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“Your mother, are you sure it was her? Not somebody else holding you?”
“Yes, yes!”
“But I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know!”
Back and forth, back and forth until Ada worked herself up into an inconsolable state of anxiety, leaping out of bed and begging to be taken outside for fresh air. They looked up at the stars together for some time and settled back into her bedroom when the sky clouded over. It had taken him a few hours to finally get her to contemplate the idea of sleep. It was back to the Bible, and some parables he read twice, once for the story itself and once for the lull of his voice.
“I like all the dips and troughs you do,” Ada said, and so he made a point of accentuating these moments, rolling the singsong question of“Where have you lain him?”and deepening his intonation when announcing for Lazarus to“come forth!”
At some point, he must have fallen asleep too. He shifted uncomfortably and blinked his eyes open. Ada nestled into his side, and Terence the teddy was wedged between them. He was hot and sticky with the heat on full blast and with no window open. He climbed off the bed, careful not to wake her, and smoothed the covers over her limp frame before turning off the lamplight and shutting the door. It was the early hours of the morning. The air outside the room was chilly, and he was grateful for it. He tiptoed his way through the hall and back toward his bedroom.
When he stepped inside, he heard a rustle beneath his feet. He shut the door, turned on the light. A single sheet of paper had been slipped beneath the door, half folded. Lifting it, he read its contents. A single word, so small he could’ve easily missed it. His heart quivered. Five letters, the length not longer than that of a thumb. It read at once hasty and overly thought-out, insincere and yet from the heart. He was shocked, confused, and unprepared to see it.
Sorry.
10
BRON CLAMBERED THE STREETSof Grantchester, a village not too far from Greenwood and southward of the city’s meadows, where the centuries did indeed blend and blur, as he remembered reading in a poem once: the windy roads, the thatched cottages, the old brick. What would it have been like to spend his summer days here, to laze in the grass by the River Cam under the gauzy shade of a willow tree? Walking along Broadway Road as his phone instructed him to, he felt anything but the reality of these thoughts. The cold wind was blustery and had him shaking under his coat.
Mrs. Flanders’s residence was a charming Victorian terrace ten minutes’ walk from the long church, with the shrubs in its front porch appearing manicured at first, especially if you were to only brush down the street, but when passing through the wrought iron gate, one could see how untamed it was, how the flowers curled into the ivy and wreaked havoc along the walls.
He had written to her the previous Monday, a modest message that apologized for his delay in writing to her, that he’d been very busy with his job but that he’d settled in well and was getting to grips with the ebb and flow of Cambridgeshire life. When he pressed “Send,” the wall of text, first green and then blue, seemed an appropriate length to be writing after so long a wait.Perhaps she wouldn’t remember him after all, the random person she’d spoken to on a train once to pass the time. He was sure their interaction would have faded from her memory.
She responded almost immediately.
She double-messaged, providing her address again, even though he had it saved in his phone already. In a third message, she wrote:
And now he rang the doorbell. The smile that lifted Mrs. Flanders’s face as she greeted him, the way she opened conversation by asking how his journey had been, made him feel as though no time had passed at all between him and this lady he barely knew. The journey was fine, he said, and how are you? Stepping through the front door, he was hit by a foreign smell that he thought he recognized—a blend of sage and onion and hot bread.
She ushered him down the compact hall and through a door that opened into a living area, where plates and framed photographs hung over every bit of wallpaper. She gestured for him to sit in the armchair by the electric fire, an eighties installation. Across the room she’d dressed the small table with a white tablecloth, a three-tiered stand full of sandwiches, and delicate pink china cups upturned on their saucers. A whole pot of tea had been brewed, and she carried this over to him slowly.
“I am so glad you could make it,” she said while pouring. “It’s not often I’m greeted with company, you know. An old lady like me.”
“The pleasure is all mine—that’s enough, thanks.”
For someone not met with many guests, Mrs. Flanders kept her house spotlessly clean; tidy and organized in that homely grandmotherly way he could only guess at, but chaotic and clustered with knickknacks.What else is there to do when one is old and lonely? Tidy up and gather things, and tidy up again.He imagined a glimpse of his future, the unlikeliness of having his own home, the inevitability of his ending up alone.
She wobbled about, the limp to her walk more evident than he’d remembered, and fussed over his gorgeous good looks, the smallness of his size. Asked if he was eating enough. She brought over the tier of sandwiches, and he took a little triangle in his hand. She insisted he take more, and when he took a second, she pressed him to have a third.
“Eat, eat, it is good for you. It will keep you strong.”
He was grateful for her hospitality, if not a little self-conscious by the way she watched him eat the sandwich until he made a start on the other. He slowed down his chewing. Mrs. Flanders reached out to the coffee table to push the tier of sandwiches closer toward him.
“It’s very kind of you to have gone through all this trouble.”
“It is no trouble, dear. No trouble at all. You remind me of my son,” she said matter-of-factly. “He liked to eat and was small like you.”
“I remember you saying you have a son—”
“Yes, he went away to Oxford many years ago. He was so fragile and curious. My little boy.”
“Where is he now?” he asked between mouthfuls.
“He is gone.”
He lurched when she said this. How stupid he was to have asked. “I’m sorry,” he said, there being nothing else to say.
