by Kate Hardy
He drained his coffee and said, ‘I’d better let you get on with your evening.’
‘Of course,’ she said, all calm and professional; but Hugo had seen the hurt in her eyes before she’d masked it, and felt guilty.
He didn’t mean to make her feel bad. But he couldn’t explain, either, not without things getting a whole lot more awkward.
‘Thank you for dinner,’ he said. ‘I’ll, um, catch you later.’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Thanks for coming to the butterfly house.’
And all the way home Hugo kicked himself. Why hadn’t he just opened up to her, admitted that he liked her and wanted to see her but he was scared about things going wrong? Why hadn’t he been honest about Emma? Alice had made him feel amazing, that afternoon. And the moment when he’d kissed her and she’d kissed him back...
He was an idiot for not kissing her again. For not asking her out properly. For not taking the risk. Life was too short to spend all your time hiding.
He’d call her tomorrow, he decided. Apologise for being rude. Explain.
And he’d just have to hope that she’d listen.
* * *
Alice scrubbed the coffee pot clean. And then she scrubbed it again, because it gave her something to do.
What a fool she was. Why on earth had she thought it was a good idea to cook dinner for Hugo? Just because he’d kissed her in the butterfly house and made her feel amazing?
Then again, maybe it was better that he’d realised this early on that she didn’t fit into his world. He’d seen her for who she was: and she simply didn’t measure up. Further proof that Barney and his cronies had been right all along and it was what you looked like, what you sounded like, that was most important.
She’d just have to hope that she hadn’t jeopardised the butterfly house project with her stupidity.
CHAPTER SIX
ALICE SENT HUGO a text with a butterfly fact on Thursday morning, hoping that she could find some way back to the working relationship they’d established, but there was no reply.
Until her phone pinged almost at the end of the day.
Sorry. Tied up in meetings all day. Fact for you: glass isn’t a solid.
It wasn’t a liquid or a gas, either. And that statement was definitely an opening. She could ignore it; or she could give in to temptation and reply.
So what is it?
Amorphous solid—molecules can still move inside it, but too slowly for us to see.
He was still playing the nerdy facts game with her, then; but it didn’t feel quite as reassuring as she would’ve liked. Especially as he’d left her house so abruptly, the previous day.
OK, so he’d made it clear that he didn’t want to take their relationship further. But that didn’t necessarily mean he was giving up on the butterfly house project. She just needed to try and keep things light and easy between them.
* * *
Friday was Emma’s birthday and Hugo woke with a ball of misery in his stomach. He headed for his office early, but keeping busy didn’t help. If he was honest with himself, he wasn’t keeping busy, either; he was just staring out of the window at the river. Stuck. Miserable as hell.
Life moved on, so why couldn’t he?
Then his phone chimed to signal an incoming text. He knew before he looked at the screen who it would be from: Alice.
Your butterfly fun fact of the day: butterfly wings are transparent because they’re made of chitin, the same protein as an insect’s exoskeleton.
Funny, she was the one person he felt he could handle communicating with today. Probably because she didn’t know what had happened, so she wasn’t going to tread carefully round him and make things worse. And her text was a really welcome distraction.
She was telling him that butterflies were transparent, but the ones she’d shown him were all different colours. He called her on it.
So how come they look different colours?
Scales. As they get older, the scales fall off and leave transparent spots on their wings. Except for a Glasswing, which is transparent to start with.
He could just hear her saying that. And then she’d find a picture on the Internet to illustrate her point, and maybe she’d test him to see if he knew what the butterfly was and whether this was a male or female of the species. He really liked her nerdy streak; it intrigued him and delighted him in equal measure, and it made him feel as if the world was opening up around him again, as if he was stepping away from the oppression of his heartbreak. Just being with her made him want to smile.
Right at that moment he really, really wanted to see her. The only time he felt vaguely normal nowadays was when he was with her. How crazy was that? Before he could overanalyse things and talk himself out of it, he sent her a text.
Are you busy at lunchtime or do you want to come and see a staircase?
To his relief, she didn’t make him wait for a reply. Alice wasn’t a game-player. What you saw was what you got.
Staircase at lunchtime is doable. I need to be back for a seminar at three.
Meet at St Paul’s? When’s a good time?
Half-twelve?
OK. See you by the main entrance at half-twelve.
And how weird it was that, for the first time that day, Hugo felt as if he could actually breathe—that there wasn’t a huge weight on his chest, making every breath a shallow effort.
At half-past twelve, he was standing on the cathedral steps, looking out for Alice; it was easy to spot her in the crowd. He lifted a hand in acknowledgement, and his heart gave a little skip when she waved back.
‘Thanks for coming,’ he said when she reached him.
‘I’m looking forward to seeing this staircase,’ she said. ‘And I know it’s not glass, but I assume you’re going to tell me about that, too.’ She gestured up to Wren’s enormous dome.
What he really wanted to do was wrap his arms round her, feel her warmth melting the permafrost around his heart. But that would involve explanations he didn’t want to give right now, so he duly smiled and escorted her into the cathedral. ‘We’ve actually got a slightly different tour. Maybe we’ll come back another day and I’ll show you the dome. Today we’re focusing on a staircase.’
