That summer it seems as though everywhere Alec goes there are small stands of rock—slate, most often, or the smooth gray pebbles that he has taught June to skip across the surface of the Lark—always waiting. Here, one at the corner of the churchyard wall where it juts into the lane. There, one in the shade of the yew the postmistress refuses to trim. Alec knows the cairns are for him, that June does not perform random acts, that there is a message in the precision with which she has laid them out. He hasn’t seen her often enough; they are only lately back in Fenbourne for the summer, and the Attwells have kept June as busy in these weeks as Aunt Constance and Roger, here on a month of leave from Kashmir, have kept him. But the cairns are always somewhere they’ve recently seen each other, somewhere she knows he’ll be again. Always, he knows, for him.
But knowing is different from understanding. He knows what he wants the stones to tell him. He knows that he feels June’s presence differently now, that how he missed her when they went away to school last autumn is not how he will miss her when he goes back to St. Paul’s in September. And he knows that the week before, when he’d squared off with his cricket bat on the pitch just outside the village, the grass defiantly emerald despite the beginnings of drought, he had turned back from the arc of the ball as it soared across the river and found June in the small crowd, her eyes and her smile on him.
He is still not used to the racket and bustle of London, although he has learned to make his way through it. He wants to tell June that she is how he does it, that it is by finding the small treasures that he wants to share with her—a cat painted on the wall of a pub, the tremble of light on the old glass of the window in his bedroom, the way snow and ice cathedraled along the Thames during that hideous cold winter—that he navigates the space she does not inhabit.
He wants to tell her that he would rather she inhabit all the space there is.
He’s contemplating the newest cairn—quartz, pale pink and shimmering against several layers of sheared-off sandstone—when his afternoon breaks open with the sound of hooves. He looks up, shading his eyes, although he knows who it is; Roger has brought a horse with him to Fenbourne, an Arabian mare with delicate ears and wicked eyes. And nobody races through the village like Roger and Noor, the midsummer sun warming the deep bay of her coat. Twice now Roger’s been seen keeping company with Melody Keswick, the youngest daughter of the local squire, but Aunt Constance says that Melody is not made for India any more than Roger is for England.
“Afternoon, Alec,” Roger says. “I’ve been looking for you.” He leans forward, holding Noor in check with his knees, and offers her a lump of sugar from his pocket.
Alec greets him and stands, mostly so Roger won’t notice the cairn and ask him about it.
Roger smiles, the horse restive beneath him. “You should come out with me sometime.”
“I’d like that,” Alec says. He doesn’t know if the galloping impresses Melody Keswick, but he can’t help but wonder if it might impress June. He eyes Noor, tossing her head in the sunshine, and Roger, keeping his seat without apparent effort. The horses at the stables in the village are a docile bunch; who there could keep up with Noor and Roger? But he is bold enough for a faster horse, and he knows it. Sometimes when he watches Roger on Noor he can imagine himself crouched over the arched neck of a horse like Roger’s, letting her guide them over hedgerows and ditches. The idea of the speed, the endless motion, calls to him.
“I daresay you’d like the course at Brooklands,” Roger says. “Motorcars and racing and so forth.” He grins at Alec, then shifts in the saddle, looking out over the landscape as if he’s trying to decide what to ask Noor to jump next. “I’m going down there for a few days tomorrow, if you’d like to come along. You seem as though you might not mind some excitement.”
“I saw the new Aston-Martin just before I came back from London,” Alec says. “The Le Mans.”
“Bloody lovely machine,” Roger says. “Two-seater?”
“Yes,” Alec says. It had sat idling in a street not far from school, and the rumble had got into his bones.
A bevy of sparrows jerks into the air; Noor startles. Roger tightens the reins around one hand and rubs the other along Noor’s mane. “Come down with me tomorrow, if your young lady can spare you, and we’ll see if we can’t get you closer.”
“Brilliant,” Alec says, rattled by your young lady. Is June anyone’s young lady? Could she be? June has always seemed to him to be just her own. He is June’s to his core, but he’s less certain that she is his. It’s an uneasy thought, though an intriguing one, so he concentrates on the cars he’ll see. In his mind, the engines expand into a barrage of sound. He has always loved that thrum and thunder. The idea of speed washes over him again, but this time he imagines himself in the low-swooping seat of an Aston-Martin, roaring along the straightaways in a dusty fever.
Roger leans down and claps him once on the shoulder. “Good lad. I’ll see you at home, yes?”
Alec nods absently. Noor whickers, and then she and Roger are gone, the sound of hooves retreating into the distance.
