The thing resolved itself, took on its own unsatisfactory form, over the coming week. I’d done something instinctual which justified itself in argument: I wanted to do things on my terms and not theirs. ‘Yes, my dear David, but what?’ said Humphrey when I saw him the next day.
‘I just needed to act,’ I said.
‘Rather, you mean, than to be acted on?’
This sounded like mere cleverness, Humphrey’s way of turning everything round. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I said.
In college, friends who had finished Finals were extending their lunch on the grass, more beers brought out, leisure they hardly knew what to do with as the last days of all this life brightened and faded. I avoided them, I felt more than ever unknown, incomprehensible – a form of solitude that opened up a larger space within itself, since I barely understood my own actions, and had no idea, having done what I had, about what to do next. Humphrey was consumed by it, made representations to the examiners, it was upsetting how much he cared, and fought for me. The Senior Dean said I might get an aegrotat, which involved an admission I was ill. I could see a psychologist, a good man from the Warneford, the legendary madhouse that hovered on the hill above Oxford, a short walk from the spot I’d unthinkingly fled to, when I ran out of Schools. Peter Roddick, in my year, had taken his Prelims in the Warneford, between schizophrenic episodes in which he acted like a different person, attaching himself to strangers in the High Street and trying to go home with them.
Mum said she’d come to Oxford and collect me, but I couldn’t face the school-like loading of the car – trunk and books and stereo and people watching. The pitiless clearing out of rooms had begun. I hardly knew which was worse, everything ending, or my not being part of it. I secured a further two weeks in my room, and hitched a lift back to Foxleigh. Standing at the bottom of Cumnor Hill with my arm out and thumb raised as car after car accelerated past me, I saw myself again through the eyes of the English driver, the boy of seventeen smiling out from the verge at the racist, the policeman and the optimistic middle-aged man who’d stopped for me and given me his number.
When I got to Crackers I let myself in quietly, as if I could avoid detection, and questions. It was half-past two, Mum was back at the shop, and it was Esme who heard me and came into the hall. ‘Oh, dear, old lovey,’ she said, and we stood in our usual uncertainty about how to greet each other. In the kitchen as she made me a sandwich she felt her way forward. ‘As long as you’re all right, that’s what I said to Av,’ she said.
‘I’m sure I’ll be fine,’ I said, and she looked at me shrewdly. I sat at the table and ate my sandwich, and the eating seemed an admission of a larger hunger and need for help.
‘All got a bit much for you, didn’t it, Dave,’ Esme said. ‘Not surprising really, it makes me feel weak when I think what you had to do,’ and she plonked herself down in the chair opposite. ‘I’m afraid your mother’s been in a bit of a state about it all.’ I knew this kind of second-hand reproach, but I had the feeling Esme was suggesting solidarity with me. ‘She’s had a word with your tutor – it seems you could still do it.’ And I saw as if in another room all Mum’s grief and anxiety, and thought perhaps that was the worst thing about it, the crisis for her, who had steered me through everything, somehow, superbly, up till the end of last week.
Back in my room with its view of the drive and once in an hour, perhaps, a car passing the gate, I was something between a convict and a convalescent. I heard the car, and Mum coming home early. I felt I would get the upshot of their own anxious talks about what to do, and felt a certain embarrassment at their not being up to the task. We were stiff with each other when I went down, and she seemed not to know what tone she would take, her sternness was panicked and beyond her control. We had tea in the kitchen, trapped in our uncertainty. Was the crisis still going on, deserving hush and tenderness, or were we ready for hard talk about what to do next?
‘We don’t want you slumping,’ said Mum, and her brisk almost comical tone smuggled in a pronomial subtlety: the bucking-up ‘we’ of the hospital nurse had merged with her first ever use, in her years as a mother, of the parent’s ‘we’: she and Esme were in this together. It bothered me, and I said, ‘I have no intention of slumping.’ There was an irksome fog of cluelessness, neither of the women had been to university or knew about the theatre. I couldn’t quite look at Mum, or acknowledge what she knew of the horror and hardship of going it alone.
I went out in the garden with a book, rather as I had in the past when exams were approaching – though even last vac I’d had Volpone with me too, sat marking it up as though revising, a reassuring sight at the end of the lawn. Now Barry had mown the grass and was doing the edges with long-handled shears. I didn’t know what he’d picked up from Esme’s gossip, we nodded and exchanged a few words as he came along sideways towards me. ‘Hope things look up for you, then, Dave,’ he said, and edged his way on past. I sensed how the idea of me that he’d picked up from the women, as a scholar at Oxford, ‘all rather over our heads, I’m afraid’, was mixed up with other feelings – guesses and suspicions – unresolved for years.
