The Whole World

CHAPTER 4

The envelopes were snatched out of my pigeonhole just as I reached for them.

“What the hell?” I demanded.

“Ooh, love letters?” Liv held them behind her back with both hands. Stretching her arms behind her like that stuck out her chest. Her shirt was tight. Then she turned her back to me, bringing the mail around to her front, and rifled through the stack: a journal, a bank statement, a mobile phone bill.

“No,” I said, not laughing, not cracking a smile. Not bloody love letters. Polly had run out of my office at Earth Sciences like I was a monster. I still smarted from it.

“Bor-ing,” Liv sing-songed. She put the mail back into its slot and tugged on my shirt.

“What are you doing?” I asked, brushing her hand off. She rolled her eyes toward the porters and waved that I should follow her outside.

Out on the cobbles of First Court she whispered: “There’s a party. Come on.” She pulled my hand. I resisted at first. I leaned back to counter her weight. “Come on!” she said again, giggling, adding her other hand and pulling harder.

Polly. She’d pushed me away, with her hands and then with her elbow.

It was nice to be pulled.

“All right, let’s go,” I said. My sudden compliance with Liv’s drag almost toppled her backward.

“Okay!” she said, slipping, righting herself, holding on. “Wow, okay.”

I followed her lead across the road and up her staircase. We stood close. We had to; there were too many people in the corridor and the music was loud. We were close enough that the bottles in our hands clinked together as we pulsed to the rhythm unconsciously.

The porter broke it up half an hour later. Students dispersed to their rooms.

“Well, good night, I guess,” Liv said, shrugging. “Thanks for coming anyway.” She was right in front of her door.

I pushed it open. She pulled me in.

Liv stood up. I kissed her on the forehead, like a niece would be kissed.

Ridiculous. She was half-naked.

Her sweater was on the bed. Somehow, I was standing on her bra. I’d tossed it to the floor. First I’d struggled to unhook its clasp, scraping my knuckles on the wall behind her. Then I’d thrown it on the floor, not caring about anything except getting my hands on her skin. In the ensuing tangle it had got under my foot.

The blue cotton was now marked with dirt from my shoe. I picked it up. “Sorry,” I said. She took it, and lifted her shoulders, like she didn’t mind. She covered her mouth and laughed or sneezed, some small sound. Her breasts bounced and she crossed one arm over them. But she didn’t dress. She smiled.

“I have to go,” I said. I did up my trousers. I looked around for my coat and realized, in amazement, that I was still wearing it.

She shivered. I got her sweater from the bed. The coverlet was dented where the sweater had landed, but the rest was all smooth. Everything we’d done had been against the wall. She’d untucked my shirt and rubbed her hands over my stomach. She’d turned us to switch places, to steady my back against the wall, right next to the window well, where the side edge of a short red curtain had tickled my ear.

I offered her the sweater now. I righted the inside-out sleeves and held it out, limp.

“I don’t want to get dressed,” she pouted, again with that smile. She reached out to me, again with that hand; she has soft, avid hands, with short fingernails, and one smooth, cool ring.

“I have to go,” I repeated, backing up and knocking into her fan heater. The corridor must have been empty by then; at least I hoped it would be.

Her hair was wild. The light from the long-armed desk lamp made strange shadows that elongated one of her nipples. Everything that had urged me on had finished. I shouldn’t have done this.

“I have a meeting, Liv,” I lied. “Richard’s expecting me.”

“Isn’t it a little late?” She laughed nervously.

“I meant to see Richard earlier, but you, uh, you distracted me.” Actually, I’d come only to collect my mail and Richard was the last person I’d wanted to see. He wouldn’t approve of what I’d got myself into with Polly. How could I possibly explain this?

“Did I do it right?” she asked.

I stopped breathing. She looked at me so hopefully. She was still bare. She was lovely and waiting.

“I’ve never done that before. Was it okay?” she persisted.

My fingers grazed the door handle.

I exhaled the answer: “Yes,” I finally said. “It was very good. Thank you.”

I got out the door.

Stairs, then the whoosh of the outer doors sliding apart like in a grocery store. I sucked in the cool air outside.

Knock, knock, knock. I looked up. She waved from her window. She had the sweater on now. I wonder how much of us had been visible, or audible, from outside.

I waved back and ducked around to the front of “O” building. It was far too late to call on Richard, but I had to make a show of an appointment, for Liv’s sake. So she wouldn’t think I was escaping her.

The walkway leading out to the street was in full view of her window, so I waited. She’d think Richard had let me in. I stood in the dark against a brick wall. My hands were cold. Somewhere along the way I’d lost my gloves. I’d had them on when I got to Magdalene, but later I’d put bare hands all over her.

I sat on a bench, between the river and an alley with a locked iron gate.

I hid there until I was sure she’d given up on me for the night.

I showered for half an hour. I didn’t usually waste the Chanders’ hot water that way. Nothing about me was as usual, nothing. Polly had been right to run away from me. I evidently wasn’t to be trusted.

I pressed my wet hair with a towel, then rubbed my face, hard. I had to be honest with Liv tomorrow, and early. I couldn’t let her think that this was the start of something.

If she had a phone I would have called her then. Liv was the sort to tell all of her girlfriends, wasn’t she? I had an obligation to spare her the embarrassment of bragging and then being broken up with.

Laughs pumped out of me: “ha-ha-ha!” I hadn’t even got her off. I’d got mine and got out. What would she brag about?

But her face. She’d looked… grateful.

A knock rattled my bedroom door. I wrapped myself in a dressing gown and opened it. There was Aashika. She’s eight.

“You should be asleep,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “But I made you something at school. I heard you in the shower and I waited.”

She offered a carefully painted ceramic tortoise. She’s been studying Darwin and the Galapagos. The paint had glitter mixed in. She held it out with both hands, and I took it.

That look on her face, so pleased and proud that I’d accepted her gift? Liv had looked just like that.

I didn’t recognise her at first. She had on a skirt instead of jeans. The expression on her face was sweet. “Hi,” Liv said softly. I’d never heard her speak softly before.

“You look nice,” I said, only to acknowledge the effort. She clasped her hands under her chin.

Gretchen drummed her fingertips impatiently. I’d finally found Liv there, after missing her at Magdalene, and outside a lecture that had been rescheduled, in between appointments of my own.

“I’m so happy to see you!” Liv said. “But I need to finish up here, and then I have an appointment with my supervisor…”

“Back at Magdalene? I’ll walk you.” Perfect. There would be an end point to cut short her inevitable acrimony when I told her that last night had been a mistake.

She was satisfied too with her own expectations. She bounced as she followed Gretchen. I trailed them into the library. Gretchen opened a first edition of one of the Susan Maud books to the title page. “I received this in the mail yesterday. It had been flagged by the bookseller as having an inscription. Please read it to me.” Her finger stabbed right down onto it, having found the indentations by feel.

Liv said, “To Mickey with gratitude. Linda Paul, 1959.”

Gretchen strained to remember a Mickey she’d never met. Liv packed up notebooks and pens into her bag, out of which she pulled a sheet of paper. “Gretchen, this is a list of my hours. I know the index isn’t quite done yet, but I figured you could pay me for these now…”

“Yes,” said Gretchen absently. “Put it with the mail.” There was a stack of it on a table near the door. “I’ll have a cheque for you when you come next.”

“Oh! Thanks. Yes. But I was wondering if maybe you could deal with these hours now…”

I stared at the handwriting. “Linda didn’t write this,” I said.

“What do you mean she didn’t write it?” Gretchen wanted to know.

“This is Ginny’s handwriting.” The loopy one, same as copied the poem.

“I guess Linda got Ginny to do some of the autographs,” Liv said lightly.

Gretchen turned on her. “Is your time so precious that you weren’t going to tell me?”

I knew that tone. Once, one of her students had plagiarised and she’d dressed him down right in the centre of Magdalene’s First Court, on a warm day when everyone’s windows were open.

“I didn’t know,” Liv said. “You asked me to read it and I read it.”

“You have eyes!” Gretchen railed. “I pay you to look at things for me. If you think you’re here to do the minimum, only to read or only to sort, then I don’t know how I can trust any of what you’ve done.”

The look on Liv’s face was awful. I’d seen other undergraduate girls hit this wall. They admire Gretchen so much. But Gretchen’s not really the mentor type.

“Gretchen, it’s my fault,” I said. “If I hadn’t interrupted just now, I’m sure Liv would have noticed and called it to your-”

“What neither of you seem to appreciate is that this is all that’s left of a woman’s life, a significant woman’s life!”

“Does it really matter,” Liv said, “that Ginny signed a book for her sister?”

I flinched in advance. Gretchen wasn’t going to take that well.

“Now that you’ve revealed your fundamental laziness, I think we can all agree that your work is worthless to me.”

Liv’s eyes sprouted tears.

“Gretchen, that’s not so. The photo index is sound,” I insisted.

“I’ll skip my supervision,” Liv said. “I’ll double-check everything.”

She shouldn’t do that, not at end of term. “I’ll do it,” I offered. “I’ll stay. Gretchen, I’ll show you that everything is as it should be.”

“Thanks, hero,” is what I think Liv mouthed at me. She looked genuine but I could only hear it sarcastically. I walked her to the door.

“I’m happy to help a friend,” I said, not sure if I emphasised the final word too much or not enough. “Can we talk later?”

Liv suggested we meet in the evening. “I’m meeting Polly at the library at four, but I can lose her after that.”

Polly. They would tell each other everything. “Oh, I have to…” Something. Anything. Once she and Polly spoke to each other there would be nothing for me to add. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, certain that neither of them would want to see me.

“Oh!” she said, rooting in her pockets. “You left these in my room last night.” She held out my gloves. I reached for them and she held on, giggling.

“Nick!” Gretchen called.

I got the gloves and stuffed them into my own pockets. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get this handwriting issue sorted with Gretchen.”

Liv stretched up and kissed me on the forehead, the same kiss I’d given her afterward, last night.

“I’ll fix this,” I promised.

I opened the box of photos and pulled out the folder with the poem and its copies in. I took one of Ginny’s copies to compare, and the original, clipped from a newspaper, fluttered to the floor. I picked it up carefully, wary of its fragility. “Sorry. We tried not to handle the original much.” That’s why I hadn’t noticed that the back of it had part of the date on it: “mber 1963.”

