How I Wonder What You Are

by Jane Lovering

  ‘Got in last night. Apparently the BBC want me, so I have to go back next week to do some filming and I’m not sure how long I’ll have to stay down in London then.’ This was all said with a new edge of confidence, an air of belonging somewhere else. Not to this little crowded valley any more.

  I felt my heart acquire a tiny frozen edge. ‘Oh.’

  ‘So I thought … might be my last chance to sort out those lights.’ He swung the bag he carried in my direction. ‘I got this.’

  ‘A holdall. What are you going to do, take them on a weekend away?’

  He flicked his hair out of his eyes. He’d got new frames for his glasses, narrower ones that made his cheekbones look stellar, and a haircut that accentuated his expression. ‘It’s a tent.’

  ‘You’re going to take them on a cheap weekend away then.’ I walked on through into the kitchen and began to fill the kettle, trying not to let myself feel anything other than curiosity.

  ‘It’s for us.’ He was still behind me, I almost walked straight into him as I went to the cupboard for biscuits. ‘I thought if we camp out up on the high moor, it needn’t be for long, maybe one, two nights. We’ll take it in turns to keep watch, we’ll be in exactly the right place then to see where they come from, where they go! Good idea?’

  He’s going back to London, Molly. He’s going to leave Riverdale, he’s going to leave you. Even friendship won’t save you from that. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You “suppose so”.’ Phinn hitched himself up onto the work surface. ‘You were keen enough to get up there the other day, when you made me ride that evil glue-stick on legs. Why have you lost interest now?’

  I opened my mouth to say that we ought to leave it alone, let mysteries be mysteries. That he’d got a glossy new persona now, new job, new confidence. And then my gaze travelled down, down those long legs in their designer jeans to his feet. Toes protruded through a sock seam that looked as though it had given way decades ago, and the heels were worn thin enough to read a broadsheet through. He was still Phinn. Glossy on the outside, but on the inside, still the carelessly dressed, painfully emotion-filled, so-clever-it-hurt, Phinn.

  ‘Oh, all right then. But it might get cold, it’s still only March.’

  ‘It’s one of those new Polar Explorer tents. All insulation and anti-walrus netting. Got it off a guy in the Natural History unit. They’d been to the Falklands and he reckoned it kept him warmer than his house.’

  I eyed up the small bag. ‘You didn’t happen to ask what sort of house he lived in, did you? I mean, Howe End is technically a house but the internal temperature goes up every time you open the front door.’

  ‘True.’ A grin that made my own lips twitch in reply. ‘So. You up for it?’

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  ‘But no horses. You understand that, don’t you? No horses, not ever again. Not even if the whole of civilisation crashes and we’re driven back to living in the Mesolithic era and I lose a leg. I’d rather hop.’

  ‘No horses. Got it.’ I poured the water onto the coffee. I’d made him one without thinking, which stopped me in my tracks for a moment, then I got over myself and handed it up to him, where he sat perched on my granite-look work surface like a big black punctuation mark. ‘So when do we do it?’

  ‘Soon as you like.’ He smiled now, his eyes creasing at me through the steam over his mug. ‘Before I go back to London would be best, unless you fancy sitting up there solo and trying to stay awake all night.’

  I sipped my drink. It was far too hot but it gave me something to do with my face while I worked out how I felt. ‘So, when will you be gracing our screens then, Doctor Baxter?’ I managed to get my voice to sound light and unconcerned.

  ‘Thinking about it, I’d rather pogo stick my way round Europe than ride a horse again. Actually, riding that horse was remarkably like pogo sticking round Europe.’

  I threw my dishcloth at him. ‘Stan is not like a pogo stick. He’s an endangered species.’

  ‘Good.’ Phinn caught the cloth in the air. ‘And if you make me get on him one more time, the species will make the “critical” list.’

  ‘Horse riding is very good exercise, I’ll have you know. Very aerobic.’

  ‘Yeah well, so is sex.’ A momentary pause. ‘And that’s all kinds of trouble too. Oh, and to answer your question, I think the programme is scheduled for autumn. The Science Behind the Fiction. Or something. I’m actually looking forward to it. Apparently I’m a natural, or so they say, although I did notice that they didn’t specify a natural what.’

