‘I don’t think … she wouldn’t want …’ Pobjoy’s excuses faltered and failed; he looked around for a change of subject, but didn’t find one.
‘It’s up to you,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Annie doesn’t bear grudges.’
At one time, Pobjoy had wanted to arrest Nathan.
The inspector retreated into silence and stayed there, until Bartlemy began to talk of something else.
Nathan and Hazel Bagot had been friends from infancy, closer than brother and sister; they used to tell each other everything, but now they were getting older they needed their own secrets. Nathan didn’t tell Hazel about the city and the princess (not yet, he said to himself, not till it becomes important), and Hazel didn’t tell Nathan about the boy she was keen on at school. When they got together at the weekends and during the holidays, they talked about music and television and lessons, and feuds or allegiances with their classmates, and how parents never understood what it was like to be a teenager, because it must have been different for them. Hazel’s bedroom had evolved into a kind of nest, lined with prints and posters, cushioned with discarded clothing, floored with crisp packets and CDs, where she and Nathan could curl up and listen to her latest musical discovery – usually something twangy and foreign-sounding and faintly bizarre – while she related how her father, who had left last year, wasn’t allowed to come home any more because he’d tried to hit her mother again, and how her mother had a new boyfriend who was rather old and a bit dull but nice.
‘They met through an ad in the paper,’ Hazel said. ‘Lots of people do that now. Has your mum tried it?’
‘I don’t think she’s too keen on dating,’ Nathan said. ‘There was you-know-who last year – I’m not sure if he ever asked her for a date, exactly, but – well, obviously it didn’t work out.’ He didn’t need to say any more. Hazel knew what he was alluding to.
‘She must’ve loved your dad a lot,’ she remarked. Nathan’s father had died in a car accident before he was born, or so he had always been told. ‘I mean, she’s not forty yet and really pretty, but she hasn’t had a proper boyfriend for years, has she?’
‘No.’
‘You wouldn’t mind though, would you?’ They’d been over this territory before, but Hazel thought it was worth checking.
‘Of course not – as long as he was kind, and loved her. What about your mum’s new man? Do you think it’s serious?’
‘’Spect so. He brings her flowers, and that’s always a sign, isn’t it? She says he’s dependable, which is what she wants, after dad. He’d never knock her about, or get drunk, or anything. He’s sort of boring, but that’s okay for her. She likes boring.’
‘Have you talked to him much?’ Nathan queried.
‘Not really. He asked me about my homework once, but when I showed it to him he couldn’t do it.’
‘If you haven’t talked to him,’ Nathan said, ‘you don’t really know if he’s boring or not.’
‘You’re being reasonable,’ Hazel said sharply. ‘You know I can’t stand it when you do that. He – he gives off boring, like a smell. B.O. Boring Odour. He walks round in a little cloud of boringness. Please, please don’t start being open-minded and tolerant about things. It’s revolting.’
‘When you shut your mind,’ Nathan retorted, ‘you shut yourself inside it. That’s silly. Besides, I just said, give him a chance. You think he’s nice, don’t you? So he might surprise you. He might be fun after all.’
‘Mum doesn’t need fun,’ Hazel said obstinately. ‘She’s my mum, for God’s sake. I like him, okay? He’ll do. I don’t have to be thrilled by him.’
‘Okay.’ Nathan grinned, a little mischievously. Sometimes, he enjoyed provoking her. She was always too quick and too careless in judging people, and slow to alter her opinions, and he liked being the only person who could ruffle her certainties.
When he had gone she took out the picture she never showed anyone, cut off from the end of a group shot taken at the school disco. It was a picture of a boy with a fair childish face, wavy hair worn rather long (hobbit hair, said his detractors), blue eyes crinkled against the flashlight. He smiled less than his classmates and Hazel believed he nursed a secret sorrow, though she could only speculate what it might be. (Of course, he could have been merely sullen.) He rarely spoke to her, hardly seemed to notice her, but somehow that only made him more fascinating. He didn’t have Boring Odour, she reflected – beneath their lack of communication she sensed the wells of his soul were fathoms deep. She stared at the photo for what felt like an age, racked with the pain of impossible longing, with anger at the hopelessness of it all, with shame because she would never be pretty enough to fascinate him in return. Her girlfriends all expected her to be in love with Nathan – Nathan with his dark alien beauty, his lithe athletic body, his indefinable uniqueness, charms she had known all her life and regarded with the indifference of familiarity – but she would only shrug at the suggestion, and smile, and hug the secret of her true affection to herself. She liked to be contrary, to keep Nathan as a friend – only a friend – and give her heart to someone nobody would suspect. Until the moment she dreamed of – the distant, elusive moment when they came together at last. The moment that would never happen …
Presently, she dived underneath the bed, groping behind the schoolbooks and sweaters and CD cases, and pulled out a carrier bag that chinked as it moved. The bag of things which had belonged to her great-grandmother, Effie Carlow, who was supposed to be a witch – the bag she had always meant to throw away, only somehow she hadn’t got around to it. Hazel hadn’t wanted to believe in witchcraft but she had seen too much of Effie not to know what she could do – at least, until she drowned. ‘You too have the power,’ the old woman had told her. ‘It’s in your blood.’ The Carlows were offshoots of the Thorn family on the wrong side of the blanket: there was said to be a strain of the Gift in their genes, dating back to Josevius Grimling-Thorn, a magister of the Dark Ages who had reputedly sold his soul to the Devil. When Effie spoke of such things Hazel was frightened – frightened and sceptical both at once. (Scepticism was her protection from the fear, though it didn’t work.) She had no intention of taking up her great-grandmother’s legacy, of dabbling in spells and charms and other stupidities. But now there was Jonas Tyler, who wouldn’t look at her, and the moment that would never happen, and maybe … maybe … among the sealed bottles with their handwritten labels was a love-philtre, or in Effie’s notebook there was an incantation, something to make her irresistible, just to him.
One by one she took the bottles out of the bag and peered at the faded writing, trying to make it out.
Back at the bookshop, Nathan sat down to supper with his mother. In the summer months she tended to favour salads, but the weather was still vacillating and he noted with satisfaction that it was cauliflower cheese. ‘You should have brought Hazel back,’ Annie said. ‘There’s plenty.’
‘I wasn’t sure,’ he explained. ‘Have you met her mum’s new boyfriend?’
‘Yes.’
‘She says he’s nice, but boring.’
‘He seems very nice, certainly,’ Annie said. ‘I don’t know about boring. I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to him.’
There
