“Sweetie,” Justin said. “Come here. Let me look at you. How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I said. “Sorry, Abby; I slept it out. Here, give me that-”
I reached for the spatula, but she whipped it away. “No, you’re grand; you still count as walking wounded. Tomorrow I’ll come up and haul you out of bed. Sit.”
That split second again-wounded: Daniel and Justin seemed to pause, suspended midbite. Then I sat down at the table and Justin reached for another slice of toast, and Daniel turned a page and shoved a red enamel teapot across to me.
Abby flipped three rashers and two eggs onto a plate, without asking, and came over to put it in front of me. “Oh, brrr,” she said, hurrying back to the cooker. “Jesus. Daniel, I know about you and double-glazing, but seriously, we should at least think about windows that would-”
“Double-glazing is the spawn of Satan. It’s hideous.”
“Yes, but it’s warm. If we’re not getting carpets-”
Justin was nibbling toast, chin on hand, gazing at me closely enough to make me nervous. I concentrated on my food. “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked anxiously. “You look pale. You’re not going in today, are you?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I wasn’t sure I was ready for a full day of this, not yet. And, also, I wanted a chance to check out the house in private; I wanted that diary, or date book, or whatever it was. “I’m supposed to take it easy for another few days. That reminds me, though: what’s been happening with my tutorials?” Tutorials officially end at the Easter holidays, but there are always a few that, for whatever reason, drag on into the summer term. I had two groups left, one on Tuesdays and one on Thursdays. I wasn’t looking forward to them.
“We covered them,” Abby said, loading a plate for herself and joining us at the table, “in a manner of speaking. Daniel did Beowulf with your Thursday bunch. In the original.”
“Beautiful,” I said. “How’d they take it?”
“Not too badly, really,” Daniel said. “At first they were aghast, but eventually one or two of them came up with some intelligent comments. It was quite interesting.”
Rafe stumbled in with his hair sticking up in clumps, wearing a T-shirt and striped pajama bottoms and apparently navigating by radar. He waved at the room in general, fumbled for a mug, poured himself a lot of black coffee, snagged a triangle of Justin’s toast and wandered out again.
“Twenty minutes!” Justin yelled after him. “I’m not waiting for you!” Rafe flipped a hand backwards, over his shoulder, and kept going.
“I don’t know why you bother,” Abby said, slicing sausage. “In five minutes he won’t even remember seeing you. After the coffee. With Rafe, always after the coffee.”
“Yes, but then he moans that I haven’t given him enough time to get ready. I mean it, this time I’m leaving him behind, and if he’s late then that’s his problem. He can get a car of his own or he can walk to town, I don’t care-”
“Every morning,” Abby said to me, across Justin, who was making outraged gestures with his butter knife.
I rolled my eyes. Outside the French windows behind her head, a rabbit was nibbling the lawn, leaving little dark scatters of paw prints in the white dew.
Half an hour later, Rafe and Justin left-Justin pulled up his car in front of the house and sat there, beeping the horn and shouting inaudible threats out the window, until Rafe finally bounded into the kitchen with his coat half on and his knapsack swinging wildly from one hand, grabbed another slice of toast, shoved it between his teeth and dashed out again, slamming the front door hard enough to shake the house. Abby washed up, singing to herself in a rich contralto undertone: “The water is wide, I cannot get o’er…” Daniel smoked an unfiltered cigarette, thin plumes curling up through the pale rays of sun from the window. They’d relaxed around me; I was in.
I should have felt a lot better about this than I did. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might like these people. Daniel and Rafe, I wasn’t sure about yet, but Justin had a warmth to him that was even more endearing because it was so fussy and unpracticed, and Frank had been right about Abby: if things had been different, I would have wanted her for a friend.
They had just lost one of their own and they didn’t even know it, and there was still a chance it had been due to me; and I was sitting in their kitchen, eating their fry-up and messing with their heads. Last night’s suspicions- hemlock steak, Jesus-seemed so ridiculous and Gothic that I wanted to cringe.
“Daniel, we should start moving,” Abby said eventually, checking the clock and wiping her hands on the dish towel. “Want anything from the outside world, Lex?”
“Smokes,” I said. “I’m almost out.”
She fished a pack of Marlboro Lights out of her dressing-gown pocket and tossed it to me. “Have these. I’ll pick up more on the way in. What are you going to do all day?”
“Be a sloth on the sofa and read and eat. Are there biscuits?”
“Those vanilla cream ones you like, in the biscuit tin, and chocolate chip in the freezer.” She flipped the dish towel into a neat fold and slung it over the bar of the cooker. “You’re sure you don’t want someone to stay home with you?”
Justin had already asked me about six times. I raised my eyes to the ceiling. “Positive.”
I caught Abby’s quick glance across my head to Daniel, but he was turning a page and paying no attention to us. “Fair enough,” she said. “Don’t faint down the stairs or anything. Five minutes, Daniel?”
Daniel nodded, without looking up. Abby ran upstairs, light in her sock feet; I heard her opening and closing drawers and, after a minute, starting to sing to herself again. “I leaned my back up against an oak, I thought it was a trusty tree…”
Lexie smoked more than I did, a pack a day, and she started after breakfast. I took Daniel’s matches and lit up.
Daniel checked the page of his book, closed it and put it aside. “Should you really be smoking?” he asked. “Under the circumstances.”
“No,” I said pertly, and blew a stream of smoke across the table at him. “Should you?”
That made him smile. “You’re looking better this morning,” he said. “Last night you seemed very tired; a little lost, somehow. Which I suppose is only to be expected, but it’s nice to see your energy starting to come back.”
I made a mental note to up the boing level, gradually, over the next few days. “In the hospital they kept saying it would take a while and not to rush myself,” I said, “but they can stick it in their ear. I’m bored of being sick.”
The smile deepened. “Well, so I imagine. I’m sure you were a dream patient.” He leaned over to the cooker, tilted the coffeepot to see if there was anything left. “How much of the incident itself do you actually remember?”
He was pouring himself the last of the coffee and watching me; his face was serene, interested, untroubled. “Bugger-all,” I said. “That whole day’s gone, and bits from before. I thought the cops told you.”
“They did,” Daniel said, “but that didn’t mean it was necessarily the case. You could have had your own reasons for telling them that.”
I looked blank. “Like what?”
“I have no idea,” Daniel said, replacing the coffeepot carefully on the stove. “I hope, though, that if you do remember anything and you’re unsure whether to take it to the police, you won’t feel you have to deal with it alone; you’ll come and talk to me, or to Abby. Would you do that?”
He sipped his coffee, one ankle crossed neatly over the opposite knee, watching me calmly. I was starting to see what Frank meant about these four giving away very little. This guy’s expression would have worked equally well whether he had just come from choir practice or from ax-murdering a dozen orphans. “Well, yeah, sure,” I said. “But all I remember is coming home from college on the Tuesday evening and then getting really, really sick in a bedpan, and I already told the police all that.”
“Hmm,” said Daniel. He pushed the ashtray over to my side of the table. “Memory is an odd thing. Let me ask you this: if you were to-” But just then Abby came clattering back down the stairs, still singing, and he shook his
