iii

It was after eight by the time I arrived at my B&B. As the landlady said something about keys, I looked around and realized: it hardly felt like I was in Cambridge. The out-of-date celebrity magazines fanned primly in the lounge, the painfully twee countryside prints that lined the walls—all reminders that life in the city had existed beyond the tastes and experiences of us students. It hadn’t crossed my mind at the time. Once I’d dumped my case upstairs and devoured the complimentary Viennese whirls, I headed out into the dusk.

I’d planned to meet Tim at a pub out past John’s. While his role as a pediatric surgeon meant his diary was rather fuller than mine, it was mainly thanks to him that we’d caught up once or twice a year since leaving college. Whenever he visited extended family in Salford we made the effort to meet, and I took him to hipster bars and gastropubs as if they, and not the cheaper sports pubs, were my locals. But, unbelievably (for him, at least), this was the first time since we were students that we’d met in Cambridge. We’d agreed to have a quick drink tonight, and then Tim would be my guest for the following evening at the Cavendish Scholarship dinner. He knew nothing about singing except that he was very bad at it, but he was enthusiastic at the idea of a free four-course meal in our old digs.

Walking the once familiar roads, I found them empty but for the bicycle lamps that sliced through the dark. At one point, my feet took me automatically in the direction of an old supervisor’s house, and I spun around just as the first raindrops tapped me on the nose.

Eventually, there it was. The Apple Tree, an image of Isaac Newton on its swinging sign. I was reminded of something Bryn had told me: that Newton wrote more books on alchemy than on any other subject, all unpublished since the work was considered heretical. There can be few schoolchildren in the country who don’t know this iconic Cambridge figure, but fewer still who do know about his secret societies or his apocalyptic predictions or his pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone. History has gently edited Newton’s achievements such that what we remember is the falling fruit, the bumped head, the discovery of a force that pulls us toward the earth.

As this flew through my mind, it was followed by a picture of something terrible, the thing I’d dreamed (nightmared?) many times—and I thought I felt gravity itself, tugging at me so hard that it might pull me onto the pavement. A passing student looked at me with alarm, likely thinking I was drunk. I hurried, panicked, into the pub, brushing rain from my coat, buoyed by the warmth of an open fire and the tang of vinegar on freshly fried fish.

There at the bar was Tim, his face a shade slacker and his body a little softer, his grin as broad as ever. We hugged and, after he insisted on getting the first round, we did the usual updates (his wife and daughter both well).

“What’s the plan for tomorrow?’ he asked, touching his lips to the foamy top of his pint.

“Auditions at ten,” I replied. “Right through until afternoon, with a bit of deliberating between the judges. So I’ll probably be back at college, to get changed and everything, by six-ish.”

“Aren’t you changing at your B&B?”

“I’m only at the B&B tonight. For tomorrow—you’re going to love this—I’ve booked a room in college.”

Tim raised his eyebrows. “What’s a young professional like you doing in a scummy old college room? And after I said you could stay at ours!”

“I thought it would be fun. Memory lane. I can see what the youth have done to the old place.”

Tim gave his head a baffled shake. “Have you forgotten what the beds are like? Best get your chiropractor on standby.”

Only then did I realize how odd my plans sounded. But the pull I’d felt since reading Frances’s letter wasn’t just about the city. It was about college itself, the space we’d inhabited when it all unraveled. I had the feeling that I’d been rehearsing, polishing my memories like scales and arpeggios, fixing them in the mind and body. But why? To carry them back to the place we’d shared? To show, by my service to his family, that I had never wanted things to end the way they did?

Seeing his puzzled expression, it made me sad to think of the deceptions I’d dealt poor Tim. Not just the normal sleight of hand between friends, like when I invited him to my most prestigious concerts but failed to tell him about the ones in poorly ventilated village halls or cabbage-scented care homes. The concealment of the fear and guilt that hung always at my shoulder. At least I’d never needed to exaggerate my love life. I’d done just fine there.

I searched for an easier subject. “Do you remember Bryn getting kicked out of here?”

“No. When?”

“First year. A charity pub crawl, I think. The blokes were dressed in women’s underwear.”

“God, I can’t remember that. Was I there?”

“You must have been, everyone was. Weren’t you in a red nightie or something?”

“Red always was my color.”

“They were by the fireplace,” I said, pointing. “With that American mathmo who left after a term. Ruben? They had a bottle of whisky, like they were in a Western or something. Then Bryn tried to climb up the chimney and they made him leave.”

Tim shook his head. “Well. Probably best that kind of thing is in the dim and distant past.”

I nodded, stared into my glass. But Tim was wrong. Bryn wasn’t distant at all. In fact, I could feel it strongly: he was very close. And getting closer.

In those brisk January days of second term, my college world expanded like a spotlight growing on a stage. Having established myself as his musical partner, I actually spent time with Bryn’s group, at more intimate parties in his room, or in pubs by the river.

It wasn’t always easy. While Sarah was superficially friendly, she barely remembered our conversations from one meeting to the next. On learning (again) that I was a musician, she’d promise to put me in touch with family friends who worked for Glyndebourne or the Royal Opera House and never follow through. Jamie on the other hand didn’t even pretend to like me. He kept his distance, regarding me with a steely suspicion, as if I might pick his pocket or try and sell him a timeshare. That Kenny bloke was worst of all—he made a game of my existence, mimicking my accent and asking questions of me as if I were a newly discovered life form (“You’ve honestly never heard of the London Review of Books?”). His most annoying habit was hanging around Bryn’s neck, constantly muttering in his ear in a way that left everybody else out.

Those gatherings were easier when I invited Alexa along. She was chatty, she was funny. Crucially, she was familiar with the public school manners I found so perplexing, and—dialing certain parts of her personality up or down—fitted seamlessly into the crowd. It must have been her heightened sense of empathy, a chameleonic social awareness. Laughing easily at people’s jokes, whether juvenile or barbed, she was the perfect party guest, the most amenable audience member.

Berenice, though, rarely joined our parties. When she’d said she didn’t intend to spend much time on her cousin, she’d meant it.

And so I clung to my place in Bryn’s group. I learned to keep up with everyone else—to power through a bottle of wine before dinner without passing out during pudding, to chug alcopops that were sickly enough to make your teeth squeak. All this without ending up in any more Old Court bathrooms. I became intrigued by the oddness of inebriation: the losing of time, the blunting of senses, the muddy memories that differed from person to person.

This meant I had less time to spend with Tim. I began to cut short our study sessions, then miss them altogether, persuaded by Bryn that while our books could wait, this sunset, this film screening, this paddle of vodka shots—well, it wouldn’t. Now and again, on my way to another adventure, I’d spy Tim in our old spot in the library, frowning over his books, and I’d wonder whether to ask him along.

But Tim, who didn’t crackle with electricity so much as glow with a hot-water-bottle warmth, wouldn’t have liked Bryn’s gatherings anyway. There were people climbing out of windows and into locked buildings, people breaking into the closed-up parts of other colleges (I’m pretty sure Jamie once stole the TV from Pembroke’s common room). Dark feats of endurance, like when some guy poked a needle through the skin of his forearm just because Bryn told him to. Or when a girl tattooed Bryn’s initials onto her thigh with a biro and a candle-scorched safety pin. Strange tests of allegiance, offerings that Bryn would receive like an obliging regent. Often, when the porters were distracted and he was feeling particularly reckless, Bryn would lead people out of a New Court window and up onto the college roof, but this was the one jape in which I refused to take part—instead, I offered to act as lookout, staring out across the courtyard while my new friends moved above me.

There was no Truth or Dare, like in other student gatherings, no faux-ironic Spin the Bottle, games designed to help us safely unveil ourselves to one another. And yet Bryn’s parties were much more revealing. Unprompted, people told outrageous stories about their sex lives, about committing real, serious crimes. Keen to make an impression, I wondered about telling tales from Peter Warlock’s life as if they were my own, but I decided that these tales of Paris jails and naked motorcycle rides were obviously too colorful to belong to me. I felt very strongly the need for stories that would secure my place within the circle.

Perhaps the thing that made Bryn’s coterie so different from Tim and his friends: they didn’t see Cambridge the same way. They looked upon the city and its traditions with an indifference that bordered on disdain. The age-old structures, the traditions that impressed the rest of us so much, Bryn and his friends would as soon have pulled them all down. They were completely unafraid to break rules, to ignore instructions. That’s not to say that they weren’t interested in learning—only that, if they were given a reading list, they’d read a wholly different set of books. If they were given an essay to write, they’d write an essay on why the question itself was inherently flawed. Perhaps it’s only natural to want to break out of structures when you already sit so neatly within them, when your life is held so securely.

It’s funny that I always think of this as “Bryn’s group.” Because, a lot of the time, he wasn’t even there. We simply moved around his absence as we did his presence, planets orbiting a great sun.

This was also the time Mona started following us around. As his fellow mathmo, Mona had supervisions with Bryn. She also lived directly below him on the first floor of Old Court’s S staircase. These facts seemed to be her entire claim to the group.

I’d thought Mona was okay when we’d met in first term. But, the more I knew of her, the more aggressively ordinary she seemed. She didn’t drink. Although her tutors described her as a bright star, conversationally she was a thumping great black hole. To paint a picture, she carried a soft toy cat everywhere she went—a reminder of a long-deceased Balinese bought by her parents as a companion that wouldn’t aggravate her allergies. It seemed always to be poking out of her bag and annoyed me to an irrational degree.

You might wonder why, as we moved around the common room or the bar, she crept so determinedly after us. But I knew that, like so many, she was in love with Bryn. I saw her lingering outside the porters’ lodge early in the mornings, waiting to see whether he’d appear in time for them to walk to lectures together (this despite the fact that he hardly ever went to lectures). I was also confident that Bryn’s courtesy toward her was directly related to her willingness to share completed coursework. Mona was the Cambridge we were trying not to be: our nerdy pasts made manifest. Rejecting her was our way of protecting the new identities we were so carefully constructing. And look, the fact is—she was really fucking annoying.

