grabs a packet of pistachios and shakes them into a dish. He offers them first to me, then begins snapping the shells, dropping the nuts into his mouth, washing them down with beer.
‘How was France?’
‘Good. I enjoyed it – although I was ready to come home.’
‘House still standing?’
‘Thankfully, yes.’
‘Fiona said the Airbnb all went well.’
‘Think so.’
‘Next time you rent it, give me the nod. Wouldn’t mind escaping the chaos of this place for a few days.’ He laughs, eyes sparkling.
I remember meeting Bill for the first time when Fiona was living in London. He was standing at her sink, thick arms plunged into a bowl of soapy water, the kitchen light reflecting off the curve of his bald head. My first thought was that he was one of her housemates’ fathers.
Bill was so unlike the sallow-skinned academics who Fiona tended to date that I’d worried it wouldn’t last – that Fiona, with her tendency to bore quickly, would become distracted.
‘You know he has a proper job,’ Fiona told me later, when we were alone. ‘Something to do with sales. They give him a car to drive. This ugly great silver thing with awful tinted windows.’ She spoke about their relationship with a tone of quiet amusement, as if she couldn’t quite believe she’d fallen for him. ‘Bill hasn’t read a novel in two years. He watches snooker. He classes a good night out as having “a few jars” at a comedy club. He’s twelve years older than me. He wears jewellery – and I don’t mean body piercings. I mean actual jewellery. A gold neck chain. And a signet ring.’
I’d looked at her closely. ‘You really like him, don’t you?’
She’d smiled, glanced away – a girlish expression I rarely saw in my sister. ‘Yes, I think I do.’
Now Bill is asking, ‘Everything okay? You’re looking a bit tired, m’dear.’
I love Bill’s knack for sensing when I’m off-kilter.
‘I’m not sleeping brilliantly at the moment, that’s all.’
‘Ah, the insomnia snake. You’ve got a lot going on, eh? Flynn. Your book deadline. Maybe you’re still adjusting to being in the new house, too.’
I nod, reminded of how intuitive Bill can be.
‘You know that we’re here if you need us, don’t you?’ he says, placing a large hand on my shoulder. He squeezes – his grip just a fraction too firm.
‘Thought I heard the door,’ Fiona says, crossing the kitchen and kissing Bill on the mouth. ‘No traffic?’
‘I had a meeting in Bristol. Finished on time. Came straight here. Drake all right?’
‘Fine – but he’s yours for the weekend.’
‘As long as you’re all mine for the weekend, too,’ he says, pulling Fiona into his arms and burying his face in her neck.
I move towards the chair where I’ve left my coat and handbag. ‘I’m going to disappear.’
‘Don’t be silly! Stay!’ Bill says, releasing Fiona.
‘I’m giving a library talk in the morning.’
‘I saw the posters,’ Fiona says. ‘We’re going to try and pop in.’
‘Are we?’ Bill asks.
‘Don’t you dare!’ I say.
Fiona bats away my resistance. ‘It’s at eleven, isn’t it?’
‘Please, you’ve got better things to do with your weekend.’
‘We are immensely boring people, Elle.’
‘And anyway,’ Bill adds, ‘we want to sit in the audience and show off that we’re related to you.’
‘Just don’t ask any embarrassing questions, okay?’
Bill links his arm through Fiona’s, wiggling his brows as he says, ‘Us?’
I step from the warmth of their house and cross the street towards my car. Fiona and Bill watch from the doorway, checking I make it safely to the vehicle.
I start the engine, flick on the heater, turn up the radio. As I move off, I lift my hand to wave – but they are already turning away.
Bill pulls the door firmly behind them, locking his family inside.
Elle’s skin held the deep tan of a summer holiday spent largely unoccupied. She was running late, still learning to navigate the sprawling campus, and she slipped into the back of the lecture theatre, breathless.
She scanned the sea of heads looking for an unoccupied seat, dismayed to spot only one at the front. As she tiptoed down the central stairway, trying to make herself invisible, the lecturer paused mid-sentence.
He was sitting on the edge of a desk, the screen behind him illuminated with the words Shakespeare’s Tragedies. He had foppish brown hair and wore a well-cut cord jacket, over a pair of dark jeans.
‘I should mention,’ the young lecturer said, ‘that if anyone is late, they have the regrettable task of being my assistant at the end of the lecture and handing out the day’s notes. So,’ he said, his gaze finding hers, ‘that role is awarded to you, today.’ He smiled. A boyish smile that lit up his face and created sunbursts of lines around his eyes.
The attention in the auditorium swung to her, as a hundred pairs of eyes followed his. Perhaps because she was nineteen, perhaps because she was still buzzing from the shots she’d only stopped drinking at four a.m., she had – right there in front of a packed auditorium of English Literature students – grinned as she curtsied to him.
‘At your service.’
Luke Linden, he was called, ‘but just call me Luke’. He was one of those lecturers, she would learn, who abandoned the lectern and preferred to roam, striding expansively from one end of the hall to the other. He had a flair for using a pause to great effect, causing even those students with a tendency to drift, to suddenly look up as if silence had summoned them. Luke Linden was a man who could talk passionately about semantics and notions of romantic love in Jacobean England – yet still looked like one of them.
Except he wasn’t one of them.
And that’s where Elle had made her first mistake.
