Although there was no discussion of maths per se, there was a lot of gossip about various lecturers, professors and fellow students. Better still, the afternoon produced a general invitation to a film the following evening as they all started the long process of pulling back on their layers of jumpers, coats, scarves, hats and gloves.
‘Hey, Nick,’ Frank said, as they stepped out on to the street, ‘you will be a mate and let me borrow your assignment notes tomorrow night, won’t you? I’m really in the sh— the weeds, I mean.’
‘You can swear, Frank. I’m not two.’
‘Oh, right. Well, you don’t mind, do you? I mean, it’s not like I’m going to copy stroke for stroke or anything. I just don’t know where to start and I could really use the chance to go through someone else’s workings: just to see how to do it, yeah?’
Nick shrugged.
Frank beamed, clapping him on the shoulder. ‘Knew we’d end up pals. See you tomorrow then!’
‘Are you sure you want to do that?’ someone whispered by Nick’s ear, making him jump.
‘I think he means well,’ he said as he turned to find Susie standing behind him.
‘Do you?’ she asked, raising an elegant eyebrow. ‘I’d have given you more credit. Nick, I’m not trying to be mean but … you do know Frank’s the sort to latch on for what he can get, right?’
‘So?’ Nick said diffidently. ‘Today’s the first time anyone outside the boat club invited me anywhere. If it costs me the loan of some homework, I don’t mind. It’s not like Dr Davis is going to think I’ve been copying from Frank. Besides, if Frank doesn’t figure it out for himself sooner or later it’ll come out in the exams. But then it’ll be no fault of mine and I’ll have had something of a social life in the meantime.’
Susie laughed, her expression lightening. ‘I didn’t have you pegged as the super-villain type. Good for you, Nick. Keep it up.’
Nick glared across the table as his father starting replying to the eleventh email since they’d sat down to lunch. Bill promptly developed a convenient fixation with the last of his beans. The silence grew loud with anger.
‘So,’ said Bill, ‘so I was wondering … There’s this village fete near me next Sunday. I thought you might fancy popping down for the day. There’re usually a few local authors who do readings, so you’d like that, Nick.’
Nick raised one shoulder in a shrug.
‘Sounds great,’ Michael said, not looking up.
Nick’s hands clenched into fists around his cutlery.
‘Come on, Mike. Just give us ten minutes without the phone,’ Bill said. ‘You know,’ he added, turning to Nick with a too broad, too bright smile, ‘I think your dad’s actually slightly better about focusing on the world around him than he used to be.’ He held up a hand as if Nick had protested instead of just stabbing a pea around his plate. ‘You wouldn’t credit the number of times he put his pen in his coffee instead of his pencil holder. And then there was the famous coffee-and-cornflakes incident … Didn’t even bat an eyelid. Just munched away, muttering over his notes.’
‘It was during Finals!’ said Michael, setting the phone aside.
Bill rolled his eyes so hard he moved his whole head. Nick would have appreciated the effort if he hadn’t been so humiliated that it was necessary.
‘And you remember that time you tried to make roast chestnuts only you didn’t know to pierce them first and they exploded in the oven?’ Bill said, face flushing with laughter. ‘And you were nothing to Yvette …’
Nick saw the moment Bill realised his mistake. ‘I’m going to visit Mum next week. On her birthday. Whether you come or not,’ Nick said into the sudden quiet. ‘If you won’t take me, I’ll get a taxi—’
‘Bill’s just invited us down to this shindig of his. Why didn’t you say—’
‘I’ve been asking you for a month.’
Michael sighed, arranged his cutlery on his plate, then beside it again. ‘Nick, I’m not sure that visiting the graveyard— It’s not like she’s, well, there.’
‘I’m not a toddler, Dad. I just want … I want to pay my respects. Last year you kept saying maybe on her birthday, or maybe on Mother’s Day, but it never happened. I want to go. I want to know I’ve gone.’
Michael sighed. ‘Well, maybe we will go on Mother’s Day this time, like you suggested. Or we could visit Gosswin in Addenbrooke’s again. Wouldn’t that be better?’