That was strange. I thought Gretchen had said Ginny had died when Gretchen was seven, which would have been 1962. But what does it matter-seven versus eight, or even nine, is nothing. Gretchen must have meant merely that she’d been young when it had happened.

“I don’t know why she would have done it,” Gretchen persisted, about the autograph. “Mother and Ginny didn’t socialise much after Brussels. Ginny travelled so much and Mother and I didn’t anymore. I don’t see how it could have been Ginny who assisted her. Unless my mother didn’t know? Perhaps Ginny was pretending to be Linda?” But the books weren’t famous enough to make a masquerade worth her while, even as a social prank. Gretchen twisted her hands around each other, around and around.

“Let’s be sensible about this,” I said. I laid out the two signed books, one of the poem transcriptions, and three photos back-side up: one of the older photos of what might have been Linda and Ginny’s parents, the photo of “Jim” (purportedly Gretchen’s father), and a photo of Gretchen and her friends as teenagers. I compared them again.

“Do you have anything else written by your mother?” I asked. I could have asked before, but frankly I hadn’t wanted to add to the chaos. The puzzle had seemed straightforward. Now more information was warranted.

“She didn’t write me letters. We talked on the phone. Her will was handled by solicitors. We can call our solicitor and look at the signature on the will.” She was talking too fast. I needed to bring her down.

“It’s all right, Gretchen. It doesn’t matter.” By that I meant that not having an extra handwriting sample didn’t matter, as we would figure things out another way. She thought I meant something else-that it didn’t cosmically matter, I would guess. She stomped out. I thought it best not to follow.

She came back from her study with a folder. “These are my school reports. Mother had to sign them. And here, these are her cookbooks. She wrote notes in the margins.”

I compared the writing. Unsurprisingly, it matched the writing in the books signed to Gretchen at graduation, and on the teenager photos, and “Jim.”

“Does it really matter why Ginny signed a book for your mother? Perhaps she promised to get a signed copy for a friend, and found it easier to make a fake than to go through the mail.”

Gretchen flexed and unflexed her fingers, kneading a memory out of the air. “I had kept asking to see Aunt Ginny. You know how children can be-I just wouldn’t take no. I wanted her to come for my seventh birthday. It was going to be just a usual child’s party: cake and balloons. I wanted her to come, but Mother told me she was travelling. And then, the day after the party, she told me the truth-that Ginny had died. She hadn’t wanted to spoil my day, so she’d waited. It had been a good little party, with my best schoolfriends. But after that I couldn’t bear that I’d been happy while my aunt was dead. I threw the presents away in a desperate ceremony. I buried them beside the house. A snow globe and a cuddly toy cat and new jacks. I was good at jacks, which surprised people. I always won.”

She didn’t stop. “It was our first year in the new house. Later I buried my pets there. By the side of the house. What was the date on the poem? Was there a date?” She asked this suddenly, and I felt for a flash that she wasn’t blind and had read it there on the back of the clipping. I hadn’t mentioned the discrepancy because I didn’t want to add more to argue about. Now, knowing that the seventh birthday was a fixed marker for Ginny’s death, the poem date was vital.

I told her the truth: September or November or December. 1963.

“No,” she said, and then waited for me to give a better answer.

“That’s what it says,” I insisted.

She took my arm, hard, which was not in character. “It wasn’t Ginny, was it? The person who copied the poem and impersonated my mother signing the book.”

“Maybe there was another sibling. Whoever she-or he-was, they were the child of the couple in the older photos. That’s all I know.” What if Ginny hadn’t died? Could Linda have just been saying that to shut seven-year-old Gretchen up about her? Or perhaps the couple weren’t Gretchen’s grandparents. “Where did these pictures all come from anyway?” I asked. The old address on the box had a CB postcode for greater Cambridge. Perhaps Gretchen had lived there once. Or perhaps they’d used borrowed boxes in a move. “Did you used to live in Haslingfield?” I asked. “On Cantelupe Road?”

“What are you talking about? Cantaloupes?” Gretchen was angry again. “Wait here,” she commanded.

A few minutes later she returned from upstairs with a heavy frame. It held an eight-by-ten photo of the dark-haired sisters in younger days, days before Brussels and before Gretchen. Gretchen turned it over and felt the fastenings, working at them. “I want to know if there’s writing here.”

She lifted the backing out, and there it was: “Me and Ginny, 1950.” So, Linda must have written it.

The writing style matched the poem transcriptions, and the grandparents’ photos, and the autograph. But it didn’t match the teenaged photos, or the inscriptions for Gretchen’s graduation.

So the one who’d labelled the framed photo couldn’t be Linda.

I could have lied to Gretchen. But I didn’t really think about the options or implications. I pounced on the paradox with a detached fascination.

“Maybe your mother didn’t really write those books. Maybe she was someone with just the same name as the author-”

She smacked my face. I hadn’t been hit since I was six years old. Our cleaner had hit me and been fired.

Gretchen’s face was rigid in a passive mould but tears gushed out as if through cracks in a dam. They slid into the paths of the thousand wrinkles that suddenly scored her skin. She was old now. She was wretched.

“Gretchen,” I said, trying to be kind.

“You don’t understand,” she whispered. And I didn’t understand. I didn’t.

She put her hands into the box and pulled up dozens of photos. They spilled from her fists. She pushed them into my chest, grinding them in. “Tell me again what she looked like. Tell me again.”

This was awful. She wanted me to be a conduit for something that was more electric than I could bear.

“Tell me again,” she demanded. She pushed me and lurched, suddenly disoriented. “Tell me again.”

“Gretchen, please.”

She stopped and got her bearings. “Take them,” she said, kicking at the photos, which were now a mess on the floor around us. “Take them away.”

I knelt on the floor to pick them up, like when Alexandra as a child used to throw cards on the floor and call it a game.

“Thank you,” she said, while I crawled under the table where some had fluttered or slid. When I passed her by she put her hand on my head, like a matron with a hunting dog in an old portrait.

I refilled the box in a jumble, and hefted it into my arms. I considered ripping the framed photo out of its place to take that as well. But there was a momentum leading toward my escape that I didn’t want to disturb. I headed toward the door without it.

Gretchen remembered. She pursued me into the lounge. The corner of the frame scraped my ear. She piled it, frame and all, on top of the box in my arms.

I promised her that I would take them all away.

She said, “Utterly, please. Utterly.”

If I’d been less rattled I would have stored the box somewhere, assuming that she would eventually change her mind. At this time, however, it seemed very important to take things literally. It seemed important to back away from making my own judgements about things. I hadn’t made good decisions lately.

So I did what Gretchen asked.

Harry’s car was just turning the corner, and I crossed the road quickly to avoid him. I didn’t want to chat, but was relieved to see him. His presence would keep Gretchen from doing something drastic.

I took the box back home. Home-home, not the Chanders’. Mum would be out. Dad was away on business. We have a pond behind the house. Not a garden pond; this was a real jungle, a wildlife zone, hopping and buzzing and splashing with life. It was deep.

My arms tingled from carrying the heavy box so far. I dropped it at the water’s edge and shook out my limbs to revive their circulation.

I considered sprinkling the photographs, like confetti, but that was too delicate a gesture. I hefted the box up and dumped it out.

I’d forgotten that they’d float. Photo faces dotted the water surface. Ginny and her side part stood out to me. I hadn’t noticed before that Liv’s hair is parted in the same way, but after last night, looking down at the top of her head, I wouldn’t forget. It’s a side part, to my left, and it had moved back and forth in front of me, my back up against the wall of her room.

The box itself bobbed, and I wondered if it had ever held something simple. I wondered if it had ever delivered a toy, or a lamp, or a book by someone who wasn’t Linda Paul.

I looked back at our house. I still had a key. My old room was still there, with my bed in it, even if Mum had her computer set up in there now too.

Gretchen didn’t like the idea of a nanny getting between her and her mother. I’d noticed that in one of the photos the nanny wore a pin from some society on her jumper. I tried to decipher it but Gretchen scoffed. She hadn’t cared. “She’s just the nanny.” Still, the photos told a different story. In the photos, she and the nanny seemed close. I’d had nannies. They were nice. Anna from Germany, and Marie from France. Anna taught me how to crack an egg, and how to cook on an Aga. Marie was retired from competitive tennis, and I spent most Marie days outside. Mum brought us lemonade and made me wear a hat. My mum was still my mum.

Briefly, I considered unlocking home and going back in time.

A car pulled up. I heard Alexandra and a friend pop out of it, spilling bright conversation. They didn’t see me, around the back of the house.

It was enough to shake me out of my sentimental mood. Going into the house wouldn’t undo being an adult.

Gretchen’s photos still floated. The framed picture glowed gold in the early winter sunset, and looked for all the world like a raft. It had drifted too far to reach with a stick, even with this long branch that had come down in the last storm. So I threw a stone at it, which smashed the glass. That bull’s-eye gave me confidence and I threw a larger one, which missed, and another, which pushed the frame perpendicular for a moment. Then it righted itself.

Something rustled in the bushes next door. Our neighbour, Mrs. Cowley, wouldn’t like me stirring things up down here. She didn’t like people around. Usually I tiptoed around her sensitivities, but now I picked up the branch. No, it couldn’t reach. But I hefted it up onto my shoulder and ran forward, releasing it like a javelin. It plunged into the water at least a metre from its target, the framed portrait. Scuttling noises retreated away toward the next house.

The lights in the ground floor of our house came on in a flash. The windows made a bright stripe across the whole building. I hadn’t noticed before that the lights hadn’t gone on as soon as Alexandra had entered.

My noise must have disturbed her. The back door banged open. “You!” she called bravely.

I waved and emerged from the trees. “Alex, it’s me.”

I expected her to be relieved. But she tensed up.

“Alex, it’s all right. It’s Nick.” My voice sounded forced. I didn’t sound like myself. She went back in without answering; the door slapped shut behind her.

As I got closer to the house, the angle of my view changed and I could see the whole of the lounge. Her companion wasn’t one of her usual girlfriends. It was a boy. He was taller than she was, so he had to be older. Most of the boys her age have yet to catch up with her. They argued. She buttoned up her blouse.

That’s what had looked so odd at the back door. Her shirt had been untucked and overlapped tightly around her, underneath her crossed arms.

I strode in. “Alexandra, won’t you introduce me to your friend?” I folded my arms across my chest.