Brooklands is a grand spectacle, a shiny world that smells of petrol and rubber. Roger knows everyone, knows everything, and Alec follows him from car to car while Roger smokes and chats with the drivers. These are men Roger has known for years, and they talk about liters and speeds, about the patches in the concrete track that have left it so rough that cars leave the earth for seconds at a time. It’s hot in the sun, and a line of sweat creeps along Alec’s spine. But being too warm is better than the too-cold of recent winters, which left him raw with longing for India. He blinks the dust out of his eyes and listens to Roger. There are quiet exchanges of pound notes, gibes about bad bets and long shots.
Roger seems closest to a group of men gathered around a brace of Alfa Romeos, bright racing red and green. He pauses to sip from someone’s flask as they drink in memory of a man they call Tiger Tim, recently dead of septicemia after a racetrack injury in Tripoli that spring.
“Heroic,” a man says. He looks at Alec. “Had a glory of a Bentley.”
Roger nods, drinks. “Used to get up to nearly a hundred forty,” he says, shaking his head in admiration. The men murmur.
“Track’s not good for it,” the other man says. “But Tiger Tim, he broke his own record time and again.”
Alec absorbs this quietly. What must it feel like to move so quickly? To roar like lightning across the track and feel the pull of gravity and the car on the steep banking curves?
That afternoon he sits with Roger and his friends and has a pint like the other men. He watches how they move. There are boys at school like that, nearly men, who fill the space around them, and boys who don’t. Alec knows he is somewhere in between; he has just begun to feel the way he occupies his ground. Cricket helps, because everyone knows who he is. His height helps too; he’s nearly as tall as Roger now, and looks older than a few weeks from fourteen.
“Tomorrow afternoon there’s women racing the course,” one of the men says. “Reckon there might be some good motors, though.”
Another man leans off to the side and spits. “No place for ladies here,” he says. “Although . . . A woman who wants to race isn’t much of a lady.” The group nods, grumbles. Alec watches their faces, puzzled by the distinction he doesn’t understand. His aunt drives fast, and there is no doubt that she is a lady. And Melody Keswick, too—she is gentry, but he has heard Roger laud her recklessness on horseback and behind the wheel. Is it the act of competition that changes things? Is it the difference between wanting to go fast and wanting to go faster than someone else? He makes a note to ask June.
After lunch the next day Roger takes Alec to a stable near Byfleet. Alec nearly protests missing the afternoon’s races—he wants to be able to tell June about the women and their cars—but the idea of watching Roger with horses pulls at him, too. Roger seems reserved and a little wary, and gradually Alec realizes that there is probably a gambling issue here as well. Perhaps, judging by Roger’s face, a less happy story than whatever is between him and the men at Brooklands.
The stable itself does not provide any answers; Roger is his usual bluff self with the bandy-legged trainer who walks them through the barn, and Alec finds himself as absorbed as ever with the way Roger touches the horses. He wants to know anything as well as Roger knows horses. Cricket is close—how the bat feels in his hands, the way he can almost sense how the air and grass and men will work together with every bowled ball . . . Yes. It’s close.
But that night, after the drive back to Fenbourne, he realizes that what he most wants to understand is June. He wants to know what she is telling him with the cairns, and what each of her smiles means.
He curls into the corner of his bed, watching the moon, wondering if June is watching it, too. Most nights, he tells himself the stories his mother used to tell him—Kipling, sometimes, or tales of Vishnu and Shiva and the Monkey King, but most of all an ever-changing tale of a princess and a bear and their life along a river somewhere. He can’t remember where, and the loss of that detail gives him a pang every time he thinks of it. The maharani and her bear, the river cold as mountain ice. But tonight the details don’t stick, and when he finally sleeps, his dreams are full of the blue sky above the Himalayas, of an avalanche shuddered into life by the sound of motorcycles, of the fire he never saw that consumed his parents and the cholera that had taken them.
It’s the next evening that they go to the vicarage for dinner. As they get ready, Aunt Constance fusses over him as if he were much younger, until Roger pulls her away with a laugh. Alec watches Roger, freshly shaved and gleaming in his dress uniform. The men he sees most often are the masters at school, or tradesmen or farmers either in the City or here in Fenbourne. But Roger is the kind of man he can see himself becoming—an officer, like his father, his shoulders broad in the uniform. Perhaps a horse, a commission in the Guides, a return to India.
At the vicarage, June enters the drawing room with her father, exactly as she had the first time he saw her. But she’s elegant now in a way that startles him to the core, in a dress the color of coffee, her hair pulled back. He is not prepared for either the lines of her beneath the fabric or the way he feels when he notices. When she turns to greet Aunt Constance, Alec tries to catch his breath. He is not prepared for June at all.
They fill the room with chatter, Alec and June together by the window with their thimbles of sherry, the adults islanded on the furniture. Alec keeps stumbling over talking about the races, and each time she regards him with her level eyes, waiting, even while he knows she’s listening to Roger and her father talk about what’s happening on the Continent.