So, when Mona trotted into the common room and plonked herself beside Bryn, I’d look meaningfully at Alexa. As she followed us up the stone staircase to hall for breakfast, we’d find a spot where there wasn’t quite enough space for her to join us, and when she artlessly copied our gestures and phrases, we made up new, ridiculous ones to see if she’d copy those too. I’m not proud of it. But I’m supposed to be telling the truth now.

One cold February day, perhaps two or three weeks into term, I found Bryn, Sarah, and Jamie having lunch in hall. At first I was puzzled as to why, when I gave them a cheery hello, they offered me only sullen mumbles—but when I sat and joined their muted conversation, I learned that Bryn was in a foul mood, having just been bollocked by college. (I didn’t dare ask why, but I got the impression that the porters had found something prohibited in his room. And while Bryn didn’t care about the ensuing fine, he wasn’t too happy about the master having a word with Frances.) Just when I thought the atmosphere couldn’t get any worse, Mona came trudging gracelessly toward us, tray in hand.

Jamie, not helping the situation, elbowed Bryn. “Mate. Your girlfriend’s here.”

Bryn looked up, unsmiling. Mona approached the space we’d carelessly left free, her face benign and uninspiring as a cow looking over a gate. She stared at Jamie as he plowed valiantly through a leathery pork chop. “Anyone sitting here?” she asked, brightly.

Jamie kept his eyes on his plate. “Before I answer,” he replied, “are you expecting a statement of fact or an invitation?”

Sarah guffawed instinctively before checking herself. “Stop,” she said, gesturing around the table, “we’re being charitable today.” Then, using the generic address she favored for people she barely remembered, to Mona: “Have a seat, babe.”

Slightly dubious, Mona turned to Bryn. Then, using what was presumably her most seductive conversation starter: “Did you finish the paper for Jennings?”

Bryn grimaced. “Barely started it. I’m fucked.”

Mona looked at him with deep concern. “If you want to talk through it, come round. Any time.”

I winced at this patronizing offer, wondering whether Bryn would feel intellectually undermined in front of his friends. But a curious smile spread across his face. “Really?” he said. “Any time?”

“Of course.”

“Thanks Mona. I might take you up on that.”

And then he reached slowly toward her—it honestly looked as if he was going to grab her by the tit—before putting his hand to the frizzy hair at the back of her head. The action was weirdly, deeply sensual, and we held ourselves in stunned stillness. Mona visibly shivered.

Then, Bryn’s hand was in front of her face bearing a shiny red apple.

She squealed and blushed. We feigned indifference.

“Very biblical.”

“Attention seeker.”

“Yeah, but can you do it with a pineapple?”

Perhaps I was the only one who noticed because, rather than focusing on the trick itself, I’d been distracted by the dynamic of this unlikely double act. But when Bryn took the apple from Mona’s hair with one hand, I saw that his other hand drifted down to her waist. And though I couldn’t swear to it, I thought his fingers dipped subtly into the pocket of her sensible coat. Almost like he was depositing something.

I remembered hearing somewhere that magicians are most worried about those audience members on the fringe of a performance. The ones who aren’t in the front rows, who aren’t touched by the magician’s gaze—they’re the ones who might just spot the five-pound note being tucked under the watch strap. And here, on the sidelines, I’d seen something. I just had no idea what the trick might be.

Alexa was particularly irritated by Mona’s fawning over Bryn. We laughed about it one evening as we trudged to orchestra rehearsal in the middle of an insistent snowfall.

“Maybe she’ll send Bryn a Valentine,” I said, enjoying the sound of my voice as it reverberated around the frigid streets.

“Written in binary. Then she’ll invite him round for a study session, to decode it.”

“Ask him to look over her vital statistics.”

“Eugh. No. If Mona ever removed that horrible cardigan, there’d be one underneath it exactly the same.”

“Ha! She’s totally cardigan squared.”

“Cardigan recurring.”

“You never know,” I said, “maybe there’s another side to her personality. She might be a bondage queen.”

“She doesn’t have a personality to begin with, let alone one with different sides.”

As we cut through King’s College, a carpet of white stretched right out back to the river, dappled with lamplight. Christmas-card trees wore a festive dusting of frost, as if they’d lost track of time.

“Speaking of Valentine’s Day,” Alexa asked, “do you and Berenice have plans?”

“Actually, she’s got to be in London for the weekend,” I said. “Family thing. So I’ll probably stay in with a takeaway and a box of tissues.”

“Too much information.”

“Tissues for my tears! Get your mind out of the gutter. What about you?”

“Well, as a single person, I’ll likely have a chow mein and a wank.”

I cackled. That was not the kind of joke I could have had with Berenice. “Well, I suppose self-love is valid on Valentine’s Day.”

“It’s for the best, given my track record. Either a guy is obsessed with me and I can’t bear him, or I’m the one who’s obsessed.”

“Hmmm. My mum used to talk about every relationship having ‘The Lover and The Loved.’ One who does all the loving, and one who soaks it all up.”

She slowed momentarily on the icy path. “Do you think a person can ever really be happy, being The Lover?”

I shrugged. “I presume most Lovers don’t realize that’s what they are. And maybe it’s worse to be The Loved, knowing that you don’t feel that intense passion that you’re supposed to feel. Yeah, The Loved get all the adoration, but they get the guilt too.”

“I guess both The Lover and The Loved can be happy so long as they can persuade themselves there’s no such thing.”

We made our way out of King’s, past The Backs.

“Would you rather,” said Alexa, “be forced to do bad deeds but have everyone believe you’re a good person, or never do anything bad but have people think you’re a dick?”

I laughed. “Is this coursework or something?”

“Just answer the question.”

“How bad are the deeds?”

“Slapping old women. Forcing your loved ones to sit through Hawley’s talk about the college’s medieval manuscripts.”

I winced. “Honestly? I’d probably do the bad stuff and have people think I was good.”

“Knowing you’re living a lie?”

“It’s a lie either way. So, I’m thinking, which lie allows me to live a happier life.”

“So it comes back to self-love. Because it depends whether you value your own opinion of yourself above other people’s. You, like many of us, value other people’s opinions above your own.”

“Is that such a bad thing? I’m going to need people’s good opinion if I’m going to make friends, get a job …”

She shook her head. “Do you honestly think people only offer friendship—and jobs, whatever—to people they think are good? Do you think being a good person is really what gets you ahead?”

“Maybe not. I hadn’t considered the difference between being thought good and being liked. Anyhow, don’t change the subject. We were talking about your plans for Valentine’s Day. Isn’t there anyone who might tempt you away from that chow mein?”

She shrugged, Maybe.

I made an educated guess. “Is it Bryn?”

For a while, she said nothing, and our footsteps landed wetly on the salted pavement. Then she said, quietly: “What do you think he’d say?”

Honestly, I had no clue how Bryn felt about Alexa. But I thought there was a good chance he’d be interested. Sure, he had his pick of beautiful girls, but Alexa was attractive in an interesting way. Her teeth, slightly gapped, her strong, aquiline nose—hers was a charming, boutique beauty, not the mass market kind you saw in magazines.

Also, the fact that Alexa asked, that she thought I might know Bryn’s secrets—I was flattered. “I know he’s hard to read,” I said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if he feels the same way. He’s very attentive.”

“He’s attentive to everybody,” she said, adjusting her woolen hat, now speckled with snowflakes. “You know, there’s part of me that would rather never know. Do you know what I mean? Like, living with the potential that something could happen is better than knowing for sure that it never will.”

“Come on. Do you want me to say something to him?”

“Fuck, no! Well. I don’t know.” She paused. “Let me think about it.”

“Fine,” I replied. “But for now, keep going as you are. The right people will end up together, you’ll see.”

“Thanks, Mister Hallmark Cards.”

Throughout that night’s rehearsal, I pondered. It could be a very cool thing if she and Bryn were to get together. To people in college, she and Berenice came as a pair. So if Alexa and Bryn got together, our two couplings would make a happy foursome. Alexa and Bryn, me and Berenice. Alexa and Berenice. Me and Bryn.

Wondering about my own dynamic with Berenice, I realized that I couldn’t identify either of us as The Lover or The Loved. Of course, I saw her as my better in many—most—ways. She was smarter. She was kind.

Did I like her, or did I think she was good?

In the end, I bought her a card and some chocolates, ready for when she got back from London. And on Valentine’s Day itself, I had a takeaway and a wank.

At weekends, locals filled the Cambridge nightclubs. And with no student deals on double spirits, no free entry for those dressed as superheroes, Friday and Saturday evenings revolved around takeaway noodles in the common room with reality TV blaring in the background. So I was delighted when, one afternoon around the middle of term, Bryn caught me in the post room and asked whether I wanted to join him and a few friends for the weekend at his family’s home somewhere near Chipping Norton. This invitation was all the more thrilling given there’d be a select group in attendance. There was Jamie, who was willing to forgo a Pitt Club dinner for the trip. Sarah too, especially since she’d recently been reprimanded for her behavior at a Wine Soc event and was finding college life “so fucking parochial.” Also that dickhead, Kenny. The twist was that we’d have to leave college in just a few hours, but the spontaneity seemed part of the fun and absolutely typical of Bryn.

At Bryn’s request, I called Berenice to invite her along too. But she declined, making some excuse about having an essay due on Monday. I also had an essay due—two, in fact, neither of them even halfway finished—but I wasn’t going to argue. Berenice and I been bickering lately. She’d accused me of being unpleasant on nights out, told me I turned into someone else when I had too much to drink. Like “a man possessed.” She was bound to say that, because she had that middle-aged, one-glass-of-wine-with-my-meal approach to booze. I regretted telling her anything about my dad’s problems with alcohol, since she was happy to use it against me. I told her, exasperated: We’re British, binge-drinking is what we do.