‘I can visit Gosswin by myself, like I have the other four times I’ve gone, seeing as how she’s only two miles away. You don’t have to come to see Mum, but it’s the second anniversary and I haven’t been since the funeral so I’m going.’
‘But Bill—’
‘It’s just a stupid local fair, Mike,’ Bill interrupted. ‘No big deal and there’s always next year.’
‘Why didn’t you just say something earlier, Nick?’
Nick slammed up from his chair and stormed out of the room.
As he started upstairs, he heard his father huff, ‘Lord save me from teenage strops … No, don’t start clearing up, Bill. Just leave it for now.’
Nick caught the sound of their chairs scratching away from the kitchen table, then footsteps moving closer, from the kitchen into the living room. He hovered at the top of the stairs, torn between going down to apologise and carrying on to his room.
‘Why are you glaring at me, Morrison?’ Michael demanded from below, sounding aggrieved.
‘Just because we’ve swapped to more comfortable chairs doesn’t mean you’re off the hook.’
‘Nick’s the one throwing the hissy fit!’
‘I expect he was hoping you’d remember what next weekend was,’ came Bill’s voice, ‘and that he’d already talked to you about it.’
‘You and Nick both know I’ve got a lot on my plate—’
‘So much you couldn’t remember that next weekend’s Yvette’s birthday?’
Nick found himself sinking down on to the top step, arms wound around the banister.
‘She hadn’t been my wife years before she died,’ his father was protesting below. ‘Why do I have to remember her birthday?’
‘Because she’s your son’s mother, Mike! Yvette will always be that, no matter how much you try to ignore the fact that she ever existed. You don’t even have a photo of her, at least none that isn’t tucked away in some dusty old corner.’
Nick lost Bill’s next words as his thoughts turned to the photo frame hidden in his bookcase. He nearly pushed himself up to fetch it out, put it proudly on display, but his fingers froze on the banister post. No one went into his room apart from the cleaner. No one knew where the picture was: no one apart from him, and what would he do if he took it out? Turn it the wrong way round? Endlessly shift it so that the reflection off the glass always obscured her face? Try to avoid ever looking at that part of his room, as if it didn’t exist? Might as well treat the picture as if it were a Medusa, ready to turn him to stone if he met her eyes.
Better the shame of leaving the photograph hidden. Some days he didn’t even remember it was there.
From below, Bill’s voice again, soft but insistent. ‘Do you ever talk about her with him?’
‘For God’s sake, Bill, where would I even start?’
A motorbike growled past outside: Nick felt the throb of the engine match the angry beat of his heart.
In the living room he heard Bill sigh. ‘Sometimes you can do more harm saying nothing than saying the wrong thing.’
‘Have you met my son, Bill? Honestly, what does a person say about this? “I’m sorry your mother went loony tunes and refused to see or speak to you in the two years before she died. I think it stinks too.”’
For a moment there was nothing, perhaps because they were silent or speaking too quietly to be heard.
‘If you and Nick won’t feel I’m intruding, I’ll go with you on Saturday,’ Bill said eventually. ‘But if I do this, Mike, you have to promise that on the Sunday you’ll do something with Nick, just th
e two of you. Drive to the Norfolk coast. Have some fish and chips. Walk on the beach. Just take yourself away from your desk and turn off your phone. And try not to go endlessly on about Nick’s studies. He probably thinks you’d forget about him completely if he didn’t have some brilliant new marks to tell you about.’
‘Oh, give over, Bill. You know as well as I do that Nick’s always been driven to excel with his studies. And, yes, of course I’ve encouraged him, but it came from him. It was his idea to come to Cambridge, not mine. He wanted to do this. And maybe I do talk a lot about his work, but it’s the only thing that’s simple. He’s always doing well. It’s something happy we can share—’
‘And that would be fine, if there was other stuff you talked about too.’
