tight. It was cold, the weekend’s sun long gone. Poppy was back at the hospital and the weather had turned. The summer skies were now a strange yellowy-gray, the color of bonfire smoke. She’d been sitting here on this garden bench for what felt like hours, unable to motivate herself for the journey back to London and the various un- pleasant tasks that awaited her there: acquiring the keys to Lara’s flat, talking practical logistics with Jez, moving her stuff, facing Rita. “What are you up to, Dad?”
“Looking for Neil, dear. Your mother wants him. He was last seen lurking around the vegetable patch, high as a kite, appar- ently.”
“Oh, I saw him briefly this morning—seemed his usual non- communicative stoned self.”
Chris rubbed his beard. “This, I fear—your mother fears—is the concern. Patti believes Neil might have developed a drug habit, a hard-drug habit to be precise. He scribbled down the lyrical ram- blings of Pete . . . is it Dogerty or some such? . . . on the telephone pad. Don’t ask me, dear. And he has been behaving, I quote, ‘irreg- ularly.’ ”
“He was born irregular.”
“This is possible.” He tried not to smile. “But the suspicious trail does not stop there, I’m afraid. I’ve also been informed that Neil’s been washing his clothes a lot, and bathing—can you imagine!—and generally being overly furtive, jumpy, and non- communicative with his mother,” he added archly. “Patti has
deduced that he’s trying to wash away the odor of crack cocaine. There’s a plague of it in Oxford, she tells me. She made me sniff his jacket.”
“What does crack cocaine smell like, Dad?”
“I have no idea. But something smelled bad.” Her father sat down, pulling up his corduroy trouser legs as he did so, exposing navy socks and a straggle of thinning leg hairs. “But I won’t let anything burst my bubble this week.”
“You do seem buoyant.”
“Rita Lewis no longer haunts my house. The troops have with- drawn.” He sighed. “Oh, you have no idea.”
“I do, actually.”
“Myopic, invasive and... so... so...
old
somehow.” He rubbed his beard. “She’s done more than any marriage counselor, I can tell you that. She’s made me appreciate your mother more than I can say.”
“Something needs to,” Stevie sounded sharper than she in- tended.
“What do you mean?”
“Dad, come on. Can’t you and Mum just sort it out?”
“Well, dear, I’m sure things will all sort themselves out. They al- ways do eventually.”
Her father’s passivity enraged her, just as it enraged her mother. Why couldn’t he work at something other than his books? “It won’t! Mum is seriously pissed off, Dad. You’ve got to
do
some- thing.”
“Flowers? Chocolates?” He looked baffled. “Should I pop to Thornton’s? What, then? What do you women want?”
It struck her that that was exactly the kind of thing Jez might have once said. Even though they were different there were similarities.
They shared their worst qualities. Had that been the attraction? Stevie pulled her legs up to her chest, hugging her knees protec- tively. What could he get Mum? The only thoughtful presents Ste- vie had received in recent years had been from Sam: the sketch pad; the photo. “Get her something she subliminally desires. Nothing too intentional.”
“Goodness, now that could be dangerous. What on earth scurries around the boggy depths of your mother’s consciousness?”
They laughed, falling into easy silence. Stevie felt close to her fa- ther. She wished he’d put his arm around her or do something pa- ternal. She guessed he wouldn’t. Their relationship wasn’t really like that.
“I
am
sorry, very sorry, about Jez, dear,” he said finally with a re- lieved huff, as if he’d been building up to the comment all day and could relax now he’d aired it.
“You never liked him.”
“Hmmm . . .” He dislodged his glasses and wiped the bridge of his nose. “Jez was unfinished, that’s what I always thought. An un- finished man. He wasn’t grown-up enough for you. I should have said so at the time.”
Her father acknowledging responsibility? This was a first. Stevie realized this was her father’s hug, the arm around her shoulder. “No,
I
should have known better.”
“Well, perhaps you were unfinished, too. You both rushed in. Your respective mothers didn’t help, ploughing ahead with that wedding at any cost, digging up this garden with those ridiculous igloos . . .”
“Tepees, Dad. We’d been together almost two years. I’m thirty- four years old.”
“Don’t get distracted by the math. Abstract numbers, that’s all
they are.” He cleared his throat. “If something’s right—a perfect fusion, as it was between your mother and me when, er, when we first met—then after only a few hours together, you’ll be closer with them than with someone else with whom you’ve spent a life- time. It’s all relative. Love shrinks time.”
