She could feel the tightness of his muscles, and knew that such moments were the closest he could come to being relaxed, like a compressed spring that was never fully unwound. Ben never spoke about the bad things in his life, but Michaela sometimes saw the pain that seared his blue eyes like lightning in a summer sky. Things she was too young to understand, even though she was only eleven months younger than he was. Hers had been a sheltered life, up until now. His had not. That was all she knew, but she wanted to make him happy because she loved him with every molecule of her being, more than she could ever have imagined it was possible to love anyone.
Some days, it seemed he could never be happy. Tonight, she thought he could.
No words. Just being. Listening. Enjoying. The voice of the organ drifted down from the cathedral tower and echoed through the darkness of the cloister, mingling with the night air. In those hours when the college slept, nobody minded. Nick could play until dawn if he wanted to, because as organ scholar he had the keys to the ancient studded oak door in the far corner of the cloister, which led up the narrow staircase to the hidden chamber where the heart of the instrument lay.
He’d started his practice after midnight. Just messing around at first: the opening Hammond organ riff from the rock classic ‘Smoke on the Water’ by Deep Purple had made Michaela chuckle. Jon Lord was one of Nick’s organ heroes he often raved about. Johann Sebastian Bach was the other; and now the organ was filling the sweet night air with the haunting, cascading music of a minor-key fugue, its lines intertwining and swooping and soaring like the flight of birds — or so she pictured it. The music seemed to pulse with its own life, making her think about the new life that pulsed inside her, so fragile, so tiny, yet growing imperceptibly each day.
Michaela hadn’t told him yet. She hadn’t told anyone. She was still waiting for the right moment, afraid of what Ben’s reaction might be. Terrified, too, of what her parents would say when she broke the news to them. She was only eighteen. So many plans had been made for her future. Now, she suddenly no longer had any idea what lay ahead. Doubts often gripped her. Would she and Ben have a life together? What would it be like? He could be so wild, even reckless. Michaela worried that her family would never accept him.
She reached up and ran her fingers through Ben’s hair. Ever so gently, he grasped her hand and kissed it.
‘I love you,’ she whispered.
‘I love you too,’ he murmured in reply, and the sound of it, and her total and complete faith in his sincerity, rocked her heart and made her want to cry with happiness.
If the baby was a boy, she’d already decided she wanted to call him Jude.
Chapter 9
Ben returned to the college on foot rather than taking a bus. The April sunshine was warm, and he took off his leather jacket and slung it over his shoulder as he walked. He liked walking, because it forced him to slow down. And because he could smoke without getting arrested, even though he was almost out of Gauloises.
On Ben’s way back towards the city centre he walked by a beggar who was slumped in a doorway opposite St John’s College. He was a man in his forties with sunken cheeks and matted hair and a cardboard sign made from a torn-up box that said HUNGRY + HOMLESS PLESE HELP. No knife. That counted for something. No dog, either. Some of these guys used their pets to extract sympathy from folks, when in fact it wasn’t the animal’s best interests they were most concerned about. Ben had once triggered one of them into a rage by giving him canned dog meat instead of money. But this guy looked as genuine as he did pitiful. Ben stopped and dug out from his pocket the fifty pounds he’d taken from the crusty. ‘Here you go, buddy,’ he said, and walked on as the guy sat there clutching his money and staring after him.
Ben spent the next couple of hours wandering through the grounds of Christ Church Meadow and down to the river beyond. The air was full of spring and the scent of daffodils as he followed the footpath along the bank of the Isis to the college boathouses, where he stopped a while and watched the shimmer of the sunlight on the water, letting thoughts and memories play freely through his mind.
For all the bittersweet emotions it kindled for Ben to be back here, Oxford was an undeniably beautiful place to live and he was happy that Nick had found his niche here, enjoying a normal and safe and happily closeted existence doing what he loved. Just like Simeon and Michaela, in the cosy comfortable warmth of the country vicarage not far from Oxford. Normal people, living out their blissfully sheltered lives. Until one day, the real world reached out and snapped them up and it was over.
Ben wondered what it must be like to be a normal person like the members of the old gang. He envied them in a lot of ways, but at the same time he knew that if he had his own life to live all over again, most of the choices he’d made in his time, however crazy or reckless they might have seemed on the outside, would remain unchanged. Maybe he was simply preordained, deep down in his DNA, not to be like normal folks.
Afterwards he slowly made his way back up the path and past the moored narrowboats and river cruisers to Folly Bridge, where he rejoined the busy streets and headed up past Tom Tower and the front of Christ Church to the city centre. Remembering that he was short on cigarettes he strolled down the High Street in search of the venerable pipe shop and tobacconist’s he used to frequent long ago, only to find to his chagrin that it had closed down and become a blasted travel agent.
But some things hadn’t changed. He crossed the street and walked inside the old covered market, which was exactly as he remembered it from years ago. He spent a while exploring, and bought a bottle of good wine to drink in his room later that evening after the concert. Thinking of the concert made him think of the dinner in Hall that would precede it, which in turn brought to mind that Seraphina’s email had stipulated that gowns had to be worn for the event. With mixed feelings Ben recrossed the street and walked down to the university outfitters to buy one. There were different types of academic gowns, depending on status. Ben’s lowly status required a Commoners’ gown, which was a truncated waist-length affair made of flimsy black material that made you look like some kind of half-arsed Batman. His very first action on dropping out of university all those years ago had been to douse his gown with lighter fluid and torch it. The new one was identical. Ben hated the thing, but rules were rules.
Dinner was dinner, too. Feeling stupid in his gown, Ben found himself seated among strangers and said little to anyone. It was his second depressing social experience of the day, and he left before the main course. He ditched the gown, jogged up the hill to the centre, bought fish and chips at Carfax Chippy, and took the satisfyingly greasy package back to Old Library 7 where he washed it down with some of his wine. In France, drinking claret this good straight from the bottle would probably have been regarded as a crime of sorts, but what the hell. Then it was time for the concert, to which he was looking forward in the hopes of seeing Nick again.
It was a leisurely thirty-second walk around the corner from Old Library to the arched doorway of the cathedral. The famous Seraphina Lewis was there on duty, as diligent as an army sentry but a lot noisier, to meet and greet the arrivals, tick off names on a register and usher them through the grand entrance. Ben liked cathedrals, not because he was particularly pious, but for their serenity. As a student, he’d often attended evensong and other choral services, just to drink in the atmosphere.