Our Little Secret

by Roz Nay

  Freddy never left my side the whole eight months I spent in Oxford. He was a third-year biochemist who’d also been to Magdalen College boarding school. That first day he took me to the Turf Tavern, a pub hidden away down a skinny alley I’d never have found on my own. The fourteenth-century beams over the bar were so low that even he had to bend at the knee while he ordered us half pints of Old Speckled Hen.

  “Some Australian prime minister set a Guinness world record right where you’re standing for quaffing a yard of ale.” He passed a glass of swirling liquid back to me and prodded at the coins in his palm. “And that’s all you need to know about that country.”

  We sat on a long oak bench with a red seat cushion that was worn into hard-packed lumps. Freddy chose a seat next to me, which made it hard to look at him. It felt like we were sitting in a train carriage. When he asked questions he rattled them out with the fear of someone racing the clock, as if a buzzer would sound somewhere and there’d be no more talking.

  “And is there a gentleman currently with whom you are romantically engaged?” He ran a plump forefinger around the rim of his beer glass.

  I picked at the dark polish on my nail. “There’s a guy. But we’re not dating while I’m here. We kind of are, but we’re not.”

  “There’s a guy, is there? Is he terribly handsome?”

  “Most girls think so.”

  “Is he beefy? I bet he is. Who’d play him in a movie? And don’t say that awful vampire chap or I’ll be forced to abandon you.”

  “Harrison Ford.”

  “He’s a hundred years old.”

  “When he wasn’t.” I took a wincing sip of the murky, warm Speckled Hen. “What about you, Freddy? Are you dating?”

  “What a dreadful expression! From now on, we will not be using North American colloquialisms. Let’s get some British into you! Come on, chin-chin. We’re off to the Ashmolean.”

  Freddy came with me to the opening ceremony of studies, where all new undergraduates had to parade through the streets of Oxford in gowns and square grad caps in order to listen to a don speak in Latin about our responsibilities as students. Beyond Freddy, I didn’t bother to make any friends. Sure, I said hi when I passed people in the corridors of Hertford, and the porters all knew my name. But I didn’t delve too deeply into the nightlife, or trawl for friends. It’s never really been my thing.

  From my college room, I could hear the rowdy bar crawls on Thursday nights and the weekend black-tie wanderers drinking from the necks of champagne bottles and shouting in plummy accents about kebabs. I never felt I was missing out. Freddy was somehow older than the average student—it was like he’d arrived at the university with all the refinement of a man in his late forties. He scorned what he termed “undergraduate thuggery” or the “yobs of college life.” We went punting on the River Ouse, and Freddy brought a windup 1930s gramophone. The only time we separated was to attend lectures and tutorials, but mine were few and far between and I barely prepared for them. Not having my dad around to check up on me felt like a whole new world. I exhaled into the absence of my mother. Finally I was a flower able to grow toward a different sun, in any direction I deemed fit.

  As fall turned to winter, Freddy and I did things I could never do at home. It became my new challenge. We went brass-rubbing in Christ Church Cathedral, listened to fiery young politicians at the Union, saw plays touring from London at the Oxford Playhouse, or took tea and crumpets at the Malmaison, talking about how a jail could fashion itself into a hip new hotel.

  “What if you sleep in a murderer’s old room? DNA persists, you know. It doesn’t bear thinking about what might be on the pillows.” He sighed and sipped his Earl Grey.

  I did Skype with HP as often as I could, although the time difference made it difficult. His routine was fairly rigid, what with all the coaching and carpentry through the week, so we mostly spoke on weekends. The Parkers didn’t have a laptop; all of our conversations took place at their computer in the kitchen, and often I could see the back of his mother as she stirred something at the stove or drifted past holding a bag of flour. HP struggled to figure out Skype and spent a lot of the calls pressing at buttons with his forehead too close to the camera. He’d cut his hair—shaved it down to a golden Velcro. His eyes and cheekbones dominated the screen.

  “My dad said it was time I looked more like a carpenter than a surfer. Does it look bad?”

  “Looking bad is genetically impossible for you.”

