"I'm fine, Sam, you needn't have come. And with your visiting basket, as well, I feel like a poor, doddering fool," Christopher Foyle muttered, stepping aside to let in Samantha Wainwright, who once upon a time had been his driver and had usually followed his orders. It had been many years since either of those states had been the case and they'd had instead a most unusual friendship, one he'd never seen replicated; he wasn't sure how much was due to his own tendency to see what others could not, patterns where others only perceived chaos, potential where nothing was expected or desired, and how much to Sam's spirit, irrepressible and widely tolerant, except when she unexpectedly was not, not at all, generally when there was some lurking injustice or on the topic of Persian cats or Vegemite's purported superiority to Marmite.
"Well, I suppose I'll see for myself, won't I? And there's nothing wrong with you having a cup of tea you haven't made yourself and something more substantial than toast and marge. I've seen how you do for yourself," she replied comfortably, taking one item after another out of the capacious basket she'd once railed against carrying. Today there was proper Scottish shortbread, a packet of liquorice all-sorts, tins of soup, a small pot of clover honey and the particular loose tea he favored as well as a baguette so fresh the crust ached to break. He'd sounded croaky when she'd rung earlier and had clearly hied herself to the shops to provide for him better than any visiting nurse might. Andrew rarely brought anything round with him when he called and preferred for his father to come to the home he and Milly had in a posh neighborhood, where the white walls were covered in abstract art no one truly cared for and tea was served in thick, garishly painted pottery they'd brought back from their trips to Spain. They'd only been married a short time and Milly was much younger, so there was still a chance for grandchildren, though what good he'd be to any descendants was the real question, at least Sam's behavior today suggested as much.
"You've gotten so…matronly. When did that happen?" he wondered aloud, realizing as he heard the words hang in the air that she might be offended. He didn't mean how she looked; she was trim and trig yet, with slim ankles and a neat waist, wearing as ever for a visit her best attempt at a smart hat. Her hair was still the color of a dark, wild honey and her skin fair and unwrinkled. It was the oversized handbag she carried and the white gloves, the somewhat shapeless coat and that mildly officious air, the way she'd brushed past him into the small kitchenette of the apartment that passed for his home and went about her business as he'd made multiple, small attempts to play the host she'd ignored or dismissed with a searching look for fatigue or illness in him that had him wishing he'd worn a nicer tie and put on his jacket instead of just a grey woolen jersey.
"Oh, Lord, ages, hasn't it been? I can't think how I should be otherwise, with all the children clattering about and the endless teas for the other wives and mothers…You must remember, I'm a vicar's daughter and an MP's wife and they say, blood will out," she said lightly, moving things about until she'd gained her satisfaction and smiled up at him. How many times had he seen that candid smile? How many places?
"You're Sam, not any of that other rot, and you'll never learn how to deploy a quotation properly, will you? 'Blood will out,' refers to murder, hardly the context for the vicar's daughter," he said, grousing a bit as he only let himself with her.
"Why, Christopher, that's quite the nicest thing you've said to me!" she exclaimed, even if she shouldn't have. He wasn't so senile he couldn't see how tired she looked around the eyes, how she sighed when she finally let herself sit down as the kettle was on. The two older boys were away at school, but Peter was still at home and six-year old Juliet, whom she said was more trouble than all the other children put together, as willful as a little queen and twice as charming "so I can hardly scold her for laughing, though I'm terribly afraid I'll spoil her and Adam has quite given up and calls her the Duchess!" The Wainwright house was always cluttered, though never dusty, and rang with shouts; he couldn't have lived with it but it was strangely appealing when he visited and Peter, as his brothers before him, was a ready student of fishing flies, a devotee of the most expurgated version of Foyle's storied career, shocked as they always were to learn Mummy had been his driver, had been a clever spy and temporary Land Girl, blown up three times and never the worse for it.
"If that's true, perhaps I'm the old fool you make me out to be," he said, a trifle morosely and let himself notice the sore pressure in his sinuses, like an old-fashioned burglar's mask under his skin, the slight heaviness of his chest.
"Is this your Lear? I had such trouble with that play, I know I'm meant to like Cordelia—to esteem her highly- but I just don't. Midsummer Night's Dream or Measure for Measure always suited me better," Sam replied easily.
"That cheek's a bit more like it, but I still think Adam ought to take you away somewhere, the Algarve or Cyprus. The sun would do you good," he replied, jollied a bit as she'd intended and with it, more attentive to her, as she hadn't.
Christopher Foyle hadn't lost his senses with age, so he didn't say that the local men would go down like nine-pins at the sight of Sam in her bathing costume, a great floppy straw hat shading her face and her hair in a tail down her back, looking all of twenty-two if you didn't pay attention to her knowing gaze, the lack of diffidence in her gait. It might wake up Adam as well, a kind, well-meaning man who'd never learned how to balance his work and home-life, quite content to accept everything Sam did for him and the children as their due and not quite inquisitive enough about what Sam wanted for herself. There were far worse husbands and the younger man had a way with a gesture, but Foyle didn't like to see his friend so entrenched in her role than she forgot who she was or remembering, felt it was not worth much. From what he could tell, that had been the pattern of her life, from her father to all the men she'd walked out with, including his own son, even how he had treated her at work for far too long.
"It's a lovely idea, truly, but I can't see how we'd manage… the children and the constituents, all the blasted meetings," she mused. She might have gone on, but the kettle whistled and she leapt up gracefully to make the tea.
"Here you go, just as you prefer," she said a few minutes later, handing him the cup and saucer, the tea-pot snug in the uneven cozy she'd knitted "my finest work and that is saying something," the rising steam making this somehow the present and the past, every time she'd handed him a cup and asked nothing of him save his honest response.
"If I'm not a senile imbecile, you're not the matron with the cardigan. A holiday would do you good and you know your Aunt Jocasta is always keen to have the children to stay. Someone else may look after you from time to time, you know, Sam," he offered, far less dry than he had ever imagined he could be, but they had been friends for so long, longer than he'd been married to Rosalind, which had been a revelation he'd hardly believed when he realized it.
"You're too…you've been, I don't, I can't think what to say," she fumbled, blushing as he hadn't been sure she still could and there she was, Sam Stewart, looking at him half-convinced he'd fire her, again, though he'd never considered it from the first day, when she'd arrived scrubbed and eager, dauntless.
"Then drink your tea and have some of the shortbread. I can't believe the children will be so gracious to you, to let you have a moment uninterrupted. I had a letter from Sergeant Brooke and I can regale you with news of Hastings for a change," he said.
It was a measure of their friendship, he thought, that she not only acquiesced, sipping at the tea and dunking her biscuit quite mercilessly in the milky depths of the cup, but had toed off her court shoes wordlessly and gestured with the shortbread, in a way he envisioned her mother scolding her for oh dear Samantha, how crass, for him to go on. The tea-pot was full and Brookie's letter was long and not entirely focused on the police station's football pool, so he settled back and started to read, each word and her bright response soothing him as much as the honeyed tea.