mad woman in the attic spot.’
Anna’s left eye flickers and for a moment she searches my face. ‘Oh I see, yes. Funny you!’ We’re almost at the front porch now. ‘So listen, Dex is in the kitchen sorting out supper. We’re having roast chicken.’
‘My favourite.’
Later, Anna will push whatever Dex cooks around on a plate before hiding it under her cutlery. But for now, she steps jauntily around a large stone carving of what appears to be a cockerel with the tail of a fish.
‘Some Portland thing called a Mer-chicken, Bo says. But maybe he was joking. It’s not always obvious with Bo, is it? Don’t worry, it won’t bite.’ Her voice softens to a whisper. ‘Gav’s here, though, and he might. He gave Dex a lift and they must have had a row on the way because he’s in a terrible grump. Thank heaven he’s not staying, but he wanted to say hello to you before driving on to Exeter to have dinner with his sister.’ She holds the door and waves me through a hallway lined with worn stone flags smelling of new paint in a Farrow and Ball drab.
‘Seems ages since we last did something like this,’ Anna says, directing me to a row of Shaker style coat pegs.
‘Wapping Festival was only a month ago.’ From the corner of my eye I see Anna stiffen.
‘I meant the last time we were together for a whole weekend. Bestival, wasn’t it? Do you remember that Bo threw a strop because that glamping yurt cost him a fortune and it was bloody freezing.’
As I recall it was Anna who threw the strop, but Anna has a habit of reinventing things.
‘I remember the rain and that amazing fluorescent candy floss.’
‘Oh yes, yum,’ says Anna.
We enter the hallway and move into a large kitchen done out boho country style, where Gav is sitting in a bentwood chair at an enormous old pine kitchen table, dressed in the full upper middle class fifty-something Londoner’s idea of country garb, cords and an Aran with a jaunty silk neckerchief tucked beneath to signal both his class and sexual preference, and fiddling with his phone. An expensive-looking wax jacket hangs over the chair. Behind him Dex is smearing butter over a large prepared chicken. A whisky bottle sits on the table and the room smells warm and peaty but there’s a palpable tension in the air.
‘No bloody signal!’ Gav looks up, sees me and manages a smile. ‘Oh, hello there, dear Cassie. Give this old man a hug and he’ll be on his way.’
Gav has always been a huge, beary barrel of a man but the weight loss in the six months since I last saw him is shocking and not altogether flattering. It makes him seem much older and a bit clapped out.
Dex turns and holding two buttery hands in the air, whoops a greeting, then Bo appears carrying a rolled-up newspaper.
‘I’ve put your bag in the hallway, Casspot. The driver said you left this?’ He slaps a copy of the Evening Standard on the table.
‘Not mine, but never mind.’
‘Why don’t I show you to your room?’ Dex says. The chicken has gone in the oven and he’s now washing his hands in the kitchen sink.
We clamber up a steep flight of stone steps with a grab rope on one side onto the first-floor landing off which come three bedrooms and a bathroom. Above each room hangs a fossil, or, more likely, a reproduction of a fossil.
‘Anna allocated the rooms. She thought it would be funny to give everyone the room with the fossil that was most like them, so that one’s Bo’s.’ Dex points to a panelled door at the end of the corridor above which sits what looks like a large elongated snail. ‘Guess.’
‘I don’t know. Leaves a trail of slime behind him?’
Dex’s eyes crease with mirth. ‘That’s what I said too. Wrong though. Apparently it’s called a Portland Screw.’
‘Boom tish.’
‘You have to admit it’s good though. Bo once told me that sex was the only contact sport where he’d played all the known positions.’
‘Funny man. What’s yours?’
‘Oh, my room is named after some kind of fossil oyster called a Devil’s Toenail,’ Dex says, gesturing at a closed door beside the bathroom. ‘Anna thought that was hilaire. Her room is the one at the end. That thing with all the arms is called a Brittle Star.’ He turns and smiles. ‘No one can accuse Anna of not being able to take the piss out of herself.’
And with that we proceed up another, even narrower and more steeply inclined staircase, onto a small landing.
‘Yours is the Urchin room. Tiny, but so are you. You’re the only one with a direct view over Chesil Beach and you’ve got a shower to yourself so we thought you wouldn’t mind.’ Dex opens the door with a flourish. ‘Ta da.’
The room is just large enough to hold a double mattress and a few stylish cushions. A stool doubles up as a bedside table. Through a small window comes the thick smell of brine and the sound of the waves on the shingle. The lights of Fortuneswell wink.
‘It’s brilliant.’
‘Oh good, well, I’ll let you settle in.’ Dex turns to walk away but hesitates by the door, waiting for me to address the elephant in the room. Though there are two, really: Gav’s weight loss and what happened a month ago at the festival.
‘Is Gav OK?’
‘He’s in a sulk, is all. He’s got it into his head that someone took some money from the house. It’s bullshit. He’s just forgotten where he left it.’
‘I meant his weight.’
Dex is hovering with one foot outside the door. He doesn’t like talking about difficult stuff. Never has. When we split up, all those years ago, he took me out for a drink in a very noisy bar, waited until Michael Jackson was working his way through the first chorus of ‘Billie Jean’ on the PA system, and, evidently imagining his moment had come, blurted, ‘I seem to have fallen in love with a man,’ and that was that. Four years as a couple. Game over.
Back then he screwed his eyes tight so as not to witness my distress and he’s doing the same now. He says, ‘Gav’s got pancreatic cancer. It’s pretty advanced. We got confirmation a couple of weeks ago and a couple of days later he was having his first chemo. That’s why he’s going to see his sister, break the news. He’s bloody angry about it.’
‘Is it . . .’
‘Terminal?’
‘I wasn’t going to say that.’
‘But you were thinking it, weren’t you?’ There’s an accusatory note in his voice. ‘Yes, probably.’
When I make a move towards him he backs off a little, unable to be comforted.
‘I’m sorry.’ I really am. Even though he stole Dex from me, I don’t wish anything nearly as final as death on Gav. A little bad luck, maybe, but this, no. Way too much.
‘To be honest, I just want to be able to
