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Audrey held her breath, then slid her arm away and turned to keep walking, deeper into the maze.
‘Why didn’t you come, that day we agreed to meet?’ she asked, her face safely hidden from view. She sounded far more measured than she felt.
‘I was in an accident. A scooter ran me off my bike, and I cracked two ribs, hit my head. I was in hospital for two days.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, feeling a nagging pull at the back of her mind that this might not be true.
‘And I did call you – first chance I had, but you gave me the wrong number.’ She had given him the right number. She definitely had. ‘As soon as I was out of hospital, I went back to our booth, stuck messages to it. I even posted a note with your photo on every noticeboard in every astronomy department I could find in London, in the hope you might see it.’
Audrey didn’t reply. The thought of him looking for her like that prompted an unexpected glow of affection. One of the worst things about him disappearing was the fear she might have imagined what she felt between them. Everything he was telling her now told her she hadn’t imagined a moment of it.
She increased her pace, taking a right turn, through a break in the hedge.
‘You didn’t call me either,’ he said.
‘The number you wrote down smudged; I couldn’t read it.’
Audrey reached another fork in the maze and stopped, turning around to look at him again, inexplicably angry now. ‘What do you want me to say to all this? That I was gutted when you didn’t show? I was. That I looked for you too? I did.’
Should she admit that she remembered every detail of their day together, that if only he’d been there, everything that followed might have been so very different? What if, what if, what if.
‘I just wanted to explain. It is one of the biggest regrets of my life, that I wasn’t there that day to meet you.’
His face was earnest, imploring. The air smelled of dewy foliage, of summer evenings full of potential. The moon shone down on Fred’s beautiful face, and she wondered if, in another life, this might have been the face she ended up knowing better than her own.
‘I’m sorry, I know this is the last thing you need to be hearing right now. I don’t want to upset you,’ he said.
Thunder cracked above them, and it started to rain once more, huge heavy droplets of water, like a shower turning on. The storm had returned.
‘This way,’ he said, taking her hand and guiding her back the way they had come. Fred had to raise his voice over the sound of the rain, since he was facing away from her now. ‘I kept your photo. I still have it in my wallet.’
He had kept her photo.
‘I still have yours in mine. I don’t know why.’ She blurted it out without thinking. As soon as she’d said it, it felt dangerous, disloyal.
He had led them back to the start of the maze. They looked at each other and laughed, both soaked to the skin. Audrey ran a hand through her wet hair, exhilarated. The rain wasn’t cold, and there was no wind, so standing in it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation.
‘I really should go in,’ she said. ‘I need to go to bed.’
‘Of course. I’m sorry I kept you out here.’
There was so much more she could say, but she didn’t trust herself to stay, so she set off in a run across the lawn, raindrops slapping against her skin. Why the hell was rain so romantic? Especially rain in a moonlit garden; she really walked into that one.
As she got to the door of the Hall, she looked back to see Fred still standing in the downpour, watching her. Audrey paused, holding his steady gaze for a moment, before turning to go. Inside, she slapped the wall in frustration. What was she doing? She knew she had the capacity to be changeable and indecisive in life, but not when it came to love. She wasn’t the kind of person to get caught up in the words of a stranger. That was something Vivien did, and if there was one thing Audrey had promised herself from a young age, it was that when it came to love, she would not be anything like her mother.