Nick and Jenny and Walter and Stella were driving to Italy in Walt’s Peugeot, sharing the driving. For a day or two there was meaningless talk about me joining them – ‘You can drive, can’t you, Dave?’ Stella said. Jenny’s line was practical, they were going for three weeks, they’d need to have bags on the back seat and under their feet as it was. I said, almost grateful for the snub, ‘No, no, there just wouldn’t be room.’
I made do with a meeting with Nick in London, an immense July day in Kensington Gardens. I was early at the Albert Memorial, walked to and fro lost between the soot-blackened Continents, India unveiling herself on an elephant, China, presumably, cross-legged at her feet. I had a fear we would be hidden from each other by the monument itself, going round and round it like a game or a dream – the gates were open, and I trotted up the wide flight of steps to look at the writers and artists in the frieze, Homer and Shakespeare and William Blake all crowded together. When I saw Nick coming, down the avenue of plane trees on the Hyde Park side, I strolled on round the corner as if I hadn’t noticed him. I think I wanted to be found, not to be forever the seeker.
A minute later here he was, we were on, and time, that had crept and jumped unbearably all morning, ran forward with breathless smoothness and speed. He’d seen me and come in and climbed the steps – he gave a big smile when he strode round the corner towards me, then looked down almost shyly. He was in baggy brown trousers and a white shirt not tucked in and half unbuttoned . . . in the breeze he seemed to flow around the lean core of himself as he approached along the chequered pavement. He was what I’d remembered night after night and he was everything else that memory hadn’t got to yet, and never could. We met and his tight hug and kiss on the cheek made me gasp and look round in case we’d been seen.
He said why didn’t we walk up to the cafe by the Serpentine, and get a sandwich or something, and already the day was reshaped by his practicality. We sauntered down the steps and round past Europe, on to the path through the trees. ‘So where are you staying?’ he said.
I told him I was staying at Brian Wood’s flat.
‘I don’t know him, do I?’ Nick said.
‘Yeah, he was in my college . . . It’s just near here,’ I said, glancing over my shoulder, ‘Queen’s Gate, do you know . . .? They’re all away in Spain for three weeks.’
‘Well, that’s handy,’ said Nick. He couldn’t have known how I’d tidied it up last night and put a bottle of Quentin Wood’s Riesling in the ice-box just in case. ‘And how have you been?’
‘Oh . . . well . . . OK . . . you know . . . not marvellous—’
‘And thank you for your letter, by the way. I ought to have written back.’
I shrugged this off. ‘Oh, that’s fine.’
‘No, it was bad of me. I just wasn’t sure . . .’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘I know,’ though I wasn’t sure either. For the first time in my life I’d become a great burden on people, and it was part of the beauty of Nick that he never let it show.
I wanted everything about him, and at the same time shrank from his news. ‘So when are you off?’ I said, as levelly as I could.
‘Oh, tomorrow, first thing. We’re getting the ten o’clock ferry. Walt’s picking me up at five-thirty a.m.’ I’d only thought up to now of all of them in Walt’s car, but it was the image of the ferry pulling out from the dock that turned me over with longing.
‘You’ll have a wonderful time,’ I said; and we walked on under the great planes, while he told me very flatly where they were going – Pisa, Florence, Perugia (where they joined Walt’s parents for three days), then on to Rome. He tried, out of niceness, to make it sound a bore and barely worth the effort, and the driving.
‘It doesn’t sound too bad,’ I said, and he smiled and said, ‘I’m sure it will all be fine.’
It simply didn’t occur to me, in the minutes that followed, while we strolled beside the Serpentine, rowing boats and pedalos out, and the faint haunting stink of the lake in summer, that he might have had his Finals results, and the question, when I thought of it, seemed too perilous. I put my hand lightly on his shoulder, to help him through, as I said, ‘I’m assuming you’ve not heard yet?’
‘What’s that?’ he said, as if I had further bad news of my own.
‘About Schools . . .’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘yes, I have, I heard on Monday,’ quite matter of fact, I couldn’t tell if modest in success or unbothered by defeat, but the whole five seconds had a desolating charge for me, the enactment in real life of the moment I could only know now as a spectator: ‘Yeah, I scraped through.’ ‘Oh yes . . .?’ ‘I managed it, I got a First.’ He couldn’t help grinning then, and I walked on a little ahead of him, my face stiff with grief. ‘I’m so glad,’ I said, ‘well done!’ I was overcome as I turned and groped for him, hugged him tight. ‘Congratulations, Nick!’