For a moment, the house went still, as if the building were holding its breath. When his father spoke, it was softly but with a strange intense note in his voice Nick didn’t recognise. ‘I do try, you know, with Nick. I have these times when I get home at a reasonable hour for a week and then … I don’t know what happens. It just seems so hard suddenly. And then I think, “Well, I’ll just have a day off,” and suddenly it’s like I can’t face it any more and then I think, “If I’ve already failed, why—” I’m so close to finally making named partner, maybe after …’
Nick crept down one stair then another, but for a while there was silence below.
‘I understand that, Mike, but I worry that in a few years, when you suddenly decide you’re ready to have a bigger part in his life, you’ll find you’ve used up all your second chances. He’s not going to be a kid forever. Soon he’s going to be an adult and then he’s going to turn around and say, “You didn’t want me when I needed you, so why should I want you now that you need me?” And I don’t think you’re going to like it, Mike. I don’t think you’re going to like it at all.’
Nick could only just hear his father’s reply over the bass beat of his blood in his ears.
‘Thanks for that, Bill. What a happy thought to end the day on.’
‘I’m not trying to make you happy, Mike. I’ve spent the last five years telling myself it wasn’t my business and “what do I know since I’m not a father?” But one day I’m going to be there when you realise what a little bit more time with Nick now would have meant to your relationship and, when you ask me how it happened, I want to be telling the truth when I say I tried to make you listen.’
Nick strained into the silence.
‘What if I don’t know how?’
‘Then you’d better learn, Mike. Somehow you’d better learn.’
Silence again, or if they were speaking it was too softly for Nick to hear.
‘Let’s have a drink, Mike. Let’s just have a long drink. I promise the only topics of conversation will be cricket matches on Fenner’s. Getting our University Blues. Old triumphs from when we were young.’
Nick pushed himself to his feet and crept away upstairs as laughter broke out in the living room. He went to the bathroom to brush his teeth, but there was something wrong with the face looking out at him from the mirror: too many shadows, too many angles. His hand fumbled for the light switch. He ended up putting hair gel on his toothbrush the first time round, but it was better in the dark. He didn’t have to face himself there.
This is pathetic, he told himself, as he skimmed another review of the film he was seeing later. He wasted a further half-hour watching a series of interviews with the actors.
‘It’s meant to be a trip to the cinema, not a research project,’ Tim said, sniggering, when he realised what Nick was doing.
Nick stuck his tongue out and stomped upstairs to get ready. He spent the walk to the Grafton Centre trying out different ways of sounding clever rather than like he’d studied up. But when the others arrived it turned out they’d already dissected the reviews and specials on the way over from College.
Nick’s Plan B – to buy the biggest bucket of popcorn available – was more successful: soon the group were clustered round him as they queued.
‘ID,’ said the doorman when Nick presented his ticket.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ muttered Frank. ‘Look, mate, how often do you take a passport to the cinema? Surely a student ID for the Cambridge University Library—’
‘If your little brother is eighteen, I will eat that extraordinarily ugly hat you’re wearing.’
Frank growled. ‘Look, you—’
‘I don’t have any other ID,’ Nick cut in. ‘But I have got a ticket and my student—’
‘You can show me a thousand student cards and I won’t believe you’re eighteen. Now, there’s nothing stopping a person buying a ticket from the machine, but it’s an 18 certificate so …’
Nick sighed. ‘See you on Monday, OK, Frank? In lectures,’ he added loudly.
The doorman rolled his eyes.
Frank shuffled his feet. ‘Sorry, Nick. Before you go, you couldn’t give me those …’
Shoving the popcorn into Susie’s arms, Nick wrestled his notebook out of his bag, trying not to meet anyone’s eyes. He pushed the book into Frank’s hands then turned away. A chorus of desultory goodbyes echoed after him.
If he’d been a character in a film, he would have screamed at the night skies. At the least he would have turned his face to the clouds and let the rain pour down on him. Instead, he pulled up his hood, dug his hands into his pockets and set off for home.
