Chapter One
Alone in the bed Alison sat bolt upright. She had trained herself not to gasp when that happened, long before she woke next to anyone, long before there was anyone to ask her what had scared her. But she couldn’t stop the jerk upwards, as if she had to break through the surface, as if water was closing over her. Paul had never asked, though: it was one of the reasons she was still here, eight months on.
Not the only reason. She could hear him in the next room; she leaned down and groped for her glasses – no table on her side of the bed, they were entangled in the bedclothes on the floor – and the bright room swam into focus. Better.
In the small old-fashioned kitchen, Paul was making tea: she could hear the kettle spit and gurgle, coming to the boil. She liked everything about Paul’s flat, a modest three rooms in a white-balconied grey-brick tenement above the comforting roar of a main road. A white-painted mantelpiece, bookshelves, two large windows, the kind of desk you found in council offices. There would have been fires in these rooms once, and a maid to lay them, someone to sweep the big chimneys that ran down through the six floors. It would be nice to live here.
It was out of her league. Alison rented a bedsit south of the river, not much more than a useful box; a bed and a foldaway kitchen and students for neighbours, although her room had a view of a tree. She liked it enough: she went back most nights still, on principle. Increasingly though, she didn’t know what to do with herself there – it had got untidy, downgraded to storage, a place where she dropped stuff without bothering to put it away. Now she shifted her gaze from Paul’s tidy desk – the pile of books, laptop, card index – to the mantelpiece. A couple of Japanese postcards, a pewter bowl, an old mirror framed in dark wood. An envelope leaned against the mirror, his name on it in big cursive script, heavy paper.
He was in the doorway watching her.
From the start there’d been that something about him, some natural reticence or perhaps just his age, that meant that other, secondary panic didn’t set in. Over the second meal out, after the first visit to the cinema. The strategies didn’t start building themselves in her head, for what to say, when he asked. About her life. About where she came from. About her family.
‘What’s that?’ she said now. She stood up and took the cup he held out to her.
Before Paul they’d been boys, scruffy, well-meaning, lazy. They’d hardly qualified as relationships: more mates, easy to close the door on quietly in the early morning, tiptoeing off to take her place in rush-hour traffic, to breathe a sigh of relief. Paul was more than a head taller than her so she had to look up to see in his face; he set his hand lightly on the small of her back and looked down. She took in all the detail of his face at once, as she’d got used to doing, gazing straight back into his light eyes, seeing him smile, seeing him approve her without thinking.
She had half an hour before she needed to get going. ‘What’s that, then?’ she said again, and pointed. He followed her gaze and, removing his hand from her back, reached for the card on the mantelpiece. He held it out.
Dr Paul Bartlett, it read, handwritten, real ink on vellum. No address, therefore hand-delivered. Something crept in between them.
‘Well, open it, if you’re so curious,’ he said, stepping back. She was aware of his eyes on her back as she took the envelope: it felt substantial. Inside there was an embossed card, gold-edged.
Dr and Mrs … Request the pleasure …
‘I’m to be a best man,’ he said. ‘Can you believe that?’
‘Morgan Carter,’ she said. ‘Have I met her? I have.’ She stared at the script. At St Peter’s on the Wall, Saltleigh. The line before her eyes wavered, the line of a silver-grey horizon, the church on the spit in a freezing midsummer dawn: something jumped in her chest. Her lungs burned as if she’d been running.
‘June,’ she said, the first thing that came into her head. ‘Nice month to get married.’ The words sounded strange, mumbled. She handed it back to him.
‘Got to get to work,’ she said, ducking his gaze. He set the card on the mantel and took her by the wrists. Gently.
‘Come with me,’ he said.
Copyright © 2015 by Christobel Kent
