Лорен Уиллиг: The Deception of the Emerald Ring

Two nights ago, there had been a little incident involving a dark room, an arm above my head, and a deliberate movement forward that might have been about to turn into a kiss, when…

Brrring!

Ringing! It was ringing! I lunged for the bag and snatched out the phone, hitting the green RECEIVE button before the caller could think better of the enterprise. "Hello?" I breathed.

"Eloise?" Instead of a masculine murmur, the voice had the crackly quality of old film.

Damn. I deflated against the nubby upholstery. Served me right for not checking the number before I hit RECEIVE.

I settled the phone more firmly against my ear. "Hello, Grandma."

Grandma wasted no time on trivialities. "I'm so glad I've caught you."

I stiffened. "Why? Is something wrong?"

"I've found you a man."

"I wasn't aware I had lost one," I muttered.

Of course, that wasn't entirely true. To say I'd lost him might be a bit extreme, though. In the first place, I wasn't sure that he was mine to lose. In the second place…

In the second place, Grandma was still talking. With an effort, I dragged my attention back to the phone, just as the bus started to crawl slowly ahead. "—in Birmingham," she was saying.

"What about Birmingham?" I asked belatedly.

Over the headrest, the man in front of me gave me a dirty look. "Would you mind?" he said, gesturing to his phone.

On the other end, Grandma was clamoring for attention. "Darling, have you been listening to a word I've said?"

"Sorry," I muttered, slinking down in my seat. "I'm on the bus. It's a bit noisy." As if in retaliation, the man in front of me upped the volume.

With a hint of a huff, Grandma started over. "As I was telling you, I was at the beauty parlor yesterday, and who should I see but Muffin Watkins."

"Really! Muffin!" I exclaimed with false enthusiasm, as though I had any idea who she was.

"And she was telling me all about her son—"

"Dumpling?" I suggested. "Crumpet? Scone?"

"Andy," Grandma said pointedly. "He's a lovely boy."

"Have you met him?"

Grandma ignored that. "He just bought the loveliest new apartment. His mother was telling me all about it."

"I'm sure she was."

"Andy," declared Grandma, in the ringing tones of a CNN correspondent delivering election results, "works at Lehman Brothers."

"And Bingley has five thousand pounds a year," I murmured.

"Eloise?"

"Nothing."

"Hmph." Grandma let it go. "He's very successful, you know; only thirty-five, and he already has his own boat."

"He sounds like a regular paragon."

"So I've given your number to his mother to give to his younger brother, Jay," Grandma concluded triumphantly.

I took the phone away from my ear and stared at it for a moment. It didn't help. I put the phone back to my ear. "I don't get it. You're setting me up with the inferior brother?"

"Well, Andy's mother tells me he's just started seeing someone," Grandma said, as though that explained everything. "And since Jay is in England, I don't see why you can't just meet for a nice little dinner."

"Jay is in Birmingham," I protested. "You did say Birmingham, right? I'm in London. Not exactly the same place."

"They're both in England," countered Grandma placidly. "How far away can it be?"

"I'm not going to Birmingham," I said flatly.

"Eloise," Grandma said reprovingly. "You have to learn how to be flexible in a relationship."

"And we're not having a relationship! I haven't even met him."

"That's because you won't go to Birmingham."

"Grandma, people don't go to Birmingham; they go away from Birmingham. It's like New Jersey."

The man in front of me let out an indignant "Oi!" but whether it was addressed to my rising volume level or the slur to the northern metropolis was unclear.

"I just want to see you married before I die."

"We'll just have to keep you around for a good long while then, won't we?" I said brightly.

Grandma changed tactics. "I met your grandfather when I was sixteen, you know."

I knew. Oh, how I knew.

"Not everyone is as special as you, Grandma," I said politely. "Oh, look, it's my stop. I have to go."

"Jay will call you!" trilled Grandma.

"I've heard that one before," I muttered, but Grandma had already rung off. Undoubtedly to phone Mitten, or Muffin, or whatever her name was, and break out the celebratory champagne.

Grandma had been trying to marry me off, by one means or another, since I'd hit puberty. I kept hoping that, eventually, she would give up on me and switch her attention to my little sister, who, at the age of nineteen, was dangerously close to spinster-hood by Grandma's standards. So far, though, Grandma stubbornly refused to be rerouted, much to Jillian's relief. I would have admired her tenacity if it hadn't been directed at me.

I hadn't been entirely lying about it being my stop; the bus, imitating the tortoise in the old fable, was slowly inching its way past Euston station, which meant that I would be the next stop up, across the street from one of the plethora of Pizza Expresses that dotted the London landscape like glass-fronted mushrooms.

I stuffed my phone back in my bag and began the torturous process of navigating the narrow stairs down from the upper level of the bus, consoling myself with the thought that with any luck, this Jay-from-Birmingham would be as reluctant as I was to go on a family-assisted setup. I could think of few things more ghastly than sitting across the table from someone with whom the only thing I had in common was that my grandmother shared a beauty parlor with his mother. Anyone who had seen Grandma's hair would agree.

Swinging myself off the bus, I scurried through the massive iron gates that front the courtyard of the British Library. The pigeons, bloated with the lunchtime leavings of scholars and tourists, cast me baleful glances from their beady black eyes as I wove around them, making for the automatic doors at the entrance. It was early enough that there was a mere straggle of tourists lined up in front of the coat check in the basement.

Feeling superior, I made straight for the table on the other side of the room, transferring the day's essentials from my computer bag into one of the sturdy bags of clear plastic provided for researchers: laptop for transcribing documents; notebook in case the laptop broke down; pencils, ditto; mobile, for compulsive checking during lunch and bathroom breaks; wallet, for the buying of lunch; and a novel, carefully hidden between laptop and notebook, for propping up at the edge of my tray during lunchtime. The bag began to sag ominously.

I could see the point of the plastic bags as a means of preventing hardened document thieves from slipping out with a scrap of Dickens's correspondence, but it had a decidedly dampening effect on my choice of lunchtime reading material. And it was sheer hell smuggling in tampons.

Toting my bulging load, I made my way up in the elevator, past the brightly colored chairs in the mezzanine cafй, past the dispirited beige of the lunchroom, up to the third floor, where the ceilings were lower and tourists feared to tread. Perhaps "fear" was the wrong word; I couldn't imagine that they would want to.

Flashing my ID at the guard on duty at the desk in the manuscripts room, I dumped my loot on my favorite desk, earning a glare from a person studying an illuminated medieval manuscript three desks down. I smiled apologetically and insincerely, and began systematically unpacking my computer, computer cord, adapter, notebook, arraying them around the raised foam manuscript stand in the center of the desk with the ease of long practice. I'd done this so many times that I had the routine down. Computer to the right, angled in so the person next to me couldn't peek; notebook to the left, pencil neatly resting on top; bag with phone, wallet, and incriminating leisure fiction shoved as far beneath the desk as it could go, but not so far that I couldn't occasionally make the plastic crinkle with my foot to make sure it was still there and some intrepid purse snatcher disguised as a researcher hadn't crawled underneath and made off with my lunch money.