Tim shook his head. ‘You don’t see it, Ange, but Nick gets so excited every time Michael comes home two nights in a row. He does this thing, you know, when we’ve been out and we’re coming home: just as we turn the corner into our road, his shoulders come up and he peers round the bend. At first I thought he was worried about finding the house had been burgled again. Took me ages to realise he was looking to see if the lights were on ’cos Michael’s home. It’s like he can’t stop himself from hoping, even though he knows better.’
‘Well maybe one time his dad will get it together and it really will be the start of something better,’ Ange said, following Tim back to the kitchen.
‘Nick’s been living with Michael since he was eleven. If it hasn’t changed by now—’
‘You’re not jealous, are you?’
‘Why would I be jealous? I may not have parents any more, but at least mine wanted me— Forget I said that,’ Tim said, squeezing his eyes shut. ‘I never said that.’
‘I didn’t mean like that. I meant that if Michael were around a bit more, then Nick wouldn’t be.’
‘Oh, thanks, Ange. That’s really nice. Like I’d prefer Nick to be unhappy just so he’s available at my convenience. Thanks for the charming compliment.’ He lurched to his feet and stalked out of the room, drowning whatever she called after him in the noise of his footsteps on the stairs.
In the bathroom, he let the cold water run over his hands, splashed some on his cheeks, across his forehead. In the mirror, his face looked flushed and hurt and guilty.
Chapter 32
(15 × August [Long Vacation])
Nick didn’t say anything when Tim put the vodka down on the patio. When he lifted the bottle for the first long, deep swallow, Nick turned to watch him, but by the time he lowered it again, Nick was looking up at the stars.
The bite and burn were a pain he could grasp: tangible, specific. Something to distract him from the other pain that just was. As if it were too huge for him to feel.
When he lowered the bottle for the fifth time, Nick held out his hand. Wiping his sleeve across his mouth, Tim passed it over, watching as Nick sipped, grimaced, then sipped again before handing it back.
‘It’s nicer with orange,’ Nick said.
‘I’m not drinking it for the taste.’ His voice came out sharp and unpleasant.
Nick shrugged. ‘Doesn’t mean it can’t taste nice too.’
Tim sighed, glared down at the bottle. ‘Maybe next year. Perhaps it’ll make me a nicer drunk.’ He took another swallow then set the bottle clumsily aside, letting his hands drop between his knees as he craned back to look up at the sky. ‘Stupid light pollution. Saw a picture of the stars above Lake Titicaca in Peru once. Like looking through a telescope and we’ve got …’ He made an uncoordinated gesture.
‘Yeah, but Cambridge isn’t about the sky, it’s about the ground. The buildings, the gardens … It’s as beautiful as anything man-made anywhere on Earth and we get to go pretty much wherever we want, whenever we want.’
‘Not in the mood to count my blessings,’ Tim growled. ‘I’ll feel lucky and privileged tomorrow.’
Nick flicked a glance over at him but didn’t comment. Tim watched him lean back on his hands, swinging his feet over the edge of the drop-off to the lower half of the garden. For once he looked perfectly at ease, as if he were quite happy to sit there and watch the dull grey and orange sky until morning.
Tim took a fast, burning pull from the bottle, hunching over to stare down at the grass below his bare feet.
‘My sister called,’ he said, though he hadn’t intended to voice the thought. ‘Made everything worse. She sounded so happy. I want to be happy for her. Just not today.’ He didn’t want to hear about how she was starting to build a new family so she could forget about the one she’d lost and left behind in England. ‘I knew when she went over there that she wasn’t coming back but at the wedding … The way she stood there with her in-laws, glowing as she looked up at them … She only misses us now when she has to.’
He sighed, mumbling a curse when he heard his breath hitch. From a surly drunk to a weepy one: what a gamut of fun. A bark of laughter escaped, startling him. And his breath hitched again.
Nick had gone very still next to him.
Something touched his sleeve tentatively.
‘I know we’re both manly macho guys,’ a nervous intake of breath, ‘but I don’t mind, you know, if you need a hug once in a while.’
