When Michael asked her about it, she’d reassured him that this was what she’d wanted. It was she who’d suggested they move out of London. And she who’d said she had to put a stop to her travelling, to change her life from peripatetic to rooted. It would be fine, she told him. She just needed to get used to the different pressure points, the new rhythms of their lives. The foreign fieldwork, she’d explained to him one morning in bed, it had been like a drug. That was all. But she was coming off it now. For them, but mostly for herself.
―
Their first winter at Coed y Bryn was long, arriving with a sudden October frost furring the fields and icing the trees, before dragging on through to snow flurries in April. Despite the weather, or perhaps because of it, it was over these months that Caroline took to climbing the hill behind the cottage on her own. There was no mobile reception inside the house and Michael noticed she’d begun taking her phone with her on these walks. It hadn’t worried him. He’d sensed no waning in her feelings for him. If anything, their relationship, still young, was only strengthening. Their life was finding its pattern, both mutual and independent. Ever since he was a teenager Michael had lived with a low-grade hum of concern that he would never be able to love. Not fully, beyond the initial attraction. Not with all of his past and all of his future as well as his present. But with every day together at Coed y Bryn, Caroline was proving him wrong.
―
She was preparing dinner when she told him.
“We got that commission,” she said from the kitchen. “Pete told us today.”
She was chopping vegetables, the tap of her knife on the wooden cutting board steady and quick.
Michael was editing a chapter at the table. “That’s great,” he said without looking up. “Network?”
It was late April and the evening beyond the French windows still held a hint of the day’s light. The previous autumn, without telling Caroline, Michael had planted an arcing C of daffodil bulbs at the top of the lawn. The letter had shown itself in March, before pausing in the spring frosts, the tall stems still budded. Only the previous week had it finally thickened into the bright yellow of full bloom.
“Yes,” Caroline said. “Transmission in October. If we can make it work.”
“And can you?” Michael struck his pen through a paragraph and turned the page.
“I think so.” Picking up the chopping board, she tipped the slices of courgette and red onion into a saucepan. “The uncle’s agreed to contribute. He’s our in, as long as we keep him on board.”
There was something about the way she’d said “our” and “we” that made Michael look up from his editing. The words had been possessive more than inclusive.
She was facing away from him, her head bent as she crushed garlic cloves with the flat of the knife. Her hair fell either side of her neck, revealing a nub of vertebrae at the top of her spine. Somehow, all through the winter her skin had held its honey colour, as if it knew where she really belonged.
“The uncle?” he said. “Sorry, love, which one is this again?”
She turned to face him. Her expression was like that of a nurse imparting news to a relative.
“The one about the boy from Easton,” she said, leaning back against the kitchen counter and crossing her arms. She still held the knife in her hands. The scent of the garlic pulp on its blade came to him. “The kid who went to Pakistan. His uncle’s agreed to go back. To make the introductions.”
He remembered now. Three young Muslim boys recruited at a mosque in Bristol. They were only seventeen, eighteen years old. Like backpackers on a gap year, they’d left for a training camp on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Two of them had returned, but a third had not. Sightline had approached his family about making a documentary. That was all she’d told him, months ago now.
He put down his pen.
“That’s amazing,” he said. “Well done. Focus must be over the moon.”
She smiled and looked down for a moment. And she was right. Suddenly it was funny. Suddenly they both knew what was coming, and the knowing of it made her wary attempt at disclosure seem ridiculous. Michael decided to go with the smile, even though a dull ache was already lodging between his ribs.
He leant back and put his feet on a chair. “But who’s on their books who could handle something like that?” he said. “I wonder…”
She looked back at him. “It would be two weeks. Max.”
“When?”
“As soon as we can get visas and travel sorted. And a fixer, but I’ve…” She trailed off.
“But you’re already on to that,” he said.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
And then it wasn’t funny anymore, as if the humour they’d discovered had been sucked out of the room with her confirmation.
Pushing herself from the work surface, she came to him, lifting his legs and placing them on her lap as she sat down.
“It wouldn’t be Afghanistan,” she said. “We’d do it all from Pakistan.”
“Would it be safe?” he asked.
She shrugged. “As safe as it can be.”
She leant forward and took his hands.
“It’s a really important one, Mikey. His uncle, the sources he’s mentioned. No one’s had this kind of access before. No one. I mean anywhere. We’d be the first. And the group he’s with, this kid, they actually want to talk. They want to tell their side of the story. And so does he.”
He knew, as he stroked the back of her hand and she squeezed the fingers of his, that he could only go with this. He could only ride the contours of her desire, and that somewhere under that deepening ache in his ribs, that was also what he wanted. It was what they’d promised each other from the start. To help each other be happy, whatever that meant.
He lifted his feet off her lap and leant forward, taking her face in his hands. “Just,” he said, kissing her lightly, “be careful.”
Her lips were warm, and as she kissed him back, pulling him to her, her mouth tasted of the onion she’d been eating as she cooked.
“Thank you,” she whispered, putting her arms about his neck. “I owe you one Mikey boy.”
CHAPTER FOUR
WHEN CAROLINE WAS killed, Michael brought so little back to London he made the move himself, loading his belongings into the back of their Volvo. He’d decided to sell Coed y Bryn fully furnished. Everything within it was resonant with her. Over the last week Caroline’s family had flown over and passed through its rooms, taking certain personal items and anything else they wanted. Michael, too, had kept a few of the smaller mementos: photographs, a box of ticket stubs and cards, a Dictaphone recording of the answer-phone message she’d left him that night in Hammersmith. But everything else he’d let go. The buyers of the cottage took the furniture. He gave her clothes, which he kept seeing filled with her body, to a local charity shop. He wanted to remember Caroline, but under his own volition, not ambushed by the objects around him.
He’d arrived late in South Hill Drive, the car’s engine sounding too loud, too clumsy between the curving banks of town houses, their windows lit with autumn domesticity. There was no space outside Peter’s flat, so Michael double-parked to unload his belongings onto the pavement. He wondered for a moment whether he should leave them unguarded as he parked the car farther up the street. But a glance along its tree-lined camber reassured him. The gentle incline was unpeopled and split into a loop that went nowhere but back on itself. In the aerial view Michael had seen online the shape of the street resembled an old-fashioned tennis racket strung with trees, an accidental growth ballooning from London’s mosaic into the green spaces of the Heath.