style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Remember your mum used to call you the Milky Bar Kid, and you’d get so cross?’ She smiled, but a look of pain shot across Adam’s face at the mention of Philippa’s name, and she regretted it. Was he still not able, after all this time, to talk about his mother?
‘I’d forgotten,’ he said, though she knew he was lying, he remembered everything. ‘You just haven’t seen me for a while, that’s all. You are a heartless girl.’
Tess shook her head firmly, glad to move the conversation on. ‘You never come to London, that’s the problem.’
‘Hey.’ He grimaced. ‘You never came home, that’s the problem.’
‘Rubbish,’ Tess said. She avoided looking at him, trying not to sound defensive, keeping her voice light. ‘Anyway, Mum and Dad don’t live here any more, so why should I?’
‘Typical,’ said Adam. ‘A brother. I’ve been like a brother to you all these years, and you just don’t care.’
‘A brother?’ Tess laughed, rolling her eyes, she couldn’t help it. ‘Right.’
Adam seemed not to hear her. He looked at his watch. ‘So—how’s Stephanie?’
‘She’s great. She and Mike just moved to Cheltenham—but you knew that.’
‘Sure,’ said Adam, stopping to let a tiny old lady clutching a green string bag pass on the crowded street. ‘She sent me a Christmas card. Morning, Miss Store! How are you?’
‘Good morning, Adam dear,’ came a bright voice back. ‘I’m very well, thank you. I have some lovely rhubarb, if you’d like some. Didn’t you say you were coming round later?’
‘Yes, please, that would be great.’ Adam smiled, and they walked on. Tess chuckled.
‘What’s so funny?’ Adam said. ‘She’s a very nice lady.’
‘OK, OK!’ Tess said. ‘Where are we going later?’
‘I’ll explain in a bit,’ Adam said. ‘I hope you’re pleased.’
Tess pulled her ponytail out and rubbed her scalp, letting her hair fall about her shoulders. She looked around her again, frowning. ‘Well, I’m back.’
She had to remind herself how, back in Balham before Christmas, dumped, unemployed and miserable, the job at Langford College had seemed, quite literally, like a miracle. Not only was it a job, which in these times was a rarity itself, especially since she was a Classics teacher and not someone providing a necessarily indispensable teaching service, but it was also a way out, a new start, a way to leave behind the misery she’d felt and start over again. But now she was here…It was eighteen months since she’d been back; even longer, she realized now, since she’d really taken stock of Langford, of what were to be her new surroundings. Like someone walking through their new house and wondering if they’ve made a terrible mistake, she now saw the town again, as if through fresh—and rather dismayed—eyes.
Take, for example, the high street. It was like walking through Toy Town. The shops looked smaller; the church of St Mary’s at the end was tiny. Even the side gate, the entrance to one of the medieval lanes that skirted around the edge of town, seemed minute to her, as if a child could climb over it. Compared to London, to her old street in Balham, which was three times as long as the high street, it was hilarious. She’d forgotten, when she first went to London, how huge everything seemed, even though she knew it already. How it took her a term of wandering around Bloomsbury to get used to it, the size of the squares, the vast classical columns of the university buildings, the height of the houses, even the size of the theatres. She was taken to the ballet by a boyfriend from university, and Covent Garden seemed as huge a football pitch.
And the shops! Everything here was either an antique shop or a gift shop or a tea shop, or else a crappy homestores place that only seemed to sell frozen Findus pancakes and ready-made Yorkshire puddings. She peered into the window of a shop called Jen’s Deli, noting with some relief that there was at least one shop that sold parmesan and prosciutto. She may have lived in Balham, but even Balham had a shop that sold Poilane bread.
‘Penny for them,’ said Adam’s voice, behind her.
‘What?’ said Tess, momentarily disconcerted. She glanced up, and saw his reflection in the window, watching her. She brushed her hair out of her face. I was just thinking how glad I am that at least there’s a half-decent shop here that sells fresh parmesan. She was ghastly. ‘Oh, well. Nothing!’ she said brightly. ‘So—tell me. How’s it going? How is—everything?’
For a while now, Tess hadn’t known the best way to ask what Adam was up to, but she knew it drove him mad, the pussyfooting. After Philippa died, people pussyfooted all the time, half-asking him what he’d do. ‘You’re—not going to Cambridge? Ah! What will you do here instead? A job at the pub? Sounds like a good one, Adam, keep you behind the bar instead of in front of it, eh! Ha! Ha!’
‘Ah, so you’re working in the museum now too? Well, no one better than Jane Austen! If that’s what you’re going to…So, how long do you think you’ll be—oh, you don’t know, well, of course, that’s absolutely right, isn’t it! Quite right.’
To Tess’s father Frank, who had asked Adam straight out a couple of months after his mother died, why he wasn’t going to Cambridge, why he wasn’t even going to defer for a year and then go, Adam simply replied, ‘Things have changed, I’m afraid. I’m not going.’
‘I think Philippa would have wanted you to go,’ Tess’s father had said. Tess had watched, terrified, her fingers in her mouth.
Adam had said, evenly, ‘I know she’d have understood why I’m not going. There are reasons why. She would understand, trust me. Thanks, though.’
‘What for?’ Dr Tennant had said, bewildered.
‘For asking directly in the first place,’ and Adam had said it so politely that Tess had looked at him, almost in despair, and then at her mother whose hand flew to her chest, as if clutching her heart in some sort of pain. He was heart-breaking, this young man, completely alone in the world, prepared to throw away his best chance at life. But what could they do? They couldn’t bind him and bundle him in the back of a van, then drive east and dump him outside the gates of his college. And there was no one else they could talk to, either. All Adam—or Frank or Emily—knew about Adam’s father, the Irish professor, was that he’d moved to America many years ago, and there were no details for him; Adam wasn’t even sure of his surname.
He was only just eighteen, and he was alone in the world. There wasn’t really anything the Tennants could do now, except watch out for him, help him as much as they could. Watch, as everyone’s favourite boy passed his twenties living in the small cottage where he had grown up with Philippa, never clearing out her possessions, and alternating jobs between the bar of the Feathers and the Jane Austen Centre, where he worked behind the front desk two and a half days a week. He never talked about his mother, or what might have been. Never.
Looking at Adam now, Tess knew she wasn’t going to get an answer out of him.
He said, ‘Things are the same as they’ve always been.’
‘Still working at the Feathers? I didn’t know the barman when I went in to drop my stuff.’
‘Yep,’