“Nice theory.”
“Just a bit of advice. A bit late in the day, granted. I’ve not been the best father, in many ways,” he said slowly. “Poppy had enough sense to marry Piers, no credit to me. She’s always been sensible. But you and Neil? You could have used a bit more guid- ance.”
Stevie felt herself welling up. They didn’t really do “intimacy” very often. It made her slightly uncomfortable. “What’s wrong with me?”
Startled by the force of the inquiry, her father’s caterpillar eye- brows shot up. “Wrong with you? Nothing wrong with you, dear.”
“I wish I were more like Poppy.”
“Life might be easier.” He smiled gently. “But we all start out at different angles from the universe. Poppy is, let me think, nine de- grees out. You’re, say, twenty-five.”
Stevie felt old childhood anxieties resurface. “And as we grow, upward on that trajectory, the angle becomes more and more exag- gerated?”
“Exactly!”
Her father beamed with pleasure. “Clever girl.” He patted her knee. “I wouldn’t have you any other way. Twenty-five degrees to the universe is perfect, just perfect.”
stevie’s phone vibrated. a
text. Sam.
fancy wlk befr i go bk to ny
? Stevie stared at the screen, trying to decode the sub-
text like a girl on a date. Or maybe there wasn’t any subtext. Maybe he just wanted to go for a walk. She hastily texted back an affirma- tive and was rushing up to her bedroom to apply makeup and dig out a half-decent dress when the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it,” shouted Stevie, clattering back down the stairs, crossing the black-and-white-tiled hall floor, pushing aside a mound of post and opening the front door. “That was quick.”
Sam smiled, shoulders hunched, hands dug into his pockets. He was wearing old torn jeans and a faded red hooded sweatshirt that Stevie remembered from years back. It showcased the wide contours of his shoulders, the boyish arch of his lower back. “Port Meadow? Old times sake. Er, if you’re feeling up to it, of course.”
Okay, he knew about her and Jez. Well,
of course
he did. Lara, his
girlfriend
would have told him.
“Darling!” Patti thundered down the stairs, blue caftan billow- ing out behind like a sail. “Lovely to see you!” She kissed Sam ener- getically, leaving his cheeks marked with opalescent prints of nude Body Shop lip gloss. “Gosh, you’re scrumptious. Isn’t he scrump- tious, Stevie?”
Stevie ignored her mother. “I’ll get my trainers.” Damn it. She was wearing old bootleg jeans and one of her dad’s Jurassic white shirts. At least it didn’t look like she was dressing up for him.
“There they are, Stevie.” Sam pointed to an old pair of Adidas trainers by the door. His wide, white smile curled upward, expos- ing that seductive sliver of pinky-brown gums.
Stevie liked the sound of her name on his lips. It struck her that while she’d always felt uncomfortable taking Jez’s surname, she would have relished taking the name Flowers. What the hell was that about? She tugged on her old trainers, amazed that Sam had identified the dirty-laced Adidas shell-toes as her own.
They walked down Woodstock Road, turned right onto Leckford Road, which led toward the bijou terraces of Jericho, then over the oily khaki-green canal and over to Port Meadow. Sam pointed to the new Berkeley homes that had sprung up by the canal-side in place of the grubby old ironworks. “I can’t believe they knocked Lucy’s down. I really dug that building.” He sighed. “I mean, come on. They could have redeveloped the old structure or commis- sioned exciting new architecture.” Sam shook his head. “It pisses me off.”
“I preferred that scruffy old factory, too. But Oxford’s changed. It’s prime real estate now.” Stevie peered down at the canal tow- path. A powerful déjà vu, clear as a film sequence, froze her to the spot: early evening, the darkness creeping up the muddy canal banks, she and Sam walking home from a pub in town along the narrow path, slightly drunk on lager. Sam stopped and looked up. When she couldn’t see what he could see, he held her by each elbow and swiveled her around until she was facing the cauldron of molten flames framed in the ironworks’ metal-paned windows, the flames repeated again in the black slick of water. The memory still hovered just beneath her skin, the secret excitement of being close to Sam on that narrow path; the electric current that ran up her arms at his touch; the sparks in the window mirroring what was going on inside her. She’d known what it meant to be desired from a very young age, all girls did. But that moment was the first time she’d felt desire
for
someone, that cannibalistic hunger. She must have been around seventeen. “It’s a shame,” she said, looking up at the new building. “Wasted opportunity.”
