. Oh, I don’t know. I went on one of those week-long courses last summer. You know, where you stay with other writers in a big house and have lessons by published writers during the day?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, though I’d never heard of such a thing.
“Golly, it was terrific.”
“Golly,” I replied, because I wanted to try the word out, and I was sure Sophie was also the sort of person who said things like “golly.”
“But I still haven’t managed to publish anything.” Derry clocked my look of interest. “Do you write?”
I gave a sheepish smile. “I’m about halfway through a novel. About fifty thousand words in. It’s complete rubbish.”
Her eyes widened. “Fifty thousand? I think I managed twenty thousand on the novel I tried before I gave up. I just ran out of steam . . .”
“Maybe we can critique each other’s work,” I said. This was uncharacteristically bold of me, and I said it slightly under my breath, so that if she kicked back on the idea I could pretend I’d said something about the scenery, or put the suggestion down to lack of oxygen reaching my brain.
But Derry had the hearing of a bat. “Definitely!” she said. “Golly, what a terrific idea! I’ve been plowing away in my free time at this new project, but it keeps wandering off into weird tangents. It’s a bit naughty of me, actually. I ought to be running my business, but writing becomes addictive, doesn’t it?”
A memory of her and Clive picking me up from the airport returned—she’d mentioned that she ran a business in design. “You work in interior design, isn’t that right?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, in a voice that sounded like she hated the very idea of it.
“You don’t enjoy it?”
“Oh, it’s all right,” she said. “I’m glad to help out Tom with the interiors for this new house. But generally speaking I’m a bit . . . bored.”
“What would you prefer to do?” I asked, thinking back to my days as an admin assistant. I would have preferred to get paid to design an office instead of working in one, but I sensed that Derry had never had to work in admin, or indeed any job that paid eight pounds an hour.
“I don’t know,” she said with a dramatic sigh. “I’m forty this year. I fancy doing something different.” She stopped and put her hands on her hips, though she didn’t gasp for breath like I did.
“The original plan was to have a baby,” she said then, her voice tinged with sadness. A hand pressed against her flat stomach. “It didn’t work out as planned. Five rounds of IVF, two miscarriages . . .” She turned away, suddenly upset. “Sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’m a total oversharer.”
I stepped closer. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. She pulled a tissue from an inside pocket and blew her nose loudly.
“Clive and I desperately wanted to start a family. We waited, of course, until we’d traveled and got the house we wanted. I had it all planned out. Two children, two years apart. A boy and a girl. They were going to be called Hugo and Genevieve. I even had the nurseries designed in my head.” She sighed. “But then it all came to nothing. We even looked into adoption, but . . .” She shook her head ruefully, and I didn’t press.
“Clive had this magical idea that I could design the inside of Tom and Aurelia’s new house,” she continued, changing the subject. “So that’s ostensibly why I’m spending so much time here, though of course the place is nowhere near finished yet. Still, I don’t mind. And now that I’ve discovered I’ve got a fellow writer here, I might just stay a bit longer.”
“I’d love that,” I said, and her smile widened.
After twenty minutes Derry suggested we turn back, and although my muscles wanted to tear themselves out of my flesh and thank her personally, I found myself realizing that I was enjoying myself. The cold wind playing in my hair, the sunrise progressing through shades of copper, transforming the fjord to liquid gold. I enjoyed Derry’s company, too, and I even began to feel like I could relax in her presence. Something about her manner made me realize that, despite her obvious wealth and social standing, she was still human. She wasn’t better than me at all. She just had more money. And more confidence.
“Can I ask you something?” I said before thinking it