we could see a comet,’ George said hopefully. ‘David –’ his elder brother ‘– showed me one once, through binoculars, but I couldn’t really see anything. I thought it would be very bright, with a tail, like a firework, but there was just a bit of a blur.’
‘Where’s Orion?’ asked Hazel, naming the only other constellation she had heard of.
‘I’ll show you.’ Standing on a box with her, leaning against the edge of the skylight, Nathan pointed upwards. ‘There. That string of stars is his belt.’
‘What about the rest of him?’
‘I’m not sure …’ His pointing finger wavered; in the dark they couldn’t see him frown. ‘That’s funny.’
‘What’s funny?’ said George. There wasn’t room for him on the box, and he was trying to gaze up past the other two, and failing.
‘There’s another star, just below Orion. It wasn’t there before: I’m sure it wasn’t. I was up here last night.’
‘Show me,’ said Hazel. Nathan pointed again. ‘Perhaps you remembered wrong. Or there was some cloud or something.’
‘It wasn’t cloudy.’
‘Perhaps it’s a comet!’ George said excitedly.
‘If there was a comet it would’ve been on the news,’ Nathan said. ‘Besides, it looks like a star.’
‘It’s not very twinkly,’ Hazel explained.
Nathan climbed down, switched on the lantern, and consulted his star map. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he said. ‘There shouldn’t be a star there at all.’
‘It must be a UFO,’ George declared. ‘They can look like stars. Let me see.’ Now the others had come down, he scrambled onto the box. ‘It’ll whoosh across the sky in a minute and disappear.’
But it didn’t.
‘It could be a whole new star,’ Hazel suggested. ‘I’ve heard how they can have huge explosions out in space, and that makes new stars.’
‘A supernova,’ Nathan said knowledgeably. ‘If it is, it’ll be on Patrick Moore.’
But there was nothing about a new star on any programme, and when Nathan looked the following evening it had gone. He didn’t say much to the other two, but on his own he wondered, and would steal up the stepladder late at night to look, just in case. But it was not until the next spring, when he had almost forgotten about it, that he saw the star again.
That winter a new couple moved down from London, causing a minor flutter of interest among less glamorous residents. They were in their thirties: he was a lecturer in history at East Sussex University and a writer of up-market period novels, popular enough to be stocked in most bookshops instead of having to be specially ordered, and she was an actress of the intellectual type who had appeared regularly on stage and television. His name was Michael Addison, hers Rianna Sardou (Rianna reputedly shortened from Marianne), but they were assumed to be married, though she seemed to be away a great deal, on tour with a play or on location shoots for a TV drama or bit-part film role. However, Michael was around most of the time, and the villagers pronounced him pleasant and friendly, and began to call him Mike. He would have a pint in the pub of an evening, and chat to Lily Bagot in the deli, and to Annie in the bookshop. He was rather good-looking, in a tousled, don’t-give-a-damn sort of way, with a one-sided smile which might have been irresistible if he had been inclined so to employ it. He wore country clothes – Barbour jackets, wellies, trainers – and glasses for reading and driving. His wife on the other hand, when actually seen, was something of a disappointment. The rumpled, unmade-up look which suited Michael so well was not what the village expected of an actress, particularly not one with a name like Rianna, and local opinion found her aloof and unapproachable. She had the appropriate cheekbones, but they displayed more angularity than beauty, and her hair, though long and dark, was usually scraped back into a tight coil, with loose ends spraying over the crown of her head. Gossip said she neglected Michael, and local attitudes became tinged with an unexpressed sympathy when he was around.
They had bought an oast house on the edge of the village, with two round towers under pixy-hat roofs, and a long building in between, wood-panelled, antique-furnished, expensively renovated. The River Glyde flowed past it on its meandering way through the water-meadows, and their garden ran down to the bank, with mooring for a couple of boats, though they only appeared to have a dinghy, left behind by a previous owner. The house had been empty for a while before they moved in, and Nathan, George and Hazel had once ‘borrowed’ the dinghy, almost coming to grief in the grip of a current too strong for their oarsmanship. They had had to ram the boat into the bank in order to avoid being swept away – or sinking, since the planking proved far from watertight. Nathan, seeing Michael in the shop one day, felt obliged to mention these hazards, though he would have preferred it if his mother hadn’t been within earshot. ‘You – took – that – boat – out – without – permission?’ Annie had paled from a mixture of anger and terror.
‘It wasn’t stealing!’ Nathan protested. ‘We put it back afterwards – and anyway, it didn’t seem to belong to anybody then.’
‘Boats are dangerous,’ Annie said, dismissing the issue of theft unconsidered. ‘You could’ve drowned. What were you thinking of?’
‘We can all swim. We wouldn’t drown, honestly.’
‘There are weeds under the water which can drag you down …’
‘Never mind,’ Michael intervened. ‘Thanks for warning me, Nathan. That was very thoughtful of you. Actually, I was thinking of getting a boat of my own, just a small one, an inflatable maybe, with an outboard motor. You could come for a ride with me, if your mother doesn’t object.’
‘Of course I don’t, if he’s supervised,’ Annie said hastily. ‘It’s very kind of you, but – I mean, you don’t have to –’
‘I’d like to,’ Michael assured her, turning up the twist of his smile.
‘Could I bring my friends?’ Nathan asked.
‘Nathan –!’
‘It’s okay,’ Michael said. ‘Friends are fine – if the boat’s big enough, and there aren’t too many of them.’
‘Just Hazel and George. When will you get the boat?’
‘Oh – in the spring, I expect. Too chilly on the river now. Don’t worry, Nat: I won’t forget about taking you out, I promise. I’m not a forgetting kind of person.’
‘I wasn’t worried,’ Nathan said. ‘No one calls me Nat, it sounds a bit American.’
‘I won’t if you dislike it.’
Nathan thought about it. ‘I don’t mind,’ he decided, ‘if it’s just you. And if Mum doesn’t mind?’
‘It’s your name,’ Annie smiled.
He told the others about this, in the Den the following weekend. George was both excited and rather scared at the prospect of going out in a boat again, but Hazel looked thoughtful. ‘What’s the matter?’ Nathan asked her.
‘D’you