When I told Bryn that Berenice couldn’t join us, he didn’t seem bothered. He only remarked casually that Sarah might think the whole thing was turning into a “bit of a sausage fest.” Which gave me an idea. I asked: Why not invite Alexa? Bryn had shrugged, Sure, and the whole thing had become an opportunity. What would make me happier than for my two friends to get together? And what would bind me more irrevocably to both of them?

Alexa and I met the others outside college, at the van Kenny had once again “borrowed” from his theater group. Giddy with excitement, we stuffed the van with overnight bags, plus some hurriedly bought deli foods as mandated by our host (my remit was limited to crisps, which I chose to read as sensitivity toward my bank balance rather than distrust in my taste). Despite me trying to maneuver Bryn and Alexa into adjacent seats, he ended up beside Jamie, she beside Sarah. Which left me in the front with Kenny. The whole journey, Kenny bellowed over his shoulder, anxious to be part of the group chat, occasionally dropping his water bottle onto my lap as if I were a side table. But, with two nights at Bryn’s on the horizon, I was too excited to care.

The sun sank slowly through the sky, and motorway turned to A roads, to B roads, to rambling country lanes. One by one we fell silent, like an audience when the house lights are dimmed. When we finally passed through a large iron gate, Bryn told Kenny to pull over—we should walk from here, he said—and we set off down a long gravel drive, so thickly canopied by trees that we could hardly see one another in the shadows beneath. As we crunched along in the dark, Kenny crept up and grabbed me suddenly by the shoulders, producing a scream from me and hysterical laughter from everybody else. Just as I was getting ready to trip him, the trees opened up and we finally saw where we were headed.

Naturally, I’d tried to imagine what the house might be like. But nothing prepared me for what awaited us that February evening. Up a path bisecting an immaculate lawn was an enormous farmhouse, its timbered walls thickly cloaked in ivy. Darkened windows reflected the silvery light, while purple flowers spilled from the sills in spite of the cold. A lilac front door beckoned, cheeky as a wink. The whole house was enclosed by dense woods, like a castle in a fairy tale.

While the others stared in wonder, they missed something strange. They didn’t notice that, as Bryn looked at the house, his expression turned to puzzlement. As if, somehow, he’d been tricked. But the look was fleeting, and—like a juggler disguising a fumble—he rearranged his features quickly so that, when everyone turned to him, he was ready with a modest smile.

We followed him up the path to the front door, Kenny trying to look unruffled, Jamie, Sarah, and Alexa literally racing one another to arrive first. Again, everyone was too busy shouting and giggling to notice the way Bryn rattled the handle before unlocking the door (why do that, unless you think someone is waiting?). In the entrance hall, we dumped our bags below a row of exquisite family portraits that hung crookedly, a blank space in the middle where something had been removed. One portrait showed a middle-aged woman you might describe as handsome, with high cheekbones and dark hair in an elegant twist. Surely this was Bryn’s mother, Frances Cavendish.

Alexa whispered in my ear. “What a dump, hey.”

I nodded, unsmiling. “Imagine having your portraits in pastel rather than oils.”

Bryn stalked up and down, throwing on lights and poking his head through doorways, peering up into the darkness at the top of the wood-paneled staircase. I looked myself, up into the glowering shadows, but saw nothing.

He led us hurriedly in and out of the games room, the library, the sitting room, where lamps of all sizes and styles gave the place a cinematic soft-focus. Each space had a signature scent, as if curated by a perfumier—here, firewood and leather, there, old newspapers and chamomile. Waving distractedly up the stairs, Bryn mentioned a roof terrace overlooking the swimming pool, a relatively new addition that had horrified the locals. I imagined inviting people to my own house, having them squeeze into our spare bedroom between my stepdad’s old telescope and my mum’s abandoned exercise bike. Finally, when Bryn outlined the available bedrooms—explaining that he’d take his father’s—I pleaded for what was usually his room, claiming that I’d prefer one within easy reach of the bathroom.

We followed him into a huge open space with wooden beams overhead and stone underfoot. At one end was a kitchen, featuring the first Aga I’d ever seen in real life, where work surfaces were strewn with ornamental jugs, dried flowers, bowls, and bottles, all in an artful mess. At the other end of the space was the dining area, containing a large farmhouse table covered in newspapers, outdated theater programs, miscellaneous correspondence. In the corner by the table was a pretty upright piano, encumbered with piles of music books, a violin and cello leaning casually beside it. Everything was so charming that I thought we might conclude this tour with a burst of applause. We all turned to Bryn, expectant: time to start the party?

But no, he was backing out of the room, jabbing at his mobile. “Crack on with the champagne,” he said. Then, waving half-heartedly at a large wine rack, “or help yourselves to whatever. I’ve got to—nip out for a sec.”

We looked at him, perplexed.

His voice faded as he disappeared around the doorframe. “Oh, and if you could make a start on dinner—”

The front door slammed.

In the silence that followed, those of us left behind looked cautiously at one another, puppies abandoned on the roadside. But nobody commented on the frown on Bryn’s face, the sudden darkness in his tone. None of us wanted to suggest the unthinkable: that we might not understand our friend Bryn very well at all.

Kenny began organizing us as if this were his directorial debut at The National. Jamie, who had studied French cookery on his gap year, was put to work at a chopping board, assisted by Alexa. Sarah—a member of Wine Soc, disgraced or no—was tasked with decanting the wine and preparing the pre-dinner cocktail. At one point I spotted Jamie and Sarah smirking behind Kenny’s back, but they worked away like indulgent parents.

I set the table, filling bowls with the snacks I’d brought. Jamie complained that few wines paired easily with Frazzles, while Sarah squealed with delight and said that the last time she even saw those things was at her junior school tuck shop. I was thankful for Alexa, who gamely ate a handful. For much of the time, Sarah monopolized Alexa’s attention with chatter about their shared connections, so I retreated to the piano and made familiar shapes with my hands, pressing the keys so softly that they didn’t make a sound.

In the time it took for Jamie to prep the meal, including a horrifying starter that appeared to be made of raw meat, our host did not return. But night closed in around the house. With the lights atmospherically dimmed, the edges of the kitchen disappeared into shadow, candlelight bouncing off the wall-mounted blades and copper-bottomed pans. Jamie set out another place at the table, and I, feeling criticized, challenged his counting. But he, as clueless as me, revealed that Bryn had said we’d be cooking for seven. Seven?

We stood around the table, at a slight distance, like police officers arriving at a crime scene. Jamie, who had donned a velvet jacket, looked meaningfully at me. “Aren’t we dressing for dinner?”

Sarah snorted. “Stop showing off, James, you look like a game show host.”

He scowled at her, poured himself a red wine. Then addressed the room. “We should start. You know what Bryn’s like.”

I bristled. “I don’t know … That seems rude.”

Jamie sputtered. “Alright, Mister Debrett’s. Tell me, what else would be rude? Licking my plate? Scratching my balls with the salad tongs?”

Kenny guffawed as if this were a much better joke. Turning to me, he asked, giddy: “What’s wrong? Aren’t you excited about your tartare?”

It looked gross. “Course I am.”

“Only I presumed you weren’t much of a foodie,” Kenny said, holding out his own glass for Jamie to fill, “since you’ve given us soup spoons for the dessert.”

Confused, I looked at the spoons I’d set out. Actually, they did look a funny shape.

Sarah jumped in, waggling her finger between me and Alexa: “Remind me. How do you two know one another?”

“We’re both in orchestra,” I replied, puzzled at the question.

Kenny jumped in again. “I wondered too,” he said. “I knew it couldn’t be through school.”

I glanced at Alexa, but she busied herself cleaning the chopping board, a nation-state attempting to remain politically neutral.

But I wasn’t letting Kenny get away with that one. “Course it wasn’t school,” I said to him, sarcastic. “Because naturally I went to a shitty school with no money, where we foraged our own pencils and shared one gym kit between three pupils.”

Sarah looked stunned. “God, did you really?”

“And yet,” said Kenny, “money isn’t what separates private and state schools.”

I knew it was bait. Still, I couldn’t resist. “So what does, then?”

Kenny moved around the table making imperceptible adjustments to the cutlery. “State school students—present company potentially excepted, I don’t know you well enough to say—are taught to see the world in a way I’d call ordinary. They’ve been told: Get a nice, safe job, be a doctor or a lawyer if you want to aim high. Get married, pay your bills, blah blah.”

Jamie rolled his eyes as if this were a hobby horse he’d seen trotted out before. I stared at Kenny as if observing someone with mild cognitive decline.

“Whereas,” he went on, “private schools say: Go, start your own company. Go and be the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And that confidence, that belief, is a skill in itself.”

Jamie spoke into his glass, murmured words that seemed meant for Sarah and maybe Alexa. “A skill that even the minor public schools can develop, apparently.”

I couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “So, people from poor families and run-down towns would have the same life chances as everyone else, if only they had the right attitude?”

Kenny stared at me as if the answer were obvious. “You’re doing okay, aren’t you?”

Jamie squealed with glee: Ooh, such a bitch. Sarah tutted and turned sympathetically to me, declaring: “You’ve done marvelously, really. All things considered. Like, gold star for you.”

I flared with fury. “It’s all about money,” I said to Kenny, losing control of my volume. “If you’re skint and worried about getting into debt, it’s a lot fucking scarier to start a degree or set up a company.”

Kenny shook his head. “Again, only if you see the world a certain way. The debt will take care of itself once you’re in a job.”

“Maybe, maybe not. I imagine it’s easier to risk it when your family provides you with a massive financial safety net.”

“There it is. That’s the attitude I’m talking about. Quitting before you’ve begun.”

Was this a fucking wind-up? “It sounds to me,” I said to Kenny, bitterly, “like you’re admitting that you’re no cleverer than the average state school kid.”

He shrugged, insouciant. “That depends whether you think imagination is clever.”

There was a shift in the air pressure, like an intake of breath. Then, sounds from the hallway. The front door slamming, keys landing on a hard surface. Feet, thumping the floorboards. I sighed, thinking: Thank fuck for that.