Finally she says, “Alec?”
“Yes?” He looks down at her, and realizes for the first time that it’s been a while since they were eye to eye.
“I’m glad you’re here.” She smiles softly at him. His heart larrups.
“I am, too,” he says, feeling the insufficiency. June’s smile broadens as if she feels it too, through him, and forgives it, and she sips at her sherry. Her hair looks so soft, and he’s glad when he hears Mr. Attwell say something about the Ashes and England’s win against Australia last winter. Talking about cricket will be so much easier.
“Australia are looking strong again for the next series,” Mr. Attwell says mildly.
“Alec can fetch ’em back if Australia win,” Roger says, reaching out and poking at Alec’s shoulder.
Alec grins obligingly. Playing for England would be grand indeed. And playing for the Ashes would take him back through India.
Mr. Attwell acknowledges Roger with a nod. “Say what you like, I prefer my cricket the old-fashioned way.”
Roger grimaces. “Nothing wrong with body-line.”
“I shouldn’t like someone bowling at me like that,” Alec says quietly, and the men both stare at him. Mr. Attwell’s thin mouth curves into a smile.
“In any event,” Aunt Constance says, her words clipped, “isn’t what’s happening in Germany more important?”
“We beat them once,” Roger says, shrugging and lighting a cigarette. “If need be, we’ll do it again.”
“But the cost,” Aunt Constance says. “Another generation, lost.”
Alec turns and meets June’s eyes. It feels good to be included as an adult, more or less, but it was easier when they could slip off to the conservatory together, away from the politics. He takes a step closer to her, wishing, although he’s not quite sure for what.
She smiles again, as if she knows his thoughts, but then she moves nearer to where Roger is talking about the last war. Alec follows.
“If there is another war with Germany, mightn’t it mean the end of empire?” she says, and the adults stop talking and turn. Alec realizes abruptly that they are listening as if she is one of them. Of course they are.
She continues. “Whether we win or lose—”
Mr. Attwell says, “We’ll win handily enough, if it comes to it.”
“That great wally at Downing Street will give the Huns his own bloody children if we let him,” Roger mutters. Mrs. Attwell frowns and murmurs something about language, and Roger goes red.
“In India they’ve begun to partition the electorate,” June says. “I should think that another war in which we expect the Indians to fight for Britain might make that fragmentation more pronounced.”
“The end of the Raj,” Aunt Constance says.
Alec doesn’t know what to say—India has been part of his family forever. He is the third generation of Oswin to be born there, the fourth to feel the shattering rains of the monsoons. Intellectually he understands, almost, but in his heart, it’s a bewilderment.
“Speaking of India,” June says, eyeing him, “or, not India, quite, they’ve nearly made Everest this time.”
“They might manage next time,” Alec says.
“Lady Houston should be credited more,” Aunt Constance says. “I expect she would have liked to see them succeed. It’s quite an investment.”
“It’s a faith,” Mrs. Attwell says tersely. “Imagine such a life.” Alec nods. He had followed the trip closely in The Guardian, the pictures ranging through his memory. Impossible photographs of impossible acts, biplanes soaring above the clouds, the sharp prow of the mountains in the background. He can’t look at the pictures without thinking about the crystallized kernel of absence his parents’ deaths left in his life, but also he can’t help thinking about what it must be like to fly. To be human, but other, thousands of feet above the surface of the earth, freed from all of it.
“On top of a mountain is not a good place for a woman,” Roger says. He narrows his eyes at his sister, who looks like she wants to interject. “Don’t look at me like that, Connie. Basic matter of strength, that’s all. Women aren’t suited to adventure.”
June frowns, clearly vexed. “What about Gertrude Bell? Or Amelia Earhart?”
Roger smiles indulgently at June. “Exception proves the rule.”
“We have our roles for a reason,” Mr. Attwell says. June looks away, her lips pressed into a thin line.
Alec smiles at her. “There were women racers at Brooklands. Mechanics, too.”
“When the next war comes,” June says, glancing at Alec’s aunt as if seeking her approval, “I suppose we’ll see what women are capable of, if all the men go to the front and we’re needed again for factories and farms.”
“That’s enough, June,” Mr. Attwell says mildly, and June blushes, looking down at her hands.
Mary comes in to announce dinner, and as they all rise to their feet, it feels as though the room has let out its breath. As they sit, June leans close and whispers to Alec, “Every time I see a picture of Everest, Alec? I think of you.”
Two mornings later, when a cairn made of sharply angled shears of slate appears beneath the willow in front of the cottage, he thinks of Everest, and something shifts in his chest, as joyous as an otter. Perhaps he doesn’t have to ask her what it means after all.