It was nice to let himself into the house to the sound of music in the sitting room, lively big-band stuff with a happy honking of brass. The stereo was playing at a satisfying volume, though the living room and kitchen were empty, and Nick found himself smiling unexpectedly as he started pawing through the kitchen cupboards, looking for junk food, while his feet moved to the music of their own accord.
‘Maybe you should join the ballroom dancing squad.’
Nick whirled at the voice.
‘That looked like actual dance steps,’ Tim said, an expression of perplexed amusement on his face.
Nick ducked his head. ‘My grandmother taught me,’ he said.
When Tim came and slouched against the counter next to him so he could help himself to the bag of nachos, Nick sighed.
‘I used to go to stay with her in the holidays,’ he found himself saying without quite meaning to. ‘Even before my parents split up, my mum … Anyway, I always used to go and stay with my grandmother and she loved this sort of music. She had this huge garden, or it seemed huge to me. Herb beds, lots of old brick walls with climbing roses and honeysuckle. We used to grow seedlings together. Lupin and marigold and hollyhock. We’d plant them in the Easter holidays: by the summer they’d be potted up and ready to go out in the garden when Mum dropped me off. It’s funny, I only ever remember it being sunny or storming. Storms were when we’d listen to music and she’d show me how to dance. And then she’d read to me. We used to read together for hours. And she still found time to cook. This one time she put me on a footstool to mix in the eggs for a cake and I puffed flour in a huge mushroom cloud over the whole table. She just laughed and hugged me so we were both covered in cake mix.’ He shook his head, pasted on a more normal, less wistful smile. ‘It’d be nice to be able to bake stuff now. Wish I’d paid more attention.’
‘You and me both,’ said Tim. ‘My sister was always the one in the kitchen with Mum when it was time to cook. Not sure if that’s ’cos she was the girl or ’cos I liked going to the shed with Dad and she didn’t. Thing about spiders.’ He grinned. ‘I thought you were going to the cinema tonight?’
‘Got carded.’
‘You don’t have much luck with your attempts to socialise, do you?’
‘You mean fate’s telling me to be a hermit and to spend even more time with my head buried in a book? Maybe this is one of the things I need to be wise enough to accept I can’t change.’
‘That’s clearly what it is,’ Tim said, rolling his eyes. ‘Anyway, while we’re on the subject of somewhat-less-than-happy stuff, is there anyt
hing I can get for the weekend? You know, something to cheer you up after … after you visit the graveyard. I mean, it’s been a pretty sucky term. Might as well be sucky with ice cream.’
Nick shrugged. ‘Dad and I are going to Norfolk on Sunday.’
Tim blinked in surprise. ‘That sounds like a good idea.’
‘Yeah,’ Nick said. ‘It was Bill’s.’
Chapter 20
(Lent Term × Week 6 [≈ end of February])
‘That looks fresh,’ said Michael, stooping to peer at a poppy wreath at the base of the war memorial. ‘I wonder who left it. Is that a card?’
Nick stared down at his father’s head as he bent to read the message, then turned away along the path that cut to the left through the garden of graves.
Bill loitered for a moment, then followed. ‘Is it your grandmother’s plot too?’ he asked, matching his pace to Nick’s.
‘Grandfather’s. My grandmother wanted to be cremated. Mum was meant to put her ashes on the roses at her house but she … she wasn’t well, so I did it.’
‘Have you ever gone back to visit?’ Bill prompted, when Nick didn’t go on.
‘Mum said she couldn’t keep the house with bits of her mother floating about everywhere, so …’ Nick snapped his mouth shut with an audible click. ‘I don’t know who she sold it to. It would be awful if they’d torn up her garden, chopped down the roses.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I’d rather imagine it’s all still there and one day I’ll buy the house back and …’
He opened his eyes, looking on down the path, and there was Roger, standing by one of the graves, a bouquet of lilies – red and gold, her favourites – in his arms. For a moment it was like looking through a camera viewfinder as the focus sharpened painfully then dulled to vagueness and finally resolved to normal. There was a sharp ringing in his ears, like the echoing slow-frame aftermath of a bomb blast in a film.
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