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‘That wasn’t the same at all,’ Jem said. ‘They were getting married. We were just?—’
‘What were we?’
‘I don’t know. How should I have known? I’d never so much as been kissed in my life, and you were in love with Toby!’
‘Yes,’ Nicky said. ‘I realise that I am a cold-hearted prick and no gentleman, but would you please accept my assurance that I would never have risked our friendship as a matter of casual diversion?’
‘You said?—’
‘I know what I said. I thought, in a desperate sort of way, that I might turn the tide of Toby’s wrath if I assured him you didn’t matter. You need not tell me that was disgraceful, cowardly, and doomed to fail. I was afraid.’
‘Of what?’ Jem demanded. ‘Losing Toby’s good opinion because that counted more than my humiliation? Doesn’t that rather prove my point?’
Nicky began to speak, stopped himself, restarted. ‘I promised myself I wouldn’t make excuses for my conduct. But I wish you would believe that I was thinking of you, even if it was through a glass darkly. I thought I was going mad that wretched term. I had Toby ranting and raving at me nightly. His uncle, his sister, his treacherous friends, the unfairness of it all. It festered and burst out, again and again, and Ella declined to take the brunt any longer. She avoided him, and I can hardly blame her. He talked to Hugo a little, but mostly to me. And it made me angry.’
‘On his behalf?’
‘On mine,’ Nicky said. ‘I had a top First to secure and he was wasting an hour or more of my lifeevery single day, over the same bitter ground again and again, demanding endless sympathy, of which my stocks are limited at the best of times. Have you ever fallen out of love?’
‘I haven’t had the opportunity.’
Nicky paused at that. ‘I am sorry to hear you say so. Probably. It did me no good, I’ll tell you that. I was desperate to get away from him, and of course he could tell. Those nights with you—I went out sometimes, walked up and down Broad Street just to be out of Anselm’s, and to see the light in your room. I looked and saw you were there, and it was a beacon of sanity, Jem. “This way lies that which is good, and clean, and healthy.”’
Jem was sitting straight upright. ‘Nicky…’ He wasn’t sure what to say, against the tumbling confession or the old remembered pain.
‘And perhaps it would have been all right in the end,’ Nicky said. ‘Perhaps he might have pulled himself together and faced his disappointment with grace if there had only beentime, but he ran out of time, didn’t he? Or if I’d told him not to be a prick. I wonder that, sometimes. All the years I agreed with him and soothed his wounded self-esteem. What if I hadn’t?’
‘I don’t know. It’s not worth considering. You were who you were because he was who he was.’
‘Never inflict a sentence like that on me again. I can’t remember where we started with this. Only that he felt all of us had hurt him, one way or another, and he reacted accordingly.’
‘You hurt him by spending time with me,’ Jem began.
‘By fucking you and caring about it. Let us not mince words.’
Jem was glad of the darkness that enveloped them now, and of the cold that soothed his burning cheeks. He didn’t know how to talk about this; he wasn’t ready, here and now on a rooftop, to hear that Nicky had cared. What that might have meant. What they might have had. What he’d lost.
He pushed on desperately. ‘He saw you and me, Ella and Aaron, as betrayers, I grasp that. What did Prue or Hugo do to offend him?’
‘I don’t know. But you suggested she was expecting? If he wasn’t the father, if yet another of his worshippers had succumbed to someone else?—’
‘Oh God. He’d have been spitting feathers.’
‘Indeed he would.’ Nicky paused. ‘Jem, must you do this? Toby was not who we loved, not the man he should have been, in those last days. He was bitter, and it made him cruel. He did harm, heintendedharm. I think he was killed because of what he intended to do.’
‘Does that mean he deserved to die? That the murderer should get away with it?’
‘If the alternative is digging up everything that was buried with Toby? Yes.’
They sat in silence after that. There was, really, nothing else to say. Oxford was a dark plain ahead of Jem now, studded with yellow lights that shone but didn’t illuminate. ‘It’s cold,’ he said. ‘We should go down.’
FOURTEEN
Jem woke the next morning to the sound of the chapel bell, wondered if he had a tutorial, and had to blink at the ceiling for a few seconds as reality settled back into place.
They’d come down from the roof in silence, each heavy step burning in Jem’s foot. He’d thought that would be it, but instead Nicky had said, ‘Come on,’ again, and Jem had followed. Again.
They’d gone to Seal’s, where he’d been dragged to meet Ella and Prue that first morning when the world was young. Jem decided not to read anything into it; Nicky probably didn’t remember. Far more likely he’d chosen it as the closest eating house. He was careful of Jem’s foot; he always had been.