His own words, but in Nick’s voice, little more than a whisper, hesitant and shy.
He wanted to laugh, wanted to say, ‘My night on the rota?’ and carry it off as a joke, maybe accept the briefest of mutual back-slapping embraces, but the laugh came out wrong and the words didn’t come out at all.
He had turned before he knew it, hands clenched in the back of Nick’s T-shirt, pressing his face into Nick’s shoulder.
For just a second, Nick froze. Then he relaxed and his hands came up to grasp Tim’s shirt in return.
Nick must have felt the sob, even though Tim gritted his teeth over it, choked the sound back down his throat.
Nick’s fingers flexed ever so slightly against his back. Then, with a soft sigh he rested his head against Tim’s shoulder in return, tightened his grip.
The pain burned in his throat, behind his eyes, in his chest, for what could have been an hour or a handful of minutes.
When he finally pulled away, Nick matched him movement for movement until they were sitting side by side once more. For a span of heartbeats, Tim felt Nick tense on the verge of speaking, then he sat back and turned his attention to the sky once more.
A plane blinked mournfully from one horizon to the other.
An hour later, Nick stretched with a huge yawn. ‘How about some hot chocolate?’
Looking up into his face, Tim saw nothing but an easy smile: no comments, no questions.
He nodded.
In the morning, Tim made himself two extra cups of coffee. He didn’t thank Nick and Nick didn’t ask him if he was all right.
Chapter 33
(28 × August [Long Vacation])
In the morning they visited Professor Gosswin. Although it was Nick’s birthday, he took her flowers: a bunch of imperial purple sweet peas. The Professor’s mouth lifted on one side as he put them down on the table by her chair.
‘Sut,’ she slurred, gesturing at the chair opposite. ‘Play. ’N’ ’im.’ She inclined her head in Tim’s direction. ‘Two ugainst one. Beat,’ a breath, ‘you birth,’ she promised.
And promptly did.
When Nick bent to kiss her cheek, she slapped gently at his shoulder then reached up a shaking hand, patted gently at his face. ‘Frst class,’ she said. ‘Always frst class.’ A snort. ‘Nut with chess.’
‘Not with chess,’ Nick agreed, ladling books out of his backpack on to her bed. When he looked up, she was smiling at him. He watched her eyes move to Tim and then back. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’ve been reading your book. I think maybe I get it now.’
‘Sluw,’ she said.
Nick huffed a laugh. ‘We’ll see you soon.’
When Tim turned back in the doorway to raise his hand in a wave more like a salute, he didn’t recognise the expression on her face.
‘Learnin’,’ she said. ‘Cle-ver boys. Learnin’.’
Though clouds loured over the village as they walked back to the station, the rain held off and by the time they were back in Cambridge, turning down Garret Hostel Lane, the sun had come out.
Ange and Susie were reclining together at the back of one of the College punts, directing Frank’s efforts to load an extraordinarily large wicker hamper.
‘Nick! Tim!’ Ange squealed, springing to her feet and rocking the punt so badly Frank nearly pitched overboard.
‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Nick!’ called Susie.
‘Um, happy birthday and all that?’ Tim suggested.
‘What does this look like?’ Susie asked, gesturi
ng at the hamper.
‘Frank trying to butter you up?’ Nick asked.
‘Yeah, well, I’m sharing the bounty,’ Susie said. ‘Though I don’t see why I should, since “Do you fancy punting up to Granchester tomorrow?” does not in any way convey that this is a birthday party. Especially one that involves Frank, given that he’s meant to be on a yacht or at the very least the other side of London.’ She pointed an elegant finger at Nick. ‘You—’
‘Oooo, pretty, pretty sparklies!’ Ange cried, seizing Susie’s hand to examine her nails.
‘All accounted for?’ Tim asked as he reached over to unlock the padlock that chained the punt to an iron ring on the College’s lower wall.
‘Cast off, good sir!’ cried Ange. ‘Onwards! Onwards! To victory and … well, not so much “glory of the realm”, but Granchester’s not so bad.’
With the faintest bump against the wall, the punt sailed into open water. A deft thrust saw Tim turn them upriver.