  “I miss you, LJ. How’s the studying? Are you talking to any guys?”

  “Not in that way, no.” I didn’t tell him about Freddy. Not because there was anything shifty about the friendship; just that over Skype, I worried Freddy’s name would be a threat, when he was anything but. “I’m not working very hard,” I offered instead. “But the city’s amazing. I can’t wait for you to come see it.”

  There was no set plan—as always with HP—but we talked of spring as if it were an anticipated reunion.

  My mother didn’t call much because it was expensive long-distance. We tried Skyping, but she spent most of the conversation disconcerted by her image on the screen and smoothing out her hair. Instead she wrote me emails. Her email account was petiteshelley@gmail.com, which made her sound like a teenage chat room user.

  I’ve checked in your closet, she wrote, and darling, you’ve left behind all of your prettiest clothes. Should I send them?

  Your dad wants to know if you’ve covered Virgil’s Aeneid yet. I’ve no real desire to know what that is.

  I hope you’re eating in the Hertford College dining room. Pay as much attention as you can to the upper table, I’ve heard that’s where all the dons sit.

  It’s only a matter of time, darling, before they all notice you. Remember how exceptional you are.

  As well as relentless advice on forging a path into the upper echelons of Oxford society, Mom was also intent on giving me HP updates.

  I saw him today going into the rec center—not with a girl, so don’t worry!

  And: He’s making quite a name for himself as a sports teacher.

  And: HP has yet to come over for dinner. But I’m sure he will at some point.

  I didn’t fly back home for Christmas—couldn’t afford the ticket—and Mom said they weren’t trying hard this year anyway. What’s the point, darling? It’s not like we’re Christians.

  I spent the holidays with Freddy at his home in Dorset. We took a taxi from the train station and drove up the long, meandering driveway through the grounds of his house, which turned out to be more of an estate. The front facade of the grand mansion boasted at least twelve windows. The cook, Esther, opened the door.

  “Major and Mrs. Montgomery are in the conservatory. They said to freshen up and join them for tea.”

  The only thing missing from the scene was a butler.

  Mrs. Montgomery was a thin, pinched woman with nostrils that seemed perpetually flared. She held out her hand and I hesitated, unsure if I should kneel and kiss it. The woman watched me for three days straight, barely cracking a smile, even on Christmas morning when we discovered that Freddy had put a book of British idioms and An Idiot’s Guide to Cricket in my stocking.

  “He’s taking you on,” his mother said from her silk armchair where she clasped a tray of crystallized ginger to her lap. Her face remained utterly without expression.

  On Boxing Day, Freddy took me pheasant shooting with his father, a man with a formidable mustache and a seemingly bottomless silver flask of brandy from which we all had to drink every time we stopped.

  “My son’s rather taken with you,” Major Montgomery said in a rare moment when Freddy was out of earshot.

  “We’re buddies,” I said.

  “Good heavens.” He shook his head and snapped his shotgun open, crooking it over his forearm. “That’ll never do.”

  I never found out if it was my inferior American phrasing he disliked or the platonic nature of my relationship with his son. When Freddy and I said good
bye to his folks in early January and prepared to return to Oxford, Mrs. Montgomery glared from the hallway while her husband shook my hand.

  “Can we expect you next year?” he asked.

  “She’ll be back with the Yanks by then,” chirped Freddy.

  Both his mother and father exhaled visibly.

  The strangest thing about Christmas, aside from the austerity of Freddy’s parents, was spending it without HP, but I got back to Hertford to find he’d sent me his version of a festive postcard. On the front of the card was a photo of the Cove library, as if it were some kind of heritage landmark, and HP had cut out a picture of Santa in the mall from the local paper and stuck it to the back of the card. Around the picture, in writing getting progressively smaller as he ran out of room, he’d written Merry Xmas from Cove, cultural hotspot. Dumping snow here, working hard, miss you in my truck. Fly back to me soon, little free bird. I stuck it to the corkboard above my desk.

