Gifted and Talented by Wendy Holden Read Free Book Online Page B

general rosy comfort and warmth, Isabel wanted to lie down on the glittering bed amid the teddies and surrender to exotic dreams. Or else hear about Ellie’s gap-year stint as a BBC intern. Her godmother worked for Radio Four, Isabel’s favourite station. ‘Jenni Murray?’ Ellie said absently. ‘Oh, she’s really sweet. Anyway, here’s my travel blog.’
    Her smart new laptop was open beside the scented candle on the desk and she was busy scrolling through a sequence of colourful pictures.
    After the BBC, which Isabel would much rather have heard about, Ellie had gone to work for various charities abroad. She had helped in the favelas of Brazil and on a women’s collective farm in the Congo. She had also taught English in India and helped build a school in Mexico.
    ‘Where did you go for your year off?’ Ellie asked brightly as she prodded the buttons from time to time, to change the image.
    Isabel felt the sudden urge to giggle. Working in ‘Bide A Wee’, the Lochalan café, hardly compared to Ellie’s altruistic globe trotting. She had been saving up for uni, not saving the world. The only social difference she had made was to persuade Miss Macpherson, the café’s somewhat conservative owner, that a patisserie range consisting entirely of shortbread was somewhat limiting and carrot cake could be introduced with no loss of life or limb.
    ‘Oh, nowhere amazing,’ she said with perfect truth, quickly turning the subject back to Ellie again. ‘That school sounds wonderful.’
    ‘It was,’ Ellie sighed, pulling a rueful face. ‘I know this sounds a bit much but I really did feel privileged to help these poor children; realised just how lucky I am and all that.’ Her face flushed, but then she grinned. ‘But it wasn’t all like that,’ she added, launching into a description of a holiday in Thailand with two schoolfriends called Milly and Tilly, both now at Exeter. ‘It was sort of like our last fling,’ Ellie reminisced wistfully. ‘They were my absolute besties.’
    Isabel examined the photos on the blog of Ellie and her absolute besties. The besties had long hair, just like Ellie, although, being thinner, they were better suited to the gap-year uniform of strappy black vest top and safari shorts. In the picture, the three of them were sitting under strings of fairy lights holding pastel-coloured plastic cups the size of large plant pots, bristling with straws. ‘Thai buckets,’ Ellie explained, her voice fond with remembrance. ‘You can dance all night after one of those. Actually, I did some fire-eating.’ She giggled.
    ‘Fire-eating?’
    ‘Mm. I’d seen a couple of girls from Australia do it in Koh Jum. I really wanted to do it and it was quite easy, actually. The lighter fuel in your mouth doesn’t taste half as bad as you expect.’ Ellie was giggling. ‘Tills and Mills thought I was an absolute maniac.’ She sighed and looked suddenly serious. ‘We had such fun. I wish they could have come here too. I miss my besties.’ She turned to Isabel anxiously. ‘But we can be friends, can’t we?’
    Isabel nodded in delight. She was more than happy to fill the bestie gap. She’d never really had a bestie before.
    ‘That’s that then,’ Ellie said, pleased. ‘Maybe we could go to the Incinerator together later?’ She was rearranging a few things on her desk, including the large pinboard covered in invitations, postcards and notes that she had had since she was thirteen.
    Isabel stared. ‘But I’ve hardly got anything in my bin yet, I haven’t been here long enough.’
    Ellie was giggling. ‘The Incinerator’s what they call the dining hall.’
    Isabel had not yet visited the dining hall and had been prepared to accept the official prospectus description of its being ‘a great, white, light-filled circular space occupying the central position beneath the college’s distinctive dome.’ But, according to Ellie, it looked like an industrial plant crossed with a hospital mortuary.