When Bryn finally appeared, we gave little cheers and gentle admonishments: Hey, man, what took you so long? But he only gave us a half-hearted wave and dropped into one of the chairs at the table, his face like a locked door. I caught Sarah’s eye, attempting to verify that the confusion I felt was shared, but she looked away. Eventually, Bryn gave us a smile. But it was a strange, unsettling smile, and when he thanked us all for preparing the meal, his voice rang like an instrument slightly out of tune. I had no idea what was going on, but something told me it wasn’t the time to ask.

Kenny, emboldened by his earlier performance, felt differently. “Hey man,” he said. “Where’d you go?”

Bryn gazed at that mysterious extra place with its gleaming glassware and neatly folded napkin. The chair, its portentous emptiness. “It’s nothing.”

Sarah and Jamie busied themselves with the starter plates. Alexa locked eyes with me, and I responded with the tiniest possible shrug.

Unbelievably, Kenny plowed on. “If something’s up, you can tell us—”

“What I’ll tell you,” Bryn said, very softly, “is to shut the fuck up about it.”

There was a pause. Taut, like the moment before a falling object hits the ground.

And then, Bryn gave a laugh like thunder, a heatwave breaking, flashed his eyes at Kenny. The others followed his lead, and Kenny smiled stupidly as if everything was fine. Although I laughed weakly along too, disappointment twisted like hunger pangs. I’d dreamed of being in this place, with these people, but my imagination had failed—this reality was nothing like my dreams at all.

We tight-roped through the starter and the main like characters in a murder mystery, primed for a revolver in the bread basket, cyanide in the port. We drank resolutely to steady our nerves and, before long, the table was strewn with wine-spattered napkins and sauce-graffitied plates like something from a war zone (Sarah had already declared, quite seriously, that Bryn should throw the napkins away because getting red wine out of linen was honestly more trouble than it was worth). The only thing that remained pristine was the dessert, plated for later, a gleaming fruit tart that someone had carried conscientiously from Cambridge in a ribboned box.

Keen to keep the atmosphere cool, I pointed at the instruments huddled in the corner. “Hey Bryn. You don’t play piano, do you?”

He shook his head. “My parents do. Obsessive about music, both of them.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. Not that they’re any good. That Bach, on the stand? Frances can’t do more than four bars, but she keeps it there because it looks good.”

I’d spotted it earlier. The Crab Canon. “I learned that one,” I said. “You’d like it, it’s kind of maths-y. You basically play the same line of music forward and backward at the same time.”

Bryn shrugged. “Maybe that’s why Frances doesn’t bother with it. I got my maths from my dad. Frances likes music with epic strings, stuff she can weep to. And they say my dad’s the theatrical one.”

I imagined Frances draped across a chaise longue, consumptive. Actually, no: in a breastplate and horned helmet. “I guess that’s the thing with music,” I said. “We can project our own stuff onto it. There’s this thing with Shostakovich, where some people say his work was a coded message condemning Stalin’s regime. Others say that’s impossible, because anybody who condemned the regime was …” I dragged a finger across my neck. “You either hear it or you don’t.”

Jamie half-stifled an ostentatious yawn, making more of a scene than if he’d just let the thing out.

Suddenly, Kenny sat up tall. “Wait. Bryn. Your dad. Is this the house where he …?”

A dark smile crept stealthily across Bryn’s face. “He has a workshop in the cellar. The locals said it was where he performed occult rituals, and that his ultimate goal was to bring people back from the dead.” He paused, thoughtful. “He must have enjoyed that particular rumor, because it was one he never bothered to counter.”

Kenny literally spat out a laugh. “Fuck,” he said, showing teeth darkened by wine. “People are so stupid.”

Bryn’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.

“But he doesn’t believe that stuff, does he?” Kenny went on. “Like, he hasn’t ended up fooling himself?”

Jamie and Sarah cast a subtle glance at one another. It seemed that, in the gloom, they leaned ever so slightly away from Kenny.

Bryn’s voice was low, cold. “My father is no actor.”

Kenny railed on. “What does he say? He must talk to you about it?”

At this, Bryn seemed almost to flinch—his wine glass slipped from his hand, producing a sudden red bloom on the tablecloth like a silk handkerchief pulled from a magician’s pocket. He swore, and Alexa dabbed quickly at the spill with napkins. Kenny only giggled stupidly at the small pandemonium. There was a hurry to right Bryn’s glass and refill it, to replace the smiles that had slipped from our faces. Again, that empty, griping feeling in my gut.

Bryn nodded to himself. “You’re clearly interested in magic, Kenny. Must be why you’ve been hassling me so insistently for a bag of tricks.”

There was a pause that felt prickly. Jamie raised his eyebrow at Sarah, and she responded with a sly smile that I couldn’t decipher. I looked from Bryn to Kenny and back again, neither understanding nor wanting to expose my ignorance by asking. Bag of tricks?

As if reading my mind, Alexa piped up. “Didn’t have you down as a budding magician, Kenny. Although you’ve definitely got a talent for making the party atmosphere disappear.”

Bryn cackled, grinned at her. “That, and most of the grand cru,” he said.

“Yeah, he’s mastered cups and balls too,” Alexa went on, returning Bryn’s grin with a wink. “As in, emptying his cup and talking balls.”

Laughter from all of us then—even Kenny, who couldn’t take offense at Alexa’s cheeky delivery. Finally, the room was righted again, order restored.

Still chuckling, Bryn reached into his pocket and retrieved a black bag, tied with a little drawstring. It was small, maybe only a couple of inches square—a coin trick, maybe? Fuck, was Bryn really going to share his trade secrets with this tosser? Kenny smiled, greedily, and held out his hand.

But Bryn stood, giving the bag a shake. “Come on,” he called, disappearing through the kitchen door. At this, even Jamie and Sarah looked flummoxed. Even so, we all jumped up and hurried unquestioning after Bryn into the dark of the house.

Past the staircase with its gleaming banister, past the library with its cold fireplace. All the way to the back of the house, where the air became heavy and stale, through a door with an iron bolt and into a darkened room. As we piled inside, Bryn flicked a switch.

We were standing in what appeared to be some kind of storeroom. The bare bulb spilled light directly onto the floor, so although we could tell that the brick walls were the grubby white of a prison cell or an inner-city gym, the very corners were dark. From out of this darkness, large structures leaned like headstones: a box as big as a sarcophagus, decorated with lusterless stars; a wooden board painted with a red-and-white target, its surface pocked and punctured. Bits of furniture in faded carnival colors, the occasional swag of fringed velvet. Everything was veiled in cobwebs, as if it had long waited to be touched by something human. Shuffling into the space, we instinctively began to speak in whispers, as if someone might be listening. Compared to the rest of the house, this room felt hostile—a lair, occupied, something you’re supposed to leave well alone. Without knowing why, I kept looking over my shoulder, to check that the door we’d come through was still open, the way out still clear.

The only sign of life was a path on the ground where the dust had been disturbed, leading from where we stood to a square in the middle of the floor. A trapdoor. Without speaking, Bryn followed the trail and knelt, lifting the trapdoor and revealing a set of wooden steps, descending. The movement produced a rancid breath of foul air.

We edged closer. There was something deeply sinister about those steps, floating down, about the intense darkness into which they sank. It was as if the gloom below was a presence of something rather than an absence of light, something that might stretch and flex and ease its way up toward us.

Bryn stood. With the drawstring hooked around his finger, he swung the little bag back and forth above the darkness below. With a turn of his wrist, Bryn let the bag fly. After a second, we heard it land with a soft thunk. “All yours,” Bryn said.

Kenny rushed to the trapdoor and peered down. Then, with an anxious look at Bryn: “Is that your dad’s workshop?”

Bryn nodded, blithely. “Where he does all his silly tricks.”

Kenny paused. Swallowed. “Where’s the light?”

“It’s broken. Your eyes will adjust after a while.”

“Come on, man.”

“What?”

“Fuck, it’s … it’s creepy!”

The others cackled and mimicked Kenny’s plaintive moan: It’s cree-pee. God, seeing him there, his face creasing into concern, gave me the most exquisite champagne fizz of satisfaction.

Kenny approached the stairs into the cellar. Like a nervous skater testing the ice, he put one foot on the top step—then quickly drew it back. “Jesus,” he said, “did you hear that creak?”

We groaned: Don’t be dramatic, get on with it. He tried again, settling himself firmly on the top step before moving to the next, his hands gripping the edges of the floor as he moved down inch by faltering inch. When he was up to his waist in the dark as if submerged in a pool, Bryn knocked him firmly on the head with a fist and we all laughed again. The smell from the cellar was really revolting, so earthy and putrid—I assumed the others were ignoring it out of politeness, so decided I should do the same.

Although there weren’t many steps, it took Kenny a good minute to reach the bottom. We peered after him as he huffed and swore, noting the change in his footsteps as he arrived on the gravelly cellar floor. The hole he’d descended into was to us observers like a square frame, and soon Kenny moved out of it, beyond our view.

His voice drifted weakly up. “I think I see it.”

We covered our mouths, smothering our giggles. Bryn’s eyes had a bright glee. Kenny’s voice came to us again, smaller this time. “Bryn? What is … Fuck …”

And then, something peculiar. From the cellar came a strange scratching noise. But it wasn’t the punctuated scratch scratch scratch you’d expect Kenny to make if he was scrubbing around in the dirt for his prize. It was a drawn-out, unbroken scratching, as if he were using two hands to keep the sound going. Weird. Was he was trying to turn the tables, to scare us for scaring him?

All the irritation I’d ever felt about Kenny seemed to blaze up, a burning, itching fury that I could hardly stand. The way he constantly took the piss out of me. The way he was always hanging around Bryn’s neck, as if he held some kind of special status. He was as bad as Mona. Honestly, did any of us even like the guy?

Nerves aflame, I stepped forward, slammed the trapdoor and bolted it.

The thud was like the closing of a coffin. Beneath us, Kenny began to yell, and immediately came the sound of feet clattering on the wooden steps, hands slapping helplessly against the trapdoor.