  As the months passed toward spring, we Skyped less. He was busy finishing up his year of coaching, or perhaps his dad was working him hard. I stayed busy with Freddy, fighting through hordes of Japanese tourists around St Giles’ and taking sardonic tours of the city in an open-top double-decker bus, Freddy disagreeing with everything the tour guide said on the loudspeaker.

  It was a relief when a second postcard arrived from HP in April with a picture of the Hulk smashing something on the front. In HP’s scrawl was a single sentence, Hey Gray Eyes, check your windows. I had no idea what he was referencing until the night of April 30, when I woke to a scattering of small pebbles hitting my window at four o’clock in the morning and looked out to see HP and Ezra on the street below Hertford College.

  * * *

  Detective Novak holds up a palm like a policeman halting traffic.

  “Your friends. They’re always male.” He checks his watch. “Don’t you find that interesting?”

  “Like I said, I’ve always been a bit on the outside of things, and if a friend comes my way, it feels lucky.”

  “So Freddy replaced HP on that trip? It seems like a pretty straight trade.”

  “Are you psychoanalyzing me or something?”

  Novak’s eyebrows shoot up. “It’s my job to ask questions, Angela.”

  “I thought your job was to listen.”

  * * *

  Novak’s lucky I’m even talking to him. I could have clammed up from the very start, but I’m doing this for HP, who might well be going through hell right now. I’m doing this for him and for me: The truth is I’ve bottled up this travesty for years.

  What I haven’t told Novak is that I missed HP desperately while I was at Oxford and there’s no way Freddy could replace him. I remember the immediate calm that came over me when I saw HP standing below the college holding a flower from the hydrangea bush.

  “Can we crash?” he shouted.

  “What are you doing?” I laughed. “Wait there.” I hurried to find a robe, stopping in front of the mirror for a second to pinch my cheeks and check my hair. After a quick scrub of toothpaste across my teeth, I jogged to the college gate, pushing open the tiny door and stepping through it onto the street. My body wasn’t fully through before HP grabbed me and swept me into a hug. His neck smelled like summer. He set me down and bent to look properly at my face.

  “You any different?”

  I’d cut my hair shorter, pixie-style, and I knew with the light from the streetlamp my cheekbones looked good. HP moved around me in a circle, giving me short, tentative kisses that pecked like questions. Are we still the same? Have the rules changed? Is this still as good as before? We didn’t have time to find out because Ezra cut in.

  “We got free bourbon on the plane!” he announced. “That stewardess kept it flowing. I think she kind of dug us. Shitty movies, though.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

  “You didn’t get my postcard?” HP looked crestfallen. “Dammit! I laid off Skype just to set up the mystery. You didn’t get it?”

  “Did you put a date on it, bonehead?” asked Ezra, slapping HP with his baseball cap.

  “Does today work for you?” HP took my hand and laid his squashed hydrangea into it, closing my fingers. “Come on, let’s stash our gear and you can show us the town.”

  As it turned out, they’d picked the best daybreak of the year to arrive in Oxford. It was May Morning, a traditional celebration that had been going for over five hundred years, and every student in town was heading to Magdalen Bridge to hear the Hymnus Eucharisticus sung from the tower by boy choristers. The university year was coming to a close, and all the colleges would throw a grand May Ball to round out the celebrations. As we walked down High Street toward the Botanic Garden, the roads started to fill with bicycles. Some students hadn’t been to bed all night—you could tell from the haunted faces above the stripy scarves. HP and Ezra kept stopping to look up at buildings.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” HP said every twenty steps. “The walls have gargoyles. That’s ridiculously cool.”

  They were jet-lagged, both of them, and fighting the fade, but the birds twittered in hedgerows as we walked past the Eastgate Hotel. The sky held a cobalt promise. At the bridge a crowd stood expectantly, their faces raised to the tower.

  “What are we looking for?” Ezra yawned.