She popped the last button in through its slit. “Gordon gave me a ride,” she said. Meaning a car. I know she meant his car.

His shirt was untucked too. He held his blazer in front of himself, draped awkwardly over his arm.

“You can go now,” I said to him.

He tried to get a cue from Alexandra. She shook her head and lifted her shoulders. I stepped between them. “Now!” I said.

When Alexandra turned to watch him drive away, I saw that her shirt had two lumps at the back where the ends of her bra were undone and poked up.

I took her blazer from the couch and handed it to her.

“Is there a problem?” she demanded, putting her arms into the sleeves.

“How old is he?”

“None of your business!”

“You’re fourteen!”

She feigned shock. “Oh my God, you’re right! Better change my nappy and put me down for an afternoon sleep!”

She ran upstairs. The stair railing rattled.

I sat down on the bottom step. After a few minutes I was calm. I went up and tapped lightly on her door. She didn’t answer. I opened it anyway.

She sat cross-legged on her bed. Her teddies were lined up behind her against the headboard. The duvet was neat underneath her. Mum must make her bed up; I know Alex wouldn’t be bothered.

“I’m sorry that I embarrassed you,” I said.

She looked at me with red eyes. “I don’t forgive you.”

I nodded. I didn’t expect her to.

“It’s only that-”

“No! Don’t tell me! I’m too young, right? And boys only want one thing? It’s not like we came up to my room. We were just messing about.”

She still slept with bears and plush ponies. A boy didn’t belong on this bed.

“Don’t tell Mum,” she begged.

I promised.

“And get out of my room.”

I did. I shut the door so that it clicked.

The house phone rang. She snatched up her extension.

“Hello… Oh, I’m sorry,” she said loudly enough to be clear to me. “He’s not allowed to talk to girls!” She hung up with an angry beep and threw the handset at the door.

“Who was it?” I demanded through the door.

“Some slag for you. Don’t you know they want only one thing?”

Had the caller been Liv? Why would she call this number? Maybe it was Polly?

Polly wouldn’t know this number either. Or think that I was here. Or want to speak to me.

She’d literally recoiled from me. Not just from me going too far, but then from me trying to help, trying to apologise, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. She’d run away from me.

And soon Liv would tell her where I’d ended up from there.

I leaned against Alexandra’s door.

The phone rang again. Alexandra let it ring. I dashed downstairs to the extension in the lounge. “Polly?”

It was Mum. “Oh, Nick! Are you staying for dinner?”

I said no. Mum was disappointed. But if I stayed Alexandra would refuse to join us, or she’d sit with us but not eat. She’d find a way to protest my presence, silently daring me to tell on her, and promising hate forever if I did. It wasn’t worth it. Not tonight.

Mum said she’d be home soon, so I left Alexandra by herself. On the way out, I picked up a thick fallen branch and sent it sailing toward the neighbours’ fence. The wooden slats rattled when it hit. I was tired of looking after people. I was tired of working ’round everyone’s delicate feelings. Our neighbour, Mrs. Cowley, was frightened by sudden noises, by any token of our existence, really; but what if I wanted to throw something? What about my feelings?

I didn’t relax until I pushed in the heavy oak door of a pub.

By the time Richard Keene walked in I was past thinking clearly. He was with Alice. They would be married soon. I acted like it was my first drink. It wasn’t anywhere near that.

“Working hard?” Richard asked. Because he was my supervisor. I didn’t look like I’d been working.

I shook my head.

“Good,” he said, drinking. “It’s good to take a break.”

I should have talked to him. Alice said she’d be right back; we had the privacy. I could have told him everything that troubled me.

“I have to go,” I said, but I didn’t move.

“I have to go,” I repeated, to prod myself. I turned.

He said, “Wait,” I think, but then Alice came back. He stood up, and I got away.

I felt breathless outside, like I’d escaped something. Ludicrous. Richard’s a good friend. I started to walk in small circles in front of the pub, convinced it would sober me up. I actually made myself go back in. They didn’t see me. They were looking at each other. I thought, Right, some friend he turned out to be.

I pushed between several chairs and put my fist on their table. “You want to talk? All right, I’ll talk.” They looked shocked. I was shocked myself. What could I say? About Liv? About Gretchen? What could I say about anyone that wouldn’t make it worse for them, not being wholly mine to share?

“Sorry,” I mumbled. Richard got up. He had to push Alice ’s chair forward to get to me. He pushed his fiancée to get to me.

“Go home,” he said, putting a hand on each of my shoulders. “Get some sleep.”

That’s the thing with Richard. His good advice is always so uninteresting. There’s nothing arresting about it. No epiphany. It’s easy to ignore.

I tripped walking out the door, and caught the jamb to keep from pitching forward. The door bounced off my back. A group of students on the pavement stopped talking and waited for me to get out of their way. One of them had dark hair. I thought it was Liv for a minute, and stared, frozen. She looked at one of her friends and laughed, which snapped me out of it.

A bicycle bell jingled behind me. I wasn’t fast enough. The cyclist skidded sideways to avoid me and hit a parked car. Its alarm siren rose and fell, too close to my ears.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded.

I didn’t answer. He pedalled away, not leaving a phone number tucked under the windscreen wiper. I groped in my pockets for an old receipt on which to scribble my number-it was partly my fault-but I didn’t have one. I leaned over a rubbish bin, and almost reached in to retrieve a paper bag. It had a wet stain and a bulge at the bottom, and I finally recoiled.

I leaned against a concrete pillar. My mobile rang, again, and I assumed that it was Liv calling from a borrowed phone. I’d already ignored two of those, in the pub. But this call was from Peter. I answered.

Peter and I have known each other since we were teenagers. We boarded at different schools, but attended some of the same camps and summer courses. We were both at Cambridge now. We both had theses to finish.

“What?” I said.

“Careful, mate. You’re being followed.”

I’d drunk too much to have a sense of humour. I flattened against the wall and demanded to know what the bloody hell he meant.

Peter laughed. “That girl you know? Polly? Her mother’s in town, and she’s been asking for you.”

“What are you on about?”

“I told her you might be at Magdalene. That’s why I’m phoning. If you don’t want to see her, don’t be at Magdalene.”

“I’m not.” I got myself together, and started walking along back streets toward Earth Sciences.

“You sound wrecked.”

“I thought you were Liv.” I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t want to explain.

“Mmmm… Liv,” he said, tasting her name. “You’re not responsible for her. She’s not your fault. You didn’t ask to be worshipped.”

“Some things are,” I said.

“Some things are what?”

“My fault. Some-a lot of things are my fault.”

He laughed again. “You dog! I thought it was the other one you were after.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” I picked up my pace.

“So what happened with her?” he asked, referring, I think, to either of them. Whichever was a better story.

“Polly…” I said, then trailed off. I don’t know what happened with her. I know what happened between us, but I don’t know what happened inside her.

“Look, you did the right thing. Liv knows what she wants. You’re better off.”

“I did the wrong thing. I did several wrong things. I’m doing a wrong thing right now.”

I skulked along the edge of Emmanuel College and crossed St. Andrew’s Street quickly.

I stopped short of my office. It wasn’t a refuge. The stapler and pencil cup were probably still scattered on the floor, where they’d fallen when I pulled Polly onto the desk with me. The cleaners would have taken the rubbish bin, but the smell of sick would still be there, trapped in the poorly circulated air.

“Are you in your office?” I asked Peter.

He was. I crossed the road. The massive whale skeleton on Zoology’s patio rattled in the breeze. Female voices in the car park froze me until car door slams shut them away.

That’s the moment I thought of Lesley Harter. I hadn’t thought about her, except in passing, for years. She was seven years my senior, which was an impossible distance when I was fifteen, at least to me it had been. Now she would be… thirty-one. Which seemed equally impossible. She was probably married. She was probably a mother. She ran her family’s businesses, and had done since she was twenty. But I thought of her as just herself.

I had met her at a dressage event, where one of her horses was competing. She knew Dad through work. Alexandra had wanted to see the “horsies,” which is why we were there. I’d only been out of choir for a year, having cracked my voice at fourteen. I’d never seen a woman so beautiful. While Mum chased after Alexandra, Lesley showed me the horses.

She asked me to carry a box of tack into the trailer attached to her car. I put it down in the corner and she followed me in. The trailer walls muffled the loudspeaker and applause. “It’s all right,” she said. She just stood there, waiting for something, and letting me know it was all right. I stepped close and kissed her, terrified I was doing it wrong. When I pulled away, she smiled again. “You’re a lovely boy,” she said. She waited a few moments more before turning to hang up a bridle. She left it to me, all on me. If I wanted to touch her I could. I could see the outline of her bra under her polo shirt. I couldn’t move. It was overwhelming. She took pity on me. She kissed me again. I was mad with it in my response; I kissed her all over her face. She had earrings on, hard little gems that scratched my lips.

That’s all we did. Then we went to watch her horse compete. When he won, she raised her arms up in a cheer. Her breasts lifted with her arms. I could hardly breathe.

We became friends, and I never touched her again. I hardly saw her, just now and then. But when I did, she spoke to me like she valued my opinion. That wasn’t new, exactly, but usually adults wanted to hear what I had to say about academic things. She wanted my opinions on life. Should she forgive someone, should she insist on some condition in a contract? It was somehow much the same as what had passed between us in the trailer. She treated me as an equal.

I would never tell Peter about her.

He opened the front door of the building for me, and we went up to his office.

An empty coffee cup from Fitzbillies bakery was on his desk. The last time we were in there together, he’d flirted with the woman at the till. I noticed that this paper cup had a phone number written on the side. Next to it was a stack of books with papers inserted between pages throughout. None of the books were open. There was an empire-building computer game on his screen. “I thought you were working,” I said.

He grinned. “Procrastination is part of my process.”

His whiteboard had notes scrawled on it in three different colours, and an idle sketch of a rowboat, surprisingly detailed. More of his “process.” Polly rushed into my mind, her laughing that Penrose had illustrated his talk with colourful homemade transparencies. It’s something to watch American standards and expectations get tickled like that.

Polly even looks American, though I can’t quite explain what I mean by that. She looks like someone in an American chewing gum advert.

“So…?” Peter asked, leaning back in his chair, and I knew what he meant. I was in the stiff-backed guest chair, sitting straight up. I shook my head. “You and Liv?” he persisted.

