“Accidents happened at the manor. Just accidents. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
“There’s something, something I should tell you—”
“I grew up,” I said. I don’t know why I thought that was the correct response. Everything was getting away from me. “I grew up!”
“Is it because of Joe?”
The reflex, never buried that deep, surfaced in one white-hot second: I curled my fingers round the little bottle and lashed out with my fist, catching Peter on the brow.
Horrible. Horrible. I took off along one of the paths. I could hear him calling for me. Saying he was sorry. My breath was all wrong, sawing in and out, and I heard myself crying, distantly crying, the sound of a woman in distress. Someone should help that woman, I thought.
Emerging from the park, I found myself stumbling under the faded neon of the streetlamps in front of Buckingham Palace. Further on, there were guards up by the gates. The palace looked like an enormous wedding cake, white and clean and gleaming; a wedding cake or a doll’s house, a doll’s house built for a nation. I wondered which room the Queen was sleeping in? Or was she awake, peeping out from behind a curtain at the nocturnal subjects of her realm? I wondered if we ever kept her up nights with the worry of us.
There were steps up on the left. I sat down on them, or sprawled. The Mail was missing a tremendous opportunity for an upskirt pic.
Joe had been my mother’s last boyfriend. He’d made my life hell from the age of thirteen to fourteen, before going out one night in his car and never coming back. Joe was the reason I couldn’t stand Midlands accents and disliked beards and never took unlicensed cabs, in case one day I got in and Joe’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. Joe was why I would never have a dog, because you owned a dog and put it on a lead, you told it what to do, and made it love and fear you, and that sort of thing was up Joe’s street, not mine.
When Peter arrived, I was gazing up at the palace facade, working out if it was possible.
“Easy.”
“What?” He sat down beside me and gently put my bag in my lap.
“To climb.”
“Think you could still do it?”
“Maybe not in these shoes.”
Peter gave me a smile that was just a twist of the mouth. I took his chin in one hand and touched his brow lightly with the fingers of the other. Peter winced.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Me too. For all of it.”
I could have said all of what? But I didn’t, because I was afraid there were things we might say to one another that would mean the end of everything. And I couldn’t afford to lose Peter. That’s what it came down to.
After that, I got what I’d wanted, because we went back to the beautiful and very expensive room, and we lay upon the bed in the dark and I think I remember Peter taking my hand. But the sadness had arrived. It was always sad to see Peter, really. That was why we saw each other so rarely.
He was gone when I woke, along with a few chunks from my own personal wedding video. I didn’t call him. I remembered enough. I didn’t want filling in. I thought that by not calling him, that night could become just one more thing we didn’t talk about. Instead, I collected my things and took the tube home, public transport as a form of penance. On the way from the station to my flat, I stopped and bought twenty quid’s worth of low-end, highly processed sugars and fats, because I was already convinced that at home an episode would be waiting for me there. And it was.
But what was waiting for Peter? That was the question. What was waiting for Peter that caused him to break the habit of twenty years, the habit he had kept religiously, of calling his mother every Sunday after Evensong?
CHAPTER 4
APOCALYPSE II
We took Marcus’s way down from the roof. As I dropped into the long, wet grass, I felt a snail shell shatter under my heel, then something small and slimy squish against the ground. After wiping my foot on the grass, I went over to where I’d left my shoes and sat down to put them on. Peter left the stranger talking to Emma and shot over.
“He’s a friend of the family who own it.” Marcus had gone over to investigate. I saw him shrug. “He’s at school with their son. His name’s David.” Peter stopped. A bubble of enthusiasm had been rising in his voice. When he spoke again, he had assumed his lazy, lecturing tone. “The parents are in America. They’re British but his father’s got business there. They’re coming back in the autumn.”
David was about our age. His hair was on the blond side; he had nice jeans on and a faded T-shirt in forest green. I could feel the day threatening to turn. He had more right to be there than we did, but he was uninvited. He came and the day I had planned so carefully was turning. Some people spoiled things. I cast another look at him, only to find him watching. He was humming as he came over and it took me a couple of seconds to pick up the melody.
“But if you’re the queen of the castle,” he said, “does that make us the dirty rascals?”
I had begun building a spliff. Now I let the lighter go out and blew out the tiny ember from what was a fast-diminishing eighth. The hash gave out a little plume of smoke. A few paces away, Em had her arm through Peter’s, as though holding him back.
“You tell me,” I said.
He sat down on the step, but not too close, and leaned back on his elbows, the toes of his shoes burrowing among the gravel. He was humming again and looking out over the lawns. Together, we followed the path of a white butterfly as it danced toward a sunken little pond, its surface covered in lily pads.
“These parents of your friend not about then?”
“In Boston for the summer,” he said. His voice was neutral, not posh, but not local either.
“And you’re what? Keeping an eye on it for them?”
I handed him the joint and his eyes met mine for a second before I could look away.
“Something like that,” he said.
* * *
We ate the picnic I’d brought under the pear tree. There were mini pork pies and Scotch eggs, pasties, a Walkers multipack of crisps, and everyone’s favorite chocolate bar: a Crunchie for Em, a Boost for Marcus, Peter’s Wispa, and a Mars for me. Em snapped a bit of her Crunchie off and gave it to David and then we all followed suit, so that there were four little pieces of chocolate lined up before him on the blanket like offerings.
“What should I have brought you?” I asked. We waited expectantly while he thought about it. Would it be something posh? Cadbury’s Bourneville, or—worse—a red Bounty? Perhaps he only ate Ferrero Rocher. In town, the nice cars had a tendency to slow down to let the kids in Marlborough College uniform cross the road while ignoring the rest of us. Then there were the plummy, carrying voices in Waitrose, the shops that sold evening wear, skiing and sailing kit, or displayed magnums of champagne in the window with strawberries around Wimbledon.
“Imagine it’s the last day on earth, just before the apocalypse. It’s the last chocolate bar you’re ever going to eat,” Peter said. I flashed him a look.
“The apocalypse?” David said. “Well, in that case, I think it would have to be a Curly Wurly.”