She was absolutely right to have broken the moment. What had they been thinking?
It was utterly ridiculous how deflated he felt.
She smiled back at him.
Yeah. Move on.
‘There’s a pheasant,’ he said, pointing. ‘Lot of them around at this time of year.’
After, really, alongnature conversation, they moved on to other topics, until it was like the near-kiss hadn’t happened and things were back to normal, except for the fact that thoughts about Dan’s father – and how much he liked Evie and how much he’dstupidlymissed the boat because now she was going out with Matthew – were bubbling at the back of his mind. If he was honest, he’d also missed the boat because he’d been too scared, of having a disastrous relationship like his parents and of losing Evie’s friendship completely and both of them getting hurt. Anyway, academic now; she was with Matthew.
‘That was a lovely walk,’ said Evie as they rounded the corner near the church onto the path round the green.
‘It was.’ He wanted to say that they should do it again sometime, but he wasn’t sure how to word it. In case it sounded like a date or something. ‘I think I’m going to text my father and suggest meeting up. Somewhere neutral. Not at his place. I’ll let you know how it goes.’
‘Good luck.’ Evie smiled at him. ‘I’ll be thinking of you.’
‘Bye then,’ he said. Hug? Air-kiss?
Evie said, ‘Bye,’ and gave him another one of her smiles and started walking off round her side of the green. Stupidly, he felt bereft now, like he didn’t want to go home.
Okay. He was going to text his father now, as he walked back round to the house. It felt like he’d promised Evie that he’d do it.
The reply came straight after he’d got inside the front door. It smelled as though his mother was making a beef stew. Loudly: there was a lot of clattering from the kitchen.
‘Hello,’ he said, putting his head round the kitchen door. ‘How’s your afternoon been?’ His mother was loading the dishwasher. ‘Let me do that,’ he said, ‘while you put your feet up for a minute. Can I make you a cup of tea?’
‘No, no, no,’ his mother said, batting him away from the dirty dishes. ‘You work such long hours and you’re here for a holiday.Yousit down andI’llmake the tea.’
‘You’ve twisted my arm,’ Dan said, smiling at her. There was no way he could read the text from his father when he was in the house with his mother; he’d feel like he was betraying her.
His mother popped out a couple of hours later to drop some home-made jam with Mrs Bird and a couple of other villagers. Dan waited until the coast was clear and then pulled his phone out. God, this felt awful. He was totally going behind his mother’s back. It would actually have felt less like a betrayal if hehadn’twaited until she’d had gone out.
Okay. His father was suggesting meeting tomorrow morning for a coffee in Cirencester.
What Dan wanted to do now was call Evie and ask her if he should go.
But since he was thirty-three years old and he and Evie were just friends who saw each other occasionally, that would be an odd thing to do.
So what was he going to do?
He was going to go. He was just going to go and meet his father.
* * *
‘Hi, Dan.’ Dan’s father had arrived before him at their meeting place in Cirencester and he was standing outside looking unusually unsure of himself, his smile a little tentative and his voice not that confident-sounding. Like a shadow of himself. Had the prospect of meeting Dan done this to him?
‘Hello.’ What now? Should they shake hands? What would they have done in the past, when they were still speaking? Dan realised with a jolt that he didn’t know, because he’d been holding his father at a distance ever since he first realised that he was having an affair, half a lifetime ago, when Dan was sixteen. ‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘I’m well, thank you. You?’
‘Yep, great, thanks. Shall we go inside?’
When they were seated at a table in the corner of the café – café was the wrong word; it was a very fancy tea room, of course, because his father had suggested it and he liked fancy places – his father said, still sounding like a muted version of his normal bombastic self, ‘I was very pleased to hear from you.’
‘I thought it would be good to talk,’ Dan said. He’d spent all evening yesterday, eating dinner with his mother and some of her friends, knowing that he should prepare something to say today, and not doing it, because it had just felt too hard. So now he was floundering. What a muppet.
His father waited and then said, ‘About anything in particular?’