He was my friend. I had to trust somebody.

“I went too far…” I began.

“Holding hands is acceptable in this century,” he teased.

The opportunity shuttered. I couldn’t make him understand without spelling it out. And once he did understand, he’d make a joke of that too, wouldn’t he. He’d think it was hilarious.

“Tell me again about your brother,” I countered. His face froze.

“The hell?”

That was mean of me. His brother was the only thing he was sensitive about.

“Seriously, do you have a problem?” he wanted to know.

“Not me, mate.” I’d gone too far. It was out of character for me to bait him, but I had to get him off Polly and Liv. “I want to talk about something else,” I said. “The only things you’re willing to be serious about are your brother and your work, so let’s talk about them.” I pumped these words out in a rapid staccato.

“I don’t want to be serious right now,” he pouted. Then, “Fine, we’ll talk about work.”

“How’s your thesis?” I asked. This was a more normal conversation.

“It’s all right,” he said. “My thesis is all right. I’ll be ready to submit soon.”

“It’s about time!” I said, joking. I could finish this year too, but I’d probably drag it out. People don’t think I’ve got laziness in me, but that’s because thoroughness and laziness can look so much alike.

Thoroughness can be a cover for numerous less desirable things.

I shouldn’t have gone on to analyse the handwriting on Gretchen’s photos. But I’d gone on to “see the job through,” as my father had said to me a fair few times in my life, despite not being home terribly much. It was my personal sense of tidiness and completion that drove me to sort out the handwritings after Liv had left; compassion and responsibility, which is what I thought it was, would have involved observing Gretchen more carefully.

I take words at face value. Gretchen had said she wanted to know everything. I don’t do well overriding what people say about themselves. I don’t put body language and tone of voice over words themselves. I should, I know that now.

“You’re a real shit, you know that?” Peter said, still hurt that I’d brought up his brother like that. But he wasn’t going anywhere. He hadn’t shifted his weight, or leaned forward as if to stand.

I decided to respond to that, instead of the words.

“It’s not just Polly or Liv. It’s…”

He prompted, “What?”

“Kepler.”

“Johannes Kepler?”

I nodded and he laughed at me.

“The cosmologist? From how many hundreds of years ago?”

Four hundred years ago. Kepler had defended the Copernican theory of a sun-centred universe. Circular orbits didn’t work out; they couldn’t explain the path Mars followed in the sky, seeming to backtrack on itself. Another kind of orbit might. He set out to prove that the orbits of the five known planets followed the shapes of Euclid ’s nested solids. This, to him, would have been a divine signature, proof that a sun-centred universe wasn’t godless or random.

What he found instead were ellipses.

Elliptical orbits are one of the greatest, most perfect discoveries in scientific history. They explained Mars’s apparent retrograde motion, the last scientific obstacle to a sun-centred system, and did so without any convoluted mechanics. Yet he despised them. They were too… I think “natural” might be the word. He’d been looking for a perfect crystal and had found a beating heart instead.

“You know,” I rambled. “Retrograde. Ellipses. The truth wasn’t exactly as he’d pictured it. So he hated it.”

I’d found truth for Gretchen. She didn’t want it.

“Are you drunk?”

“No.”

“You’re not all here.”

“I had an uncle who drowned,” I said. This had little to do with the flow or point of the conversation. But I said it.

It was the intensity of Gretchen’s faulty memories, I think, that triggered the thought. It was the way my mother always told me how much I used to look like my uncle; but, from the pictures I’d seen of him, I don’t think I ever did.

“I never knew that,” said Peter.

“It was before I was born.”

He picked up the paper coffee cup and rolled it between his hands. “Are you going to be all right? I’m supposed to meet someone. But if you want to talk about Polly or Liv, or your uncle, or Kepler…”

“No. No, thanks. Really.”

“Just a bit of advice, though, all right? Whatever you’re not talking about-it’s not as bad as you’re making it.”

He would know, wouldn’t he. He’s always got a new girlfriend.

“Is it the woman from Fitzbillies?” I asked, flicking my fingers against the cup.

“I’ll phone her this weekend. Tonight I’m meeting an old friend. We were a pair back in the old days.”

Old days? Undergrad, maybe? “I’m really sorry that I mentioned your brother.”

“I know. It’s done.”

“No, I’m really, truly sorry…” Regret and sentimentality inflated within me. “That’s not how to treat a friend.” I meant that in so many ways. I’d been poison to so many people in the space of two days.

“Nick. You’re drunk. You should go home.”

“That’s what Richard said.” Hours ago. Maybe by now the Chander girls would be in their room, doing homework or reading in bed. I wasn’t up to facing their usual enthusiasm.

I got up.

Peter’s phone rang. While he chatted and organised his laptop bag, I looked hard at that rowboat scribble on the whiteboard. The colours were vivid-red, green, and sunbright yellow.

I remembered Wesley, a blind boy Peter and I had both known from a summer cricket camp. He’d been blind in the same way as Gretchen: able to see in his earliest years and then losing it. He couldn’t play real games with us-it would have been too dangerous for him. But he could train. He was a decent bowler, actually. He couldn’t tell what was going on in the field, but he could see people as “blobs.” As for throwing the ball, he was excellent.

We’d been roommates. He confided to me back then that his memory of colours was fading. The red he had that summer was less bright than the red he’d had five years before. I didn’t see how he could know it was less bright, since he would have to mentally compare it with the bright colour to notice. He repeated that he didn’t have the bright colour anymore-he couldn’t call it up in his mind-but he knew its absence. He knew that the red he used then wasn’t fiery or sharp or any other kind of feeling word that one might use to capture the saturation of a colour. He knew it like someone knows they don’t remember when they were one year old, or where they left their keys. So his memories were literally fading like an old photograph. Not a metaphor like most people mean-the details going away-but the colour actually draining. And these memories were his visual vocabulary, so his visual present and future and even his imagination were drained as well. I presume that Gretchen had had a similar experience. It put her attachment to her youth, and to the brightness of her early life, in perspective.

“Shall I go first, as a lookout?” Peter joked. I’d almost let myself forget that Polly’s mother was looking for me.

I laughed. Maybe I should have said yes.

I’d forgotten what the Georgian buildings on St. Andrews Street look like. They’d been covered for months, three cranes sticking out like antennae, while the new shopping mall was being constructed behind their facades.

I could have crossed at Emmanuel, but in my cowardice I craved the shelter of the scaffolding. I turned left down the pavement alongside the construction site and kept under it until I had to cross the street. More construction obscured me there, between Christ’s College and the bus station. I’d been under cover since coming out of Downing Street. The open green of Christ’s Pieces stretched in front of me. I hesitated to step out from the covered alley.

“Don’t be an idiot,” I said out loud. I made myself step onto the path.

Approaching footsteps beat behind me, under the alley’s temporary roof. I quickened my pace to keep ahead of them. Once into the park, I looked over my shoulder, but couldn’t make out more than a silhouette.

It was a woman. I don’t think she was a student; at least, she didn’t come across as studenty. Maybe it was the hair. The hair seemed like it belonged to someone’s mother. Polly’s mother.

I walked faster.

She was as quick as me, quicker. The distance between us shortened, despite my longer legs.

When she inevitably caught me up I whipped around to face her. “What do you want?” I shouted. I shouted it into her face.

She stepped back.

“Why are you following me, Mrs. Bailey?” I demanded.

She stepped back again. She wore a tracksuit, with a stripe down each leg. She had trainers on her feet. She flicked earphones off of her head.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. Her glance flitted over all possible directions of escape. Back through the alley? Across the grass?

I pushed my hair off my forehead. “No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else…” I walked closer, so I wouldn’t have to raise my voice.

She ran for the alley, probably because there was a homeless person in there. I suppose she thought I wouldn’t hurt her in front of a witness.

She wasn’t Mrs. Bailey-I realised that from her reaction-but she reminded me of Polly just the same. It was the turning and running.

I leaned over, hands on my knees, and tried to slow my breathing. The grass looked awfully close, closer…

“Nick?”

A soft, feminine voice. I sprang back upright.

“What? What do you want?” I spluttered. In that instant the voice was Liv, it was Polly and Gretchen and my sister. It was my mother, disappointed that I wasn’t staying home for dinner. I held my hands up in front of my face.

“I’m Miranda Bailey. Are you Nick Frey? Are you,” she asked, in light of the ridiculous outburst she’d just witnessed, “looking for me?”

She hadn’t followed me. Anyone with my address could guess I’d come this way. She’d simply waited.

“No, I, no…” I babbled.

“Are you all right?”

“Never better!” I flung my arms out wide. Then I started walking.

It was a public park. It’s not like I could stop her from walking beside me. It’s not like I could stop any of this.

We crossed the road together to New Square.

“Polly wrote me such nice things about you.”

“That’s very kind of her,” I said, staring straight ahead.

“I need to talk to you because you’re her friend.”

“You’ll have to ask her about that.” Polly had made it clear how she felt about me now.

“If you and Polly have been… intimate…”

“Good God, Mrs. Bailey.” I stopped in front of a rubbish bin. “I’m not going to talk about that with you.”

“There’s something you need to know.”

What? A disease? This was horrible. “Mrs. Bailey.” We faced each other. I put my hands on her shoulders. “You’ve got to stop. Please leave me alone.”

“You need to know that she’s a fragile person. You need to be gentle with her.”

Gentle. Had I been? I remembered pushing her up against the back of the lift.

She continued, “I think you’re good for Polly, you’re a good person. So I’m going to tell you this, so that you’ll understand what Polly’s going through, and why.”

And then she told me. I was stunned, of course, and sickened. She was matter-of-fact about it, having, I assume, gone over it so many times. She didn’t cry. She didn’t claim any part of the trauma for herself. I genuinely think she was telling me for Polly’s sake, misguided as that may have been.

“I’m so sorry,” I said automatically. Manners are a good fallback during times of stress. “That’s awful.”

In the lift, Polly had put her arms around my neck. I’m sure she did. But had she really wanted to? Or had she forced herself, trying to conquer her trauma by will? Were there signals I’d ignored? I’d stopped when she wanted me to.

Hadn’t I?

In my office, I’d only touched her shirt a second time because…

Because I wanted to. Because everything else about her acted like she wanted me to. There was just the hand, brushing my hand away. One hand, versus everything else about her: the way she was breathing and her open mouth.

