Dropping By

[Rosanna Roscoe]

Bee was just so...Bee, and her bubbly warmth was just so genuine that even Rosanna could not help but relax in her presence. She even let out a brief burst of laughter when Bee mentioned the smog. London wasn't exactly free of pollution, either, but one still heard horror-stories about Los Angeles.

"...what's it like, in L.A.?" she asked, honestly curious, as she leaned into the sofa a little more, pulling her sock feet up to tuck them beneath her and settle in for something more like a chat than a meeting. "I've been on trips to New York, but that's all I really know of America."

[Bee Rosdew]

As much as Bee loved her work, and she did, and liked her life in Los Angeles, which she did, she did not immediately light up with the passion of one who had gone native. If Bee Rosdew could do pensive, one might have even called her expression pensive. "It's... sunny. Which sounds like what everyone says, but it's so sunny. Somewhat oppressively sunny. I think I was built for cloud cover." With a laugh she shifted in her seat, settling. "Of course, I chose to come home in the dead of winter."

After a pause, she continued. It doesn't move as fast as New York, but it's... big, in a way that's hard to explain. People are a bit odd, too." Yoga was well and good, but too many trends made her head spin--and that someone as relentlessly cheerful as Bee could get sick of the smiling was telling. Part of it, however, she knew was a bone-bred tendency to mistrust anyone from much further than a town over. 

"Lots of dogs, though. It's a dog city," she said with genuine approval, brightening again.

[Rosanna Roscoe]

"That's...very British of you," snickered Rosanna as Bee described the weather, looking up as Mrs. Abberley swept in with a tea-tray and plunked it onto the table with a smile for the girls before she swept out again.

Sitting up straight again, she seemed to morph once more back into Rosanna Roscoe, who had been Well Brought Up and had the tuition receipts to show for it, and knew how to perfectly pour her guest a cup of tea.

"Mungo's loving it out here," she said. "He got plenty of walks in the parks in London, but here I know I can just let him off his leash and he'll go for miles along the beach or fields or cliffs."

Mungo himself raised his head at hearing his name, and Rosanna smiled, broke off a piece of home-made shortbread, and tossed it to him.

"Don't tell Mrs. A," she warned Bee, glancing over her shoulder at the open door.

[Bee Rosdew]

"Cornish of me. Penny of me, to be specific," she said with a pleased little smile. She took the tea with a nod of thanks. "And to compound the issue, I desperately missed proper tea."

With her free hand she tapped her nose as she sipped, offering a glance toward Mungo. "Awfully handsome--wolfhound? I think Tank's part Lab, he's got the webby feet. Loves the water. I haven't had the chance to take him out, yet--it'll be a rude awakening when he runs for the waves."

[Rosanna Roscoe]

"Deerhound--Scottish," said Rosanna, looking at her dog with a fond smile. "Whatever he may lack in sleek good looks he makes up for in being huge and harmless."

Taking her own cup of tea, Rosanna blew on it to cool it off, given that she didn't take milk in hers, only a slice of lemon, and listened with interest as Bee described her own dog.

Loves the water, name of Tank...yes, that sounded like a dog belonging to Bee Rosdew, thought Rosanna with a small smile to herself.

"You and he are staying with your family, then, down in the village?" she asked.

[Bee Rosdew]

"I know what that feels like," Bee said, with no self-deprecation in her voice--she was, after all, tall. She hadn't really hit her growth spurt in earnest until after Rosanna had gone to school; when they had been closer friends it had been expected but not yet certain Bee would inherit the Rosdew height.

At the mention of the ancient farmhouse on the edge of town, she smiled and laughed. "I am! I think my father's glad to have Roscarrock full again; he cried when Jules moved down the road, he cried when I told him I was coming, and then again when I arrived." Ned Rosdew, salty fisherman that he was, was well-known to be a soft touch when it came to his children. "I barely dare tell them I want to rent a place once I get settled."

[Rosanna Roscoe]

Rosanna grimaced mildly with understanding when Bee mentioned her father's reactions.

"I think my Dad had to practically beg Jasper to get his own flat in London," she said. "But then he was always coming home at all hours with God knows who in tow."

Whatever her faults, Rosanna had never had such disruptive habits as to make her move out of the family townhouse. If she had a wild night out on the town, she was more likely to crash at a friend's place than return home...and if she did, she did it with such guilty awareness that she was more silent when drunk than if she were sober. The risk of fraternal jeering from smug and knowing Jasper or exasperated disappointment from her father made it easy enough to make the effort not to wake anybody up.

"How is Julia?" she asked, vaguely remembering the other girl. "I know I've probably seen her around the village in the past few weeks but I've been kept pretty busy up here." Another burst of guilt as Rosanna had to admit, to herself at least, that she'd done her best to avoid too many reunions all at once with old friends and acquaintances. There was only so many times she could repeat her prepared speeches about what her father and brother and self had been up to over the past decade.

[Bee Rosdew]

Bee was friendly and smiling on nearly every subject, but there was a particular warmth when she spoke of her family. "She's well! Working at the little garden place. Loves this town; I was worried she was only staying for our parents, but she moved in with Max--Max Burnett, they've been dating for ages--and I don't think she'd want to be anywhere else." Julia was sweet and good and gentle, and Bee had always admired her commitment to their family.

