In flood years, the River Lark and the various rills and streams and minor tributaries that feed from it creep into the roads and lanes of Fenbourne. June has lost count of how often the bells of St. Anne’s have rung the alarm when the river has crested too high, and twice that she can remember the water has edged up nearly to the steps of the church. Everyone knows the council needs to fix the sluices and clear the canals, or the flooding will just get worse, but so far they are mired in inaction like the tangles of branches and scummy dross that catch in the gates of the lock.
June wakes one morning the summer she turns fifteen to find the half-familiar stench of muck filling the air. She lies still, breathing it in. Not a flood yet, or the alarm would have rung, but something. And the floods are a winter problem, for the most part, when the rain fills the ditches and the wind brings more water in from the Wash. She stands and goes to the window. There’s a ginger tom lying in the lane that runs alongside the vicarage, basking in the bright yellow morning and washing his paws. But no mud. Maybe she’s dreamed it?
Today is the day Alec comes home. He’s been away at school in London, and his absence has cut her to the bone. It’s unfair, of course; she’s been at school too, far to the west in Winchester, and no matter how often they write each other, the letters are no real substitute for what they have when they’re together. They can’t meander along the riverbank or explore the lanes, and she can’t watch his dark eyes spark with interest when she shows him one of her maps or talks about someone they both know in the village. But she’s also been back in Fenbourne longer, and it feels like an entirely different place with Alec not in it. She’s surprised by how unsettling it is to move through a day here without seeing him, or without feeling the curious weight of his seeing her. The year before had been harder; there was the adjustment to being away from home completely, not just the shift of being apart from one’s shadow.
June settles herself into the window seat, watching the cat. He has stretched himself out like a bow, a proud arc of fur and sinew. A breeze pushes over him, ruffling a tangle of wild roses that tumbles into the lane. The cat stands, stretches fore and aft, and meanders away, his tail waving behind him like a periscope. June looks out over what she can see of the village, but most of it is behind her—her window faces north toward the river. Toward Alec.
On the north bank of the river lives a boy who carries with him a stub of pencil and a battered notebook. Inside it, he draws pictures of the stars and moon, of boats he remembers from what seems like a lifetime ago, of the lines he sees in the bark of the larches and oaks that stand outside his aunt’s house. On the south bank, waiting, June makes maps of the world around her and lays them out across the ancient, creaking atlas in the study where her father composes his sermons. He is a dry man, and his sermons read accordingly, but his study is full of the deep smell of leather and books, and the small thunder of letting a map roll itself back up. She opens a notebook and lists the railway timetables from Ely to Norwich and King’s Lynn and London by memory.
Her father teases her sometimes about her need for information, the hunger she has to know everything. She can’t explain it, any more than she can explain the way maps unfold in her head, or the stories she sees in equations. Alec never asks her why she needs to know—he quietly tries to find the answer. She maps the cities for which she’s listed the times. Compared to hers, Alec’s drawings are like puzzles, lines that leap and curl, stars that don’t exist, imprecise but somehow perfect even when she doesn’t understand them. She looks down at the paper on which she has been making her own lines, satisfyingly straight. She smiles.
The maps keep her attention, as they always do, until Mary Hubbox bursts in an hour or so later.
“Begging your pardon, Miss,” Mary says, “but Master Alec is here for you.”
June looks up, a little lost. She’s been deep in re-creating a particular street in Winchester, not far from school, where she and her friends go to buy ices on the rare afternoons that they can leave the grounds of St. Swithun’s. The vicarage seems almost imaginary. As does Alec, and then he pokes in his head behind Mary.
“Thank you, Mary,” June says. Mary bobs a light curtsy and leaves.
Alec has grown again. His jaw is thicker, and his hair, which he has always let fall how it will, is now carefully combed back over his head and neatly parted. He is not quite a man, but not the boy he was last summer, either. Over the Christmas holidays June had noticed that he was changing, but this seems abrupt. She can’t decide how she feels about this new version of Alec.
“I say,” he says, and June’s eyes widen at the new depth of his voice, “can’t just leave a fellow standing around. Got scooped up by the pater.”
“Hello, Alec,” she says, wondering what her father had to say to him. “Welcome back.”
He strides forward as if he’s going to hug her, then stops himself. June has a bristle of feeling—not panic, exactly, but a new kind of confusion. An embrace from a young man, even this young man, perhaps especially this one, is another thing entirely now. She can almost see him look through the floor as if seeking out her father. Ah—perhaps he has given Alec some kind of hint about keeping to himself. But Alec is suddenly bigger, more assured, more like his own person than she’s ever seen him. For an instant, she hopes her father’s speech, if there was one, doesn’t stick.
“June,” he says. He exhales, and then it’s as if he’s himself again, the affected public school chap gone and replaced by the boy with stars in his eyes.
They have developed rituals for these reunions. They go to the kitchen and bother Cook, who adores Alec and has made his favorite cake, a sandwiched Victoria sponge, special for him. Alec and June sit at the heavy oak table in the kitchen with thick mugs of tea, and June’s heart warms at the way he trails his fingertips through the extra jam at the seam of the layers. Then, full of cake, Alec and June lie on benches in the conservatory and talk about their schoolmates, working their way back to the way they are here, in Fenbourne, at home. For the first time, Alec is quiet about school, and she can’t quite put a finger on why.
