He understands then where we’re going, he surrenders to it. We’re back at Hintze Hall now, Hope’s skeleton suspended above us as we cross to the central steps. I take each one carefully, if I’m too abrupt, my abdomen twinges. At the top, I pause to watch him. He blinks at the sight of the old route laid out before us as if he’s come out of a darkened room, taking in geological treasures on the left, birds on the right, and then I know in the days he’s been waiting for me, he hasn’t dared come up here. Iwonder if he dreams about these long stretches of balcony like I do, if he fears them. Their quiet, transgressive power. Falling captive again.
The door to Lepidoptery is the same – utilitarian, nondescript – we cannot get in without a pass but there’s no need, just this small section of balcony is electric with memory. Pillars soar up to the vaulted arches of the ceiling, I lift my hand to one. The stone, carved to resemble the bark of fossilised trees, is as much a part of the first time I touched him as the touch itself, and then all my pretending falls away, the stupid games I play to erase what happened. Under my fingertips, truth is bulletproof.
He is seconds behind me on the highway of memory, his face a reflection of my own, a collapsing building, the jolt of bricks before the floors fall through. He steadies himself against the wall, a hunched, broken posture, and it occurs to me that I’ve never witnessed the damage on him; right to the end, he was always so sure, so certain. But he is blown apart too. He presses the back of his hand to his mouth.
I turn away. I thought I wanted him hurt. But I don’t have the stomach for his grief.
After a few minutes, he joins me at the balcony. We look out over the hall together. Below us, the visitors are liquid under the cage of Hope’s ribs, water forming and reforming.
‘Did you think about this place?’ he asks.
I nod. ‘You?’
‘Every day.’
‘We never really talked about it when we went away,’ I say. ‘What happened here.’
‘No.’
‘So many questions I never asked.’
‘We didn’t think it would end.’ His elbows lean against the railings; he presses his fingertips together. ‘But now, we have all the time in the world.’
Or none.Fresh out of prison, he has no obligations – no family, no career. But for me, time is the one thing I don’t have. Even standing here now, I’m a thief; I’ve stolen minutes, hours, days away from my husband and daughter, each second ticking down an already negative balance.
A laugh echoes from the opposite balcony, a couple in their twenties, meandering through the displays, his arm slung languidly around her shoulder, her arm around his waist. They are pointing at the pheasants. Simple Saturday activity.
‘Ask me,’ he says, his eyes on them.
‘What?’
‘You said there were so many questions you never asked. Ask me. Whatever you want.’
How much time have I squandered thinking about him? Is it even calculable? I’ve tried and failed to stop myself but my mind has always been ungovernable, sliding back and forth like a finger across a frosted pane. ‘Where do you go?’ Kit would ask when we first started dating because the smallest thing – a flash of blue, a shirt collar – would send me reeling back. Later, it became an inside joke, that I was a daydreamer, one of my little idiosyncrasies. But I am not a daydreamer.Where do you go?I am on this balcony, in a mews house, on a beach, desperately trying to find answers in facts I’ve already sifted, memory I’ve already dissected.
But in a relationship, there are two bodies, two minds, two memories. This is the chance I’ve been waiting for. To test if my version of events is true.
‘When I touched you—’ I start, then stop because it is impossible to carry on, I have a daughter, a husband, how can I say these words out loud? But there is something else here too: relief. The expression of our intimacy after almost two decades of silence is a bloodletting. ‘Why didn’t you stop things?’
He turns to stare at the door to Lepidoptery. He imagines himself back, as I do too.
I’d been feeling it for months. Each Saturday I saw him, every time I heard Mama talk about their dates, their future, a tightness would fill my chest, a balloon expanding. One afternoon, as we’re leaving to go home, he holds the door open and I’m seized by the fact that there are only a handful of seconds when I am standing in front of him, this moment, a grain of sand trickling through the narrow neck of an hourglass. Surely, he can see it, everything between us – wings and watercolours and ammonites – and then I cannot bear it anymore. In front of the pillar, I touch my finger to the pulse of his throat.
There is a single beat of silence.
‘Lauren,’ he says quietly and I know I’ve made a terrible mistake because the way he says my name is the way he’s always said it in the lab, nothing more. I run through the dark of the balcony, tears smarting my face, trainers smashing against the museum tiles.
‘You should have done something,’ I say.
‘What should I have done?’
‘Something. Anything. You should have told my mother.’
‘What would I have told her?’
‘The truth. That I was attracted to you.’
‘Based on that?’ He shakes his head. ‘Nothing happened.’