  ‘You’re going to be famous.’ I tried to put the same teasing note into my voice that he had in his, but I didn’t think it was working.

  ‘Molly, I’m already famous. Well, famous-ish. If you’re into theoretical physics and dark matter investigations then you’d know me, know my work anyway. All that will happen here is that I’ll get more attention from people who know about life outside the lab.’ He dunked a biscuit. ‘So what about tonight then?’

  ‘Tonight?’ I wondered if I’d made some promise, some date that I’d forgotten. ‘What about tonight?’

  Another grin. He was positively Mister Smiley today. ‘Up on the moors. I was thinking, we get up there as it gets dark, what, about fiveish, maybe a bit before so we can pitch the tent, get set up, see what happens. Okay with you?’

  ‘I’ll need a bath,’ I said meaninglessly, while all I could think was – all night? In a tent? With you? How do I play it, cool or do I pretend that sitting in a space a little bit bigger than a hamster cage with a bloke I think I might be in love with who looks on me as a friend is the best offer I’m ever going to get? Even if it is the best offer I’m ever going to get. ‘And to put some warmer clothes on.’

  ‘No hurry,’ and he dunked again, distracted this time by the end of his biscuit falling into his coffee.

  I finished my drink and washed up the mugs. Phinn eventually swung back down to earth. ‘I’ll go back to the farm, fetch the Primus then. Maybe a jacket.’

  ‘All right.’ I didn’t turn round, although I could see him hovering just behind my shoulder. ‘I’ll meet you back here at half four?’

  ‘Well …’ Phinn looked down, wiggled his bare toes against the lino. ‘I was going to come straight back. Things are … with Link, I don’t know what to say to him. He’s carrying on like nothing has happened, he obviously doesn’t know what he said, doesn’t know that I know.’

  ‘Or you think you know. There may be a reasonable explanation, Phinn, you do realise that don’t you?’

  His head dropped lower. ‘I want to believe that. Really, I do, you don’t know how much I want not to think of my best friend and my wife together.’ He rubbed his hands over his face, smudging his expression. ‘I don’t want to know the worst, is what it is. This way I might suspect, but I don’t know. A kind of Schrödinger’s affair.’ A sudden glance up at me, as though he was waiting for me to tell him to pull himself together, to give him an order, and when I simply smiled he nodded slowly. ‘And I don’t want to open the box. But you’re right. I have to talk to him.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘But, later. After tonight.’

  ‘Right.’

  He left the tent on the floor and walked silently in his holey socks to the front door. ‘Thank you,’ he said, the words having more weight than if he was just thanking me for the coffee. ‘I’ll see you in a bit.’ The door closed gently behind him and I left a decent interval, then ran upstairs to break the world record for bathing, hair washing and leg shaving before changing into some decent jeans and a warm thick jumper.

  When I came down again Caro was lounging on the sofa. ‘So? What did he want?’

  I gave a disbelieving giggle. ‘We’re camping out on the high moor tonight. Both of us. One tent.’

  Caro whistled. ‘Way to go. By the way, your phone was ringing just now.’

  ‘Yes, I heard it.’

  ‘I picked it up. Thought it might have been import
ant.’ She gave me a straight look. ‘It was your mum.’

  The giggly warmth that the thought of spending a night with Phinn had engendered evaporated like water hitting the sun. ‘You had no right to speak to her.’

  Caro gave a long, slow sigh. ‘Your mum, Moll.’

  ‘I don’t ever want to speak to her again. I wish she would fall off the face of the planet, just go away and just … just stop.’

  Caro leaned forward. She clasped her hands around the back of her neck. ‘Look, Moll, it might be none of my business …’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘… but my mum died when I was fifteen. Do you know how much I’d give to have her back here today? Do you?’ Caro sounded almost as though she was close to tears. ‘Anything. Molly, I would give anything.’ Her voice was not much more than a whisper. ‘I’d trade the rest of my life for one more day with Mum.’ Her head dropped and her hands came forward to cover her face now. ‘So it makes me angry when you won’t even spare a couple of minutes to chat to yours.’