‘I didn’t want to mention, because . . . you know.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said, ‘it’s wonderful news.’ And he stood and held me and patted my back until I’d more or less stopped crying.
‘And what are you going to be doing?’ said Nick. We were perched at a table overhanging the end of the Serpentine, ducks in the weeds below making doting noises as they travelled about. I waited till the girl had cleared away the plates and paper napkins and given us our menus, and then I looked up and down at mine and turned it over as if not seeing what I wanted, though in fact I saw nothing at all. ‘I hope you’re going to act.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and touched his hard knee under the table. ‘That’s what I want to do.’
‘You’ve made a pretty impressive start.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘that was Oxford. It’s not so easy in the big wide world.’
‘I honestly don’t see why, Dave, with your talent. What about that review in The Times? – “tireless brilliance”, was that the phrase . . .?’
I said, ‘Have you noticed I don’t look much like, say, Alan Bates?’ and smiled, to soften my sharp tone. Sometimes Nick’s absolute unconsciousness of my appearance, my difference, a sort of ethical beauty in him, seemed to verge on a blander disregard for the whole problem.
He blushed slightly and looked down at his hand as he laid it on mine. ‘Don’t be daft,’ he said, and rubbed the back of my hand before he sat back. ‘Your appearance is just a part of your talent. You are who you are.’
I think I saw what he meant. ‘Well, thank you,’ I said again, drily, though the wonderful rub of his hand, like any touch of Nick’s, was a wild reminder of what I couldn’t have.
The food came, unwanted and expensive but remotely worthwhile, a show of our coping and having lunch, at least, together. This time tomorrow he would be disembarking at Calais, perhaps out already on the road across northern France.
‘What about the others?’ I said. ‘Has Jenny had her results?’
‘Yes, she has, she got a Second – a “good Second”,’ with a smile at the conventional phrase.
‘And what will she do?’ I said. ‘What will you do? Will you stay on – do a doctorate? – that’s what everyone thought I was going to do.’ It was consoling to think Oxford might keep him, within reach after all.
Nick looked down, applied himself to cutting up his toasted sandwich, with its ooze of cheese. ‘I’ve had an offer, actually, from Harvard, I’m going to do a master’s degree there.’
‘Oh, amazing!’ I said, in a faint friendly tone.
‘Yes, I think it could be good,’ he said, with a flinch, as if still undecided about it.
‘Harvard,’ I said, ‘for fuck’s sake!’
‘Yeah, I know’ – he laughed, and looked down again – ‘and Jenny wants to be nearer her mother in Boston – you know, since her father died. So that all makes sense.’
‘Right,’ I said, ‘yes, of course,’ and then airily, ‘I didn’t know her mother lived in Boston.’ It was a perilous performance, but I managed it, the selfless pleasure in its all, as he said, making sense. I saw how Nick’s tact, which was a kindness to me, was also a sign of his power, of things kept from me. Of course he’d left Jenny this morning to come out and meet me, they’d talked in a firm but considerate tone about the things he would have to say. The vision of them in a hallway, her kissing him lightly as he went out, with reminders about packing, and not being too long, was also a vision of myself as a problem they shared. He was explaining now about Jenny and her plans, and I cut in quietly, ‘Well, I hope it goes wonderfully for you both.’ I’m not sure if this quick masochistic surrender to the idea of their happiness helped me to accept it or dug me in deeper in envy and loss. He looked at me steadily, grey eyes through the square gold-framed glasses, his large thoughtful scrupulous gaze; then blinked and looked down.
‘I do worry,’ he said, ‘about what part I’ve played in . . . you know . . .’
‘Oh . . .’ I said, and now the water of the lake seemed to well and fill the view and block my thoughts.
He glanced round before he spoke. ‘You’re very special, David . . . Dave’ – he laughed softly. ‘I do love you, you know, but just . . . well, not like that.’
I nodded, not tearful, unchangeably corrected. The words I had longed for were spoken, and followed in the very same sentence by the others, so banal that they shocked me in themselves, as much as in what they said. I said, ‘Mm, well, I love you too,’ as if our being in love was his idea, to which I was responding with my own tact, a mere form of words. It was the first time I’d said it to him, out loud.
