomatoes stuffed with crab, and new potatoes stuffed with caviar. Frances was doubtful about the last. ‘I’ll need to run this past the wretched Daisy at G and C’s,’ she said. ‘This might be a bit steep even for them. I saw some caviar at Fortnum’s the other day. It was about a million pounds a thimbleful.’

As she was talking, I heard a ping from Milena’s computer and suddenly it was as if I was in a dream and Frances’s words were meaningless background noise. I had to force myself to talk normally as she put the cookbooks down and wandered across to the shelves for an exhibition catalogue.

‘Can you give me a moment?’ I said, and walked across to Milena’s computer. I clicked on the new message. ‘Nobody has this address,’ it said. ‘How did you get it?’

I collected my thoughts and made myself take on the character of Jackie, a non-existent person conjured up by another non-existent person. ‘Maybe I got it wrong,’ I wrote. ‘I just wanted your name to see if I’ve mixed it up with someone else. But if it’s a problem, don’t worry about it.’

I sent it and returned to Frances, who had found an old catalogue for an exhibition of Elizabethan miniatures. She smiled and pointed at an exquisitely delicate oval image of a woman wearing a tall hat with a white ostrich feather, a lace ruff, sleeves bunched and embroidered with gold thread and a rigid, richly decorated bodice. ‘She looks like you,’ she said. ‘I’d like to see you in that.’

‘I haven’t the waistline for it,’ I said.

Frances looked at me appraisingly, as if I was a pig she was considering buying. ‘Oh, yes, you have,’ she said. ‘How do you do it? Exercise and good living?’

Not eating, not sleeping, constant anxiety, I thought, but just smiled with what I hoped was rueful modesty. We leafed through the gorgeous catalogue, pausing over men in doublets and ruffs, stockings and breeches; women in cloaks and petticoats, corsets and farthingales.

‘If we can dress some of our young actors in these,’ said Frances, ‘and get them to learn a few lines, it should be magnificent. If we want to be really authentic, we should probably have the women played by men as well.’

‘I don’t think the lawyers would like that,’ I said. ‘When they asked for Elizabethan they were probably thinking of wenches dispensing flagons of ale and behaving bawdily. It might be a gruelling evening for some of them.’

Frances grunted. ‘The drama-school girls we employ are pretty unshockable,’ she said. ‘You know, if they were laid end to end in the garden, et cetera et cetera.’

I heard another ping from the computer and got distracted again. ‘Et cetera what?’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t be the least surprised.’

‘What?’

‘It’s an old joke. I’ve ruined it now. If the girls were laid end to end in the garden. You know. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve heard it.’

‘Dorothy Parker, I think.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Excuse me a moment. Someone’s sent me a message.’ I couldn’t pretend to continue a conversation. I walked over to the computer and clicked on the new message.

‘Sorry for being paranoid,’ the message read. ‘It’s a security issue. Just give me your phone number and I’ll give you a ring and tell you my name.’

As I read the message, I felt as if I had immediately, and without warning, become immensely more stupid. I was like a person in a foreign country who just about understood what basic words meant but couldn’t make out what lay behind them, what was implied, what were the customs everybody took for granted. I found it impossibly difficult to assess what the message meant, its implications. Was there any possible way I could give some phone number or other to this person? Was it conceivable that they would ring and tell me who they were and I would know who this lover of Milena’s was?

Suddenly everything was made up of puzzles I wasn’t equipped to solve.

Was it possible that whoever it was believed my message had been a mistake? Could that be a security issue? Was it likely they would go to the trouble of phoning to clear the matter up? My thoughts were slow, trapped in sludge, but in the end, with Frances hemming and hawing and waiting for me on the other side of the room, I decided, no, it was not possible. I had gone too far. I had laid myself open.

My password seemed safe. Certainly it was safe from me, as there was no chance I would ever remember it. But just to be absolutely safe I deleted all of the messages, both those I had received and those I had saved, and then deleted the deletions. If I could have, I would have deleted those as well, but as far as I could tell, they were as pulverized as anything can be in cyberspace.

I rejoined Frances and we made more Elizabethan plans, then went out to lunch where we ate a meal that seemed as far from Elizabethan cuisine as it could have been, all tiny slices of tuna carpaccio and miniature heaps of spicy noodles. But, then, I know nothing about Elizabethan cuisine apart from what I’ve seen in historical dramas on TV. For all I know, Elizabethans might have had delicate side orders of beansprouts with their haunches of venison. We also had a small jug of warm sake which Frances drank quickly and greedily, barely looking at her food before ordering a second. I remembered the vodka bottles in her desk drawer. She talked about whether we could hire a jester from the Comedy Store and wondered whether health and safety regulations would allow flaming torches on the walls, whether we could hire Elizabethan musicians – and what was Elizabethan music like? What about morris dancers? Were they Elizabethan?