At home, I couldn’t shake this feeling of anxiety. It was like a low-level current running through me, and it fed into everything I did. I asked Patrick, ‘Would we have done this if my sister hadn’t needed my room at home?’
He had looked at me as if I were daft. He leant over and pulled me to him, kissing the top of my head. Then he glanced down. ‘Do you have to wear these pyjamas? I hate you in pyjamas.’
‘They’re comfortable.’
‘They look like something my mum would wear.’
‘I’m not going to wear a basque and suspenders every night just to keep you happy. And you’re not answering my question.’
‘I don’t know. Probably. Yes.’
‘But we weren’t talking about it, were we?’
‘Lou, most people move in with each other because it’s sensible. You can love someone and still see the financial and practical advantages.’
‘I just … don’t want you to think I made this happen. I don’t want to feel like I made this happen.’
He sighed, and rolled on to his back. ‘Why do women always have to go over and over a situation until it becomes a problem? I love you, you love me, we’ve been together nearly seven years and there was no room at your parents’ house any more. It’s actually pretty simple.’
But it didn’t feel simple.
It felt like I was living a life I hadn’t had a chance to anticipate.
That Friday it rained all day – warm, heavy sheets of it, like we were in the tropics, making the guttering gurgle and bowing the stems of the flowering shrubs as if in supplication. Will stared out of the windows like a dog denied a walk. Nathan came and went, a plastic bag lifted above his head. Will watched a documentary about penguins, and afterwards, while he logged on to his computer, I busied myself, so that we didn’t have to talk to each other. I felt our discomfort with each other keenly, and being in the same room as him all the time made it that much worse.
I had finally begun to understand the consolations of cleaning. I mopped, cleaned windows and changed duvets. I was a constant whirl of activity. No dust mote escaped my eye, no tea ring my forensic attentions. I was dislodging the limescale on the bathroom taps using kitchen roll soaked in vinegar (my mother’s tip) when I heard Will’s chair behind me.
‘What are you doing?’
I was bent low over the bath. I didn’t turn round. ‘I’m descaling your taps.’
I could feel him watching me.
‘Say that again,’ he said, after a beat.
‘What?’
‘Say that again.’
I straightened up. ‘Why, are you having problems with your hearing? I’m descaling your taps.’
‘No, I just want you to listen to what you’re saying. There is no reason to descale my taps, Clark. My mother won’t notice it, I won’t care, and it’s making the bathroom stink like a fish and chip shop. Besides, I’d like to go out.’
I wiped a lock of hair from my face. It was true. There was a definite waft of large haddock in the atmosphere.
‘Come on. It’s finally stopped raining. I just spoke to my dad. He said he’ll give us the keys to the castle after five o’clock, once all the tourists are out.’
I didn’t feel great about the idea of us having to make polite conversation during a walk around the grounds. But the thought of being out of the annexe was appealing.
‘Okay. Give me five minutes. I need to try and get the smell of vinegar off my hands.’
The difference between growing up like me and growing up like Will was that he wore his sense of entitlement lightly. I think if you grow up as he had done, with wealthy parents, in a nice house, if you go to good schools and nice restaurants as a matter of course, you probably just have this sense that good things will fall into place, that your position in the world is naturally an elevated one.
Will had escaped into the empty grounds of the castle his whole childhood, he said. His dad let him roam the place, trusting him not to touch anything. After 5.30pm, when the last of the tourists had gone, as the gardeners began to trim and tidy, as the cleaners emptied the bins and swept up the empty cartons of drink and commemorative toffee fudge, it had become his private playground. As he told me this, I mused that if Treena and I had been given the freedom of the castle, all to ourselves, we would have been air punching with disbelief and getting giddy all over the place.
‘First girl I ever kissed was in front of the drawbridge,’ he said, slowing to look towards it as we walked along the gravel path.
‘Did you tell her it was your place?’
‘No. Perhaps I should have done. She dumped me a week later for the boy who worked in the minimart.’
I turned and stared at him in shock. ‘Not Terry Rowlands? Dark slicked-back hair, tattoos up to his elbows?’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s him.’
‘He still works there, you know. In the minimart. If that makes you feel any better.’
‘I’m not sure he’d feel entirely envious of where I ended up,’ Will said, and I stopped talking again.
It was strange seeing the castle like this, in silence, the two of us the only people there apart from the odd gardener in the distance. Instead of gazing at the tourists, being distracted by their accents and their alien lives, I found myself looking at the castle for perhaps the first time, beginning to absorb some of its history. Its flinted walls had stood there for more than 800 years. People had been born and died there, hearts filled and broken. Now, in the silence, you could almost hear their voices, their own footsteps on the path.
‘Okay, confession time,’ I said. ‘Did you ever walk around here and pretend secretly that you were some kind of warrior prince?’
Will looked sideways at me. ‘Honestly?’
‘Of course.’
‘Yes. I even borrowed one of the swords off the walls of the Great Hall once. It weighed a ton. I remember being petrified that I wouldn’t be able to lift it back on to its stand.’
We had reached the swell of the hill, and from here, at the front of the moat, we could look down the long sweep of grass to the ruined wall that had marked the boundary. Beyond it lay the town, the neon signs and queues of traffic, the bustle that marked the small town’s rush hour. Up here it was silent apart from the birds and the soft hum of Will’s chair.
He stopped the chair briefly and swivelled it so that we looked down at the grounds. ‘I’m surprised we never met each other,’ he said. ‘When I was growing up, I mean. Our paths must have crossed.’