I wrote a cheque for the waitress, Nick left a small tip, and we strolled back the way we had come, at a leisurely pace, like two people talking more earnestly than we were; we barely spoke. I dreaded leaving him, though I hungered perversely for the five or ten seconds of physical contact: the sportsmanlike clinch which was his way, our way, of saying goodbye – the kiss that was his best offer, and was my inarticulate promise of all I was ready to give. This time I needed more, I pressed myself against him, so that his hidden cock glanced off mine, I couldn’t see what he thought about that when I let him go slowly – stood back with my hands on his warm hips and shook him as I said, ‘Have a wonderful time!’
He blushed as he laughed. ‘Thank you!’
‘And give my love to the others, won’t you.’
‘OK – yes, I will.’ There was just a chance, there was every chance, of a scene – the rush of ruinous emotion that I always kept back.
‘And . . . you know,’ my last shake a little melting stroke before I stood back empty-handed, ‘keep in touch!’
‘Will do,’ said Nick, ‘will do,’ and I turned then and walked off fast down the path, and veered away under the cover of the trees.
I went at a relaxed-looking pace down the tree-shaded length of Queen’s Gate, windows open on the lounge bars of discreet hotels, cream-stuccoed consulates where Filipina maids swept the areas and put out the rubbish, all the beautiful business of London going on, and let myself in at the black front door of the house. The second post had come, and I took up a postcard for Brian’s mother in the lift with me to the fifth floor: a beach on Tresco, ‘Dear Connie, The boys are having a whale of a time!’ I got into the flat, the little learnt procedure of the three locks, and snapped the bolt behind me with a strange sense of imposture. The flat was at the edge of its tolerance, in fact it was offended that I was still there. The sun shone down steeply into the empty sitting room, the cool kitchen at the back, with its pans and scales and electric clock, seemed to frown as it watched me open the cupboards and stare without knowing what I wanted at the spices and jams. In the ice-box the Riesling was frozen solid, the cork forced half out of the neck of the bottle. I stood it in the sink, not wanting it or knowing what to do with it.
In the hallway of the flat there was an entryphone, a white handset fixed to the wall, silent throughout my stay, and now it buzzed, and buzzed fiercely again, a new sound, as unlike the telephone as a fire alarm. I felt incoherently that Nick had found the place, rung the bell, and after a heart-stopping second of adjustment I lifted the receiver and said hello. Only the weirdly magnified sound of a van that I could hear at the same time through the open window as it went down the street below. Then two voices, the words indistinct, out on the front steps perhaps, some helpful exchange. I said hello again, as a matter of form, a car door slammed, a car moved off, and in the London silence that followed, steady murmur of the city, with a faint low-pitched buzz from the entryphone itself, I stood waiting and listening, and then hung up.
Esme was at Swindon to meet me. I threw my overnight bag on the back seat and climbed in beside her with a heavy live feeling of distress and exhaustion it was hard to conceal. ‘Meet up with your friend OK?’ she said.
‘I did, thanks, yes.’
‘Everything all right?’
‘Oh – fine, yes,’ I said, as though I’d already forgotten about it.
‘You know,’ she said, checking in the mirror as she pulled out onto the main road, ‘you can always ask him, Nick, he’s called, isn’t he, to come and stay with us.’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said, ‘thank you. Actually, he’s just going off to Italy for three weeks, but it’s a nice thought.’
‘Well then, after that.’
I couldn’t tell if Esme was tactfully waiting for me to own up to something that was obvious to her, or if she just thought I needed more company of my own age.
‘The college forwarded some post for you,’ Mum said. ‘I put it in your room.’ I could tell from her casual tone that she was curious about this post, and I said, ‘Oh, I’ll have a look at it tonight.’ A few minutes later she said, ‘Do have a look at your letters, love – you know, just in case there’s something important.’ I went up to my room and closed the door, and opened the post in order, two from the Faculty that I couldn’t take in, and an unexpected postcard from Tim’s Joanne, to say how sorry she was and how something was sure to turn up. The picture was Olivier as Othello, cork-black to the navel, with the six wavy lines of the postmark impressed on his face. On the top left-hand corner of the last envelope the three forward-leaning sans-serif capitals were so familiar and so momentous that I couldn’t face opening it for a minute or two. I went to the bathroom with an illogical feeling that the contents could be good or bad, like the exam results my friends were getting every day now.