And what I wanted.

“Polly’s a good girl.” Polly’s mother brought me back. “She’s a good girl, and she cares for you, and she’s been punished for caring for someone before.” I noticed that she’d not once said the name of the boy. “So you can understand,” she concluded, “why it would be a hurdle for Polly to let herself go again.”

I did understand. But, “Why didn’t she tell me?”

“She doesn’t want anyone here to know.”

Miranda looked very like Polly. Obviously older, but with much the same face. It gave the illusion of a future Polly time-travelling back to now to share this important information. But this wasn’t future-Polly. This was Miranda and she had no right. “If that’s so, then you shouldn’t have told me.”

“You need to know…”

“Polly will decide what I need to know. Polly will tell me when she’s ready to tell me. She’s brave, and she tried with me, and it’s no one’s place-not mine and not yours-to rush her into anything she’s not ready for.” I wanted to tell Polly that. I wanted to promise her patience. I wanted her to know that the lead was hers to take.

Miranda looked away from my indignation, staring at her purse held tight in both hands. “She’s lucky to have you,” she finally said.

Liv had said something like that last night, at the party. Just before the porter came, she’d said, “I’m lucky to have run into you tonight.”

Lucky.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. “No, she’s not.”

Miranda took a deep breath. She wasn’t done with me yet. “If you’d just go to see her…”

I cringed. No. Polly would have talked to Liv already. She’d be done with me. “I don’t think so.”

Miranda was offended, actually offended. She gasped. How dare I.

“Truly, Mrs. Bailey, I’m sorry. I just…”

“You just what? You just care about her, except for the part of her that hurts? That part of her that’s vulnerable? Is that ‘just’ it?” She looked so much like Polly in that moment, yet so angry. I don’t think I’ve seen Polly angry in that way. Then Miranda deflated. “I’m sorry. It’s only-she cares for you. I think you’re good for her.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I’m much good for anyone at the moment.” Not Polly, not Liv. Not even Gretchen, on whom I’d forced an unnecessary truth.

Miranda reached for me and I stepped back.

She reached again, and I stepped back again, almost tripping backwards over the low fence that lined the path.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I turned and headed toward the Grafton. Miranda didn’t follow me at first. I got almost as far as the compass rose embedded into the pavement where Fitzroy and Burleigh Streets meet. I heard her footsteps growing louder and I turned.

She ran for me, charged at me, really. When she reached me, she begged. “Polly will think it’s her fault. And it’s not. You’ve got to let her…” It ran down into incoherence, and then, at last, apology. “This is madness. I’m sorry. I know you’ll do what you feel is right.”

That was a laugh. So I laughed, a ridiculous, strangled giggle. I’m sure Miranda could smell the drink in me. This was the nice man Polly wrote her about?

I turned down Burleigh Street to end the conversation. I hunched up my shoulders to discourage her. “Leave me alone, Mrs. Bailey!” I said loudly.

But we’d already diverged. I saw over my shoulder that she was headed the other direction down East Road, toward her hotel. At the pedestrian light I finally felt far enough away from her to unclench my hands. I didn’t pay attention to the stranger next to me.

This person also crossed the street. He stayed just a step behind and beside me. At the mini-roundabout just off the main road, he grabbed me by the collar of my coat and shoved me up against the wooden fence. He wrenched my backpack off my shoulder. I got twisted around, and for a moment the strap caught on my wrist. He pulled, hard, and the bag jerked free. He ran, pounding his steps into the pavement.

My arm quivered. Ridiculous. He was just a teenager. There wasn’t any danger. He didn’t want to hurt me; he just wanted my backpack.

And the laptop that was in it.

My thesis. Shit.

That was my excuse. I took off after him. He was faster than me, but it felt good to run.

In my mind, I caught up with him. I slammed him up against a fence, like he’d slammed me. I wrenched the backpack off his shoulder. It was only fair. But my imagination had momentum; it didn’t stop there. I took out the laptop and raised it over my head. I slammed it down onto him. The plastic casing cracked, creating sharp edges. I beat him with it. I beat him bloody.

It never happened. He outran me through the park and I stopped and caught my breath.

I sank down onto the kerb, my shoes nestled in broken glass. Nothing desperate had been lost. A little money, a few cards in the front pocket, two books. My phone and computer could be replaced. I had backups of all but my latest work.

Thank God he’d got away. I couldn’t even hear his steps anymore. Thank God.

I waited for the adrenaline to subside. I didn’t want to bring rage inside the Chanders’ house.

I no longer had my keys. I didn’t want to chat in answer to the doorbell. It was late for them anyway-they go to bed by nine, usually. The front window was partly open, as usual; the house thermostat against all reason goes by the temperature of the unheated entry hall and so never stops pumping heat into the lounge. I pushed it up the rest of the way and climbed in. I still had on the gloves that Liv had returned to me.

On the next floor up, the girls were in bed. I stepped carefully and slowly, to dull the inevitable creaking of the floor. Their parents were making love, quietly, tactfully, so that the girls wouldn’t know. The door was closed and their sounds were discreet but definite as I went past.

Up another flight. In my room, on my desk, Mrs. Chander had left me a note: Miranda Bailey had phoned this afternoon. It was probably she who had been hung up on by Alexandra as well. She’d probably been behind the unidentified calls I’d got on my mobile earlier. I’d thought they were Liv. I’d made a lot of assumptions today.

I threw a shirt and socks into a bag. I needed only one more thing.

I pulled open the Russian inlaid-wood box Alexandra had given me Christmases ago-but there were only some francs and lire inside, my pre-Euro collection. Where was it? I always kept it in there.

I rifled through my wardrobe drawers, the contents of which were never well folded to begin with because I do my own laundry. I checked the top shelf of the cupboard-knocking down two shoe boxes that then spilled out shoeshine tools and a mini-humidifier. It wasn’t there.

Then I remembered the girls. They’d been through the boxes on my desk, in an innocent, curious way, and had admired it. Aahana said she’d always wanted a great key like it-like something out of The Count of Monte Cristo. I’d told her that great keys come with big old houses, and that this wasn’t for her. I remember putting it back inside and closing the lid. Aahana was usually a good child, but apparently not always.

Past the closed bedroom doors, all quiet now, down the carpeted stairs and into the cramped kitchen. The stove-top espresso maker was still full of this morning’s grounds and filled the room with an incense-like sharpness. Through the patio door at the back I could see the girls’ replica Chateau d’If, made of crates and scrap lumber.

The cardboard box making one end of the structure was mouldy and sagging from repeated damp, but the main part of it was grand, if precarious. It also had only a tiny opening, possibly to keep out adults, but mostly, I suspected, to heighten the dramatic prison effect. They were dramatic girls.

I probed with my hand, banging on the outside first to frighten spiders. On a nail inside the entry hung my key.

CHAPTER 5

I cycled out of town on Barton Road.

I switched off my headlamp where there were streetlights, to conserve the battery for the dark stretches, which were utterly black. The route took me down curvy lanes, past the lit church towers of Haslingfield and Fowlmere, and over the moderately busy A505. The repetition of pedalling dulled my anxiety. I panted in exertion instead of panic. Suddenly the steeply banked single track I was on spilled out into an expensive cluster of new-build homes. There, in the last, weak glint from my weakening bicycle light, was a sign for Dovecote.

I tried to remember it, to calibrate my expectations. I knew the version in my mind, exaggerated over the years, would be less than accurate. Would the driveway stretch as long as it had appeared to me then, would the main house loom as massive and solid? Up till then, my experience with buildings of that size had all been school-related, all shared space. That Dovecote was owned by a single person had thrilled me. I used to fantasise about being one of those boarders whose parents didn’t bring them home for school holidays. I knew it didn’t work this way, but I imagined they got to roam the school grounds, and camp out on their own in the empty classrooms. I wanted to run up and down the stairs, and yell to hear the echo. In my memory of that fantasy, I’m slamming doors. It doesn’t feel angry, it just feels strong. Does everybody want to do that?

Lesley Harter had bought Dovecote to convert it into a hotel. To celebrate her purchase, she’d held a garden party on the grounds, avoiding the interior of the manor house, which had been in need of major renovations. I was nineteen then. I came with my family. I told a story that had happened to me just weeks before:

I’d been accused of stealing a woman’s purse in a crowd. A policeman had detained me but could find no evidence that I was the thief. I’d felt confident of my honesty, and never feared they would take me.

Everyone who heard it laughed. No one ranted on the unfairness of the accusation, because they had all felt it: I was unassailable. No authority would ever believe I had done it. It was a fine adventure-that was all.

But Lesley took me aside and said, seriously, “Nick, you’re a good boy. But if you’re ever in actual trouble, you can always come here. All right? It’s yours if you need it.” She gave me a key to Dovecote. “It may be a mess of reconstruction for the next few years, but it’s a place to go.” Her security code, she said, was the year Hatshepsut became Egypt ’s first female pharaoh. I looked up the numbers when I got back to our family house, in a history almanac that had been kept in the bedside table of my old room ever since I was a little boy. I wasn’t surprised that it was still there. It’s amazing to me now what I’d taken for granted.

The sign ahead of me didn’t indicate whether Dovecote had yet become a hotel. For all I knew, Lesley might have sold the place. There could be a conference going on, or a wedding. But I didn’t really think so, just as I didn’t really think Lesley was changed. Lesley, who wasn’t fragile. Lesley, with whom no carefulness was required. I wanted to hold something durable, something that wouldn’t shatter if I dropped it.

I was certain that nothing had altered while I’d been looking the other direction, except that the cars had gone, full of party guests, leaving just a few special people or none. I felt I was nineteen, fresh from the hands of the police. I felt free.

Gates put a stop to my fantasy. Two expanses of chain-link fencing abutted sharp holly hedge on both sides. Pulling on the obstruction did little more than rattle the chain and padlock holding them together. I pressed my face up against the fence: There was a tarp-covered hill to one side, probably earth from digging foundations or a pool; and an incongruous temporary building on the other side of the drive, presumably a site office for builders. But the manor house beyond appeared whole. I know Lesley had planned only interior renovations for it; the more drastic work must be aimed at the outbuildings. I saw no cars. But there-a light in a window!

Richard had once said to me, dead earnest: “Don’t rush.” Meaning, I think, everything. Don’t rush with women, don’t rush away, don’t rush into.