Bryn looked at me, his eyes huge and mouth open. For a horrible moment I thought I’d crossed a line—but, giving me a look that said, You read my mind, Bryn burst into laughter. Taking his cue, the rest of us shrieked with delight, and I felt that swell of showman’s pride.

Below, a cry, rising in pitch: “Guys! Please …”

“We’ll be back in a while,” Bryn called, stepping noisily away from the trapdoor as if we were leaving the room. “Take it easy, man.”

People were doubled over, smothering their laughter. Kenny called again, but his voice sounded different somehow. In between his cries there was still that scratching. God, it must be really dark down there. After a minute or so, when the joke seemed to have landed, I returned to the trapdoor, unbolted it and tugged at the handle.

But the trapdoor wouldn’t move.

More wailing from below, louder now. “Please! Help me, please!”

“It’s jammed,” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. “Kenny, are you holding on? Let go.”

How was Kenny making that scratching sound when he was banging on the door? I kept tugging and yanking, hard enough to make my back muscles scream, but I couldn’t move the thing. Every second that passed seemed to stretch, endless, and gradually the laughter fell away as people realized: No, I was not kidding anymore.

In the end, it was Bryn who managed to get the door open again. I expected Kenny to come up shouting and swearing, maybe even square up to me. But after scrambling out, he threw himself on the ground and lay, panting, like a shipwrecked sailor washed up on an unknown shore. We jostled around him, jovial again, loudening our voices to counter his odd quiet. But it was only when Bryn squatted beside him and patted his cheek that Kenny seemed to refocus his gaze, to stagger to his feet and force a laugh.

The light bulb above us must have swung softly, because when I glanced back down through the trapdoor the shadows seemed ever so slightly to shift. An illusion, the mind tricking itself. As we made to leave, I hung back, watching as Bryn lingered in the dark, staring down into the cellar. Strange—watching his rapt expression, I could have believed that something looked back.

Before I could say anything we were shambling out of the storeroom, shrieking with delight. Even Jamie giggled like a schoolboy. And when Bryn, beaming, took Alexa playfully by the hand, I forgot everything that had gone before.

The glow of this incident lasted the rest of the evening, which was even more enjoyable once Kenny had hurried early to bed. Then, after the rest of us said our messy goodnights, when I lay in bed and closed my charmed eyes, a thought repeated like a stuck record. I’d imagined that it would be the ultimate punishment to be down in that cellar, in the dark, alone. But I hadn’t considered the possibility of being down there, not alone.

By the time we made it downstairs the next morning, the sun was high and bright over the chill gardens. We were jaded by the wine, but cheerful too, like an army unit that had survived a particularly treacherous mission. All cheerful except for Kenny, that is, who hadn’t slept well and had a ghastly, shell-shocked look about him.

After a breakfast that was more like lunch, we strolled into the village, lingering in a quaint little bookshop and stopping at a café for coffee. Then we took a walk across some unchallenging fields. Leaving Alexa with Bryn (smiling to see him guiding her over unsteady ground or the occasional stile) and Kenny to trail alone, I walked beside Sarah and Jamie. For perhaps the first time, Sarah shared her own stories of calamitous school concerts, acting as if we had common ground despite the fact that her school orchestra toured in Barcelona while mine toured in Blackpool. Jamie didn’t say much, but, whereas his previous aloofness had felt like hostility, it now seemed merely to signal disinterest.

When we returned to the house in late afternoon the daylight was already disappearing. I led everyone toward the kitchen, ready to make tea, but when I got there, something startled me, causing me to stop so suddenly that Kenny walked straight into my back.

There was someone in the room.

As I gaped, I felt a crazy certainty: She’s stepped out of the portrait. Pale as a wraith. Tall and lean, her hair now roped loosely down her back. And those eyes. She was as commanding as I’d imagined. But in an unexpected way, like a holy woman or an empress.

However, the heavy wool coat and leather hand luggage suggested that Frances Cavendish had arrived not through sorcery but likely by taxi. I opened my mouth to say hello, but at her icy expression the words froze on my lips. Judging by the others, I wasn’t the only one with no clue what the fuck was going on.

After an excruciating and confusing pause, Bryn stepped forward, beaming at Frances. “Surprise!” he said.

Her voice was deep, silvery. It made me think of vaulted halls and bottomless sea caves. “Yes, quite.”

Subtly, the rest of us exchanged mystified glances.

Bryn let his arms fall. Allowed himself a beat. “Hello, Frances dear.”

“Care to explain?” She asked, her voice chill.

“But of course. Won’t madam make herself comfortable first? Please.”

Bryn went to take his mother’s coat, but she shrugged it off herself, revealing a fine woolen sweater, trousers that hung like silk. Then she sat, taking in the casual havoc of her dining table while Bryn introduced each of us. Frances already knew Jamie and Sarah thanks to their school connections—the two of them greeted her as if they were charm and courtesy personified—but she had to be reminded of Kenny’s more businesslike family connection. Bryn acted as if everything was going to plan, whatever that was, while the rest of us stood, sheepish, a Greek chorus finding themselves in the wrong play.

“So,” Bryn said, “I was messaging George, from the cricket club. And he said he’d seen Ivy coming to clean. So, I figured you must be staying the weekend, and … decided to surprise you.”

I blinked. What was he on about?

Frances practically snorted. “Really.”

“Yes,” Bryn said. “For your birthday.”

“My birthday isn’t for weeks,” Frances replied.

“No, but you’ll be in Geneva on the day, so we ought to celebrate now.”

Frances picked up one of the many wine bottles and inspected the label. “And you enjoyed my birthday meal, did you?”

“Well, you’re rather later than we expected, Mummy. But you’re in time to cut the …” He gestured at the tart that had sat on the table since our arrival the previous night, its sliced fruits losing their shine.

“Ah,” said Frances. “Your father’s favorite.”

Something fell over Bryn’s face, then, a cloud passing over the sun. But it was gone in a moment, and he chuckled to himself as he retrieved champagne from the fridge. “You’re so cynical, Mummy,” he said. “It’s not very festive.”

She set her face against his, belligerent. “So. When would you like to do presents?”

There was a long pause. In it, Bryn removed the champagne foil and dropped it on the floor. “Any time. In fact, why not now?” Then, turning to me: “Just for you, Frances. A private performance of that wonderful Bach.”

He gestured toward the piano, and I realized with horror what he wanted me to do. I gawped at Frances—frowning gently now, as if genuinely intrigued—then back at Bryn.

“You want … me …?” I said quietly, my mouth suddenly very dry.

He gave me a big, straightforward smile.

Jamie sputtered behind me. I balled my fists, felt my fingers stiff and lumpen. How long had it been since I’d played that piece? A year? It was so short, probably only thirty seconds long. But it was so precise, each line so exposed. To fuck it up now would be mortifying.

Heat rose in my chest, my face. And yes, it was fear. But it was something else too, something like fury. A performance wasn’t a casual offering. It was sacrificial: something that stripped you naked, that carved a piece from you. Yet here he was, handing me out, like corner shop sweets from a paper bag. And for what? Some kind of joke. But what could I do, other than force a smile onto my face and trudge to my stage, a jester tumbling before a king?

I went slowly to the piano, vaguely aware of everyone taking seats at the dining table. There was maybe a ripple of preemptive applause. But all sounds fell away as I sat heavily on the piano stool. This isn’t really happening, I told myself. It’s a weird, nonsensical dream.

The thing about pieces like that: their intricate Baroque mechanism should tick over like clockwork, the notes falling neatly into place as if plucked by the revolving pins of a music box. There’s no space to pause, to think. In fact, if your head gets in the way, you’re fucked. So I tried to let my muscles do the remembering, allowing my fingers to travel the little notated paths they’d travelled so many times before. But, unsurprisingly, my lines were perfunctory and spiritless. Ordinary. I was glad when I came to the closing bars, when I could let the final notes ring in the silence.

My audience—not discerning—clapped politely, their confusion evident. Even on the spot, I was frustrated to deliver a performance so average. Frances shifted impatiently in her chair, searching for Bryn’s eyes as if she wanted to speak with him very urgently.

Which is when I thought: If he wants a show for Frances, I can play along. “Bryn,” I called. “Shall we do the next piece now?”

A slight tilt of his head. The others shushed.

“You know the one,” I said. ‘“Is My Team Plowing?’”

He laughed, sporting, gave me a rueful look that said: Touché. He had a good memory, would surely remember the words. And I knew the piano part by heart. Sure enough, unfazed by anything, Bryn stood and took his place beside me. He absolutely delighted in his guests’ confusion—total, now—and, part of the joke, so did I.

When every guest had stilled, I put my fingers to the keyboard once more. Moving over the notes I seemed not to feel the keys themselves, as if my fingers belonged to someone else or as if each touch was the phantom sensation of a limb no longer there.

And then, those opening notes: that exquisite falling figure—

Extraordinary, how it came back to us. But the telepathy we’d developed was still there, a secret language sunk into my DNA. Yes, we had our misfirings, phrases where he pulled ahead of the tempo and I lagged behind. But it happened: that sorcery, when people go from playing notes to making music. That ebbing and flowing against one another, that push and pull between solo and accompaniment. The rhythm of the breath, the melodies rolling inexorably toward their resolution. Strange, that such an intensely physical act creates something so ethereal. That the sound, gone in a moment, leaves a mark that lasts a life.

Music is like pain. You forget what it was to experience it in the moment. You only know that there was no such thing as time, and your whole self was splintered into fragments, connected to everything that ever mattered and that ever would.

Even Frances—reluctantly but unmistakeably moved—clapped this time. From the others, the applause was ecstatic. When our audience had rightly enthused about Bryn’s tone, his delivery, they poured their compliments on me. “Those pianissimos,” Kenny murmured to Frances, wiggling his fingers. I smiled, thinking: Prick.

