Em was sitting on the lawn and had taken out her sketchbook. She lifted her skirt so the sun could get to her legs, her gaze settled upon the fountain and its stone cherubs, and she sighed contentedly.
I stepped into Marcus’s cupped hands, swung up into the pear tree, and a couple of birds shot skyward. Following the trunk, I hauled myself up and then, as I got higher, shifted my weight so that the tree bent over toward the wall of the house. As it did so, I pushed off with my feet and caught hold of the drainpipe. It was easy and within a few seconds, I had shinnied up and got my hands around the first of the cornerstones. There was a breeze higher up. A little winged creature, a beetle with petrol-blue iridescent wings, landed on my forearm. I got my feet right up under me and grasped for the next cornerstone and then the next, feeling the oil from my palms seeping into the stone.
The guttering was choked with rotting leaves and bright green moss. I reached up and put my hands on the roof. The shingles seemed firm, but they were old and I wondered when was the last time a human hand had touched them. It seemed likely that they would take my weight, but I wouldn’t know until it was too late. There were no handholds on the tiles, so the thing was just to get the feet up and run, keeping low and hunched forward. I got the first chimneystack in my sights, drove up with my legs, and went for it.
By the time I got my hands to the stack, I was panting. The chimney pots were covered in bird shit and I held on tight to them, managing a single whoop as I caught my breath. Marcus was coming up over the other side. From the other chimney he walked the length of the roof to me as though along a tightrope, his arms held out for balance. I swiveled round to get my first look over the back of the manor.
I would get to know it all well: the courtyard with the remains of a once-fine rose garden; the walled kitchen garden where a few fig trees, spliced against the crumbling walls, dropped their fruit onto stone pathways where it split and rotted; the derelict greenhouses full of empty snail shells, spiders, and broken glass. My gaze passed over the tangled orchard of apple trees and the remains of a rotting summerhouse. Further away, bordering the property at the back, was a copse and then the pale yellow of barley fields which rose to the horizon. Then I glimpsed the glint of sun on water and saw, to the left, at the bottom of the sloping lawn, a small lake, half choked with reeds, and there on its far side, a folly, a little white-pillared replica of a Greek temple.
Marcus kissed me, a quick, juddery kiss as we held on to the chimneys. Down below, a wood pigeon flew to a perch atop the pear tree and when I looked up toward the sun, the sky was clear as glass, and specked with tiny flying insects. The shingles were like scales under my feet, like the scales of a great dragon. The shimmery feeling was back, and I did not think I could contain it. It tempted me to flinch, as though the joy of it would break my heart. For a second I thought Marcus was going to say something and I turned to look at him, at his gleaming face, wet with sweat from the climb, and ever so briefly he appeared to me like a stranger. But before he spoke, if he even intended to, I saw the white flash of Peter’s waving hand and looked down to see, standing next to Peter, a real stranger looking up at us, face shadowed by the hand that was shielding his eyes from the sun.
CHAPTER 3
WEDDING
Just before he disappeared, I invited Peter to a wedding. He came, but arrived so late I’d given up on him coming at all. Dinner lay in ruins, the father of the bride was inching toward the summit of his speech, when suddenly I caught sight of him, slipping around the edge of the room toward me. The wedding was at the Savoy, in the Lancaster Ballroom, and the room was a sea of pink roses, of gleaming points of light flickering from candle to crystal to chandelier. Waiting staff dipped among the tables, and the mirrored walls made it seem like there were more of them than there were, more of everything. For a moment I lost sight of Peter, then he was there, right beside me, the same dark hair and widow’s peak, the aquiline nose and bone-white skin.
He gave me a quick squeeze of the shoulder by way of apology, and then gestured to a waiter to fill his glass. The others at the table, strangers all, appraised him: so tall and slender, so well dressed, the keen and handsome face, and then … Ah! They’d seen it, what people have always been able to see in Peter, even children who don’t know the name for it yet, even when we were tiny, long before Peter himself knew what it was.
“Three?”
“Oh, four at least.” But before we could agree on how many hundreds of thousands of pounds the wedding had cost, it was time to raise our glasses to the bride and groom. I felt Peter take in my dress and then glance at my face, so that I tipped my head forward into the light to give him a better look. His fingers quickly reached out and touched the back of my hand, and then just as quickly retreated. He smiled at me. I smiled back.
“How long has it been this time?”
“About six months,” I said.
The last time I saw Peter, I’d gone to meet him and some friends of his—or at least people he knew—in a bar on my way from somewhere else. Peter had bought round after round of drinks and had his arm slung around the shoulders of a young Norwegian who looked at him with hopeful bright blue eyes.
Later that night, toasts finally over, I asked him about Anders as we strolled through the Embankment Gardens.
“Torn apart by wolves in Regent’s Park. A very sad business.”
“And the one before, wasn’t he…?”
“Made into black pudding by a German cannibal? Yes. I had to testify at the trial. Shocking.” I suspected he left them, most of the time. Or perhaps they tired of being kept at arm’s length. “Nothing to report on that front, I’m afraid. Are you seeing anyone?”
I shook my head. The Thames was a sheet of rippling darkness. By the wall, Peter turned to me.
“Whoever are these people?”
“I only know the groom, Oliver. He’s my boss. You know the type, but we get on. I think her dad owns British Airways. Or Bahrain Airways. Something like that. It’s his second go. Her first.” I paused. “I wasn’t going to come, but then I thought it might be fun. If you came too. Isn’t this where they arrested Oscar?”
Wilde, patron saint of queer and clever boys, was once Peter’s darling. I remember notes passed in the classroom: Oscar said this, Oscar said that, as though Wilde was climbing up the ivy and in through the vicarage back bedroom window each evening. We would have been about twelve. Em was already our friend by then, Marcus still a few years off.
Peter did not reply. I was struggling to judge his mood. The air was cold, and I gripped his arm. Even in heels I barely reached his chin.
“Silly shoes.” I pointed at my toes.
“Pretty.”
“Christian.”
“You naughty thing.” But he didn’t want my hag routine. Instead he ran a hand through his hair and sighed and I was possessed by a memory of Peter turning to me at our infant school thirty years earlier and whispering, “Your Ws are like wobbly bottoms, Andy. Like bums. Fat wobbly bums. Mine are much better. See.”
I scavenged a cigarette from a young man with glistening eyes standing among a group of smokers by the River Doors. A pale bridesmaid in light blue chiffon hung from his arm as he cupped his hands to offer me a light. I walked back to offer it to Peter.