‘Good day, love?’ Lauren asks.
‘Yeah, all right.’ He grabs a banana, peels it swiftly and chomps down half of it in one bite.
‘Got your exams coming up?’ Esther asks. What a typical thing to say to a teenager, she thinks, then remembers that she only turned twenty in February.
‘Yeah, prelims in January,’ he replies.
‘Which subjects are you doing?’
‘Maths, physics and chemistry.’
‘Oh my God. That’s so difficult. Think you’ll do all right?’ Esther has never encountered anyone quite like Charlie before. None of the boys at Willow Vale were as obviously academic as he is, and now she’s curious to know what he’s all about.
‘Hope so,’ he says with a shrug. ‘But yeah, itishard.’
‘Bet you’ll do fine,’ she says, which is silly really as she doesn’t know him at all. She guesses he’ll put in the work, though. Not like her, even though Esther’s teachers had reckoned she could have done really well, if she’d pulled her finger out.
‘Did you do A levels?’ Charlie asks, having devoured the banana and set about eating another one.
‘Yeah. I mean, I showed up,’ she says with a small laugh. ‘I did history, which I loved, and English and art. But I didn’t work nearly hard enough.’
‘But you’ve done really well,’ Charlie says, with such earnestness she could hug him.
‘It’s been a lot of luck really,’ Esther says truthfully. ‘I’ve kind fallen into anything I’ve ever done. I mean, there’s never been a grand plan.’
‘Nothing wrong with that, is there?’ Charlie starts to pick over the jewellery that’s still scattered all over the table.
‘No.’ She smiles. ‘There’s nothing wrong with it. But my two best friends are away at university. Gracie’s at Durham and Jess is at St Andrews …’
‘D’you still see them?’ Lauren asks.
‘Not much,’ Esther replies quickly. She wishes now that she hadn’t started this conversation because it’s difficult for her, constantly seeing what Gracie and Jess are up to, hundreds of miles away from her. Their lives don’t include her anymore. They’re far too busy making tons of fantastically clever new friends. She’s heard about the flat parties, the sprawling picnics with wine and proper wicker hampers, and the boozy dinner parties where everyone dresses up in their poshest clothes. ‘Frocks’, they call them. Her friends wear frocks! And they go on big group holidays with their uni friends because someone always knows someone whose family own a ramshackle house in Provence, and they all lie around getting gently pissed on French rosé in the afternoon sun.
They don’t go to terrible clubs where middle-aged people dance badly with sweat flying off them.
‘Not everybody has to go to university,’ Charlie remarks now.
‘As Miles pointed out,’ Esther says with a trace of a smile. She catches his eye – he smiles too – and she decides she likes this shy boy who seems to be into the solar system in the way that ‘normal’ boys of his age tend tobe into gaming, football or just hanging out, being a pain in the arse, basically. ‘Sorry about that,’ she adds, reddening. ‘About Miles, I mean.’
‘Nothing to be sorry for,’ Charlie says with a shrug. Although Lauren is busying about with a camera at the worktop, Esther can tell she’s listening in.
‘You want to go to uni, though?’ she asks.
‘Yeah, I do,’ Charlie says.
‘What’ll you study?’
‘Astrophysics, hopefully.’
‘Not astrology?’ She raises a brow.
‘I’m considering that too,’ he says, chuckling at her joke, looking the most relaxed she’s seen him so far.
‘Good to keep your options open,’ she says, almost wishing they could hang out and chat for longer as she and Lauren head into the garden to do the shoot.
*
It’s bizarre, Esther thinks when they’re done, how a little connection seems to have sparked up between her and Charlie today. They gravitate towards each other again as Lauren makes hot chocolate, and the two of them wander around the wintry garden together, sipping from mugs and chatting about this and that. He’s a sweet boy, Esther decides as Lauren serves up bowls of mushroomy pasta. Later, as Lauren drives her to the train station, she can’t resist finding out a bit more about him. ‘Does Charlie have many friends in the village?’ she asks.
