Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

had stopped calling me ‘lardarse’ and, in my mother’s, that there was usually a
mug of tea waiting for me when I came home.
To Patrick, and to my sister, I was no different – still the butt of jokes, the
recipient of hugs or kisses or sulks. I felt no different. I still looked the same, still
dressed, according to Treen, like I had had a wrestling match in a charity shop.
I had no idea what most of the inhabitants of Granta House thought of me.
Will was unreadable. To Nathan, I suspected I was just the latest in a long line of
hired carers. He was friendly enough, but a bit semi-detached. I got the feeling
he wasn’t convinced I was going to be there for long. Mr Traynor nodded at me
politely when we passed in the hall, occasionally asking me how the traffic was,
or whether I had settled in all right. I’m not sure he would have recognized me if
he’d been introduced to me in another setting.
But to Mrs Traynor – oh Lord – to Mrs Traynor I was apparently the stupidest
and most irresponsible person on the planet.
It had started with the photo frames. Nothing in that house escaped Mrs
Traynor’s notice, and I should have known that the smashing of the frames
would qualify as a seismic event. She quizzed me as to exactly how long I had
left Will alone, what had prompted it, how swiftly I had cleared the mess up. She
didn’t actually criticize me – she was too genteel even to raise her voice – but
the way she blinked slowly at my responses, her little hmm-hmm, as I spoke, told
me everything I needed to know. It came as no surprise when Nathan told me she
was a magistrate.
She thought it might be a good idea if I didn’t leave Will for so long next time,
no matter how awkward the situation, hmm? She thought perhaps the next time I
dusted I could make sure things weren’t close enough to the edge so that they
might accidentally get knocked to the floor, hmm? (She seemed to prefer to
believe that it had been an accident.) She made me feel like a first-class eejit, and
consequently I became a first-class eejit around her. She always arrived just
when I had dropped something on the floor, or was struggling with the cooker
dial, or she would be standing in the hallway looking mildly irritated as I stepped
back in from collecting logs outside, as if I had been gone much longer than I
actually had.
Weirdly, her attitude got to me more than Will’s rudeness. A couple of times I
had even been tempted to ask her outright whether there was something wrong.