And Simon said, ‘I’ll see you all in a couple of weeks anyway, right?’
‘At your parents’, yeah,’ said Jess.
‘Not me,’ said Emmanuella. ‘I must be in Madrid all summer.’
And Simon let out a roar and charged at Emmanuella. She screamed as he lifted her up to the stars and crunched a martini glass under his sandal, letting out all the glitter and bubbles. He spun her around, the orange dress streaming out behind her like underwater seaweed, and crushed her to him in a hug and set her down giggling and gasping on to the grass.
He looked around.
‘Anyone else?’
We shook our heads.
‘Right then,’ and he beat his chest at the sky and he and Franny went to bed.
Not long after that Lars arrived for Emmanuella. He crashed through the garden to reach us, and when he emerged, he appeared downcast and serious, even though he had arrived so late, and so clumsily and with such an obvious purpose. Emmanuella allowed him to help her to her feet and I thought, I never understood her at all, never knew a particle of who she was. She wished us goodnight graciously and the orange dress swirled in the grass and I could tell that Lars was impatient to his fingers’ ends to be touching her. I found I felt amused, with only the tiniest flicker of smoky jealousy at the edge of my thoughts.
And then we were three. We sat among the remnants of the picnic, eating an olive or quail’s egg from time to time. We lit several of the storm-lantern candles dotted around the edges of the lawn and they cast a gentle light. We drank a little more, peering into the bottles’ ends to see whether every drop had gone, and buoyed by our own lightness we stayed up a little longer and a little longer.
It was 3 a.m. and Jess had already fallen asleep several times for a moment or two in my arms when she whispered that she was so tired she had to go to bed. Through her starched pale pink shirt, her breasts pushed against my chest as she kissed me goodnight. I placed my hand between her shoulder blades and pulled her down for a kiss: wet, open-mouthed, her body resting on mine, pushing down into me. Her left leg was between mine. I could feel the pressure of her pelvis on my stomach, the slight friction. Mark, lying on his back next to me, heel to head, sat up and said, ‘Oh, just go and fuck already.’ Jess’s eyes were half-closing with sleep and she smiled and shook her head a little. She lay for a while along my body, and then gently disentangled herself and went to bed.
‘It’s nearly dawn,’ said Mark. ‘We should be facing east at a time like this.’
I looked and saw that at the edge of the world a thin line of blue had cracked open the black and glittering sky. One or two birds had noticed this too; a bubbling warble came from the holly hedge. So we repaired, with the final bottle of champagne, to the huge swing chair suspended from a low-hanging oak branch and sat in silence for a while watching the crack of light widen and day enter the world again. I found myself thinking, perhaps this will be the last time, perhaps I’ll be sent down after those exams, perhaps this is all I was ever going to get.
And without quite meaning to I said aloud, ‘I’m afraid I’ll never get to come here again.’
Mark was lying back in the swing chair, one foot trailing near the ground. He gave it a push and we rocked gently.
‘I’m not going to throw you out, am I?’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s not that.’
‘You can come here whenever you like.’
I took a breath and spoke. ‘I might fail,’ I said. ‘I might be sent down. I really might.’
I hadn’t said it to Jess, not like this. She believed in thinking positively, in not allowing doubts to enter one’s mind.
‘Yeah,’ said Mark. ‘I might too, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?’
‘I’d have to go back home.’
‘Don’t see why. If you get sent down you can carry on living here, can’t you?’
‘Really?’
‘Of course. You could go to Brookes or something if you wanted. There’s no reason …’ He toed the grass thoughtfully. ‘There’s no reason we all can’t go on living here forever, you know.’
‘Forever?’
Mark dug his heel into the ground and set the swing going again.
‘Why not? Why not forever? The house is big enough, and we could make it as we liked it, and change it when we wanted. Why should it ever end?’
‘I should think we’ll want to get jobs, won’t we? Simon wants to be Prime Minister.’
Mark wrinkled his nose. ‘Oh, jobs. Well, he can be Prime Minister from here, can’t he?’
He sat up and jabbed at the ground with both heels, sending the swing arcing back, his legs held stiff in front of him.
‘Yes, if you just rename the house Chequers, I expect that’d sort it.’
Mark laughed.
‘See? It’s not so hard. But really, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re welcome here. Especially after …’
He looked at me and then at his feet. The swing had come to a halt again, and he kicked gently at the dandelion clouds among the grass.
‘It was OK. She couldn’t be as angry with me as she could with you, you know? It was fine.’
‘It was good,’ said Mark. ‘You were good. It was more than I deserved. Do you know,’ he spoke quickly, ‘do you know I mentioned you in confession? What I did to you the first night, I am sorry for it, with the hash cake. I am sorry. I had a penance for it particularly. And all the other clumsy things. I am so often stupid, but I am sorry. Do you think we can be friends?’
He said this with the simple sincerity of a child and I found that I could not help responding in the same way.
‘Yes, I hope so,’ I said.
He hugged me then, briefly, one arm thrown around my shoulders, and I hugged him back.
Afterwards, we sat for a while in silence beneath the vast, lightening skyful of stars. While some cover of darkness still remained, he started to talk, quite slowly and precisely, about his mother. He told me about her four marriages ‘so far’ and her lovers and her strange oeuvre of 1960s movies and her exotically aristocratic relatives and her house in California with the macrobiotic chef.
‘For a long time we only had each other,’ he said at one point.
Then later, after he had told the story of how his mother set one of his father’s Jaguars on fire during their divorce, he said, ‘It doesn’t sound quite normal, does it?’
And I said, ‘She’s not like my mother. But I don’t think normal’s so great either.’
He said, ‘I’m so fucking embarrassed, you know? That you all had to put up with her and her weirdness and Father Hugh and … I’m just so fucking embarrassed.’
And I said, ‘You don’t have anything to be embarrassed about. She’s horrible to you, but she was charming to us.’
He looked at me gratefully. A long, careful look.
He put one foot on the ground to steady himself, leaned forward, rested his hand on my upper arm and pressed his lips to mine. There was a moment’s pause. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. Neither of us moved. He blinked. I put a hand between us, resting it in the centre of his chest, and pushed him off.
I said, ‘Mark, you know that I don’t, you know. I’m just not attracted to men.’
‘Jesus, James, I’m sorry. Must be the drink. Fuck. I didn’t mean anything by it. It was just, you know …’
‘It’s fine, Mark. Really. It’s fine.’
We sat for a few moments in silence, until the loud, fluid song of the blackbird began. All at once, the dawn chorus rose up like jungle chattering, wild and insistent, without any possibility of comprehension. We staggered into the house and wished each other goodnight.