‘I owe you for my ticket,’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘My idea, my bill.’
‘Then I’m buying coffees and sandwiches after,’ she said firmly. ‘No arguments.’
They were just in time to join the tour, and when they got to the end of it—the bit he’d really been waiting for—Hugo watched Alice’s face, pleased to see how amazed she was by the Dean’s Stair.
‘It’s a spiral staircase, but it doesn’t have a column in the middle,’ she marvelled. ‘I don’t get how it just floats in the air like that, without falling over.’
‘It’s cantilevered,’ he said. ‘Each step is shaped so it can bear the weight of the next. And it’s not going to fall over—it’s been there for more than three hundred years.’
He held her hand all the way to the top, pleased that she seemed to enjoy the elegant stonework and wrought-iron railings as much as he did.
‘What a view,’ she said at the top, looking down at the elegant spiral with the eight-pointed star at its centre. ‘I need to take a picture of this for Ruth.’
‘The art historian,’ he remembered.
She nodded, and snapped the picture on her phone.
And then he heard the cathedral organist start to play. Something he knew well. Bach. A piece Emma had loved and had used to play on the piano he’d given back to her parents, knowing they’d find it comforting. The piece the organist had played at her funeral. And suddenly the weight was right back in the centre of his chest, along with sapping misery.
* * *
Something was wrong. Alice didn’t know what, but Hugo looked terrible. There were line
s of pain etched round his mouth and smudges beneath his eyes. Once the guide had led them back out into the main part of the cathedral, she said gently, ‘I think we need coffee and a sandwich. And somewhere nice to eat it.’
‘Sure.’
His voice was flat, worrying her further. She quickly bought coffee, muffins and sandwiches at a shop nearby, then shepherded him to a quiet garden not far from St Paul’s.
‘I had no idea this place even existed,’ he said as they sat down. ‘Where are we?’
‘Christchurch Greyfriars garden,’ she said. ‘The church was pretty much lost to the Blitz, apart from the tower, but the authorities have kept the land as a garden. The pergolas are full of bird boxes for sparrows and finches. I love this place because it’s full of the most gorgeous blue, purple and white flowers.’
‘And butterflies.’
Even now, one was skimming past them. She inclined her head. ‘Indeed, because a lot of the plants here are nectar-rich.’
‘I’m guessing you know a lot of hidden gardens in London?’
She smiled. ‘It kind of goes with my job. I need to know where I can take my students on a field trip semi-locally at different times of the year. Here. Have your lunch.’ She handed him a cup of coffee and a sandwich.
‘Thank you.’
They ate in silence; it wasn’t completely awkward, but Alice could see that he was wrestling with something in his head. She had a feeling that talking about whatever was wrong didn’t come easily to him. So, when they’d both finished their sandwich and he was staring into his coffee, she reached out to take his free hand. ‘I’m probably speaking out of turn here,’ she said softly, ‘but you look like you did the very first day I met you—lost.’
‘It’s how I feel,’ he admitted. He looked at her and his eyes were full of misery. ‘It’s selfish of me, but I wanted to see you today because you don’t tread on eggshells round me. You stomp about and you tease me and you teach me things and you...’ He shook his head. ‘You make me see things in a different way.’
Which was an incredible compliment, but it wasn’t what had snagged her attention. ‘Why do people tread on eggshells round you?’
He took a deep breath. ‘Emma—my wife. It’s her birthday today.’
He was married?
But, before she had a chance to absorb that, he continued, ‘She died nearly three years ago.’
Widowed, then. And she was pretty sure he wasn’t that much older than she was. Her heart broke for him. ‘That’s rough, losing her so young.’
He nodded. ‘She had asthma. After she died, I found out there’s something called Peak Week—it’s a week in September when allergies and asthma just spike because there’s a big rise in pollen and mould, plus the kids have just gone back to school so there are loads of germs and what have you that compromise people’s breathing. Emma was a middle school teacher. I was in America giving a paper at a conference when she had a severe asthma attack.’
Obviously in that week in September, Alice realised.
‘She called the ambulance and they came straight away, but she collapsed before she even had a chance to unlock the front door. She had a cardiac arrest and she never regained consciousness.’ His expression grew bleaker. ‘I never got a chance to say goodbye to her.’
No wonder he’d looked so lost, that day at the solicitor’s. The meeting had been about his great-aunt’s estate, and it must have brought back all the memories of his wife’s death. She put her arms round him and just held him. ‘That,’ she said softly, ‘is so sad. I’ve never lost anyone near my own age—the only person I’ve lost is Grandad, and although he went a bit before his time it still felt in the natural order of things. Your wife was so young. It must’ve felt like the end of the world.’
‘It did. And then in the cathedral just now...the organ music. It was something she played on the piano at home. A piece—’ his breath caught ‘—played at her funeral.’
Music that had brought back everything he’d lost. ‘I didn’t know Emma,’ she said, ‘but she mattered to you, so she must’ve been special.’