I abandoned my bicycle, threw my bag over the fence, and scrambled to join it, squeezing my hands and feet into the many tight little squares until I was high enough to jump down the other side. I thudded onto the drive and skidded till I rolled backward, gravel digging into my palms.

My new vantage point allowed me to see that the light had been a reflection of the moon off glass. The house was fully black inside.

I tilted my head back and closed my eyes.

Bloody idiot, I thought. Light rain dotted my jeans. This wasn’t the first grand gesture of my life that had been completely ill-advised.

I remembered the flu I’d had as a child: the closed room, the pulled curtains, the piles of bedclothes on top of me.

We were still in London then. I’d read The Velveteen Rabbit, set in the old days of scarlet fever, and had got it into my head that anything I touched while ill would be burned. So I stayed away from all my things. I refused to have any toys or books in the bed with me, which Mum and Marie didn’t understand. I had learned the word “stoic” in my Greek history phase, and applied it.

One night, while a vaporiser puffed damp white air toward the bed where I slept, one of them tucked my cuddly lion next to my head on the pillow. In the morning I woke up nose to nose with it; some of my saliva had dribbled onto its mane. I screamed out loud, over and over again, a “horrible” scream Mum says when she tells this story. I thought I’d killed it, that it would have to be burnt up because it had touched me. I screamed and screamed and wouldn’t touch my mother when she came for me. I’d become convinced in that moment that I could ruin anything. I yelled until she and Marie stayed at the edges of the room, pressed into the walls by my noisy threats. I was the captain of my own ghost ship, and all I could do to save them was to warn them off.

Marie and Mum had looked so shocked at me those years ago. I’d gone suddenly wild, suddenly vicious. Eventually they left the room; otherwise I wouldn’t have calmed down. They didn’t know why I was upset, so they couldn’t explain the truth to me. They called for a doctor to come, which he did, and I let him examine me because, if I didn’t, Mum would have tried to help him. I’d rather he died than she, so I submitted.

It came out to him what I’d been thinking, and he talked me down like a man. It all deflated out of me. I hadn’t been brave, I’d been idiotic. I’d never felt so ashamed in all my life.

Mum sat on my bed but I wouldn’t say anything. She didn’t try to make me talk; she kept smoothing the covers. Eventually she told me about my uncle and how someone dying was the worst thing in the world. She told me that I’d been brave and good to try to protect her, and Marie, and Lion. She thanked me.

She told me I could have anything I wanted for lunch. I asked for a cherry lollipop and a butter sandwich. She offered to tuck my soft toys in with me, but I felt too grown up for that, suddenly. I felt heroic.

There was no one to bring me lollipops here. It was puerile to have come. I got up and readied to re-scale the fence.

My leap back onto it knocked over my bike on the other side. I hung there off the ground, in a staring match with my bike’s headlamp. It wouldn’t have enough charge to get me home. It couldn’t even get me back to the last pub I’d passed. I had to wait for daylight.

I got down off the fence and turned to face the building. It was bigger than I remembered. My memories hadn’t exaggerated; if anything, they’d minimized the length of the drive. By the end of walking it, the door couldn’t shock me. Its immensity was inevitable.

I poked my key at it, but the lock had been changed. It was smaller, for a modern key. This key she’d given me was large and old-fashioned.

The rain intensified into cold stabs against my shoulders and scalp. I shivered and followed the perimeter.

There were two more doors on that part of the house, both with new, small-holed locks. I kept on. The house was massive. I felt like the bricks were multiplying to keep ahead of me. I jogged, half believing I really did have to outrun them. I didn’t slow down until I got ’round the corner.

Around the back at last were the remains of the original house, much older than the impressive, decorative front that had been stuck onto it. This solid block had been adapted into a grand kitchen wing, at least it had been planned to be used that way.

It had its own door, which predated the rest. The key fitted and turned.

The door opened outward. As soon as I swung it toward me, beeping emitted from a box on the inside left wall, echoed by distant beeping elsewhere inside. Really, I didn’t know if the house was occupied or not, and, if so, whether it was still owned by Lesley. I leaned in, not technically entering, to press the glowing green number keys in the order she’d told me five years ago. The noise persisted until I pushed in the largest button, an “enter” rectangle. The beeps cut off, leaving only the loud hum of the now pounding rain. The house must still be Lesley’s. I leaned into the blackness inside, giving a few seconds for a dog or person to come investigate.

When nothing happened, I put my foot onto an old stone block, the step down to the original floor. At first I felt it was a hollow under my foot, smooth from centuries of use, wobbling me. I sought to steady myself with my left leg, planting it down hard, alongside my right. But it too wobbled and then swung out forward. My first foot pushed sideways, sliding behind and under my other leg, stretching them past each other into a horrible right angle.

Cheap plates. Lesley had rigged the one unmodernised door by putting actual dinner plates on the slippery step below it, as a bit of extra homemade security for the old door. Whether this was a Victorian method of security or one of Lesley’s own invention, it had served its purpose.

One plate spun and the other shattered. My right hand plunged down onto another plate, which sent my upper body falling. I ended up lying on the floor along the step, my legs blessedly together again, with a conk on my head from the corner of the stone and a sharp pain in my left ankle.

I lay there for a while, until the cold blowing in from outside and the cold coming up through the stone floor pushed through my daze. I hauled myself up to sitting. Pressure on my left foot caused a starry burst of agony around my ankle.

The weather had gathered itself into a temper. I managed to close the kitchen door by hopping up and out on my right foot. Bringing the door back with me was harder, necessitating a hop back onto the slippery concave stone, which, even empty of plates, was slick. I fell again and this time bashed my hip.

“Shit!” I said out loud. “Bloody hell.”

The thermostat didn’t respond to my nudging, but the heat was at least minimally on, I would guess to keep pipes from freezing. I was sceptical that the tap water was potable, but there were two long-dry glasses in the sink, so I took a chance that I wasn’t the first to drink it. The pantry had a few long-life foods. It was obvious Lesley stayed here only occasionally, probably to monitor progress on the outbuildings or as a pied-à-terre. Telephone service was not yet connected.

My right foot started to swell. It too must have been hurt, but, in comparison to the horrid pain on the left, I hadn’t felt it. I wrapped myself in a coarse blanket folded near the door; it was probably meant as a mat for wiping muddy feet when the place was occupied. I only needed, I was sure, to get through the night.

The utilitarian gates were convincing evidence that Dovecote was not yet finished. The rain would stop and the builders would return. Surely.

The stone floor in the kitchen would only chill me worse, so I crawled out into the hall beyond. I reached up to press the button on the switchplate by the door. A lamp hanging from a bulky chain glowed a sallow yellow in response. I pressed the second button. The room beyond suddenly dazzled-hundreds of pinpoint stars shone from the ceiling onto a wooden table near twenty feet long.

I shuffled into the dining room on my knees, staring up. Even with the enormous table, the room felt vast. There were no chairs yet, no sideboards. Just space. I leaned back against a wood-panelled wall to marvel. Had she put in constellations? Or was the patterning random: space observed from another galaxy entirely?

The door to the hall fell shut, crack! My arms flung out in surprise, to steady myself. And my left hand recoiled from a sharp point.

More than a dozen sets of antlers were piled in this corner, some of them huge, and my disturbance sent them toppling toward me. One pair of spirals fell into my lap. They were monstrous up close.

Marks high on the walls showed where they all had once been displayed. Of course Lesley would have taken them down. She’d never tolerate anything along the lines of hunting or taxidermy.

I pushed them away, with a horrible clatter, and backed toward the now-closed door, sliding on my bum. Obviously, I’d nudged the door when I’d entered, that’s all. For some reason I needed to open it again. It seemed important to confirm that the hall was still on the other side of it.

There it was: hall, stairs, yellow light from the hanging lamp.

A tiny marble rolled out from under the tangle of antlers, past me and out the door.

There must be a stuffed creature there too, now one-eyed. I didn’t check.

There was no rug, but the floor here was wood, an improvement over cold stone. I crawled underneath the banquet table, as if it were a tent. Caught up in a figment of camping, and reduced even in my fantasies to mere expedience, I wished for a rock on which to lay my head.

I spread the blanket from the kitchen over me, and stacked my hands to form a pillow. The fibre-optic stars above twinkled mechanically, alternating between blue and white. In my mind, one-eyed owls hooted from antler-sprouting trees. I slept.

I woke the next day hungover. Rain streaked the tall, bare windows, adding a further filter to the daylight which was having enough trouble getting through the persistent layer of cloud. I could still make out the ceiling stars, but they had little effect without the contrast of full darkness. The aggregate of antlers was, of course, in exactly the messy pile in which I’d left it. My relief that they hadn’t organised themselves overnight was absurd.

I tested my legs. Useless. I couldn’t scale the fence now. I couldn’t ride my bike.

I waited.

No one came. Even if the wet weather stopped, there was a good chance it would be too muddy for the builders to come the next day either, and then there was the weekend.

I crawled back to the kitchen and punched in the security code to set the alarm. Then I opened the door.

The siren sang at an unbearable volume. Its source was in the kitchen, twinned with another I could hear whining on the other side of the house. Sticking my head out the door, I could tell there was also an exterior siren. But in the wind it wasn’t nearly as loud as I’d hoped.

I huddled on the step and covered my ears. After about twenty minutes, it all stopped.

Without phone service, there would be no connection to the police.

The driveway was a half-mile long, putting the road beyond the sound.

There were gardens and fields behind the house-perhaps she let someone graze their animals there?

I waited an hour. I ate Weetabix out of the box. No one came.

At first I resisted making any kind of settlement. That would be too much an admission of failure. I explored, using a lone golf club upside down as a cane. I’d found it in the pantry miscellany.

Most of the rooms were empty, punctuated only by occasional swatches and colour samples. One held rolled-up rugs stacked like a log pile.

Some doors were open and some I had to push. I did so with little expectation, just dogged thoroughness. I was mentally cataloguing the place: the rug room, the green room, the room with the ugly lamp. The wonder behind this panelled door rocked me back.

The fabric wallpaper, long tasselled curtains, and upholstery were all dizzyingly patterned, and accented with shiny gold thread. Framed prints of horses leaned against the skirting boards, presumably testing where Lesley wanted to hang them. Several were already up, and the idea that she’d add the dozen more of them cracked a smile in my face. She was poking sly fun at her own house.

