Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

But if I had found it hard to get employment, prospects for a 55-year-old man
who had only ever held one job were harder. He couldn’t even get a job as a
warehouseman or a security guard, he said, despairingly, as he returned home
from another round of interviews. They would take some unreliable snot-nosed
seventeen-year-old because the government would make up their wages, but they
wouldn’t take a mature man with a proven work record. After a fortnight of
rejections, he and Mum admitted they would have to apply for benefits, just to
tide them over, and spent their evenings poring over incomprehensible, fiftypage
forms which asked how many people used their washing machine, and
when was the last time they had left the country (Dad thought it might have been
1988). I put Will’s birthday money into the cash tin in the kitchen cupboard. I
thought it might make them feel better to know they had a little security.
When I woke up in the morning, it had been pushed back under my door in an
envelope.
The tourists came, and the town began to fill. Mr Traynor was around less and
less now; his hours lengthened as the visitor numbers to the castle grew. I saw
him in town one Thursday afternoon, when I walked home via the dry cleaner’s.
That wouldn’t have been unusual in itself, except for the fact he had his arm
around a red-haired woman who clearly wasn’t Mrs Traynor. When he saw me
he dropped her like a hot potato.
I turned away, pretending to peer into a shop window, unsure if I wanted him
to know that I had seen them, and tried very hard not to think about it again.
On the Friday after my dad lost his job, Will received an invitation – a
wedding invitation from Alicia and Rupert. Well, strictly speaking, the invitation
came from Colonel and Mrs Timothy Dewar, Alicia’s parents, inviting Will to
celebrate their daughter’s marriage to Rupert Freshwell. It arrived in a heavy
parchment envelope with a schedule of celebrations, and a fat, folded list of
things that people could buy them from stores I had never even heard of.
‘She’s got some nerve,’ I observed, studying the gilt lettering, the gold-edged
piece of thick card. ‘Want me to throw it?’
‘Whatever you want.’ Will’s whole body was a study in determined
indifference.
I stared at the list. ‘What the hell is a couscoussier anyway?’