‘You mean, what’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like that? It all started with Great-Granddad. It was a great interest of his. Surely you knew that?’
‘Well, yes. He mentioned it a couple of times, something about the Bible, ancient Israel, the life of Jesus. I can’t really remember any detail. And he went to Israel several times, I know that. Jerusalem, mostly. All the same, I never knew it was any sort of big thing with him.’
‘Have you never looked through his library?’
‘I’ve glanced through it a couple of times.’
She gave him the sort of look a woman gives a man who is proving not quite with it.
She took the skillet and started to heat olive oil on top of the gas ring.
‘And you’re telling me you never noticed his books about biblical archaeology?’
‘Maybe, I can’t remember. I was only interested in fiction. I wanted ripping yarns to read on my hols, that’s all. And when I was in my teens I sometimes wondered if the old dog had any…well, off-colour stuff.’
The look again.
‘Don’t say anything more. I don’t want to know about your taste in porn.’
‘It wasn’t exactly… I was a spotty teenager. Anyway, I never found any.’
‘I shall have to keep a very close eye on you, Ethan. Perhaps I won’t marry you after all. Now, as I was saying, Great-Granddad built up a remarkable collection of books on the subject. Taught himself some Hebrew and Greek, messed about with Latin. The collection isn’t very systematic, but it’s full of good things. I used to pop over here a lot when I was an undergraduate.’
The rice went in, along with the onions. A warm smell rose from the pan.
‘I never bumped into you.’
‘I kept away from you. I had a strong feeling you were a lecherous old man, and now I know I was right. Now, keep quiet and let me get on with this.’ She paused. ‘What was I saying? Yes, when I was in my teens, he talked to me about his interests and started suggesting that I might study languages and maybe study Hebrew and some archaeology. He even paid for me to go on visits to the Holy Land. Took me with him once.’
‘I knew about none of this. He never talked of it.’
She added some wine, then two ladles of the stock. As the rice started to absorb the liquid, the mixture began to look like a risotto.
She turned to him, a pensive look on her face.
‘Never?’
‘Not to me. Maybe my father, maybe someone else. But I’ve only heard about it now. I knew you had a degree from Oxford, and a PhD and so on, but that was the full extent of it. I’m sorry I wasn’t more curious. You must think I’ve been negligent.’
She shook her head, and her expression changed, for her flippancy in finding him slow on the uptake had passed, and with it the little impatience she had felt. She had just started her degree eight years earlier, only a month or two after her aunt Abi had been killed. How on earth would he have found time or a space in his mind to enquire after the doings of a niece to whom he had never been particularly close? Their families had had a falling out years earlier, Ethan’s brother James — Sarah’s father — had argued with their father and things had festered.
‘You weren’t to blame,’ she said. ‘There was the feud, then…what happened to Aunt Abi. Actually, if I’m to be honest, I didn’t try to see you back then. I was just nineteen, and I was afraid of you. Because of what happened to Abi. What happened to her frightened me a great deal. I thought you might have taken it badly, that you might not be someone I could cope with. I heard of you from time to time, and I thought you might be bitter. I let a lot of time go by. We just have to make up for that.’
He nodded, but said nothing. Sarah had been right. He hadn’t added things up until now, but his life since Abi’s murder had been a blur, not quite a life in any real meaning of the term. He’d relearnt the basic skills of meeting and working with people, but for most of the time he’d been a recluse, leaving work for an empty flat and a takeaway, falling asleep in front of the television most nights, avoiding the constant temptation to drown his sorrows in drink. His colleagues regarded him as a loner, good at his job, but no use for a night out in the pub. Even after eight years, a dark depression could descend on him out of nowhere and cripple him for days. Last night and today were the first occasions he’d talked to anyone properly in all that time. Suddenly, the thought of Sarah leaving filled him with a puzzling dread.
‘Apart from being brainy,’ he went on, ‘is there anything else in your life? Books, music, men?’
‘You’re trawling. All of them, if you must know. Well, not so many men, as it happens…’
‘You must get plenty of offers.’
She frowned.
‘Offers? Yes, I suppose so. I turn them all down.’
‘Please don’t tell me…’
Her frown deepened, but she shook her head.
‘No, it’s not that. I like men. I’d like to get married one day and have children and all that. It’s just…’
She hesitated, and he sensed that she didn’t want to be pushed, that he’d have to wait for her to say whatever it was she had difficulty in saying.
‘After I graduated, one of my lecturers asked me out. Dr Gardner. Jeremy Gardner. We…got involved. At first it was just sex, but as time went by it turned into a proper love affair. He was ten years older than me and married, but unhappily. It lasted over two years, and he was talking seriously about getting a divorce and marrying me. It turns out, he did file for divorce, but that…’
She stopped talking and took a slow breath.
‘It’s all right,’ said Ethan, ‘you don’t have to go on.’
She looked directly at him, and he saw something troubled in her eyes. As if she was haunted, as if she could see ghosts.
‘It’s all right. I’d like to tell you. But keep it to yourself. Nobody else in the family even knows I had a lover, let alone… Something happened. Jeremy was a climber. He would go away for a month or more at a time, climbing one peak after another, each one higher and more difficult than the last. That year, the team he was with chose Nanga Parbat in Kashmir. He was about halfway up when a piton broke and he fell onto a ridge and broke his back. I didn’t hear about it at first. He’d kept me secret. I didn’t even get to go to the funeral.’
She came to a halt. All the time she’d been speaking, she’d been stirring the rice. Now she added the prawns in generous spoonfuls; they were large and pink. The cheese, which looked like cheddar, added a final touch of flavour. She grated it into thick yellow ribbons and spooned them into the risotto. As they melted, she stirred them softly until they vanished into the soupy mixture.
While the risotto settled, Ethan laid two places at the table, using Christmas plates that had already been set out for the lunch that had not taken place. He found a bottle of sparkling white wine and two fluted glasses to go with it. And he lit the candles.
When he finished setting the table, Sarah had already conjured a light green salad from the fridge and sprinkled it with an Italian dressing. She put the bowl in the centre of the table, and Ethan hurried off to find servers. Finally, the risotto was lined up alongside the salad, and all was ready.
With one mouthful he was smitten.
‘This is delicious. A pity I’m your uncle and you’re my niece.’
She gave him a curious look, as if what he’d just said was not quite what it should have been. Then she smiled.