"I'm gearing up for eighty-seven rounds of catchup when Mam inevitably drags me to church tomorrow," Bee added with a rueful smile. "I can't reasonably make myself busy or scarce enough to avoid it. Not until we really gear up for production, that is." Though there were hints of chagrin in her tone, she was visibly excited for shooting to start as soon as she mentioned it.

[Rosanna Roscoe]

"Max Burnett?" Rosanna repeated faintly, vaguely recalling some weedy-looking brat who had once thrown sticks at the spokes of her bike's front wheel, and wrinkling her nose. "...well I guess we've all improved over the years..." she muttered. "Julia was always a sweetheart, though."

At the mention of church, Rosanna raised her eyebrows a little. She hadn't attended a service in years, and certainly hadn't thought of going in Penchurch. The scrutiny, the service, the guilty feeling she almost always got while sitting in a pew...but then again, Penchurch had changed, in some ways. Maybe the church had, too.

"I hear there's a female vicar, now," she said with evident interest, though it was tempered with equally-evident skepticism about religion in general. "Maybe it won't be too bad."

[Bee Rosdew]

"He's good to her," Bee said with a shrug. "And she's better judgment than I did at her age."

While not a gossip, or at least not a carrier of any tales that could hurt someone, Bee took all the pleasure in discussing town goings-on with a peer that could be expected of a woman raised in a small town. "The Suze has told me all about her," Bee said, eyebrows raised for emphasis. Susan Rosdew was a curiously pious sort. "She's given up trying to get Da to go, but I missed Christmas and won't hear the end of it. She once called the pastor of the Episcopal church closest to me in LA, to see if I was attending," she reported with good humor. It was all well-intentioned, anyway.

"Of course, the poor man had never heard of me."

[Rosanna Roscoe]

Rosanna had to laugh, rolling her eyes knowingly at the mention of Susan. It did sound very like the woman she remembered from so many years ago, and the Sunday school attendance in crisp clean dresses and stockings edged with fine linen-thread lace that made the ankles itch.

"Never missed the week-in, week-out style of churchgoing," she said. "...but sometimes in London you can't help but wander into a church on a Tuesday afternoon when there's hardly anybody else about, just for a bit of peace and quiet. Even the parks have too much noise, sometimes."

[Bee Rosdew]

Happy to have made Rosanna laugh, Bee threw one elbow over the arm of the couch, easy and pleased and entirely committed to the fact that this had become a catch-up rather than any sort of professional meeting. Rosanna had crossed her mind frequently enough over the years (even without Susan's prompting) that she was nothing but glad to have the opportunity to be in proximity again.

Of course, Bee rarely sought peace and quiet. The opposite, really--she'd been raised in an affectionate house and had always been of a social nature, but she nodded all the same. "To come back to California, I think I missed things being old. There's something, a peace, about something that's been there so long, and everything in LA is new. I know Bournewood is period, but I never went much in for history until I realized it wasn't around me anymore." It wasn't a thought she'd verbalized, but certainly one that had been hovering vague and esoteric in her mind for at least a year, maybe longer. Bee had never paid much mind to history because she'd always counted it a given.

Perhaps it was the reason she'd suggested Penchurch at all, and maybe even the reason she'd taken the job on Bournewood. She shook her head and took a piece of shortbread with a little smile.

[Rosanna Roscoe]

Rosanna pressed both hands around the fine china teacup, letting the warmth spread through her cold fingers. Despite the electric heater and a few layered vests beneath her jumper, some of the grand rooms couldn't help but be on the chilly side, some days, and fingertips and noses were always the first extremities to feel the nip.

"Do you think you'll miss it?" she asked, almost hesitantly. "I mean...when Bournewood is all over, and you're back in America?"

Rosanna supposed that they would know more once the series had gone to air, whether any more would be commissioned, but even hit programmes didn't last forever. A young woman like Bee couldn't build her career in a place like Penchurch, even if she was relishing the chance to come back for a while to work.

[Bee Rosdew]

"I always will," she said simply. "Always have. I love my job, and I even love America, in some ways, but it isn't home." Bee sipped again for lack of anything else to do.

As ever, she forged onward. "Didn't you miss it?" And wouldn't she again?

After a moment, though, she realized there was another reason for Rosanna to have avoided Penchurch. Bee had never borne such a loss, and she was a dozen years too late for condolences, so instead she changed tack entirely, glad not to have made any direct reference and seemingly unaware to have touched upon a sensitive topic, or even a deeper one. "I don't have anyone to hold me there, really. But if Bournewood goes well, I'll be back, and going forward the BBC is always an option. It's a little closer, anyway," she said with an easy smile.

[Rosanna Roscoe]

Rosanna could only smile faintly, almost impersonally, in response. Bee's forthright question had startled her more than she'd liked--after all, London wasn't so very far from Penchurch, much as some Pennys acted as if it was another planet. But if it was an easy distance, what had been her excuse for staying away?

She set her teeth a little behind her closed lips, reminding herself that she didn't owe anybody any justification for anything. And surely Bee, of all people, didn't mean anything in a gossiping, prying sort of way. She'd always pretty much said what she thought, as a child, even when Rosanna was already fast learning to hold her tongue like a grown-up.

"...your parents will be pleased if you're back in Britain for good. Or for longer, anyway." Bee Rosdew would come and go as she pleased for as long as she lived; and Rosanna wondered just what, if anything, could settle such a restless spirit as hers, if the tranquility of Penchurch could not have such a firm or lasting hold on her as to make her decide to stay for good.