November 1997
“Ah, hello,” said the tall, thin, dark-haired man who answered the door. “Careful, we’re missing a step. The stone dislodged itself last week and I don’t know how the devil to replace it.”
How the devil. Another American trying to sound English. “I’m Charlie. Granville.” Charlie stuck out his hand.
“Ah, yes, Charles Granville. Benjamin Sayers. Ben.” He squeezed Charlie’s hand and smiled. “Claire said she’d invited you. Said she found you aimlessly wandering the streets.”
“Something like that.” He could see Claire inside the house. She was biting the lip of a plastic cup, laughing at something somebody was saying.
“Come in, come in,” Ben said, waving him up. “Claire likes to think of us as the Cambridge University Immigration Service for New Americans. Been here long?”
“Two weeks.”
“Bit of a culture shock, isn’t it? Flats and lifts and all that.”
“There’s a lot of rain,” Charlie said. By now they were standing at a drinks table in the middle of a small living room crowded with people, most of them sitting. Without asking, Ben poured a tiny glass of pale sherry and handed it to him.
“You’ll get used to it,” he said. “Have you got a bike?”
Charlie took a sip of the sherry and winced at the flame in his throat. He’d only tasted sweet sherry before. “I need to get one.”
Ben looked him up and down. “What are you, five nine?”
“Five ten,” he said, color rising to his cheeks.
Ben smiled. He’d obviously caught Charlie’s sensitivity about his height. “Just a few inches shorter than me,” he said. “I have a bike you can use, if you want it. A friend left it behind last spring.” Before Charlie could answer, Ben asked, “So where are you from?”
“Kansas.”
“Kansas!”
“What about you?” Charlie said, ignoring Ben’s response. He was used to it; Americans at Cambridge all seemed to be from the East Coast or California.
“New York,” Ben said, confirming Charlie’s generalization. “You’re not a ‘Harvard man.’” He drawled the words with self-conscious irony. “I’d know it if you were—we’re a pretty insular group. I’m guessing—Penn?”
“University of Kansas, actually.”
Ben raised his eyebrows.
“My mother taught there,” Charlie said, hating himself for feeling the need to explain. “Tuition was practically free, so—”
“So you saved your parents a bucket of money and ended up here anyway. That’s the way to do it. You on a Marshall?”
“Fulbright.”
“Law?”
“Philosophy. You?” Charlie said, struggling to regain some leverage in the conversation.
“Mellon. Architecture. I’m auditing Petrovsky’s lectures on ancient Greek philosophy, though. Fascinating stuff. Have you made it to any of those?”
“It’d be a lot less work if you two just exchanged résumés,” Claire said, coming up behind Ben and putting her arms around his waist. “Hi, Charlie.” She smiled a big, open smile. “So nice of you to come.”
He looked at the two of them—Ben tall and lanky, with unruly brown hair and small, round wire-framed glasses, and Claire with those wide-set hazel eyes and high cheekbones and candy apple lips—and suddenly wanted more than anything to be a part of their lives. “Thanks for inviting me,” he said.
“Come on. There are people you should meet.” Claire flashed a smile at Ben and took Charlie’s hand, leading him into another room.