Sarah raved while Jamie looked reverently at my hands on the piano, their admiration clearly genuine. Alexa offered a quiet, sincere nod that said: Nice one. But the feeling their reactions gave me was nothing compared to what I felt when Bryn hugged me roughly, almost pulling me from the piano stool, forcing my face into the folds of his shirt.

Job done, he made to sit down again. But, God, I couldn’t stand for this to end just yet. “Wait,” I murmured, grabbing his elbow in a way that would have felt forward only days before. “One last thing.” Then, turning: “Lex, come up here. Er, Mrs Cavendish, please can we use your violin?”

Frances didn’t protest, and the table understood. They started to cheer for Alexa, and the same terror that had dawned on me came over her. In fact, she might have refused had Bryn not stretched out his hands to receive her.

Tuning the violin, she glared at me as if betrayed. “Don’t worry,” I murmured, scribbling some notes on a sheet of paper. “Just follow me.” Silence fell, and I savored the collective bafflement, the knowledge that I, for once, was the one with the punchline.

Finally, I turned to the room. “Okay,” I announced. “You all know the words.”

Then I played our opening chord—preposterously dramatic, arpeggios dancing the length of the keyboard from bottom to top—and led everyone: “Happy birthday to you …”

And then, that beautiful, bellowed tune, the perfection of untrained voices in happy unison. At the final lyric, some started to clap. But I didn’t stop. I played the song through again, encouraging Alexa—smiling now—to lead us this time, to look Bryn in the eye as he improvised an imperfect but charming harmony around her melody line. The third time, even she became more daring, adding grace notes and flourishes above my stately chords, taking the tune up the octave with soaring strokes of the bow, an unmeetable challenge that made Bryn’s resonant vocals turn to percussive laughter. I kept going. With every round the voices became louder and more experimental, the lyrics repeating like an invocation … Hands drummed at thighs, at the tabletop, feet pounded rhythmically at the floor, all of us whirling in a kind of willed madness until my climactic, crashing cadence brought us to a staggering, exhausted stop.

Cheers, then. They rushed to the piano, all except Frances, whose irritation had been replaced by something like resignation. Bryn thumped me on the back and then—equally thrilling—threw an arm around Alexa, kissed her firmly on the cheek.

Finally, Frances addressed Bryn wearily. “I’d still like to speak to you, darling.”

Bryn looked unbothered. Sauntering out of the room, leaving his mother to follow, he called back: “Help yourselves to drinks. It’s a birthday party, remember.”

Kenny stared after them. Alexa smothered a smile. Jamie and Sarah looked at me plainly as if, for once, I might be the one who knew what was going on, and as soon as mother and son were gone we all burst into daft and uncontrollable laughter, the sound of it like a song I wanted never to forget.

After a while, almost dizzy from the praise, I went outside for some air. There, beneath the dark, starred blanket of sky, I was rocking on a garden swing when I heard behind me a scratch, a fizz. I turned to see Bryn, the lines of his face gilded by the glow of his lighter. Pulling on a cigarette, he took a seat beside me, his weight unbalancing the swing and lifting me upward as if I were a child.

“The man of the moment,” he said, his voice warm against the cold air. “I’m still in the shit with Frances—a long story, one for another time—but that was like a fucking spell. If she hadn’t been so impressed, my bollocking would have been so much worse.”

I smiled, allowing our breaths to fall into a steady, satisfying rhythm. I knew not to ask any more about Frances, but dared a different question: “So your dad didn’t stop by too?”

Bryn tapped ash from his cigarette. Then, carefully: “I thought perhaps he might. But his travels have taken him elsewhere.”

“Travels?”

“Since the TV magic got less popular, he’s been away a lot. Exploring … esoteric stuff. Traveling the world, researching different belief systems.”

“And that’s what the locals were gossiping about?”

He grinned. “They think he’s in league with the Devil or something. Some of the old churchgoing ladies would cross the street when they saw him. Saying Hail Marys as they went.”

I remembered the mums at the school gates, whispering behind their hands. “Do the locals still act weird about you guys?”

His smile slipped then, and his face almost frightened me. So very sad. It was like seeing him with a shattered bone poking through his skin. “Actually, no,” he said. “Because my father isn’t around much since he and my mother separated. It was a few years back. I’ve only seen him a handful of times since.”

A picture came to me of Louis Cavendish, descending into his cellar, further and further from his family, increasingly more concerned with the dead than the living. What did I feel, then? Sorrow, yes, bottomless and black. But maybe the slightest satisfaction too, that the darkness of loss was something we shared. “Fuck. I’m sorry,” I said, daring to put a hand on his shoulder, imagining I could feel the pained throb of his heart. Then: “It must be hard having people talk about him as if they knew him. I had the same thing with my dad.”

“How come?”

This was it. It felt like slicing open my own palm to seal a blood pact, and I wouldn’t have hesitated to do it. “So, you know my dad died? It was because he was an alcoholic.”

The look on his face was pure understanding. “Fuck. I’m sorry too.”

“People talked about him. But not openly. All sotto voce, you know? If my mum mentioned him it would be in a whisper, like he was still there and might overhear.” I suddenly felt self-conscious. “Sorry, that sounds weird.”

Bryn shook his head. “Not at all. My father’s alive, but when he’s not around—I sometimes feel like he’s here. I was practicing a card trick the other day, and I swear I could hear his voice telling me how to do it better.”

That made me shiver. It seemed that, beyond the sprawling shrubbery, between the trees at the bottom of the garden, a shadow with the same stance as Bryn might be standing silently. Or maybe it was right behind us.

We looked at one another then, and I suddenly felt more exposed than I ever could at a piano stool, on a stage. But what a strange and pretty polyphony our vulnerabilities made. The moment became taut, almost painfully so: like the silence after an extraordinary performance, when the audience dare not clap and break the spell.

From behind us: the sliding of a patio door, the sound of Jamie’s bellowed voice. Frances had gone out, was “dining with a neighbor” and, fuck it, shall we just open the Pétrus?

I declared: After our dazzling performance, we musicians should be exempt from dinner duty. Incredibly, Jamie and Sarah thought this was fair enough, and they encouraged Bryn, Alexa, and me to head to the roof terrace (Kenny had gone to bed early, citing a headache). We settled ourselves up there on the elegant garden furniture, blankets and booze protecting us from the freezing night.

“And then there were three,” Bryn announced. “You know, Pythagoreans called the number three the noblest of all digits.”

“It’s supposedly a magic number,” said Alexa, beside him. “Father, Son, Holy Spirit.” She had a dreamy look, as if a song were playing in her head, and it suited her. The angles of her face were gentler, somehow, softened by the light of Bryn’s company.

“Sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” Bryn added.

“Three billy goats gruff.”

“Three blind mice.”

I stuck a hand up. “The ghosts of Christmas past, present, and yet to come.”

“It’s a good job your girlfriend isn’t here,” Bryn said. “Four doesn’t have the same ring.”

Fuck, I’d completely forgotten about Berenice. I hadn’t even texted her since we’d left college. It was true, though: if she were here, she’d be telling us to take it easy on the booze, stop putting our feet on the furniture. In the event of any broken glasses or red wine stains, she’d be the first to grass us up to Frances. I resolved to text her later.

Bryn gave Alexa a top-up, allowing his fingers to brush against hers as he steadied her glass. She gave me a small, secret look. Something shy and hopeful, an unspoken acknowledgment of the crackle in the air. And in that moment I saw myself as a fulcrum between them, the pivot chord linking different keys. Yes, there was something magic, something inevitable, about the three of us.

“Speaking of our trio,” I said, “you two were brilliant. Riffing off one another.”

And then it was Bryn stealing a look at me, playful and wicked as if to say: I see what you’re doing, and I like it. Everywhere, the hum of electricity—some glorious frequency, ringing. Trying to look casual, I made my way to the railing and looked down at the pool.

“Tell you something,” Bryn said, following me and laying a hand on my shoulder. “When this terrace was built, I celebrated by jumping into the pool from here. I must have been even madder back then.”

I stared at the inky rectangle below. “Jesus. What would you give someone to do that now?”

“Probably not three whole wishes from the lamp. But maybe one.”

The pool lights were off, and only the electric light leaking from the house illuminated the loungers that lay like gurneys in the gloom, the poolside paving that would shatter oncoming shins. There, in the middle, the black shape of water. In the absence of light, it was impossible to see the bottom, and I wondered how cold it must be, how deep it might go.

I had a dull sense that, somewhere behind me, a door had opened and Jamie and Sarah had joined us, carrying clanking plates and cutlery. But, beneath the force of Bryn’s hand, I was busy thinking how it would feel to go cutting through the air. I almost saw myself in slow motion: arms overhead, toes together, arcing gracefully to earth in a perfect mathematical curve—

Sarah’s shriek startled me back into the moment. “Whoa! What the fuck is he doing?”

I looked down at my hands. Having already kicked off my shoes, I was busily unbuckling my belt. I observed my own movements impassively, as if someone else was in control of my limbs, feeling nothing as my trousers rumpled at my feet.

“Jesus,” Alexa said to Bryn, “he isn’t …”

Then, Jamie: “He fucking is.”

And somehow, I was down to my underwear. It felt as unstoppable and unconscious as breathing or sleeping or falling in love. Bryn laughed, and the rational part of me felt a low shiver of relief: he was going to stop me. But he merely pointed again. “That’s the deep part,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, don’t aim anywhere else.”

Grasping his arm to steady myself, I clambered onto the edge of the balcony, feeling like I was inhabiting someone else’s body. Legs shaking, I focused on the frigid feel of the night air, the shush of the trees. Maybe this was what it felt like to be Bryn—to know that everyone’s astonished eyes are fixed only on you.

And then I was plunging through the night, feeling the wind tearing across my skin, leaving my stomach high up on the balcony behind me—

—there was a cry that may or may not have come from me, before—

—the sudden slap of the water, something glancing my foot. But there was no time to register any pain, as I was too busy clawing myself up, sucking desperately at the air, feeling the cold clamping my ribcage like a torture device.

