I can’t help sniggering out loud as I say, ‘I’m so excited to have such an enthusiastic companion.’
‘Of course I’m enthusiastic. If the rest of the trip is even half as good as it’s been so far, I’m the luckiest man alive,’ he says. ‘Half the night pretending to be asleep in a single bed and the other half sitting in a chair, and now a morning sitting for an unspecified length of time in an incredibly attractive garage. Fun times.’
‘You enjoyed dinner. And breakfast.’
‘That is actually true,’ he concedes. ‘And we did meet a lot of nice people. And the monks were great. And the food was pretty good.’
‘Exactly. And we can have fun this morning while we’re waiting.’
‘Really?’
I almost go down the ‘Er, isn’t that quite rude; shouldn’t you be expecting to enjoy my wonderful company?’ route until I realise just in time that it might sound flirty and that would be excruciating.
So instead I say, ‘I have a backgammon set stashed away for just these eventualities. It’s come in very handy during this trip and you’re going to appreciate it now.’
‘Have you been playing solo backgammon or have you been meeting people along the way?’
‘I frequently lure strangers back to my van and make them play backgammon.’ I smile as he laughs politely. ‘No, I’ve had a couple of friends come out to meet me. Some girlfriends and my sister came at different times and—’ for some reason I’ve suddenly had this feeling that I should mention Dev ‘—my ex visited too.’
Callum nods a lot and says, ‘Great,’ and I feel like I’ve achieved exactly what my subconscious probably meant me to do when I mentioned Dev, which was – I think – to underline that I have no hesitation (although I did hesitate) in mentioning him to Callum because Callum and I are so far in the past we might as well not have happened.
Okay, now I feel sad, which is silly.
‘Backgammon,’ I say.
‘I had no idea you played.’ Callum’s frowning a bit, as though it’s wrong that there’s something he doesn’t know about me, which is utterly ridiculous because he’s the one who left and didn’t come back and it’s been a very long time. I am an adult and there’s a lot more than my backgammon skills that he doesn’t know about me.
‘I played a lot with my grandmother at one point,’ I explain.
‘Oh, how is she?’
Callum used to get on very well with her. They had a very similar sense of humour.
‘We lost her three years ago.’
I shouldn’t have mentioned my grandmother; I don’t want to talk about her with Callum.
‘Oh, no, I’m so sorry.’
‘Thank you.’ I could give him the details of her illness, but… I don’t want to.
It was a huge thing in my life when we lost her and, now that we’ve touched on it, it seems very, very odd that Callum knew nothing about it. It’s so strange, actually, the way two peoplecan be so entirely in each other’s lives and then just go off in their separate directions. If we’d stayed together – and we could have done, I truly believe – we wouldn’t have huge things to find out about each other, and he would have been with me through that difficult time, and I would have been there for him through whatever’s happened in his life.
Somuch must have happened in his life that I just don’t know about. Starting with how he’s wound up wearing lawyerly clothing and doing a lawyerly job and being in Rome on business.
It would havekilledme if I’d known that our lives would diverge so entirely.
I don’t want to think about this any more.
‘I’m going to find the board,’ I say.
The backgammon works like a charm because the second we have it all set up on the van’s table and Callum’s rolled up his sleeves and flexed his wrists and told me to prepare to lose – andthenadmitted he doesn’t even know the rules – a man who looks like he might be in charge of the garage turns up.
We both stand up to rush out of the van so fast that we collide as we scramble to the door.
And it’sweirdphysically bumping into Callum. Every time I’ve touched him over the past twenty-four hours – like when we were squished up against each other at breakfast – I’ve felt odd about it.
He clearly feels odd too, because he’s just leapt about a mile and banged his head on the van’s ceiling.
