The first reading of the Bill would be after recess. Jules stayed to help Diggory brief the minister on the opening sections, then slipped away from Westminster as soon as he decently could. The long, luminous evening was dimming into twilight, the heat of the day radiating out from the paving stones along Petty France. At the edge of St James's Park, Jules had a sense of entering another world. Someone was practising fire poi, arcs of flame sweeping through the air, and the lights of Piccadilly seemed impossibly distant on the other side of the park. Jules wondered how he'd find Ari and Eilidh, who hadn't been involved with this round of ministerial briefings and would both have been here for hours, but he heard his name being called before he'd gone five steps.
"Jules! Over here!"
It was Eilidh, who sat down again with a haste that didn't suggest impeccable sobriety. Jules hurried, suddenly wanting nothing more than to be sprawled on the grass with all the rest.
"Hi," he said, giving Ari a copy of the draft explanatory notes to the Bill and a bunch of pink tulips. "Do you think, as a collective, we drink too much?"
"I don't know what you mean," Eilidh said, gesturing expansively at the loose gathering of people sprawled in various attitudes of dissipation on the grass. The picnic, which constituted the departmental summer party, had begun in the middle of the afternoon and continued lazily through to this late dusk. "No one here has been drinking. Perish the thought."
"Perish it," Ari agreed, flicking through the notes to the Bill before looking in surprise at the flowers in his other hand. "These aren't for me, are they?"
"They're not not for you," Jules said. "I had lunch with my mother in Borough Market. She thought we both might like them."
She'd also tried to drag them both to dinner this evening, but Jules had demurred. It helped to maintain polite relations with his father, if only to retain access to his connections with the other hereditary peers, but there was a limit to what he would inflict on Ari.
"That's adorable, I hate it," Eilidh said. "Speaking of adorable things, Diggory's girlfriend is here. The one who apparently he didn't meet on Tinder but somewhere really wholesome, like the civil service sports and social club."
"Have you considered you're a little obsessed with Diggory's sex life?" Ari murmured, giving up on the Bill in favour of pouring warm white wine into a recyclable cup. Jules leaned in and kissed his cheek, absurdly pleased to see him. It had been a good day, a day of forward motion, but exhausting in the way of such things.
"Shut up, Ari, you are deeply invested in it also," Eilidh said. "Actually I think that's her. I think they're coming over here. I think we should panic."
"Yes," Jules said. "Rather than introduce ourselves nicely and say how pleased we are to meet her, we should panic."
"Jules!" Diggory called, picking his way through the crowd of people. "Everyone, this is Kate."
Kate was tall and had brown skin and eyes, and looked understandably nervous at meeting her new boyfriend's senior colleagues after they'd clearly been marinating in wine for several hours.
"Hi, Kate," Jules said, not trusting the other two to behave themselves. "I'm Jules, that's Eilidh, this is my partner, Ari."
"Hi," Kate said. "Nice to meet you all."
She sat down and accepted a cup, and Jules breathed out in relief. Diggory looked happy and relaxed for the first time all day. He'd been nervous about doing the ministerial briefing without Ari, but he'd got through it with élan. Forward motion, Jules thought again, settling in and letting some of the conversation wash over him. He had never particularly enjoyed summer in London, having spent too many years peering at graphs of rising global temperatures, but he wasn't immune to the honey-sweetness of this evening. He cast off the day's swirl of statistics and policy indicators and lay flat on his back, half-listening to Eilidh and Ari telling some shared war story to Kate. She was laughing in the right places. Diggory was smiling.
"So you're also at Energy and Efficiency," Kate said. It seemed she'd thought that Ari was Jules's plus-one for the party. "Wait, does that mean you're Diggory's boss?"
"I used to be," Ari said. "By the time we get to the first reading of the Climate Change Bill, I will be again."
"If we ever do get to it," Diggory said. "We've got about twelve hundred pages still to go."
"Read them in the bath," Ari said, helpfully. "It's what I always used to do."
"The interim Bill manager is nice, but she's not you," Eilidh said to Ari. "By which I mean, she's nice. She's friendly and she never asks anyone if they were born this idiotic or do they work at it."
"Maybe I'll have mellowed by the time I come back," Ari suggested, and was elbowed by Jules and had bits of grass thrown at him by Eilidh. Kate looked on with polite incomprehension, not wanting to ask the obvious question. Jules didn't volunteer the information, feeling that it was too close to the bone. Ari hadn't resigned or been sacked or gone on sick leave, or years-late compassionate leave, or any official version of what Eilidh had been tactfully calling Transitional Arrangements For The Prevention of Crack-Ups. Technically speaking, he was just taking the ordinary sort of annual leave a person might have accumulated when they had worked pretty much non-stop for two years. Jules had been quietly relieved, nevertheless. This was July, the beginning of the long parliamentary recess; the Climate Change Bill would be brought to the House in the autumn.
"If your weird love affair with a spad didn't do it, then nothing will," Eilidh said decisively.
Diggory looked as though he wished he'd never come over to see them, or been born at all. But Kate laughed again; Jules had a feeling that this entire encounter was going to become an anecdote she told at dinner parties.
"It's been lovely to meet you all," she said, standing up, reaching for her handbag and something else large and blocky. A violin case, Jules realised. "But the civil service string ensemble is doing a little recital for the picnic. I've got to go and do my bit."
It hadn't been the sports and social club after all. Jules sat up, just as Eilidh said, "Ari was in that."
"Were you?" Kate said. "I don't think I've ever seen you there."
"I used to be a lot more involved with it than I am now," Ari said. "A friend of mine from the Department of Health ran it for a while."
"Well, you and your friend should come back to rehearsals," Kate said. "We need more people if we're going to perfect our instrumental cover of Call Me Maybe."
"That sounds extremely terrible," Ari said. "I'd like to, if I can."
Kate beamed. Jules reached out and squeezed Ari's hand, unobtrusively.
"Bill allowing," Ari added, after a moment. "And, ah, my friend isn't with us any more. She died a couple of years ago."
"I'm so sorry," Kate said. "I didn't mean to bring it up."
"You weren't to know," Ari said, passing a cup to her. "Take some warm wine with you."
Kate thanked him, hefted her violin case and went over to where Jules could just make out some other people with various instruments, passing around sheet music. Diggory scurried after her.
"Well done, that boy," Eilidh said, once they were both out of earshot. "She's nice. You're going to join the string ensemble again?"
"Perhaps," Ari said. "I'll have time. You and Jules will take care of the Bill."
The shadows were dense enough now for a little indiscretion. Jules kissed him again, a promise for later redemption, and lay back on the grass.
Presently, the music started. Jules didn't recognise the piece, but Ari obviously did, echoing the phrasing with delicate movements of his fingers. It was beautiful, even half-carried away on the breeze. Jules thought about Ari's friend Lil, who might, in another life, have been here with them, and about his own other life, of being less than what this love and work had made him.
"Don't fall asleep," he said. "I'm not carrying you, a Bill and a bunch of tulips through Westminster."
"You would, if you had to," Ari said, dreamily. "We do what we have to."
"Yes," Jules said, with love like the weight of earth. "Yes, we do."