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He took a moment to process this. “You mean the whole evening...?”
“Was my best friend playing Cupid, yes,” I said, laughing.
The instant Patrick walked into that dining room, I had realized it was a setup. That Athena—despite all my attempts to convey to her the complexity of my feelings about Patrick, despite all the times I had tried to explain to her the intensity of my anxieties around relationships generally—had taken it upon herself to matchmake. I was not sure if I felt annoyed about this or amused. Athena had always been so easy to read, at least to me (except when it came to Freddie, whose appeal was eternally baffling). Apparently the same could not be said the other way round.
Then again, I had often felt that Athena’s brain was not wired quite like other people’s—the directness of the way she approached things, perhaps to do with the way she had been brought up, an assumption that if she wanted something enough she would always get it.
It was a little irritating to think she would claim credit for all this, and yet as Patrick and I stood in that doorway, his lips pressed against mine, never before had I been so certain about what I wanted to happen next. Never in a moment like that had I felt so in control of my anxiety, so confident that if a wave of panic did start rising, I could face it down.
We giggled all the way up the stairs. We kissed in the corridor outside his room. There was a clash of teeth, more laughter. Then we were on his bed. His body on mine. My body on his.
It was only afterward, lying there, that I started to feel that familiar anxiety simmer. I sat up, asked Patrick for a glass of water. He passed me a mug, with a grin. “Even if it was Athena’s doing,” he said, “I’m really glad this happened. I really hope that maybe this time around...”
I tried to keep my breathing steady, to stop my throat from constricting. “Maybe,” I said. “I think, perhaps... it’s just that... it’s not that I don’t like you. There’s just quite a lot of stuff I’m working through. Family stuff. Complicated stuff. I’m sure I’ll tell you about it one day, but for the moment we are going to need to take things very slowly, okay?”
“Of course,” he said. “We can take things at whatever pace you want. Just know that I like you—I don’t think I ever stopped liking you—and I can be patient.” He thought to himself for a minute and frowned—or pretended to. “Although I was going to ask you if you wanted to come to the Witt Library with me tomorrow. But if you think that would be too...”
“That sounds great,” I said, with genuine enthusiasm.
Then somehow, we were kissing again, urgently. But even as we melted into each other, at the back of my mind was the knowledge that if I wanted this to be more than a three-night stand, I would have to find a way to open up to him. To try to explain why Juliette Willoughby’s journal spoke to me so personally. To explain that I could remember exactly how it felt, that sense of constant anxiety she described, of always being on guard, never knowing if you were being too paranoid or not paranoid enough.
I was ten years old when my mother finally left my father. She must have spent years building up the courage to do it, months working out the practicalities, weeks waiting for the perfect moment to run. I understood implicitly that I would not be going back to that school or seeing my friends again. That we would be in a new place, a new city. That this was the last time I would ever see our house. I was allowed one bag and had half an hour to pack, and all that time she was standing by the window, watching for his car, terrified he would return early from work.
He had always said that if she ever tried to leave, if she ever tried to take me away from him, he would find her and he would kill her.
PATRICK’S VISION, I THINK, had been for us to cruise up to London in the MG with the roof down, stopping somewhere for a pub lunch in the sunshine. When we woke up it was raining. We got to the car and found it would not start. He was touchingly apologetic about this as we waited for a lull in the rain and then made a dash for the train station. All the way to King’s Cross, Freddie Talbot was our main topic of discussion.
It was a relief to learn that Patrick was as uncharmed by him as I was. His not turning up for dinner the night before was typical, I explained. As was Athena’s reaction to it, the realization visibly dawning on her that Freddie was either not going to show or would be wasted if he did come.
“There are good reasons why he is the way he is, though,” Patrick commented. “Because my dad is friends with Philip Willoughby, I spent a lot of time at Longhurst as a kid, hanging out with Harry. Often Freddie would be there too. I remember playing hide-and-seek for hours. Freddie would always win—you’d spend ages looking for him and there he would be, stretched out on a rafter.”
I tried to imagine them, three little boys with the run of a great big country house—the very house that Juliette grew up in. Perhaps I should have been more surprised than I was to discover that Freddie was Harry’s cousin—when I had first arrived in Cambridge I would have thought it almost as bizarre a coincidence as the discovery that they were both related to Juliette. Now, though, it just further underlined the interconnectedness of the circles into which I had stumbled.
“Why was Freddie at Longhurst so much—did he live there too?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” Patrick said. “Most of the time he was at boarding school, but he’d stay during holidays when Arabella—his mother—didn’t want him. She’d be in Monaco on someone’s yacht, or in Spain on honeymoon, or doing yoga up a mountain. She moved to South Africa with husband number five when Freddie started secondary school, but I don’t think he’s been over there once.”
“That must have been unsettling for him,” I said.
“He certainly never liked to talk about it. If you really wanted to annoy Freddie, asking him where Arabella was would always do it. Not that upsetting Freddie was ever really something you wanted to do, because he’s always had a mean streak. To freak Harry and me out, he used to tell us about all the creepy stuff Cyril kept in the house—the mummies, the old scrolls. He also had this Usborne World of the Unknown book of unsolved mysteries with the story of Longhurst’s Missing Maid—this servant who disappeared there back in the 1930s. He always claimed that the room I’d been given to sleep in had been hers, and he would tell us about various family members who had definitely seen her ghost. Which, aged eight, you laugh about when you’re all together, but come bedtime I’d sleep sitting up, back to the wall, with all the lights on.”
Patrick paused. “The thing that really explains Freddie, though, the root of all that bitterness, is that technically Longhurst should be his.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Juliette’s father, Cyril, was the oldest of three brothers, but he never had a son. So when he died, Longhurst should have passed sideways to the second-eldest brother. That’s where it gets peculiar. Freddie’s grandfather Osbert was the next in line. Harry’s grandfather Austen was the youngest. It skipped a brother: the house, the inheritance, all of it.”
“Why?”
“Not sure,” Patrick said. “Harry says he doesn’t know and neither does Freddie. My dad thinks it was to do with Freddie’s grandfather being a drinker, that Cyril was worried he’d piss the lot away. But I would imagine it does rankle with Freddie.”
What none of that explained, I said, was what I had seen the other day, the peculiar incident in the car, Freddie being screamed at. Patrick said he was not sure what that could have been about either, or who had been screaming at him.
“The thing about Freddie is, he’s always had a peculiar talent for pissing people off.”
THE WOMAN BEHIND THE Witt Library’s front desk explained it would take me a little time to get a reader’s card. Patrick asked if I would mind if he went ahead of me to start on the task his father had set him.
“Of course not,” I said. It sounded like he had a lot of photographs to leaf through.