This must be where she spent her time here.

The down-filled cushions got flat underneath me in no time; I fell into a light sleep that must have filled hours. When I woke up, it was getting darkish outside. I thought I was hallucinating. The old-fashioned room, its colour faded in the dim light… I thought I’d woken up in Gretchen’s eyes.

I shot up, startled.

I had to prepare for another night, or more. It was time to set up camp.

A red wagon was parked next to the fireplace. It held a box of matches and bits of wood chip, but no logs. I used it to drag in a cache of food from the pantry. A wheel caught on the threshold of the lounge as I reentered, and I stumbled to the floor. I tried using the golf club to help me get up, but my hand was too stiff to hold on to it anymore. I set it alongside the couch, for later when my hand had rested.

I shuffled on my knees back to the kitchen, to fill a couple of large empty Coke bottles with water. I briefly considered dragging back a large cooking pot too, but I swore to myself that it wouldn’t come to that. There was a toilet near enough, just down the corridor.

Reentering the lounge, my left ankle smacked into the doorframe. I lay flat-out down on the floor, biting my sleeve, until the blast of pain subsided.

When I opened my eyes, the view from the floor revealed boxes lined up behind the couch. I retrieved the water bottles from where they’d rolled, and crawled over to look inside the cartons.

Books.

For a moment I revelled. Books and privacy and time are a heady mix. I rummaged through, pulling them out and scanning the titles, separating them into two stacks. I piled the Terry Pratchetts and Feynman lectures within reach from the couch.

Then my situation came back to me. I pulled the box with the rest of its contents over to the fireplace.

I picked up two paperbacks I didn’t recognise. The pages resisted, but they were not in charge. I tore and crumpled, and tossed them in on top of the ashes that were already there. I opened the flue, and set the pages alight using the matches from the red wagon.

Maybe someone would see the smoke and worry about squatters. Even if Lesley’s unpredictability would comfort any observers into assuming it was she herself randomly come home, at least I’d be warm. Briefly.

I grabbed more books and got into a tearing rhythm. I didn’t burn the covers. I started a deck of them, facedown, as a little book graveyard by the hearth. A batch of thick romances added lurid embraces to the pile. I stopped short at a blonde holding a champagne glass. I knew her: Linda Paul’s Susan Maud Madison. I set that one aside, on top of the Pratchetts. I continued to tear and crumple and aimed paper snowballs between the andirons.

Polly and Liv’s paper blizzard. I rubbed my hair as if little scraps still clung there.

The fire didn’t last. I upended the box and pulled it apart. The cardboard burned only a little longer. The cold coming in more than outdid any warmth from the brief flames. I put out the embers and closed the flue.

I stretched out on the couch, and put my feet up on the far armrest. If I rested, in a few days I’d be ready to climb the fence, or at least to troll the edge of the property, looking for a break in the hedge.

I tried to read. I chose the Linda Paul book because it was on top. It was described on the back as a “romp”: Susan Maud gets into “hot water” pretending to be a famous reclusive novelist who has failed to show up for a party.

Most of the scenes take place in a borrowed manor house, so my imagination had little work to do. Despite the cover illustration, for the heroine I pictured Gretchen’s nanny. She was blond and from the correct era; why not? When, later in the book, contradictory features were specified, the nanny persisted in my mind.

I thought again of Wesley from cricket camp. Some of the other boys had played a stupid trick. They told Wesley false descriptions of people: ginger hair, fat, even a limp, more and more exaggerated lies to see what they could get away with. Wesley finally caught on. It was horrible. He’d been betrayed in a way we couldn’t comprehend. Despite learning the truth, he couldn’t shake the false images out of his head.

I sat up. Perhaps neither could Gretchen.

The handwritings were intolerably contradictory. Something in our assumptions or her memory wasn’t right. Ginny’s death date? A misprinted year on the newspaper poem? Perhaps there was a third sibling who wrote “Mother” and “Father”; perhaps those older photographs weren’t of relatives at all. What if the whole box had nothing to do with Gretchen? What if a former resident of her mother’s house had left their own family mementoes behind?

No, that was too far. Too many of the photos matched her expectations for the whole to be entirely random. But an idea just as huge loomed up in my mind.

What if the “nanny” was Gretchen’s mother?

Her mother, and perhaps a hanger-on who’d joined Linda Paul for a few adventures, then been cut off? Who then pretended to actually be her idol?

It all made sense. She called herself Linda Paul. She gave Gretchen a set of books upon completing sixth form, and signed them herself. She took photos of Gretchen and her teenaged friends, and labelled them. Everything else, which perhaps she’d stolen, had been written by Linda-the real Linda-and her sister, Ginny. This fit. This justified the contradictions between the handwritings in the same way that ellipses had explained retrograde. Gretchen had been uniquely vulnerable to such a ruse: a small child, just losing her sight…

Words jumped around on the page in front of me; either my hands shook or I wasn’t focusing. I looked at a print on the wall to test my eyes: It was still.

I looked back at the page. Susan Maud juggled two conversations, one as herself and one as the famous author. Double-meanings and misunderstandings were tossed and caught and balanced.

The words leapt again. I looked up at the wall; the print was steady. My hands were shaking, that’s all, out of cold or exhaustion. I closed the book.

I checked the print regularly. If the horse in the picture stayed serene, I was well enough. It was only my body that shivered; my eyes, and by extension my head, were fine. I was fine. The horse never moved even one leg or flicked its tail. I know because I checked over and over to be sure.

The rain kept on. Not constantly, but enough to ensure that mud stayed mud. Builders failed to appear. I reread half a dozen Discworld books. The throbbing in my ankle dulled somewhat, though it still couldn’t bear much pressure. Solitude and inaction squeezed me from all sides; after three days I popped out of Dovecote like a cork.

I thought the drive would be the safest and most direct route out. That’s what comes from not paying attention.

Unlike in the house, where I held on to the golf club’s flat metal head and used the rubber handgrip against the smooth wood floor, outside it worked better right-way-around: with the head of the iron slicing into the thick mud. It hit hard-packed earth not far down. My progress achieved a nearly jaunty rhythm. How high was the fence, really? How long was the holly hedge? I was sure there would be someplace to burst through. There had to be.

When I’d come to Dovecote, it had been dark. But that was no excuse for not having noticed the brief change that had happened under my feet, a sudden switch from pounding dirt to thumping across planks, then pounding dirt again. The planks covered a ford across the drive, a ford which had been a ditch when I came and was now a rain-filled brook. The planks now just underwater kept cars from getting mired. Wheels would just splash through and ride them.

In my state, mud would have been preferable to wood. I plunged my golf club cane into the shallow, flowing water, expecting to work it deep into sludge until it was a secure hold to help me through.

Instead, it hit plank and slithered forward, splashing me facedown into the wet. I hit the front of my head on the far side. It was all I could do to pull my face up out of the water. The brook wasn’t running hard, but it was enough to nearly roll me. It prowled over me, an endless glide of cold. My forehead bled. I couldn’t see where the golf club was.

I sputtered. It wasn’t worth the energy to yell.

I propped myself up on my hands and knees. I didn’t know if I could make it over the fence now. If I couldn’t, but tried, I might not be able to get back to the house either. I backed out of the water on my hands and knees.

I looked back at the house. This time, the light in the window was true: my light, my little lounge, a real haven, not a trick of the moon.

I turned around and crawled back.

The fever lasted days.

The house, which had seemed so big, shrank down to the room around me. The patterned wallpaper hemmed me in. The fence and holly hedge around the grounds seemed hardly necessary.

I don’t usually dream. People don’t believe that. Or, I should clarify, women don’t usually believe that. It’s been insisted to me over and over that I must dream, and that my denial of it is some sort of a “repression.”

An old girlfriend used to ask me first thing, before I was properly awake, what I had dreamed. Not if, what. I never had the answer she wanted.

But, in this fever, I dreamed.

I was back at school during a half-term, as I’d once fantasised. I had the buildings all to myself. I scrawled on blackboards; I ran in the corridors.

Then the holiday ended. I waited, but no one came back.

I rationed the food. When I was ready to try escape again, I went better prepared.

I had no cane anymore. My right foot had improved, but the left still required some coddling. I didn’t want to crawl through the ford. It was too cold to get wet again. I tested the red wagon by the fireplace for my weight. It bowed a little but held. I could ride it over the planks.

I’d found secateurs in the kitchen. I could try cutting through the hedge, or even attempt cutting the wires of the fence. I tossed them in the little wagon and dragged it outside.

There was no rain, just a damp haze in the air. I shuffled forward on my knees, pulling the wagon behind. I looked like an actor playing at being a little boy.

I think it was that ridiculousness that made me first angry at rescue. That, and the single-mindedness that comes from desperation. I’d planned to go down the drive. This car blocked my plan.

Lesley had come back.

She didn’t ask me anything, just helped me to get upright and back into the house. She had hot Indian takeout for herself in the car, which she brought to me. She put a blanket over my shoulders. I assume she eventually remembered giving me the key. It had been five years.

She took everything in without visible shock until she realised her part in what had happened. “You stepped on the plates! Oh, God, Nick, I’m sorry…” She put her hands on mine. She tried to laugh at how pitiful I looked, but tightened her grip. “God… I hadn’t thought… I hadn’t thought you’d ever really need to come. Nick, what happened?”

Lesley must have been over thirty. But she’d always looked “grown-up” to me, so the changes were… appropriate. She was still in the right proportion to me, always older and wiser, always beautiful. She was as beautiful as a person could ever be.

“I made some poor decisions,” I said. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone.” She looked alarmed so I quickly explained: “I haven’t done anything bad, not like that. I just… I had to leave.” It had seemed so urgent at the time.

I put more chicken tikka into my mouth. I didn’t want to explain.

“Does anyone know you’re here?”

I shook my head.

“God, Nick. Did you tell someone you were going?”

“I know,” I said, putting both fists against my head. “I know.”

She looked at her phone. “My mobile’s out of charge.” She put it back in her bag. “You should see a doctor.”

I think she meant for my ankles but, given my demeanour, she could have meant anything.

“I was worried about slipping in the shower, and getting in and out of a bath,” I explained, justifying my Robinson Crusoe look. Hitting my head crossing the ford had frightened me. “I’ve been brushing my teeth and washing my hands; I’ve done that much,” I asserted, suddenly almost in tears.

