“Drink?” she asked, tipping her head at the wine bottle tucked under her arm.
I shook my head. “Thank you, but I’m driving.”
“Can’t you get a taxi?” she asked, then seemed to think again. “Oh no, unless you booked it six months ago, I suppose you probably can’t. Maybe just a little one?” She nodded at the wine bottle again. “It’s going to be an awfully long night without.”
Regretfully, I shook my head. “I’d rather not risk it.”
“Well, if you’re ready to meet the other wives sober…” she said and pushed me toward one of the groups of women. “Ladies!” she chirped. “This is Daisy.”
“Hello, Daisy,” one of the women said. She was perfectly, expensively, designed; not a cell in her body looked natural.
“Daisy is married to James Dixon, our cryptocurrency entrepreneur,” Margery said, and this aroused some interest among them.
“Do you mine for cryptocurrency yourself, Daisy?” another expensive-looking woman asked.
“Are you a billionaire as well?”
“Can you teach us how to do it?”
“My husband put £600,000 into your husband’s cryptocurrency empire. When are we going to see it back? I thought it was meant to grow like billy-o.”
I laughed nervously. “I leave all that to James.”
“But how do you get money out?” she asked. “My husband wanted to make a withdrawal, and he was told he had to leave it.”
“You have to leave it quite some time,” I said, happy to have been asked a question I knew the answer to. “Think of it more like a pension plan.”
“That’s not what he said when we put the money in,” she said.
“I think he’s updating his blurb, to make it clearer.”
“What do you do all day if you’re not involved in the business?” the first wife asked. “Do you have a job?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you on any committees?”
“No.”
“Do you have children?”
“No,” I said.
“We’re looking for someone to help with the Fun Run, contacting the council about road closures and so on. Is that something you could do?”
That sounded well beyond my organizational capabilities. I couldn’t imagine myself contacting people and making arrangements for things that were actually going to happen. I think I visibly quaked.
I’d had enough. I’d been briefly buoyed up by the knowledge that within twenty-four hours, I would have left all this behind me, but now flight was starting to win the fight or flight dilemma. “Where is the toilet?” I asked.
Margery gave me directions and I stayed there, looking at sewing patterns on my phone to while away the evening. I even had time to look at a few crochet designs—I still had the needles from a failed project in years gone by, and I had ideas about trying again—before someone hammered on the door, shouting, “Are you going to be much longer?”
Reluctantly, I left the bathroom and went in search of more water, which I found in a neighboring room, where a stash of drinks and nibbles were set out on tables waiting to be dispensed to the guests.
I peered at a platter of canapés. There were no labels to tell you what they were, and I was wary. I looked around for a wrapper. There was a pile of the Lidl packets that they had apparently come in and little flags with descriptions written on attached to cocktail sticks nearby, but they were all in a heap.
I tasted a canapé. It was something fresh and fruity, watermelon. I tasted another. That might have been fish; I ate two. I tried a different one and ran out of luck: beetroot! Gagging, I looked around for somewhere to spit it out.
“Ah, so you’ve found Aladdin’s cave!” a man’s voice boomed behind me, and I turned to see a portly man with white hair and a red face, probably older than sixty but younger than eighty, at the door. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. Maybe we were related and I was seeing myself in him. It had been a long time since I’d looked at an older man and wondered if he was my dad, but I peered at himas he scanned the plates on the table, trying to spot a likeness, until he turned to face me and I was forced to swallow the beetroot down.