  Caro was never angry. She never lost her temper or shouted, she never even so much as kicked a bale of hay in annoyance. It was one of the reasons she was so good with the horses, however badly they behaved, she always knew they didn’t mean it and kept her sense of humour. How could she be angry with me?

  ‘My mum ran off with my fiancé, Caro. They were having an affair behind my back.’

  Caro took a deep breath. ‘I knew it had to be more than just your boyfriend cheating on you. You should have said.’

  ‘I didn’t know how to.’

  Now she stood up and was suddenly very tall. ‘To me, Molly. You should have said something to me. I’m your friend and you couldn’t tell me something that important? D’you know something? It makes me feel a bit like you’ve been using me.’

  I felt my heart drop suddenly down onto my stomach, then further. Like a huge, heavy weight was falling through the centre of me. ‘No,’ was all I could say.

  ‘You’ll tell me the superficial stuff but not anything that really matters underneath. It’s like you’ve been keeping me at arm’s length, and that’s not a nice feeling, Molly. Not nice at all.’

  ‘I …’

  Caro’s voice grew cold. ‘Eventually it’s going to sink in, you’ve been looking for replacements for the parents you never had. You’ve used me to replace your mother and the men – they’ve all been father figures. I’m hoping you’ve finally grown up and started looking for someone to be an equal, not someone who’s going to tell you how to live your life. Because, from what I’ve heard from Link, Phinn is not the kind of man you muck around with.’

  She didn’t give me a chance to reply, just pulled her jacket from where she’d draped it over the back of the sofa and went out, suddenly much more of a stranger than she ever had been since the moment I met her.

  I sat and stared at the door after it had banged shut behind her. I’d got so used to Caro being quiet and uncritical about my life choices that her abrupt anger had left me not knowing which way I was facing. But I’m right not to speak to my mother. After what she and Tim did to me, I’m right. If I don’t make contact, then they can’t hurt me any more, can they?

  “I’d trade the rest of my life,” Caro had said, “to have one more day with Mum.” But then her mum had wanted her, hadn’t she? Brought her up with love and attention and all those other things? While mine …

  The door banged again and Phinn was in the room, wearing a big coat. ‘Hey. Are you all right, you look a bit – shocked.’

  ‘I’ve just …’ No. This wasn’t the time. ‘It’s fine. Perhaps we should go now. Get the tent pitched and everything.’ My voice sounded a bit squeaky, probably because of the way my stomach was trying to hijack my vocal chords. ‘It’s only an hour or so until it gets dark.’

  ‘All right.’ Phinn swung the tent bag onto his back. ‘It might take me that long to get the damn thing up. I’ve never pitched a tent before. But, on the plus side, I do have a down-filled sleeping bag here.’

  One sleeping bag? ‘Only the one bag?’ I tried to think my way through this one. It was a bit … well, blatant for Phinn, surely?

  ‘One on watch, one sleeping,’ he said, giving me a look. I hoped he hadn’t picked up on what I was thinking. ‘Why?’

  ‘Nothing. Just wondering how big the tent is. Thought there might only be room for one person at a time,’ I improvised hastily.

  ‘It’s fine. Plenty of room. We could hold an orgy in there if we wanted to – which, of course, we don’t.’ He swung the bag from one hand to another. ‘Shall we go?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I think so.’

  Outside the wind was changing direction. The metal fox on the top of the maypole was swinging to and fro with a noise like an angle grinder at work and a bank of cloud was moving in from the coast, sending sudden trails of darkness out as it covered the sun.

  We hit the steep part of the slope out of the village and Phinn puffed a bit. ‘Sorry. Theoretical physics isn’t much of a preparation for the real world.’

  ‘Maybe that’s a good thing. The real world isn’t so great when you get into it, is it?’

  ‘So you are hiding here?’

  I stopped and looked back. Phinn was about twenty yards behind with the tent bag slung across his shoulders and the last rays of the sun tinting his face and hair before it sank behind the huge hump of moorland to the west. It caught his glasses and blocked out his eyes, replacing them with reflections of the scenery, making him look as though he’d been possessed by the spirit of the moors.