‘Any developers?’ said Esme, when I went down. Both she and Mum were languid with anticipation. When I told them, she mixed extra-large gin and tonics for all of us to celebrate. ‘It’s not, you know, playing Hamlet,’ I said, ‘it may not even happen,’ but we were all shuffled up for an hour or so into a dubious kind of cheerfulness. Esme asked to look at the letter again and by dinner time she had it more or less by heart.
‘So you have to go and read for a part,’ she said. ‘I wonder what that entails, exactly.’ I tried to be offhand about it, and teased her for being excited. I said, ‘The casting director saw me in a Jacobean play set in Venice and thought I’d be just right for a hotel receptionist in Torquay.’
‘Well you’ve got to start somewhere, Dave,’ Esme said. ‘And I’ve always loved Torquay.’
Mum shifted the sizzling onions in the pan but her cook’s concentration was divided. ‘I suppose you can play a character like that,’ she said, ‘I mean you’ve been taken for Malayan before now.’
‘God knows,’ I said.
‘It’s acting, isn’t it,’ said Esme sensibly. ‘I mean, look at Olivier, all blacked up like an old . . .’ – she stared into the distance, but I knew then she’d been through my post. ‘And this is on the Beeb! We’ll get the girls round to watch.’
‘I’ll probably only be on for three seconds.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone I actually knew on telly,’ said Esme. ‘Have you, Av?’
‘No,’ said Mum, ‘I’m not sure I have.’ I saw her old belief in me, her trust that everything would pay off, at odds with her new wariness and sense of danger.
We had our supper in the garden, not yet a tradition, but suggested as a treat for me, celebration winning out for the evening over worry and unfocused blame. I opened the French windows and set up the card table on the path, small stones from the flower bed wedged under the feet to keep it steady. A white cloth over the baize and two candles in jam jars. A tray then with glasses, cutlery, Mum’s best red napkins, the Crown Derby cruet that Esme had had as a wedding present. I brought out three heavy chairs from the dining room, stagey and out of place. I took all my usual care with presentation, folded up the napkins like fortune-tellers, brought out the silver bowls of ginger and sugar for the melon starter, and it felt like a pathetic consolation, I wished I wasn’t doing it, or was doing it for someone else. All the time as I went in and out I was dawdling and wincing through thoughts of Nick and me together, and ideas, blurred and slipping, of the evening he was spending in London without me. I looked at the perfect table. I had everything except my meal.
We sat down as the last sun went off the garden. The candles in their jam jars burned steady while the breeze got up and pushed Mum’s hair across her face and flipped the corner of the tablecloth into the sugar. A touch of English stoicism stiffened our smiles. Esme had opened a bottle of Moselle, but Mum covered her glass with her hand. ‘Cheers,’ I said, keeping up the positive mood, the audition in London next week to look forward to. The card table brought us close together, Esme and Mum facing each other, partners, and me in the middle, turning from one to the other, or at times simply gazing at the empty place facing me.
‘So London, love, yes, how did it go?’ said Mum, as if I’d just arrived. ‘It was all right at your friend’s flat.’
I hated this kind of stilted talk, and then felt it was better than the serious talk it was a fragile defence against. ‘Yeah, it was fine, Mum,’ I said – and heard my adolescent mumble. ‘It’s where I stayed last summer, if you remember, for the Proms. It’s five minutes’ walk from the Albert Hall.’
‘I don’t think I knew who you stayed with, you see. What’s his name?’
‘Brian – Brian Wood. He read English in my year. He’s very nice – big Delius man. He’s going out with Fiona Harris – you know, who used to be Giles’s girlfriend.’ It was craven, my need to reassure her about Brian, I seemed to dream up her suspicion that I might be going out with him myself.
‘How funny . . .’ she said.
‘And you saw your friend Nick . . .’ said Esme, coaxing things along.
‘Yeah, I wanted to catch him before he goes off to Italy.’ I said this very calmly and in the silence that followed it seemed transparently inadequate.
‘So, Dave, what about this Nick?’ said Mum, in a funny house-master tone I hadn’t heard before. The thump of my pulse in my ear was so loud because the looming frankness wasn’t just about me. It seemed to me all three of us were about to declare ourselves.