Unable to touch my toes to the bottom of the pool, I sank, panicked by the water closing above me. Finally managing to plant my feet, I pushed myself toward the lights of the house above, fractured through the distorting waves. Bursting through the surface again, I took a heaving, juddering gasp, splashing ungainly until I discovered the point where I could touch my toes to the floor and keep my head above water. Up on the balcony, figures jostled, whooping and shouting. I forgot the cold.

As I blinked and waved, not daring to call out in case my voice trembled, a blot appeared on my vision, hurtling closer. There wasn’t time to turn my head before the waves exploded beside me, making the whole pool lurch. Jesus.

Bryn emerged like Poseidon, shaking out his hair and slapping at the water. “You’re fucking crazy,” he shouted, joyful.

Before I could reply, he lunged, grabbing me in a headlock. As my weight went backward my feet came off the floor, and I felt myself dropping again like a stone beneath the water—there, an airless moment of thrashing limbs and white noise. Just as the panic began to rise, Bryn took me under the armpits and hauled me up through the surface, both of us spluttering and shouting, flailing wildly, our laughter eventually dissolving into even, exhausted breaths.

Water lapping our chests, we faced one another in the shivering dark. God, I felt so awake. Bryn’s mouth fell slightly open, and I thought he might speak—but he only stared silently at me, his gleeful expression softening into something like seriousness. I became very aware of our exposed skin, waxen beneath the distant electric glow, of our breath, steaming in the chlorinated cold. The way the light rippled off him, he didn’t look himself—his face, his eyes, unfamiliar.

He stepped toward me. Thinking I was in his way, I moved back—but he took another step, and another, making waves that wrapped around my trembling body like searching hands. When he was very close, close enough that he might whisper in my ear, I thought I felt the heat coming from him, like an aura, as if—even in this freezing pool—he couldn’t ever be cold. Beneath the water, his hand moved so close to mine. There, alone with him in the frigid surge and swell, what I felt was abject terror.

Then, very slowly, Bryn sank below the water.

Seconds passed, and he didn’t reappear. Rubbing my eyes, I scanned the surface. But I saw nothing moving in the black. “Bryn?”

Something brushed my legs from behind, and I spun splashily around. “Hey,” I said, my voice waterlogged and croaky. “Stop messing about.”

Seconds slipped by. Still he didn’t come up for air. Currents moved around me, and I jumped as something scratched softly at my calves. I rubbed at my arms, speckled now with gooseflesh. The water swirled around me in confusing patterns, and a shape shifted at the corner of my eye—

—no, wait, there was more than one shape, something that made me feel queasy, that made me think of that figure beyond the window or the shadows in the cellar—

And then: hands, wrapped tightly around my feet.

Then I was leaving the water, being raised onto Bryn’s shoulders, while laughter and cheering fell like confetti from the terrace above us. My heart still thumped, but triumphantly now, and I waved and beamed, not minding the others pointing at my exposed body, enjoying the warmth of Bryn’s hands as he gripped my shins. Once or twice, so as not to fall, I allowed myself to lay my hands on his wet curls. The realization was exhilarating: nobody else was going to jump.

He stepped slowly through the water and deposited me on the edge of the pool, then I took his hand and helped him out. Panting, we collapsed onto the lawn.

Lowering his eyes, Bryn gave an exaggerated gasp. “Oh shit,” he said. “Look.”

As soon as I’d seen the line of scarlet running across my heel, it began to sting. On my damp skin, the blood spread quickly and dramatically. We stared for a moment in silence before bursting simultaneously into imbecilic laughter.

Then—I remember this vividly—he touched his fingers to my foot. Not to soothe or stem the bleeding. It was more like a gesture of curiosity, poking roadkill with a stick or prodding the flesh of a bad apple. When he took his hand away, the fingertips were red with blood. He looked as if he might smear it across his cheeks.

Holding out his fingers, he looked at me and whispered: “An offering.”

Then he jumped up and bounded toward the house, leaving me shivering on the grass.

But then he was back, in one hand a roll of gauze, and in the other a ratty-looking blanket with trailing tassels. He threw the blanket around me and rubbed my hair, like my mum used to do after we’d been to the swimming baths, and I pushed him away and called him a dickhead. Then he took my foot in his lap as he looped the gauze around it once, twice, three times. And he leaned very close to my cheek.

“So,” he whispered. “What’s your wish?”

Still panting, I pretended to think. “Genie. I wish for you to dunk Alexa in the pool.” Then, meaningfully, “And I don’t think she’ll mind one bit.”

He laughed. Gave me a wink.

And then the others were there too, calling us insane, stupid, reckless, bloody legends. Alexa rushed over and knelt beside Bryn, her eyes racing over his body as if she couldn’t believe him to be unscathed. God, she genuinely looked terrified. But her terror turned to delighted shock when Bryn lunged at her, scooped her up and sprinted to the pool, throwing the two of them into the water. I clapped when they resurfaced, Alexa still in Bryn’s arms. And I almost punched the air when Bryn leaned in—a looming that made me think momentarily of old vampire films—for a long, cinematic kiss.

Stunned, Jamie and Sarah stopped their squealing, sought my eye as if to say: What the fuck is going on here? I gave them an insider’s knowing smile.

And suddenly everyone was cheering, laughing, screaming toward the pool, all of us leaping now, the water exploding like pyrotechnics around us in our great subaqueous Bacchanalia. Limbs moved against one another in the churning waves, as if we were all part of the same spectacular sea creature; or as if we were tiny fish in the stomach of the same great whale. Tuneless sirens, we sang once more happy birthday to you—only now, on each round, the person named was the recipient of a hysterical dunking or splashy body slam. The giggling victim (happy birthday dear Sarah) would thrash uselessly away, before the rest of us closed in—lifting, howling, dropping, splashing. It was electric: the alternating touch of chill water and warm skin. The reassuring weight of bodies against mine, the weightlessness of my own frame supported in the water. The more I laughed, the more water I swallowed, and the more euphoric I felt. In this maniacal baptism, all the worries, the neuroses of which I’d seemed to be made, fell clean away and, finally, I was encompassed. I was in concert. Subsumed.

Much later, I lay clean awake in Bryn’s bed. When my mind tired of replaying our glorious evening, it began to ponder what might be around me, hidden, in Bryn’s room. Some cups with false bottoms? Another bag of tricks, whatever that was? I closed my eyes and told myself to be quiet. I was hardly going to go snooping around, was I?

Slipping from under the covers, I went first to his desk. A mayhem of papers covered in half-written paragraphs, columns of numbers stretching down, down. I peered at the pages in the gloom, telling myself that I wasn’t snooping, merely noticing what had been left on display.

But of course, time being relative depending on

Askew on the page, a very expensive fountain pen, its cap not replaced.

this kind of time travel requiring an endless loop

Beside these papers, a calculator that looked a lot more complicated than the ones we used at school, a huge pair of headphones like a DJ might wear, scuffed. The latest iPod. Next to the desk, the wardrobe, its door open just a crack. Peering inside, I found no cursed portraits, no doors to other worlds. Only some photographs pinned to the wood, of school-uniformed youngsters looking fearless.

Then, across the room—someone staring at me.

I gasped, jumped backward. But it was only a mirror on the far wall. Jesus Christ, I half scared myself to death. As I stood, trying to slow my breath, I remembered a Ghost Club story, one where you summoned a spirit by speaking its name into a mirror. Like the girl at Bryn’s party, saying his name three times. It’s not a very scary story, though. Why would I be afraid, when all I had to do to keep the spirit at bay was not speak of it at all?

Once my pulse had evened out, I slipped back across the room and lowered myself onto the bed, wincing at the squeal of springs. There, one last thing: his bedside cabinet. But that felt like crossing a line. It’s one thing to gaze idly about a room, another to rummage through the closed-up places within it.

Then I thought: He’d look. If he were in my room, he’d have been in and out of every cupboard, sampled my one expensive bottle of aftershave. He’d have put my slippers on, read my diary, and told me that privacy was a social construct or something.

I slid open the top drawer. There, a half empty packet of Marlboro Lights, and a lime green lighter. A toiletry bag bearing the name of an expensive airline. The middle drawer, more interesting. Packs of cards, still in cellophane wrapping, apparently ordinary. Some grubby sponge balls, several black candles, two textbook-sized chalkboards, a piece of rope. Curious.

Now, just the bottom drawer. I paused, listened for the sound of approaching footsteps. Nothing. Not even any bumps or creaks as the house shifted in slumber, no whisper of leaves beyond the window. It was as if silence itself had crowded into the room to peer over my shoulder.

I pulled the handle, but it resisted. I frowned, searching for a lock that didn’t exist. The drawer didn’t seem jammed. It was more like—I know this sounds odd—someone was holding it closed from the inside. I tugged again, harder this time, and the drawer shot out of the cabinet completely, landing on the carpet with a thud and vomiting its contents onto the floor.

Shit, shit, shit. I hunched in the dark, poised for the voice that would call to ask: Is everything okay and, by the way, what the fuck are you doing in there?

Seconds crept by. No call came.

Releasing a long, shuddering breath, I gathered up the spilled bits and pieces. But the items made me pause. Each was strange. Unsettling, somehow.

There were sheets of paper, the color of old newspaper, folded. I opened one of them, careful to touch only the very edges, to find that it was covered with pencil-drawn symbols, curling and archaic. Definitely not Greek or Cyrillic. I opened another sheet, and another, and found they were the same, just with a different pattern of symbols. There were also five or six photographs, as if from an old photo album—here, people sitting at a garden table, there a handful of boys wearing sports kit. But in every picture, all the heads had been cut off.

I dropped the mutilated photographs and turned to a small round tin, perhaps for boot or furniture polish, the label rubbed away. The lid came off with a sucking sound, revealing a number of teeth. Not little milk teeth, but long, yellowed molars, their hooked roots still attached. Maybe fifteen or twenty altogether, they were arranged around the perimeter of the tin so as to look like a horrible, yawning mouth, all strung together with strands of long, dark hair. Not wanting to touch it any longer, I closed the lid and put the tin away.

