“You know, I thought you might be Andrea’s mystery man,” Oliver was saying to Peter. “We all think she’s got one, you know.” Then he asked what I had been like when I was younger.
“Oh Hobbesian. Absolutely Hobbesian.” Oliver didn’t get it, so Peter explained. “Nasty, brutish, and short. From Hobbes’s definition of the life of mankind.” Oliver had looked away. Peter swallowed and just for an instant a crack opened up and I glimpsed another Peter. The Peter who was always quick and clever, but not quite clever enough to hide it, so people were unkind to him, how unkindness seemed to follow him wherever he went, till he took on a hunted, slinking quality, which was when it really got bad.
My eyes fell on the smoker. There was something about him. He threw me a wink and then mimed smoking a cigarette from where he sat at a table of friends. When I turned back, I thought I heard Peter say, “She was our queen.”
“I’ll be right back.”
I made my way to the River Doors. It was raining and everyone had gone inside. I counted to three and turned and there was the smoker, and didn’t he look happy. A couple of cigarettes, my drink, a slug from his hip flask, and the evening began to tear like tissue paper. It was like ripping the wrapping off a gift. Inside was a box of glittering fragments and darkness.
We wandered a few steps into the gardens until we were under a tree. I felt the old, careless joy. Oh Andy? She’ll do anything, she will. The cold rain fell on my bare arms and it fell on London, filling the gutters and flowing into the storm drains. Elsewhere, it fell on woods and fields, on the Savernake Forest and the old earth fort at Barbury, on the manor and whoever lived there now, and—a little further still—on the gravestone at Saint Helen’s, where I still thought nothing on earth would ever bring me.
“You should have a coat on,” he said. I put my hands inside his suit jacket. The heat was radiating through his shirt. He put his hands on either side of my waist. Even in the heels, I had to get on tiptoe. White shirt, white teeth, dark blond hair. His name is one of the things I lost. I kissed him. Or he kissed me. And it was like finding a door to a warm room unlocked on a cold night and slipping inside. Lovely, until the bridesmaid showed up.
* * *
When I finally found Peter, he was sitting alone in the American Bar. I thought he’d gone, that I had, not for the first time, ruined everything. I called a waiter and ordered us two glasses of champagne, feeling the panic draining away. The smile Peter gave me was thin.
“Some things don’t change.”
“You were four hours late.”
Peter looked at his hands. His voice was tight. “It has, of late, been hard to get away.”
But I didn’t ask. Once again, I missed the chance.
“Did you have fun?” When I didn’t reply, Peter said, “He looks like David. That young man. When you think about it.” It was a little bit like having a bomb thrown at you from a very great height, watching it turn as it fell toward you through the air.
“Do you think so?” I took my drink in a gulp.
“Is it because of David that you’re not with anyone?”
I signaled the waiter for another. “Do you remember when everyone used to say they didn’t mind gays as long as they didn’t ram it down their throats? But it’s heterosexuality that’s rammed at people, Peter.” I started laughing. “Like a shopping cart, right in the back of the knees.” I got up and mimed it for him, earning a worried look from one of the barmen. “Seeing someone nice?” Ram. “I know a lovely chap, just your sort.” Ram. “What about kids?”
Next, I remember standing at the sink in the marble bathroom. In the mirror, the bridesmaid’s hot, hurt eyes were boring into mine. Beside her, I looked like the wicked queen: black hair, now turning to frizz, gray eyes, mouth red, like someone’d slapped it.
“Sometimes I look so much like my mother,” I told her.
Two whiskies, and the night was black streamers. I had Peter’s hand in mine, and we were dashing up the Strand and then along the Mall. Saint James’s Park was a pool of darkness and as we slipped in among the pathways, I asked Peter if he’d ever gone cruising there.
“Not even a little? Not a Coldstream Guard or a member of the Household Cavalry? No, not even a little member?”
He shook his head. The water gleamed. There was no one there, not a dog, not a jogger.
“I’m thinking of inventing an app,” Peter was saying, “and when you open it, it will give you a history of all the crimes that have ever taken place in the surrounding area. All the murders and robberies and incidences of gross indecency and … slight indecency? Minor indecency? Going back to when records began.”
“Here Bishop Barnaby famously burned on a pyre his loyal servant Robert for serving his tea tepid.”
“Exactly.”
The cold was getting to my head. I crouched down and put a hand on the grass to steady myself. The earth was folded in on itself. Bleeding cold. I felt it reaching up my arm.
“‘And no birds sing.’”
“What?” Peter said.
“Where’s that from? ‘And no birds sing’?”
“Keats. ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci.’”
“Ah, the one about the fairy who enchants the knight.” I owed my reading to Peter. He was my friend, my special friend, my very best. I demanded a haircut like his, shoes like his. I tried complaining that I couldn’t see the board in a ploy to get glasses so I could be like Peter. No one expected anything of me, but if Peter was on the clever table, then so was I, even if it meant murder. I wasn’t going to let him escape me through the pages of a book.
My fingers sank through the grass into the dirt. To lie down, to get inside it, to be covered over. Just for a bit. Drinking thoughts. Peter pulled me up and led me over to a bench.
“Do we have anything to drink?”
“Nope.”
I opened my handbag and inside there was someone else’s pack of cigarettes, and a clutch of bar miniatures.
“Looky, looky.”
“That’s the girl I remember.” Out in the darkness, I heard the water part and glimpsed a serpentine neck dipping beneath the surface. He fell silent for a moment. “I saw David, Andy.”
I’d always thought it was Peter who was keeper of the great silence. Had it been me? And if so, for how long? I opened another little whiskey, a fairy-sized bottle of oblivion.
“And?” I felt a little rocket of rage going up. At an airport baggage carousel, wife and child in tow? On YouTube or giving a Ted Talk? Crouched on a pavement, begging for spare change?
“Does it matter?”
“How did he look?”
But Peter didn’t answer. Instead he asked me if I was happy.
“Delirious, Peter. Absolutely delirious.”
“Why can’t you just be fucking happy, Andy?” He rubbed at his eyes. “Just be fucking happy.” And for a horrible second, I thought Peter was going to cry.
“Look, I am happy. We’ve gone to the ball. We’re having a nice time, aren’t we?”
“We’ve never really spoken about what happened at the manor. Not just … I mean all of it.”