“I’m a journalist. Figuring people out by what they’re purposely not telling me is all part of it, yeah. It’s an art form when it’s done well.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. Sam shoots me a sharp look.
“You think I’m exaggerating? Let me tell you what I’ve learned about you, then. You take sugar in your tea even though you’re trying to cut down. You’re newly engaged—congratulations, by the way—to a safe, practical man who is quite traditional. He’s well-off, and you like to think that your future children will have your looks and his brains. Then there’s theDraculaconnection. Which one is it? Your mum or your dad?”
“How do you—?”
“Mina Harker. The ‘light of all lights.’”
I laugh.
“It’s my dad. He took my mother to Whitby Abbey while she was pregnant with me. My poor brother narrowly escaped being called Van Helsing.”
Sam grins and I feel myself loosening, just a little.
“I saw your face when Horace gave you that tea. There was no sugar in it and you looked like you’d been poisoned. Then there’s that sparkler on your ring finger—a solitaire diamond on a gold band. Expensive but not ostentatious, very traditional. It’s a safe choice from what I’m imagining is a safe man.”
I look down at the ring on my finger. It throws off little sparks of light sharp enough to cut me.
“The only thing I can’t work out about you, Mina, is what youdo.You’re early twenties, right? I’m guessing no kids for a few years. You seem quite grounded, quite intelligent. Are you a teacher?”
Normally I’m wary of revealing too much of myself but there’s an intimacy here, something formed out of our shared experience, our grief, that makes me be more open than I usually would.
“Close enough. I’ve just graduated in psychology but I specialize in the clinical aspect of working with children.”
“Child psychology, huh? What made you take that path?”
Briefly, I consider telling him how my brother’s death had opened a gulf between myself and my parents which had seemed long and black and endless. I think about telling him how it had been a woman called Rebecca Frost who had stopped me sailing over the edge of it, sitting me down quietly in her small office between the school canteen and the cloakrooms with the noisy hiss of water pipes overhead and the sign on the door which readPASTORAL CARE. Mrs. Frost hadn’t beena trained counselor but she’d spoken to me with a tenderness and care I hadn’t realized I’d been lacking, a box of oversized tissues on her desk that I’d used up in all but an afternoon. I had regular meetings with Mrs. Frost until the day I’d left for university when she’d given me a quick, inexpert hug and told me firmly that Eddie’s death was not my fault. I think about explaining to Sam that the impact Rebecca Frost left on me was like a meteor striking the earth but instead I take a sip of my tea, now turning cold.
“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t. It’s a lot of work in a highly competitive field. After graduation I’ve got to complete a doctorate and an observational psychoanalytic study—not to mention all the clinical training. Any idea how hard it is to get a work placement without experience?”
“I can imagine. What did you write your thesis on?”
“The effects of complex trauma on undeveloped brains, chiefly in adolescents. It’s personal. I’m sure you understand.”
Sam nods, lips pressed together tightly. Outside, the pulse and hum of crickets in the long grass. A moth bats against the windowpane. I turn to rinse my cup in the sink, thinking about getting home to an empty house, dinner under cling film in the fridge. Oscar is at the lab till late this evening, sequestered with his group of young students, everything sterile and precise and carefully weighed. All those rocks from outer space held in airtight vacuums. He once brought home a chunk of meteorite and asked me to hold it. I did so, surprised at how little it weighed, full of holes like a pumice stone streaked black and brown and gray. Oscar stared at me, eyes glittering with expectation. I didn’t know what to say. He wanted me to say the same thing he would, which is that it made him feel like a god.
“Listen, I have to go. My bus is leaving soon. It was nice to meet you, Sam, I’m just sorry it had to be here, for these reasons.”
I hold out my hand to him and he hesitates so long I think he isn’t going to take it. When he does, folding his hand over mine and looking me right in the eye, I feel a spark of something, some understanding, shared. The dead like golden threads, pulling us together.
THREE
A week later the hosepipe ban comes into force and the verges and lawns yellow and turn brown while flowers desiccate and shrivel into husks. There is no breeze and the air is dense as velvet. I lie on my stomach in the garden, dozing slightly in the shade, a can of lemonade open at my side. Heavy lidded eyes watching a wasp crawl into the hole at the top of the can, too lazy to lift my hand to swat it away, too hot to do anything except lie and stare with my mouth hanging agape.
I hear the phone ringing from inside the house. I look down the lawn to the open doorway into the kitchen. The phone rings and rings.Can’t be bothered,I think.Go away, whoever you are.
Finally it stops. I can hear the wasp buzzing inside the can, an angry metallic sound. I wonder what it would be like to beimprisoned in that sweet smelling dark, a pinhole of light overhead, the sides slippery and sticky with sugar. There are worse ways to go.
When the phone starts ringing again, I sigh loudly, hoisting myself up onto my hands and knees and staggering to my feet. Sweat trickles down the backs of my legs and between my breasts, skin glistening. I’m meant to be going to meet the caterers later this afternoon to discuss food for the wedding, vol-au-vents and king prawns on chips of ice, tiny slivers of fruitcake. I’m not looking forward to it. My appetite has shrunk to nothing in this weather. Oscar and I are having a winter wedding, like I’d always wanted. Holly and ivy and mistletoe, the bright red of poinsettias. The day will be crisp and bright with frost and I will wear white and my father will walk me down the aisle of the old church with the tilted gravestones out the front.
Inside, the house is cool, a few flies lazily drawing zeroes in the air of the kitchen. I bat at them ineffectually as I pass but I’m hot and slow and they instantly regroup. The phone is still ringing by the time I get into the hallway. Up until last year, we still had a rotary dial phone but I insisted we replace it much to Oscar’s irritation. He likes “old things” as he constantly reminds me. If it were left to him, we’d still have the old black-and-white television set with the rabbit ear antenna.
“Hullo?”
“Mina? Is that you, light of all lights?”
I can’t place his voice, not at first. Then he laughs gently and I remember the tall, snaggletoothed man who had stood quietly in the kitchen of the church hall with a crumpled piece of paper in his hand.