One other thing. A bundle of envelopes, held by an elastic band. Carefully removing the band, I saw that the envelopes all bore the same address—one in Italy—and their edges were slightly furred, as if they’d been handled many times. They were all addressed to the same person, one Louis Cavendish. What were they doing here? Had they been returned to sender? Why would Louis return Bryn’s letters?

An image came to me then: me, knocking on my dad’s door, and him not answering.

After putting the envelopes back as I found them, I rattled the drawer back onto its tracks. But, as I did so, I saw them sitting in the very base of the cabinet, beneath the bottom drawer itself: a little spread of black drawstring bags, just like the one Bryn had awarded Kenny. I ran my fingers over them, pressed and handled them. Some were empty. Others had a gentle weight, as if they were filled with flour or ash. Not a coin trick, then.

And then: a soft creak, beyond the door.

Moving quickly, delicately, like a man defusing a bomb, I pushed the drawer back into place. Then I threw myself back into bed. Silence, all around.

Rubbing my hair, I felt something catch in my fingers. A little piece of wool, from the blanket Bryn had wrapped me in. It made me think of a story—was it MR James?—where an occultist hexes a man by secretly slipping him a little piece of paper. Until he gets rid of the paper, the man is haunted, or hunted, by something. Lying there, I felt like someone had slipped me something too. But this was a blessing, not a curse. I was going through a good spell.

Perhaps that was when I finally got it, that feeling of being on the inside. Only later would I see that I had to fall—to bleed—to get there.

When I shambled downstairs the next morning, shirtless, there was nobody in the games room or the library. The kitchen was quiet. I was rummaging in the fridge when I was startled by the peal of polished vowels: “Good morning.”

It was Frances, cold and statuesque as ever. “Morning,” I replied, hugging my arms around my bare chest. Unsure whether it was better to offer a handshake or keep covering my nipples, I went somewhere in between: arms folded, I gave a small, cringing wave.

She waggled an espresso cup, and I nodded gratefully. Over the buzz of the coffee machine she explained that the others were up and packing the van. “And is that a Lancashire accent?” she asked, handing me a cup of something that looked like tar. When I nodded, she added: “Which school did you go to?”

“Oh, you won’t know it,” I said, before wondering if that sounded rude. “The only thing our school was famous for was some year elevens selling weed from the boys’ toilets.”

She blinked. “And what do your parents do?”

I knew this question was not really about what a person does—the actions they carry out daily—but who they are perceived to be. “My mum works in a care home,” I said, wanting to explain that she’d been studying to be a solicitor before my dad cracked up, while feeling it shouldn’t matter. “And, er, my dad died. When I was ten.”

Frances didn’t soften at that, like other people did. But she inclined her head as if something made sense. Then she asked an odd question: “Have you found ways to keep him near?”

Had I? Memories, then: of me, inexplicably trying to persuade a curious classmate that I’d never had a dad in the first place, as if I were some kind of eighties Jesus; stuffing Dad’s things into the bin, including the shiny Zippo lighter that I’d always wanted. In the end, I replied feebly: “I’m not sure.”

She sighed, looked out onto the gardens. Somewhere within the house, a clock chimed softly. “You do realize,” she said eventually, “that Bryn isn’t here for my birthday?”

A shift in energy, here. It felt foolish to lie. “Honestly, I don’t know.”

Frances nodded, as if respecting my honesty. “His father arrived in the UK on Friday. Bryn expected him here, but I imagine Louis’s latest companion prefers a fine London hotel. Our cleaner was actually preparing the property for my own visit.”

There it was, the dove emerging from the magician’s palms. If Bryn had hoped to see his father, it all made sense: his dark mood on Friday when he found the house empty. The dining table, the empty chair at its head, reserved for this ghost at our feast. All of us, destabilized by the force of a person who wasn’t even there. Frances gave me a thin smile that said: That’s enough of that topic.

“Actually,” I added, an attempt at cheer, “my mum says that I got my love of music from my dad. I suppose that keeps him near. Did Bryn tell you we played for the fellows?”

She looked blank. It was hard to tell if she’d forgotten or never known. “My,” she said, “aren’t you all very useful friends to have.” Then, fixing me with a cryptic look, she spoke in a voice of concern: “One thing. Do remember that Bryn has a habit of … going over the top.”

It took me a moment. But I remembered what he’d confided that day, in the practice room that wasn’t a practice room. “Oh! You mustn’t worry about him,” I said, glad to be the one reassuring her. “He’s on great form. The life and soul.”

Her eyes searched my face. Finally, as if unable to find what she was looking for, she collected her things and gave a polite smile. “Your playing was beautiful,” she said. “Bryn chose his guests very carefully.”

And she was gone. I stood, alone, feeling more than a little unbalanced.

Back in Bryn’s room, I dressed and stuffed my things into my overnight bag. Then, confident that I was the only one upstairs, I slid the bottom drawer of the bedside cabinet open once more. There, the same objects that had looked so troubling in the night. Daylight poured onto them, illuminating fluff and curls of hair, and now everything seemed merely haphazard and confusing. Even childish.

This is where I did something odd. I took one of the pieces of paper, scratched with symbols, and slipped it into my pocket. When I jogged down the stairs for the last time, that paper seemed to throb at my leg like a walled-up heart.

Even then, I knew this little theft was ridiculous. Embarrassing. But the only way I can explain it is this: that I had a sense that those days—the greatest, that’s what everyone said, that’s how they felt—would not last. That I would need a token, a totem, to keep them near.

And so: the perfect end to the perfect weekend. Or it would have been, if not for the journey back. The juddering of Kenny’s shitty driving, the stink of dust from the van’s seats—all of it aggravated the gurgling in my stomach that had been getting worse all morning. We weren’t even halfway back to Cambridge when I had to ask him to pull over so that I could puke into the grass on the embankment. When I was finally back at college and in my room, I staggered like a living waxwork between the bed and the sink, alternately vomiting, drinking water, and dozing fitfully, the whiff of car air freshener still coming off my clothes.

I was ill for the rest of the evening and, weirdly, the whole of the next day. Which was an especial disaster, since this was the time I’d ambitiously earmarked to complete my two essays (the idea of begging for an extension would once have horrified me but, now, given my infirmity, it felt like the least of my problems). Tim came to see me, bringing rehydration salts and Lucozade, marveling at the extent of my sickness and wondering if I might be better sticking to beer.

When I went to bed that second evening, I took the little paper I’d stolen from Bryn’s room and tucked it under my pillow. I don’t know why. But over those grim hours it only reminded me that he hadn’t yet checked on me and, if anything, I got worse. During the night, in a fit of pique and fever, I tore it up and tossed it in the bin, and somehow I felt better when it was gone.

After our weekend at Bryn’s, I thought more often about my dad. How, having perched me on his lap between his dancing hands, he’d pick out pop songs on the piano, how he’d sit in silence while I practiced my exam pieces and clap noisily however they turned out. How he never once got annoyed when I, increasingly precocious, corrected his pronunciation of musical terms (Wagner, étude, Haydn).

How he drove me to my lessons, stopping at the shop on the way back: sweets for me, a scratch card or two for him. Also beer. Later, vodka.

Once, we were driving home—this must have been early on, when we were gauging my enthusiasm for this new hobby, when he was still gainfully employed, still married, still happy—when some classical piece came on the radio, one I didn’t take the time to remember. And Dad told me: Music is a time machine.

This? he said, It was playing in the hospital when I first held you. When I hear it, I can smell the washing powder on your little baby blanket. He fell silent, smiled. I imagined them with us, in the car: my younger dad, me, in his arms. Is that why they call melodies haunting, I wondered? I had long hair, back then, he said laughing. Can you imagine? At that time, I refused to believe that my dad had ever existed in any form other than the one he took now.

He didn’t drive me so much after he’d lost his job. Not at all after he’d lost the job after that, the light from his eyes. Mum hid the car keys, not that he’d have remembered my lessons anyway. He was playing a different kind of music by then. He’d hammer tunelessly at the piano like a demon, slurring. Glasses would smash, cymbal crashes. I’d watch from the doorway, frozen—half of me wanting to throw my arms around him, the other half wanting to run as far away as possible. It’s a peculiar agony, to feel so absolutely stuck.

But that’s the maths, isn’t it? When an object is acted on by two forces that are equal in strength but opposite in direction, those forces will cancel one another out—the result of which is that the object will stay completely still. I ended up paralyzed, unable to move from the point where love and fear existed in perfect equilibrium.

Dad was only partly right about the time machine. Because it could only ever take us backward. As an adult, I wondered endlessly about what had happened in his life to send him careening off course, but maybe I was looking for something that wasn’t there. Maybe what haunted him was not some trauma from the past but the absence of a future.

When, a few days after our trip to Bryn’s, I was back to full health, something odd happened. I was coming back from Bryn’s room in Old Court, having presented him with a copy of Peter Warlock’s biography as a thank you. And, as I jogged down S staircase, something gave me a start: a figure in a hooded coat, standing completely immobile, facing one of the ground-floor bedrooms.

It looked as if the figure was about to knock at the door, but its arms hung loose at its sides, a set of keys dangling from its fingers. There was something eerie about its absolute stillness—it was like an automaton whose seized mechanism might still spring into life. I didn’t like to pass by. Then I realized who it was.

“Mona?”

She jumped, as if startled from sleep, and spun around. Her face shocked me. Not just because it was a bloodless white, but because she looked utterly terrified. “Hey,” she said, her voice almost inaudible.

“I didn’t mean to scare you. You okay?”

“Yeah. Fine.” She fumbled the key in the lock and gave me an awkward wave. I smiled vaguely and carried on out of the building and into the courtyard, supposing I must have interrupted some worries about coursework or something. Only later did I think: I never actually saw her go inside her room.

Was this the point I started to wonder? Or am I mis-remembering?