  I thought of Caro, of her sad, accusatory expression and the fact that she hadn’t waited for my explanation, and gritted my teeth at Phinn. ‘Look. I’ve had enough of this today. If we’re going to be spending any length of time together in a small, inflammable container, then you’d better learn to stay off the topic of my private life, all right? We’re here to track those lights, not do an Oprah.’

  Phinn struggled closer up the hill. ‘You said it.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Fine.’

  We walked the rest of the two mile trackway in silence.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Phinn frowned and swore quietly to himself under his breath. Oh gods. Why didn’t I pay more attention when that bloke showed me how the damn thing went up? ‘Maybe this bit goes in here?’

  But Molly wasn’t paying any attention to his increasingly feeble attempts to erect the tent. She was staring out over the hills with dusk snagged in her hair, and his heart snuggled itself away behind his stomach to hide.

  He flicked the tent again and this time one side stayed up for long enough to get the ropes tight and he managed to get the securing pegs dug into the earth, screwing them in with the kind of vicious energy that displacement activity lent to any action. ‘There.’

  Molly turned just in time to see the tent tug gently against the guy ropes and collapse back to earth like a shy ghost. ‘Oh. It seems to have deflated again.’

  It was almost completely dark now. Phinn stumbled over the groundsheet in his attempts to locate the peg he’d just managed to dig into the banks of heather and bracken, caught both feet in the fallen tent and fell full-length on top of the failing structure. The huge, hot weight of humiliation tucked itself around him like a blanket of shame. ‘Bugger. Sorry, I really should be better at this kind of thing.’

  To his amazement Molly laughed. ‘Why? I can’t imagine quantum physics requires you to camp out much, does it?’

  ‘Well, no, but …’ But real men can put up tents. ‘I’ve got a doctorate,’ he finished, berating himself for the non-sequiturial nature of his follow-up. ‘I mean, I thought these things were designed to be foolproof.’

  Molly looked down at the tangled mass of ropes and shiny, weatherproof fabric. She shook her head as though casting off unwanted thoughts. ‘Yes, but it’s a tent. Don’t they have their own kind of cunning intelligence? So they can only be erected on dry sunny days, during the hours of daylig
ht?’ She poked the canopy with her toe. ‘It is clearly in keeping with the rest of its kind. Violence is probably the only language it understands.’

  She seized the poles and shoved them through the fabric sleeves which gave the tent structure, then rammed the first of the pegs into the ground. Obediently it remained up for long enough for the rest of the ropes to be tightened and the pegs to be forced into the peaty soil. ‘There. Told you, sometimes violence is the only way.’

  Phinn stared, amazed. ‘That’s incredible.’

  She grinned. ‘Yeah, well sometimes Stan can only be steered if you get off, run round to the front and lean against him, so I’m used to having to use force.’ She walked around the tent checking the ropes were all taut, leaving Phinn staring into the darkness.

  The wind cut like glass and a few gust-borne particles sliced at his cheek. He tipped his head back to greet the sky and hoped that the lights would put in an appearance soon. If he had to spend any time at all in that tent with Molly he wasn’t sure what he’d do. If they came in the next hour then he’d be able to strike camp and head back down to the relative warmth of the valley rather than hovering around up here in this liminal wasteland.

  Phinn shivered. The dead felt so close in places like this, he could almost sense Suze hovering over his shoulder, muttering critically. He had a sudden image of her body as she’d looked when he’d identified her, greenish-pale, her hair dried to strings around her head. And even then, even in the mortuary, she’d seemed to him to have a half-smile of derision on her lips, as though she was mocking his tears.

  When Molly touched his elbow he leaped into the air, so lost in his vision that he half-expected Suze to be standing there, dripping water and accusing him of sending her to her death with his last, desperate words.

  ‘Phinn? Are you all right?’

  He became aware of the scalding feeling behind his eyes and turned away to hide his face in the dark sky. ‘I’m fine, yes. Just, you know. Wind in my eyes.’