They climbed into the car. Should there not be ceremony of some kind? He didn’t even want to listen to the radio. What news could there be that would rival the misery of this day? Even the BBC would sound cheerful compared to what he was facing.
He didn’t tell Ben to slow down. Maybe they would all die in a fiery wreck and he could stop the pain that way. Emilia crossed her arms on the back of his seat and blew the longish hair on the nape of his neck. It really didn’t help. She traced along his ear-notch with one fingertip. He stared out at the mist-shrouded, low-lying fields. October. Everything was dying. There was nothing to look forwards to in the autumn, just winter’s bareness and the cold.
They reached Cambridge in four hours, something Ben seemed inordinately pleased about—as if hastening dying was something to be admired.
But he perked up a little as Ben navigated the car through the ancient cobbled streets and found the place they wanted. He stopped the vehicle at the end of a long gravel-lined driveway that led to a mellow perfection of brick and mullioned glass. Aleksey sat up straighter. Everywhere he looked it appeared as if they had ascended into architectural heaven. Smooth, green, manicured lawns, heart-achingly beautiful halls and colleges and chapels…and right at the centre, the most perfect one of all: Jesus College—Emilia’s new home.
They hefted her trunk up to the undergraduate rooms for her. It only seemed a few minutes since they’d been carrying it the other way, bringing her home from school. He stood alone in her little study room while she and Ben ran back to the car to get the bicycle, and pictured himself aged eighteen, starting his degree at such a place. He realised he was being disingenuous thinking that this perfection, this level of exquisite achievement, could have been his had his life only taken a few different curves. Teenage Aleksey had burned for something very different than this, and he could not blame his father entirely for the way his life had turned out. He leaned on the windowsill and peered out of the thick, stone-mullioned window to the pristine quadrangle below and over to the mist-wreathed spires of the chapel.
He heard the other two returning and straightened.
There was nowhere to store the trunk, so Emilia emptied it while they waited. He saw now why it had been so heavy: it appeared to have more books than clothes. When she was done, she rose and faced them both. She wasn’t starting her actual courses until the beginning of the following week, and the rest of this one was dedicated to all the usual bacchanalia of the start of a new year. But she wanted to get on with it all. They needed to leave. As she was hugging Ben, and he was telling her tofill her boots, Aleksey gave a last look around. Her books were scattered on her bed: Beowulf; TintinAn Ynys Dhu; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Le Morte d’Arthur; Ecclesiastical History of the English People… His eyes returned to the second book. Snodgrass was on the cover—or his look-alike Snowy was anyway. It was a book about Tintin in Cornish.The Black Island. Translated by Mark Trebetherick. There was a picture of the delectable Dr Mark on the back cover. He was still windblown and blond and excessively annoying. He tapped the picture warningly and placed it on her new bookshelf. The first one there.
He tried to focus on what was about to happen as he saw Ben preparing to leave, but his mind darted off as if trying to find another distraction, procrastination from the inevitable. Emilia looked around to make sure everything was up from the car. ‘Well, this is it then.’
Aleksey nodded.
‘Do you remember what you once told me?’
‘I never remember anything I say. Other people would be wise to follow my example.’
She handed him a wrapped parcel. ‘Open it later.’
He took it, clenching his jaw, and said roughly, ‘What’s this for?’
‘Try and work it out for yourself, maybe?’
He nodded. She punched his arm. ‘Go away. I’m going to get on my bike and ride to the northern isles to seek an emerald sea…’
They went down the narrow, twisting stairs together, both having to duck their heads beneath medieval stone arches not made for men such as they. When they were back in the car, Ben put a hand on his thigh and squeezed it gently. ‘Okay?’
‘I’ll survive.’
‘This isn’t the worst thing you’ve had to endure, is it?’
Aleksey gave a maudlin shrug.
‘Open it.’ Ben pulled away from the curb, watching as he peeled off the wrapping paper.
It was a book of watercolours and sketches. Emilia’s holiday journal. There were pictures of the cottages in the woods, red squirrels, Radulf and PB, a Dartmoor tor, the horses, Light Island lighthouse, Guillemot House, Kittiwake, The Crow’s Nest, and tiny detailed sketches of some of the flowers that grew on the island, or a flake of lichen caught on a granite stone. The final picture was of him, the only person she’d included. He was staring right at himself out of the book, his amber eyes watchful, cautious, at odds with the savagery of the scarred features she had captured to perfection. His hair was windblown and golden, and she had given him a Viking rune choker on which she had intricately penned, as if engraved:faoir minn faoir.
Minn.
‘What does it say?’
‘Eyes on road, maybe?’
Ben poked his thigh. He turned his head to gaze out at the passing misty landscape. It was possible it wasn’t mist at all.
When they crossed back once more into Devon, he told Ben to take the road to Barton Combe. Ben glanced over. ‘Why?’
‘Phillipa is going to be there, and I thought I might take her up on her offer to collect a few things.’
‘Good.’ Ben looked behind at the now empty car. ‘I’m guessing not the billiard table though.’
There was no security. The place had been shut up since the wedding in January. Now that Ben was accompanying him, Phillipa didn’t seem particularly worried about a stray lens capturing this meeting with her ex-husband at their marital home. Ben, apparently, was chaperone enough. But Aleksey suspected more that she had begun to carve her own life out of this union and that she now felt more confident doing what she wanted when she wanted. If she had brought her protection officers with her, they were nowhere in evidence. They pulled up on the gravel at the front of the house, and Aleksey didn’t even bother to knock.
She was in the family kitchen, packing some china into a cardboard box. ‘There you are. How did it go?’
