‘Do you love me?’
His hair against her face made her want to sneeze.
‘Tutu! Stop it!’ The dog was tugging her away to play among the forest leaves with no idea what his monochromatic eyes had just missed: her first ever real kiss. With tongues.
‘Of course I do,’ she said, rubbing her nose with a mitten. Sarah had known this boy James in junior Sunday school, when they were very young, then waved him off at the airport when he left with his family for India. They had spent a fortnight together every year since. Strong, bright and funny, James told stories about the missionary life and teachers who thought they were still living in the Raj. He was smart and sensitive, the things she thought she wanted. And he made fun of the Lord with jokes, which was way cool.
‘The nun says to Mary, “Why do you always look so solemn in your statues?” So Mary says to the nun, “Between you and me, I wanted a girl . . .”’
Back at the rectory, her father was saying to James’s parents, ‘They’re good for each other. As friends, I mean. Obviously. They’re good friends. Oh, I don’t know, doesn’t it scare you how fast they are growing up?’
The parents sat over cold tea and uneaten crumpets confessing that yes, it was alarming and it did make them feel old. They were all praying together, Robert and Tom and Judy, holding hands and asking the Lord for strength and wisdom, when Sarah and James were under the forest canopy kissing, trying to work out where to put their noses.
‘I am in love.’
The first time James wrote those words to her was on tissue-thin blue airmail paper, sent from India seven days after the kiss. She wrote back, ‘Thank you for what you said, but I am afraid to say that I think a proper relationship requires more than a fortnight a year of proper contact in which to flourish.’ She felt very grown up, writing that, and it was only half serious, but it was also true. Sarah wanted a boyfriend whose hand she could actually hold. Lovely as he was, James would not do. They traded letters once a month, but by the time he returned to England a year later they were like brother and sister again, mooching around dusty museums and playing long games of chess.
‘I am in love.’
The second time James wrote those words, he did not mean with her. They came after a complicated, lingering description of an unnamed school friend, which was confusing to her for reasons she could not immediately identify.
‘This is it, Sarah. His name is Parv.’
Ah. Then she knew what her father would want her to think, but she was not going to think that, thank you. This was great: James was a secret friend, far away, who knew her like nobody else and had found a love really worth writing about. What a great secret. She was just a little bit jealous, though. Not of Parv, but of the passion.
‘I love you too,’ she wrote. ‘I always will.’ She meant it. ‘I will be as loyal and faithful a friend as you have been to me, James.’ Very Jane Austen. She was pleased with that. ‘I do not suppose there is much I can do to help you tell your parents. You are going to tell them, right?’
Right. Her father called out as she passed the half-open door of his study later that day. ‘Honey . . . I guess you know about James then?’
She was disappointed to lose her secret, and also very worried. She had heard her father preach. Love the sinner, hate the sin, he said. It was against God’s will. ‘It is different when you know somebody,’ he said gently, as though stumbling on a thought for the first time. ‘I suppose that is true. When you love them.’
He pushed his glasses back up his nose and shuffled his papers in the wordless way he had of saying that he needed to be alone to work now, thank you. His sermons changed after that. He began to quote Tutu – the archbishop, not the dog – so often that the phrase became his catchphrase in the church. ‘Love is stronger than hate. Light is stronger than the darkness. Life is stronger than death. Love changes everything.’ Sarah didn’t know whether to tell him the last bit came from The Phantom of the Opera.
The Reverend Robert Jones said those things so often to his daughter because she would not let him say what he really wanted to say, never ever. He wanted to talk about his wife Jasmine, her mother, but Sarah would not have it. He very much wanted to give her a letter that Jasmine had written for her before she died, but Sarah would not take it. He tried on her eighteenth birthday, then her nineteenth and her twentieth. He tried again on the morning of her twenty-first birthday, holding out a blank white envelope. Inside, he knew, was a much older letter with her name on it, written in her mother’s flowing hand.
‘Please?’
‘No. You can’t make me.’
The eggs were burning in the pan. There was smoke in the kitchen. He pleaded, cajoled, paced the room, circling her, shouting, even cursing . . . and finally, when his eyes were blind with tears and his face flushed with exertion and he seemed about to lose his temper in a way that frightened Sarah, he went quiet. ‘Fine. It is your choice.’ He kissed her on the forehead, wetting her hair and thinking, you are so much like your mum.