  “Wait for the chimes.” I had both hands in my jacket pockets, but HP reached in and laced his fingers through mine. His hair had grown by a couple of inches and sat in a tousled scruff. He looked up like everyone else, but he had that familiar golden glint at his jawline and I pressed into him until he put his arm around me. I could feel the strength of his stomach through the lining of his clothes. I felt settled, happy, as if there’d been parts of myself I hadn’t known I’d missed until he brought them back for me. With the first strike of six from the clock tower, everything else fell silent. The boys looked down at me for a moment, only to swing their faces back skyward as the Magdalen College Choir broke into hymn, as they’d done on that day for more than five centuries. We all stood still listening to blackbirds and boy sopranos; even Ezra looked reverent.

  At 6:10 a.m. the singing ended and the bells rang out of Magdalen Tower. People cheered and hugged as Morris folk dancers appeared on the street with bells tied to their elbows and ankles, and drunken students climbed the bridge to jump into the river—only to think twice when they saw the water level. Ezra turned to HP and me.

  “This place rules,” he shouted, joining a band of dancers, heel-toeing his way into the line and leaving me alone with HP for the first time in months. It didn’t take us long to curl into a kiss. I arched up and he leaned down and as the crowd bumped us we rediscovered the feel of each other. It felt like a wedding, the kiss on the steps outside the church with a frenzy of bells and cheering. HP broke off to catch his breath—his face was familiar but shy somehow.

  “Have you been having a good time here?” He had to yell above the din.

  “I love it here,” I said.

  “Yeah? I told you so. You sticking around?” I knew he was hedging; he really only had one question.

  “Till the end of the semester. Only two more weeks!”

  He brushed a dark strand of hair from my forehead. “So, will we…” he began, but behind us a new voice cut in.

  “Angela Petitjean, as I live and breathe!”

  Of course it was Freddy. I’d promised to meet him at the bridge and had forgotten the plan in all the excitement. He wore a tweed blazer and cream chinos, one pant leg tucked into a paisley sock so as not to get bike oil on it. Under his arm was an umbrella.

  “I thought I might find you here. That hymnus was glorious, although the tenors lacked conviction.” He glanced at HP. “Who’s this?”

  The words tumbled out quickly. “Freddy, this is HP. HP, Freddy.”

  A light dawned on Freddy’s face. He held out his right hand, the fingers and thumb closed and rigid. “The guy. What a pleasure. Now tell me, are you named after the
sauce or the computer company?”

  HP shook Freddy’s hand.

  “Or perhaps you’re Harry Potter?”

  “I don’t read kids’ books.”

  “Not even as a child, I’ll warrant.” Freddy’s head tilted.

  HP took a breath to say something but at that moment Ezra arrived back from dancing. “English girls, man, they know how to party. Holy cow. Oh, hey.” He held his right hand up for a high five. “How’s it going?”

  Freddy stared at Ezra’s palm.

  “Ez, this is Freddy.” I lowered Ezra’s arm for him. “He’s a biochemist.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, dude. But I guess somebody has to be.”

  HP chuckled.

  “I’m taking these guys to go get breakfast on Cowley Road,” I hurried. “You want to join us, Freddy?”

  “I’d be delighted.” Freddy’s eyes glittered toward HP. “After all, celebrity guests deserve the best Oxford experience. Angela and I can fill you in on what’s what.”

  Freddy bowed his head and linked his arm through mine, pushing us forward into the throng while the boys followed behind. When I strained back through a gap over Freddy’s shoulder, I could see HP trudging with his hands in his jean pockets while Ezra wove in and out of groups of long-haired girls drinking champagne straight from the bottle.

  Café Coco was teeming even though it was barely seven in the morning. We slid into the last available booth. The room was divided into two halves, split by an art deco bar where a sleepy-eyed waiter lolled a cocktail shaker close to his right ear. Behind the bar was a sculpture of a man sitting in a large porcelain bath. Our table was bare, save for a porcelain egg cup filled with rough clumps of brown and white sugar. While HP and Ezra stared at Freddy, I peered for ages at the specials on the blackboard, glancing back now and again at each of their uneasy faces.

  “Mimosa, Ange?” piped Freddy after a long pause. “I think it’d be rude not to.”

  “I’m in. Guys, do you want one?”

  “Is it a beer?” asked Ezra. “It better be.”