‘Near-perfect technique,’ Susie said. ‘I don’t know you yet, but I like you.’
Tim grinned, doffing an imaginary cap to her, then returning Frank’s glare with a grin. ‘Going to have to work on your punting skills, old chap. But first, to the order of the day: a certain birthday—’
‘Hey, how about a celebratory bridge hop, birthday boy?’ Frank asked. ‘Go on, I dare you.’
‘No!’ said Tim. ‘No way. We’ve already done a hit-and-run and pneumonia this year. We’re not doing head-injury-by-bridge or drowning.’
‘What’s bridge hopping?’ Nick asked.
‘It doesn’t matter because you’re not—’
‘It’s when you climb on to a bridge as the punt passes underneath, run across the top, then jump down into the punt as it passes on the other side,’ Frank said with a wicked grin at Tim.
‘That sounds—’
‘No. No. No. No and completely not!’ Tim sighed as Nick’s face closed up. He squeezed his eyes shut. ‘On your eighteenth birthday, when doing stupid things is your prerogative and entirely your own responsibility because you’re officially and legally a grown-up, we will do a bridge-hopping trip up the Granta. This is my only offer.’
He expected Nick to look happy, not equal parts wistful and surprised. ‘My eighteenth?’ he said softly.
‘Provided you don’t die agreeing to Frank’s more idiotic ideas in the meantime,’ Tim said, searching Nick’s face for an explanation for that odd look. ‘You know perfectly well that Bill is going to ask me what we did today and I do not want to have to tell him a humungous fib about why I’ve delivered you home half-dead instead of in the same state of health as you woke up in.’
‘Champagne!’ Ange crowed as she delved into the hamper.
‘Apparently even you have your moments, Frank,’ Susie said as he popped the cork.
He handed the bottle to Ange, lolling back in his seat as she passed him a glass. ‘I could get used to this,’ he said, trailing his free hand through the water. ‘Champagne in the sunshine and double the usual eye candy.’
‘Aw, Frank. Didn’t realise you’d noticed,’ said Tim, giving him a wink. ‘Back atcha, cutie.’
‘To the birthday boy!’ cried Ange, squirming to her knees so she could reach over to chink glasses with Nick. She started a rousing chorus of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, which was promptly taken up in six-part harmony by a passing punt.
‘And many more!’ they roared, Ange and Susie craning round to toast their fellow singers.
‘I love Cambridge,’ breathed Susie. ‘I am never leaving.’
‘Why would you leave?’ asked Ange, wide-eyed. ‘Why would anyone ever leave?’
Bill was there when they got home. Michael was running late.
In the end, by the time they’d laughed and fought their way through a chaotic attempt to cook Nick’s grandmother’s lemon cake, dealt with the enormous mess that was the kitchen, then taken entirely necessary showers to clean up, it was past nine-thirty and none of them fancied dinner anyway.
‘Dad says he’ll be home in half an hour, so let’s just wait. Then we can all have cake together,’ said Nick.
‘Who knew cooking was such good exercise?’ groaned Tim, resting his head on the table. ‘Hope you’ve got your wish all sorted, ’cos I tell you, if you’re not swift with the candle-extinguishing and cake-cutting I may just fall asleep in my chair and nose-dive into the icing.’
‘You know what I’ve always hated about maths?’
‘What? Who?’ Tim lifted his head, blinking blearily at Nick. ‘I hope that was not a propros of your birthday wish, ’cos if it was—’
‘It’s … related,’ Nick said, flushing. ‘Anyway, the thing I hate about maths is that so much of it is just about trying different things and seeing what works. I always thought when you got to a certain level it would be about logic and knowing what to do, but it’s not like that. It just keeps on being about trial and error. You just have to keep taking your best guess and having a go and seeing what happens until you figure it out.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Tim said, smothering a yawn. ‘Pretend I’m listening and understanding.’
Nick rolled his eyes.
‘Oh, come on. How is this related to your wish?’
‘I just realised that maybe that’s what it’s like with people too. With relationships. Maybe even if you think other people just know all this stuff you don’t, they don’t either: maybe they’ve just been lucky with how things worked out or someone showed them what to do … or maybe they just tried different things until they figured it out.’