I set down my knife and fork, sat forward, laid my hands flat on the table, in candour and steadiness. ‘Mum, I love Nick,’ I said, ‘I’m in love with him.’ Esme shifted in her chair but said nothing. I didn’t know which of them to announce it to, so I said it to the garden in front of me: ‘I’m a homosexual.’ Then it was Mum I looked at first, and I couldn’t tell if her gaze as she took it in was one of shock or pity. The words had a physical presence – it was like being high in the garden with Nick himself, words printed on the night, imminent, and so obvious in prospect that you thought you might have said them already. The candlelight on Mum’s features made her strange. There was a throat-clearing from Esme.
‘Well, we rather gathered that, I think, didn’t we, Av?’
‘Well,’ I said, and shrugged as I turned to her, ‘there you are then.’
‘I’m just worried, love, about you generally, you know, at the moment,’ Mum said. It wasn’t clear if this included a worry about me being homosexual or if that barely figured in the larger concern.
‘I know, Mum,’ I said.
‘I’m glad you’ve told us what you just have, but you must know it makes no difference to us.’ And she reached out and took my hand, a quick warm clasp giving confidence and seeking it too, and which we both knew in the moment she did it was very unusual.
‘I mean, for god’s sake,’ said Esme, and reached out and gripped my other arm. ‘I’ve glad you’ve come out with it at last.’
Then an awful perspective opened up, as they sat there holding on to me on either side, of having to go into the thing, with tearful confusion, and shy reminiscences, and the still unsubsided shock, for me, of having spoken. ‘I’ll get the main course,’ said Mum, and I think we all saw that the subject I’d come out with over the melon could not be kept up through the chicken casserole and the trifle. It left me at least with a breathless feeling of being launched and treading air, waiting to touch down. The relief of our each having said what we’d said was so great it was almost an anticlimax, as we nattered about Wincroft, and what Jane and Molly Carr had been up to – though Molly and Jane themselves appeared now in a subtly liberated light. I felt in an unexpected way that I’d joined the girls.
Over coffee, with Mum in a shawl now to keep warm, our faces, in the soft but unwavering light of the candles, were mask-like, so shadowed and private as to seem unknown, but then again frank, and even mischievous.
Esme sat back, a small brandy glass in her hand. ‘I have to say, Dave, about you, you know, if you won’t mind me saying, that it’s been pretty obvious to me since the first day I met you. I have a nose for these things, I just know,’ and she wrinkled her nose like someone amusing a small child.
‘Oh, really!’ I said, ‘was it . . .’
‘Certainly when we had that holiday in Devon – the way you stared at men all the time – look, I don’t want to embarrass you.’
‘No, no,’ I said – almost curious now about how I’d been seen, and read.
‘That young waiter you couldn’t take your eyes off – do you remember?’ I looked down, amused and ashamed. ‘And then when your mum and me came to see you in that play, where you were so brilliant as the old woman. If I didn’t know before, I knew then.’
‘Well . . .’ I said, ‘that was years later,’ and I wondered if she had kept these suspicions to herself – it brought back those glimpses, on the sands at Friscombe, and in the hotel dining room, of the talk that she and Mum must have without me, and at night, in their shared room: the first seeping awareness that they knew each other better than they pretended to me they did.
‘I’ve known a lot of gay men, as we say now, in my time – Christ, I was married to one for four and a half years!’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know you were,’ and felt almost envious of her and gorgeous Gilbert, as she sometimes called him.
‘Gilbert had a number of good friends in the theatre world, so if you’re going to be an actor, my impression is you’ll be absolutely fine. In fact it will be an advantage, won’t it, Av?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mum: ‘I mean, so I’ve heard.’ I wasn’t sure at first if she liked this candour; but I think it was the fact of speaking candidly that took some getting used to, more than the things that were being said. ‘I think I will have a brandy,’ she said. ‘A tiny one, love,’ and it wasn’t clear for a second if it was me or Esme she was looking at. I got up and went into the house for a glass. It seemed a moment for them to talk, to come to some murmured agreement, but I heard nothing, and when I stepped back outside they both smiled calmly up at me, as if to say that harmony was now restored. ‘Ah, you’re having one too,’ Mum said, and I poured out half an inch for each of us. It wasn’t expressly a toast, but we touched our glasses, all three, in a delicate chiming collision, before we drank.
Esme said, ‘I think we just want you to be happy, love, like your mother and me.’
‘Mm, quite,’ said Mum, in a considering way.
‘And, you know, we couldn’t be more delighted that you’ve got Nick.’
I looked down, breathed deeply, very grateful for her kindness, then lifted my glass and peered ahead, at the lavender and the low wall, the garden losing colour to the night, the tips of Gilbert’s conifers like cypresses against the deep blue sky.