They continued to walk over the railway bridge, through a swing gate, and into the expanse of Port Meadow that rolled out like an old bumpy green carpet from Jericho to the village of
Wolvercote, a natural ancient floodplain. Stevie loved Port Meadow for its rough charm, thistled grass, its spray of buttercups, its wide stony path that damaged shoes, the winter floods that turned it into one vast sky-reflecting mirror and protected it from develop- ment, and the horses and cattle that grazed free and fenceless. She’d taken Jez here a couple of times, but he hadn’t really liked it, and they’d ended up in the local riverside pub for an overcooked lunch and bickering.
“The mother of all meadows.” Sam shaded his eyes with his hands. “I forget sometimes.”
Stevie smiled. It was part of their connective tissue, this land- scape, its big skies, its shared history. Whenever they came here to- gether, it felt like a consummation of sorts.
“Shall we park ourselves here?” Sam squatted down at the side of the river where it frothed over stones beneath a flat bridge, its planks rattling loudly every time a cyclist whizzed over it. Stevie sat next to him on a wall of sandbags, which lay hard and long. Neither of them spoke for a few moments. It wasn’t an easy silence. “I am sorry about you and Jez,” said Sam eventually. “Are you
okay?”
Stevie smiled shyly, looking him directly in the eyes, their blackness unlocked by the sunshine, exposing flecks of chocolate, his warm intelligence. “Actually, you know what? I think I am.”
Sam frowned. “You’re not pregnant? I thought . . .” “No. I am not pregnant.” She shrugged. “False alarm.”
“Oh, okay.” Sam’s shoulders dropped. “Life starts again, right?” He put his head in his hands and groaned. “Corny. Sorry.”
“Well, it’s hard to know what to say.” “I’d say Jez is a wanker.”
“He says he’s fallen in love.”
“He’s a wanker.” Sam shook his head from side to side. “Katy Norris of all people.”
“One woman’s wanker . . .” She sighed, watched two ducks dance around each other in a mating ritual. “He didn’t love me. Maybe I can’t blame him.”
Sam looked at her sternly. “Don’t go there, Stevie.”
“Well . . .” She stretched out a leg, quickly retracting it when she spotted leg stubble in the gap between sock and jeans hem.
“It’s not your fault.”
Stevie rolled her eyes. “Tempting though it is to absolve myself . . .”
“Why do women always blame themselves? What’re the odds that Jez is flagellating himself right now?”
Stevie laughed. “I should never have married him, Sam. That’s all I mean. It was a shortcut, but it turned out to be the long way around.”
There was a silence. Sam broke it. “Why did you, then?” He leaned away from her slightly, as if wary of the answer.
Stevie sighed, resigned. “Well, I almost canceled the whole thing, you know. A few days before the wedding . . .”
“You did? Shit. Why?”
“All the right reasons.” She ripped off a tuft of grass and rolled it in her fingers. “We weren’t well-suited. We’d fallen out of love. Maybe we were never in love, really. He doesn’t seem to think so now.” A shaft of sunlight, momentarily absorbed by cloud, then re- leased again, lit up Sam’s face. For the first time, she noticed a sim- ilarity between their features—a similar curve to the lip, the arched eyebrows, the breadth of their faces—a similarity that created a strange chemistry.
“Easy to be harsh in hindsight.”
“I loved him. But not like . . .” She blushed. Not like what? Not like how she felt for Sam. He caught her hesitation: his face twitched with recognition so fleetingly that if she hadn’t known him for years she would have missed it. “When Colin—Jez’s dad— died . . .” Facts: she was on firmer turf now. “Well, I couldn’t can- cel. Not then. I wanted to stick by him.”
“You didn’t just lose your nerve?”
Stevie looked at Sam sharply, almost angrily. “Lose my nerve?” She blew air out of her mouth. “Oh, shit, maybe.”
“It feels easier to stick with what you know, sometimes.” “Hmmm.” Stevie gazed at the river wistfully as a boat made its
way upstream.
“Real intimacy is scarier, isn’t it?” Sam grinned, stretching his legs out toward the river’s edge, scattering the ducks. “Man, scares the shit out of me.”
She stole a glance at him. “You’re presuming quite a lot.” He shrugged. “Just a hunch.”
“Well, it seems Jez has found real intimacy. Beat me to it.” “Katy.” Sam shook his head. “What an exchange. I will never
ever
understand, man.”
“Can’t you?” Stevie said quickly, probably revealing too much. “I thought you’d understand perfectly.”