She told me about her recent trip to Kosovo, from which she’d just returned. She was on the board of several charitable groups and had gone to inspect a children’s home they’d funded.

I felt small, which was wonderful. I felt like nothing in comparison to attempted genocide and potential independence. I felt like no one was looking in my direction, and I could finally relax.

“What have you been up to?” she asked, as if this were a normal conversation.

“I’ve almost completed my thesis. I’d like to get a Fellowship.”

“You want to be one of those eccentric old men who live in college rooms as lifelong bachelors?” she teased.

I shook my head, smiling. “You know it’s not like that,” I corrected her.

And it’s not. It’s just normal, a more peaceful version of normal. As a child I’d been treated as a prodigy. The truth is, I liked lecture halls because the seats were set out and the focal point was obvious. People had been impressed, thinking me clever. Really, I’d just been suited to the atmosphere.

“We’ll go now,” she said, standing up when I’d eaten everything. “Or would you like to shower first?” she added, reminding me what a mess I’d made of myself.

She would have to help me. It would be too embarrassing. It all would. Where would I let her drive me? Would I just walk into the Chanders’ house as if nothing had happened? I’d have to go home. To my parents’ house. It’s what I’d been wanting, to put them out of their grief, but my shame swelled greater than my compassion.

“I can’t,” I said.

But I whispered it, and she said, “What?”

“I can’t,” I said more loudly, pushing on the second word. “It’s too embarrassing.”

This is not how I wanted to be in front of her.

“I’m not proud of myself right now,” I explained. “I deeply distressed one friend, misled another, and stirred up things that would have been better left alone. Now here I am, a dirty hermit hiding out in the house of someone whose respect I would really like to have. I’m not respectable right now, at all, and I can’t even wash myself.” I’d actually started a scraggly beard, which takes some doing with my fair hair. “I’ve been brushing my teeth,” I repeated. It seemed important that she know that.

Lesley laughed again. It took great rib-spreading breaths to make a laugh like that. She put her hands on her face but even they couldn’t make it stop. At last it petered out, and two little wet spots on her cheeks sparkled from reflected light. “I’ve just been among people who, fifteen years ago, were murdering each other,” she said quietly. “You can’t shock me. All right? I’m not shocked.”

My supervisor, Richard, sometimes has to defend himself to creationists, because he combines his faith with his science. He told me about a time he got in an argument over Noah’s Ark. He’d said to some devout person, or at least in her hearing, that his understanding of the idea of a “whole world” flood had flexibility. That, depending on who was telling the story, “whole world” could mean different things. The borders of one person’s whole world may not match another’s, or even overlap. This upset her a lot. But I know what he meant. And I realised in this moment, here with Lesley, that my whole world was actually rather small. It matters, of course it matters, because it has people in it, but it’s not the actual whole world, and I needed to get that straight.

“You’re right,” I said.

If I’d been washed, I’d have reached out to her. I would have pulled her to me and made love to her somewhere in the house on some grand bed or uncomfortable Victorian sofa. I’d have again ignored Richard’s admonition not to rush. I’d have rushed ahead and lost myself in it. I wanted to rush, even though rushing had, so far, been a terrible idea.

“I broke up with my fiancé,” she said, out of nowhere. “He works in Kosovo right now, though he’s being transferred to Congo. He’s with an American charity. He’s American. He’s saving the world.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

“His world, my world. You know. I don’t want to live there. Either there. Maybe I should, but I don’t.”

She stopped talking about it. I tried to picture her in Africa, but I don’t know what Congo is like.

“Your father,” she said, “will kill me if I don’t promptly return you.”

“I would like to bathe,” I said, determined now to risk a fall coming out of the tub, knowing at least that I wouldn’t be left shivering on a tiled floor for potentially weeks. “I can do it myself.” God, I sounded five years old.

“Help yourself. There’s a ground-floor suite with a tub in the east corner. Leave your clothes on the bed and I’ll put them in the wash. Soak. I’ll put my toiletry bag in there. Some soap and a razor.”

She turned on a water heater in some far cupboard. The hot bath felt wonderful. I scrubbed myself, and shaved my face with her leg razor. I drained the tub and towelled off inside of it. Getting out was all right because she would be there if my one good foot slipped, though I was not going to let that happen. I hobbled into the adjoining bedroom, holding on to the tub edge, then the doorframe. Of course my clothes weren’t ready yet. She walked in just then with a robe in her arms. I shook my head.

“God, I want you,” I said, helpless to get her naked myself. I wanted to pull off her shirt but she was wearing a turtleneck. She pulled off her own clothes and guided me to the bed. It was an enormous, indulgent bed-maybe an American king, I’ve heard about those things. Right then it was big enough to be the whole world.

“I can’t believe you don’t drive,” she said.

“I’ve lived all my life in London and Cambridge; why would I drive?”

“I still don’t believe you can’t drive!” she mocked, and still hadn’t started the car. We were in the curved drive in front of Dovecote’s massive front door. The car was spattered with mud from her journey from the airport, but the weather was clear now. It was dark, but there was a bright moon. “Are your legs really all right?” she asked seriously. I nodded. The left one still hurt, but it wasn’t horrible. It wasn’t broken. So she got out and came around to my side.

“No, Lesley, I don’t…” I don’t know why I felt such an aversion to the idea, but I really didn’t want to.

“I want to teach you,” she said. There was an absurd and irresistible sexual undertone to it. I shook my head and groaned, knowing I’d give in. “It’s dark. It’s muddy. I don’t know these roads.” Thank goodness the rains had stopped.

“I’ll lead you,” she said, right up in my face, through the open window. I kissed her again, I had to. “All right,” I said, getting out of the car. “All right.”

I strapped myself into the driver’s seat. I thought of the mechanics of the engine and the condition of the roads. I didn’t think of how I would face my parents, what Gretchen would do, whether police would be involved. I was grateful that the battery of Lesley’s mobile phone had expired en route from Pristina, preventing me from responsibly phoning home. There would be this privacy, this fantasy, for at least a while longer.

She pulled a map from a pocket behind the passenger seat, and showed me the route home. I objected to taking the M11 and insisted on village roads; they’re skinnier and windier, but much less likely to have other cars on at that time of night. I didn’t think I could face competition or confrontation. Bury Lane, Church Road, Crawley End… The names of the streets washed over me. Across the A505, then through Newton, Harston, and Haslingfield. Polly and Liv popped into my thoughts, and the way those street and town names would sound so English to them. Then I put the girls out of my mind. I wanted to stay in Lesley’s world as long as I could. Church Street, Brook Road, streets called after their towns, and then yet another Church Street. They all sounded familiar. Village streets tend to share the same names.

Lesley patiently explained the gears; I could manage the clutch if I squeezed my teeth together while my foot pressed down. I made the windscreen wipers whoosh and flashed the headlamps. I felt giddy like I had when visiting the war museum at Duxford with school, and had been allowed into the cockpit of a World War II T-6 Harvard Warbird.

“It’s going to feel different when it moves,” I said aloud, when I had only meant to think it. Somehow this too was a kind of double entendre. Everything was.

“Take me to Cambridge,” she said, like it was an outing. She’d always made me feel like a grown man.

I used the bright headlamps, because no other cars were out.

I dismissed the thatched cottages and fields as we passed them to concentrate on the road itself, but, really, I’ve always ignored them. My blindness to the picturesque had driven Liv crazy.

I braked to cross the A505, and, when I tried to start again, the engine made horrible screechings. I pushed down the clutch, winced, and changed gears, though apparently to a worse gear, which I quickly corrected. “You should take over,” I said.

“If you really want to switch with me you can pull in at the pub in Fowlmere. It’s not far.” She sounded tired, and her willingness to accept my surrender made me change my mind.

Driving was all right. I said it to myself over and over: It was all right. It all hummed along, between occasional dire gear changes. I even enjoyed it. We were almost to Newton, which sounded familiar, but most of them do. The road here was unusually long and straight. I looked over at Lesley, proud to be managing the car, to have accomplished something in this mess I’d made. She was fast asleep.

This is where things went wrong.

All along the way I’d been reassured by the signs pointing the direction toward nearby towns. I meant to be heading toward Harston. A sign in Newton assured me I was. Then a sign in Harston assured me I was heading for Haslingfield. This was all good. It was where I was supposed to be.

On the Haslingfield High Street, a sign for Harston pointed me up New Road. I couldn’t remember if I’d been through Harston yet. All the place names had become a jumble. Was New Road somewhere I’d meant to go? It was too common a name for its familiarity to warrant confidence.

I took it anyway, and then a singular name stood out to me in the light of New Road ’s yellow streetlamps: Cantelupe Road. Like cantaloupes. Surely this street must be part of the route we’d sketched out. Why else would I remember it?

I turned. It was unlit, single track, and unpromising as a route to the distant ambient glow that was Cambridge. There wasn’t room to turn around. I had no idea how to reverse without stalling the car.

Still moving forward, I reached for the map in Lesley’s lap.

I never saw it, not even in the headlamps. I must have been looking at the map at just that moment. There was just a horrible thud and then a bump-bump, a lump in the road under the left side of the car. Both left wheels went over it, and the car tilted to the right. It almost went over; I felt like it was going to; I pulled the wheel far to the left to compensate. We ended up sideways to the road, across the middle of it. The headlamps faced directly onto a house, Tudor-looking, very English, with a sign instead of a number: Rose Cottage. Our headlamps shone rudely into the front windows, but I dared not turn them off. We had to see. I wanted to move the car, but I’d become disoriented. I didn’t want to run over whatever it was again.

“A dog?” Lesley asked. She was awake, already exiting the car, taking things in hand. She grabbed a torch from the glovebox and swept its beam over the road. I scrambled out myself, following the torch beam with my eyes.

It was a person. The mid-body had been crushed. The limbs were stretched apart at surprising angles like they were running away from each other. Lesley swept the beam over to the face.

I jumped backwards. I pointed. Lesley turned the beam onto me. I gibbered at her.

The face was Gretchen’s. She’d been pushed almost in two by the weight of my driving over her abdomen.

I did something terrible: Instead of wishing for it to not be real, I wished that I wasn’t crazy. I wanted Lesley to see her too. I didn’t want to be losing my mind.