‘Very.’
‘Do you have a photo of her?’
For a moment, Alice thought she’d gone too far; but eventually Hugo nodded and took out his phone. He skimmed through the photos, then handed the phone to her.
It was clearly their wedding photograph, with Hugo in a tailcoat and Emma in a frothy dress with her veil thrown back; they were both laughing, radiant with happiness, while confetti fluttered down around them. Emma was utterly beautiful.
‘She looks lovely, really warm and kind,’ Alice said.
* * *
‘She was,’ Hugo said. And, although Alice was a very different woman, she had that same warmth and kindness about her. The thing that had been missing from the centre of his life. The thing he’d tried so hard to live without. But he’d just been existing, not living. Putting one foot in front of the other, taking it step by step. It was all he could do, without Emma. On his own, nothing made sense.
‘Remember the love, not the loss,’ Alice said gently. ‘I know it’s hard when you’re missing someone and want them beside you, when you want to share things with them and you can’t—but you can still share things in spirit. When I see the first butterfly of spring, I think of Grandad and I kind of send him a mental phone call. I sit down wherever I am and I talk to him about it, remember times we’d seen that same species together, and it makes things not hurt quite so much. Maybe you need to give Emma a mental phone call. Talk to her. Tell her about your staircases and your glass.’
Hugo’s throat felt as if it were full of sand. He couldn’t speak, so he just nodded.
‘And you can still celebrate her birthday with cake, because that’s how birthdays should be celebrated.’ She produced two muffins from a bag. ‘It’s white chocolate and raspberry. I hope that’s OK. I’m sorry I don’t have a candle to put in it and light, but we can pretend we have candles and wish Emma happy birthday.’
Hugo’s eyes stung. He and Alice had kissed. They’d started to get close, taken the first tentative steps towards a relationship. Yet she still had a big enough heart to make room for his late wife and celebrate Emma’s birthday instead of putting herself first.
‘I’ll spare you the singing,’ she said. ‘But happy birthday, Emma.’ She raised her muffin in a toast.
‘Happy birthday, Emma,’ he said, his voice thick with unshed tears.
And how odd that eating cake and wishing his late wife happy birthday made him feel so much better, taking the weight of the misery off his heart. He really hadn’t expected this to work.
‘Emma used to make amazing cakes,’ he said. It was why he rarely ate cake nowadays; the memories were too much for him.
‘Then,’ she said, ‘if the butterfly house project goes ahead, maybe we can call the cafe after her. Emma’s Kitchen. And then she’ll be part of it, too, along with Viola and Rosemary.’
How on earth had he ever thought Alice was an ambitious gold-digger who didn’t care who she trampled on her path to the top? She was nothing of the sort. She was inclusive. Kind. Thoughtful. This was so much more than he deserved, given the way he’d misunderstood her.
And she still wasn’t taking for granted that the butterfly house would go ahead. She wasn’t seeing his feelings as a weakness and using them to pressure him into getting her own way. She was being kind.
It made him feel too emotional to speak again. He just took her hand and raised it to his mouth, pressing a kiss into her palm and folding her fingers over it. He hoped she understood what he was trying to say. How much he appreciated her being there. How he wanted things to be different.
She rested her palm against his cheek. ‘I have half a dozen students expecting me this afternoon, but I can call them now and reschedule our seminar.’
He shook his head. ‘That’s
not fair.’
‘It’s not fair of me to leave you right now,’ she said.
‘I have meetings, in any case.’ Meetings that he’d force himself to get through, and he’d do his job well, the way he always did. He had his professional pride. He took a deep breath. ‘You’ve made me feel so much better today. Thank you.’
Her grey eyes were unsure. ‘Do you want me to walk you back to your office?’
‘No. But I’ll walk you back to the Tube.’
‘All right.’
She didn’t push him to speak on the way back to the station; she just let him be. No wrapping him in platitudes and pity, and he was grateful for that. How often did you find someone who’d just let you be you, with no pressure?
‘I’ll call you later,’ he said.
‘OK.’ She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. Just once. ‘Give that mental phone call a try. It always makes me feel better.’
And then the train pulled up at the station and she’d gone.
* * *
Hugo was thoughtful all afternoon, between meetings.
A mental phone call.
Better than that, he’d visit. Just as he always did on Emma’s birthday, his own birthday, their wedding anniversary and the anniversary of her death.
He took stocks, her favourite flowers, to the churchyard, and rinsed out the vase on her grave, filling it with fresh water before adding the new flowers.
‘Happy birthday, my love,’ he said, sitting down next to the grave. ‘I can’t believe it’s nearly three years, now. I miss you so much, still.’ He swallowed hard. ‘And I know you’d be furious with me for moping. I know I need to move on—to live life to its fullest, the way you used to do. But it’s just so hard without you, Em.’
He wrapped his arms round his knees. ‘I miss you. And this is incredibly crass of me to say this on your birthday—it’s wrong on so many, many levels—but I’ve been so lost and lonely without you. And I’ve met someone. She would’ve liked you, and I think you would’ve liked her.’