‘Ah, so this is about girls. I’m liking the direction of this wish.’
Nick shook his head. ‘You’ve just got girls on the brain ’cos you haven’t been out with anyone for three entire weeks. It’s a record, right?’
‘Something like that,’ Tim grumbled.
Nick shot him a suddenly intent look. ‘I wonder what you might get for New Year if you can tell Ange you’ve been at Bill’s for the holidays and you haven’t broken any hearts for five entire months.’
‘You— No, I can’t say that on your birthday. Don’t be a smart-arse. At least don’t be a smart-arse out loud.’
Nick propped his elbows on the table and rested his chin on the heels of his hands so he could grin across the table at Tim.
‘Stop,’ said Tim warningly. ‘Desist. Don’t even think it.’
Nick blinked innocently. ‘Who, me? I’m just sitting here—’
‘Being a smart-arse. I know exactly which strange little person you learned that move from.’
Nick laughed and sat back in his chair, swinging his foot.
‘So what’s your wish, then?’ Tim asked.
‘I’m not going to ruin it by telling you! I will say that it’s … similar to last year’s wish. Which came true,’ he said, looking startled. ‘Huh. I hadn’t realised.’
‘What was last year’s wish then?’ Tim asked.
‘To get a First and make some friends. Only …’ He stopped, bit his lip. ‘My new wish is about the stuff I got this year that I didn’t even realise I could have.’
‘Anything interesting happen while I was rinsing the cake batter out of my hair?’ Bill asked, strolling back into the kitchen.
‘Nick’s been tormenting me,’ Tim said pitifully.
‘Good, good. Don’t let me interrupt,’ Bill said, opening the cabinet to take down a set of wine glasses.
‘The night’s just got interesting,’ said Tim, brightening.
The sound of a key in the front door echoed from the hall.
‘Of course Michael turns up in time for the alcohol,’ said Bill, rolling his eyes. ‘Off you go, Nick. Say hi to your dad, then stay in the sitting room for a few minutes while we put the candles in the cake as if it’s a surprise. We’ll give you a yell when we’re ready.’
‘Happy birthday!’ Michael said, stepping forwards when Nick went to greet him but stopping just the wrong distance away for a comfortab
le hug.
‘Mike! Mike, get in here and help!’ Bill called.
Michael rolled his eyes, but hurried through to the kitchen. ‘What are you bellowing about now, Morrison?’
Smiling, Nick curled up on the window seat with Professor Gosswin’s book, letting his hands warm the leather for a minute. The pages were soft with age and wear. The spine creaked when Nick opened the cover, as if the book were trying to speak.
To a true scholar: a rare treasure.
From your proud father
Matriculation Day, 2nd October 1958
And now to Nicholas Michael Derran, Scholar.
A worthy heir to the spirit in which this book was first given because the family we find is as truly family as the one we are born into.
Midwinter Day 2015
A Matter of Facts
Cambridge University and Trinity Hall are real institutions. The physical descriptions of the Colleges, Faculties and the town are accurate, as well as details about courses, the admissions process, formal halls, etc. (at least at the time of writing). Although exam results are also posted via the online CamSIS system nowadays, not only does this sometimes go very much awry, collecting results from Senate House remains a popular tradition. I’ve gone with the old-school version for the sake of tradition – and drama. All the characters who people the Cambridge of House of Windows are entirely fictional and their actions should not be taken as characteristic of different Colleges, Faculties and so forth. I’m just trying to tell a good story in a real place.
Although Cambridge University does, occasionally, accept very young students, all of the details relating to how the University, and Trinity Hall in particular, deal with Nick’s age are my own creation. As far as I am aware, Trinity Hall has never accepted a student of Nick’s age. My aim was to make the University and College’s actions logical and believable, while serving the development of the plot. In the real world, from what I’ve read about very young students at Cambridge, there is a great deal of care and oversight. The Cambridge in these pages belongs to the World of the Book, not the real world. Even I’m not confused about that, so no one else should be.
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