On Saturday night, she took him for a birthday meal at a restaurant on the Banbury Road. She’d looked at the menu once or twice when she was a student and laughed at the prices; now they only seemed average. The dining room sat inside a wrought-iron conservatory, filled with fronded plants and fairy lights, a true winter garden. Ellie thought it was magical; Doug just looked uncomfortable. When the waitress arranged his napkin on his lap, he sat stiff as a corpse until she’d gone. If she came and poured more wine, he’d break off whatever he was saying and stare awkwardly at his plate. Ellie barely noticed her.
Doug tried to order risotto, the cheapest dish on the menu. Ellie overruled it and ordered him a rib-eye steak, with a bottle of Saint-Émilion, which she thought she remembered from one of her dinners with Blanchard.
‘It’s your birthday,’ she reminded him. ‘We should celebrate.’
She handed over the small box and watched anxiously as he opened it.
‘A watch.’
It was Omega, bought from Brussels Duty Free for a price that owed more to guilt than value. Without much enthusiasm, Doug slipped off his own watch to try it on.
‘You didn’t have to,’ he murmured. ‘The old one works fine.’
She remembered it had been a present from his father when he graduated.
‘A change might be nice, once in a while.’ To her guilty ears, even that simple sentiment was heavy with double-meaning. She cringed. Had Doug noticed?
I am not going to ruin his birthday.
He raised his glass. ‘It’s nice to see you.’
‘Happy birthday.’ They chinked their glasses tentatively, as if afraid of breaking something.
‘I was thinking about Christmas,’ Doug said. ‘I know it’s late, but perhaps we could go away, get a cottage somewhere. Maybe even go abroad. The college gave me a travel bursary for Paris and there’s some money left over. I suppose you could afford it.’ He reached across the table and put his hand on hers. ‘We could use some time together.’
Ellie squirmed. I’m sleeping with someone else. She wanted to scream it, so loud the glass walls would shatter, the roof fall in and the cosy warmth blow away into the night.
‘I promised Mum I’d spend Christmas with her.’
By Christmas, you’ll never want to see me again, she thought.
She couldn’t bear to see his disappointment — a proxy for all the ways he didn’t know she’d let him down. ‘Maybe in February, for our anniversary.’
I am not going to ruin his birthday.
Doug fingered the metal strap of his new watch as if it itched.
‘How’s your work going?’ she tried.
His face brightened. ‘Very well. You remember the poem I told you about, the old guy in the wheelchair? I sent him some preliminary thoughts and he liked them a lot. Invited me up to Scotland to see the original. Offered to pay for my train fare and everything.’
‘When are you going?’
‘I went. Last weekend. He said I could bring my girlfriend, but you were in Brussels or somewhere.’
Always the reproach. In a way, she drew strength from it. It made it easier to think about what she had to do.
‘How was it?’
‘Amazing. You should have seen this place. I had to change trains at Edinburgh and again at Inverness. This gnarled old gillie type picked me up from the station in his Land Rover, drove me about an hour into the mountains. Just when I thought we must be completely lost, we came over the ridge and there’s this castle on a hill rising up out of the forest. Forget Scots Baronial revival — this was the real thing, probably fourteenth century. You could still see the moat, though someone had tried to turn it into a ha-ha when they landscaped the gardens in the eighteen hundreds.’
The waitress brought their food.
‘It was almost dark when we got there. The gillie led me into this great medieval hall, tapestries and hammer beams and a fireplace you could park a car in. There was a table with twenty chairs and one place set — for me. Apparently, Mr Spencer couldn’t make it for dinner but would join me afterwards.’
He saw the flash of surprise on Ellie’s face. ‘Mr Spencer’s the chap in the wheelchair. Anyway, it was all kind of eerie. There were about a hundred dead deer on the walls and they all seemed to be staring at me while I ate. Venison, to make it worse. And after supper, Spencer rolled in with his minder and brought out this leather case. Inside was a single leaf of parchment with the poem on it, hand-written in gall ink.’
‘Was it genuine?’
Doug sliced off a piece of steak, relishing it. ‘I’m no expert, but it looked pretty authentic to me. You could see where the acid had etched into the parchment. I asked if he’d had any tests done and the minder said the parchment had been authenticated as twelfth century. Twelfth century, for God’s sake. He hadn’t had the handwriting done, because he didn’t want anyone to read it. Fair enough. I told him I didn’t know much about palaeography, but the text certainly rang true for that period.’
‘So what did he want you to do with it?’
‘Mr Spencer thinks the poem’s a riddle. He thinks it leads to buried treasure or something.’ Doug rolled his eyes. ‘At least, that’s what the minder said. The old man never says a word. Just sits there sucking on his respirator.’
Ellie topped up the wine glasses. ‘So what do you think?’
‘There’s a riddle all right, but it’s nothing to do with lost treasures.’ He leaned across the table, cupping his glass in his hand. ‘The real question is, who wrote it?’
It was obvious from his face he had an idea, that it excited him very much. Ellie played along with a wide-eyed stare. ‘And?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
She slapped his wrist across the table. ‘Cheat.’
He gave a shamefaced grin. ‘I’d love to. But I signed a confidentiality agreement.’ He inclined his head towards the next table, where a group of dressed-up young men and women were laughing loudly. He lowered his voice to a mock whisper. ‘You never know who could be listening.’
They’re listening, Ellie. All the time. Suddenly, the glass room felt more like a cage than a garden. She pulled her shawl over her shoulders. Doug didn’t notice.
‘I stayed up half the night poring over the parchment. The poem’s only eight lines long, but I wanted to remember every detail, every fibre in the parchment. I drank it up. In the morning the housekeeper rolled it up and put it away, the gillie drove me back to the station, and I was trundling back to Oxford.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed the whole thing.’
Talking about the trip to Scotland had warmed Doug up. He no longer looked offended by the restaurant. He tucked into his steak with unfeigned enthusiasm; the wine flowed out of the bottle until it was empty. When the waitress took their plates and asked if they wanted pudding, Ellie glanced across the table and saw a familiar suggestive smile on Doug’s face.
‘Just the bill.’
Afterwards, Ellie knew it was unforgivable. She should have told him the truth. But somehow it was never the right time. On Saturday night they slept together for the first time in weeks — a birthday present and a farewell all wrapped in one — and when she woke on Sunday morning Doug was already in the kitchen cooking her breakfast. They walked through the University Parks, pale with frost and winter sun, and each time Ellie thought she’d summoned her courage the moment seemed too good to spoil. Maybe it was nervous energy, or the delicate knowledge it was almost over, but she felt closer to him than she had in months. All her senses were heightened: the smell of his coat when she snuggled against him on a park bench; the touch of his lips when he kissed her; the laughter as they sat outside the Turf Tavern drinking mulled wine. The intensity reminded her of their first few weeks together. Before she knew it, she was sitting on a train pulling out of Oxford station and she still hadn’t told him.