Later, they stop at the cottage and spin the globe in Aunt Constance’s parlor, Alec quizzing June about the geographical details he knows she loves. After a while, he stops the globe with his palm across India and sighs. “In India my ayah told me stories about painting the world with mud and saffron, so I wanted to show you, but . . . I haven’t any saffron, and the mud here is all wrong.”
“But . . .” June frowns. “Why is that bothering you today in particular, Alec?”
Alec shrugs, the small boy showing through for a moment. “There’s a new fellow at school, from Pondicherry. He was talking about the monkeys who lived out behind his house.” He looks down at the globe, his fingers tracing the equator.
Now his reticence about school makes sense, if there is some new talk of India, or any of the kaleidoscope of things that makes him fall into memory. Sometimes June wishes he could be more here, more now. He’s been in England for almost seven years, and now and again she feels as though he thinks he’s working out a punishment for something, and then he can go back, join the cavalry with his uncle or some such idea. But how could he be so far from her? What would either of them do? But then he’ll smile, or perform spectacularly for his side in the annual village cricket match, and she’ll go back to believing he almost feels at home here.
“It’s not just mud,” she says, hoping to distract him. “It’s all the present and past of the riverbank, all at once.”
He grins at her. “Historical mud, then? Possibly some old Normans catting about in it?”
June laughs. “Quite.” Something is shifting between them, and June knows he can feel it too, this new thrum of tension between them.
“I missed you.” He stares down at the globe, his ears red. June has never made a boy blush, as far as she knows. Or at any rate, not like this. Not in a good way.
“I missed you too, Alec. I’m glad you’re back.”
He smiles at her, and June, abruptly aware of how near he is, says, “It’s awfully warm up here, isn’t it?”
“We could go sit in the garden,” Alec says, and June nods. They make their way outside and sit beside each other on the old bench beneath the larches. After a moment, he says, “Once upon a time, there was a river, and on that river there lived a bear.”
He had been taken from the forest as a cub, but he was too small to fight the other bears in the pits. And there was a keeper, a man named Rowland who had spent too much time among the animals of the forest, and he believed that a bear was almost like a human.
On the south bank of the Thames, Rowland’s bears were known for being smarter and larger than the other bears, but as likely as a wild bear to take off a man’s head. But the small bear, who Rowland taught to dance, was known to be his favorite.
The Thames froze hard that winter, and tents sprang up almost overnight between the boats held captive by the ice. A group of men from one of the theaters built a pit out of rocks and ice and bags of ash. They asked Rowland for a bear, and another man for a brace of hounds to torment it, and when Rowland said no, they spat at his feet.
He walked the ice for two days, wondering how to keep the little bear safe. A princess from India watched Rowland from her sleigh, pulled by immaculate white oxen. The glassy eyes of the furs she wore shone so bright Rowland nearly believed she balanced an actual leopard around her shoulders. Maybe she was a witch, he thought, and he pulled his tattered coat around him and walked on.
He pauses, and June reaches out and puts her fingers on his wrist. The air tightens between them. Then, as he leans closer and her face turns up to the sun and his smile, a clatter of lorry and work boots pounds along the lane. Alec jerks away, his face going crimson.
And June reminds herself to breathe. All in good time, she thinks. Like the ends of the bear stories, like everything. All in good time.
The summer they turn eighteen, Alec takes her up the River Lark in a borrowed punt. The water is running high again this summer, and she trails her hands in it like a Victorian heroine. Alec grins down at her, his shirtsleeves rolled up over taut forearms, and she’s glad to have this time to spend with him. She has seen the way other girls in the village look at him, and soon he’ll be off to university, where she imagines he will cut a dashing figure. He’ll play cricket for his college at Cambridge, and she can see already how he’ll look in the whites, standing ready with his bat on the endless green of the pitch. She is going to Oxford, to read mathematics at Somerville College. She would have liked it if Alec had come to Oxford too; she can imagine them punting on the Thames and wandering the ancient town together. But he will be happy at Clare College, following in his father’s footsteps. At least he is staying in England. When his uncle Roger had visited over Easter, full of tales about the Frontier and the bandits of the Hindu Kush, June had felt Alec’s longing for India to be as dense as the thick weave of a tapestry.
She closes her eyes and listens to the water, to the shush of the pole against the current and the riverbed, imagines the light splashing of a frog somewhere, or a fish. The afternoon climbs through her like a film, all crystalline black and white.
Alec whistles quietly. Then he says, almost under his breath, “June? There on the bank.”
At first she doesn’t see it, but then the otter moves again, gliding into the water with a suspicious glance at Alec, the punt, everything.
“It’s good luck,” Alec says, and goes back to guiding them up the river. And then, before she’s really ready to be there, wherever there is, he adroitly steers the punt into the bank and ties it to a willow tree’s convenient branch. He anchors himself on the riverbank and reaches down for her. She takes his hand, and for just a moment, there’s a shift between them.
“Look,” he says, pulling his gaze from hers, and helps her up the gentle slope of the bank. In the field opening before them, there are five horses the color of sugar just before it burns. They’re grazing, and then one tosses his head and sends his mane sparking out from the arch of his neck. He whinnies, his ears pricked forward, and then he runs, gathering speed. She is still holding Alec’s hand, and she knows he will not let go.
When he turns to face her, his eyes questioning and all brown and gold in the sun, she says nothing. And when he bends to kiss her, his hand still tight around hers, she lets him.
Is this how it happens, then, falling in love? In stages for years and years, then one swift tumble of feelings at the end?