‘Sometimes he can be such a jerk.’ Clio poured herself a glass of water.

  Again, I wanted to ask what, if anything, was between them, but I checked myself. None of my business. Another version of what I thought might play out today was that Clio had only invited me to lunch because Louis had asked her to, and the whole occasion would feel contrived, a set-up for his film. Wish fulfilment, as Louis had put it. Capturing my wannabe dream life as a Cambridge student on camera. But Clio seemed to be there on her own accord rather than at Louis’ behest. I need to stop being so down on myself.

  ‘Does he film you a lot?’ I asked. ‘I saw him the other night, at the bar—’

  ‘All the time. He is obsessed. Not with me, but with filming “life”.’ She made air quotes with her fingers. ‘He needs to grow up, stop being so pretentious.’

  ‘Am I making a mistake, then?’ I asked. ‘Agreeing to be filmed?’

  ‘It’s your life. Louis and I aren’t talking, so I’m biased. Of course, he is a brilliant filmmaker. Truly gifted, though it pains me to say it. Why not?’

  ‘He didn’t ask you to have lunch with me, then? For his film?’

  I regretted the question as soon as I’d asked it, remembering Louis’ words.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, laughing. ‘Nobody tells me who to date.’

  A date. We were on a date. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply—’

  ‘Please, let’s not talk about Louis and his films,’ she said. ‘Not today, not here.’

  She dabbed the corner of her full lips with a napkin. Instinctively, I picked up my napkin too and wiped unnecessarily at my own mouth, just as a young boy started to cry at the neighbouring table. I glanced across at him and pulled the napkin up over my face for a second, lowering it with a mock frown. He stopped crying and looked at me with a mix of bafflement and terror. The dad turned around and we smiled at each other.

  Clio watched the exchange and leant forwards across the table. ‘Do you want to have children?’ she asked, glancing over at the boy, who was smiling now. Her voice was even more intimate when she spoke quietly, her breath warm and sweet. She knew the question was loaded and I blushed again, less so this time.

  ‘I do, yes,’ I said.

  The sensation of falling in love with Clio was so physical, I worried she could actually see me tumbling and plummeting. There was nothing I could do in her presence, nothing any grown man could do, but give in and admit defeat. I felt so powerless, emasculated, such an idiot, it was embarrassing. She’s not my type, never will be, but I was unable to resist. He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall, as the Good Angel said to Faustus, hoping to steer him away from his pact with Lucifer.

  ‘I seem to get along with them,’ I said, raising my eyebrows at the boy again. ‘Maybe that’s why I plan to become a paediatrician. I always thought I’d go into neurosurgery, but I think it’s paediatrics for me.’

  ‘You have your whole life mapped out already,’ she said, lighting a cigarette as she looked at the menu. ‘Have you always wanted to be a doctor?’

  I turned away, wondering how much to tell her. ‘I wasn’t one of those young kids who played doctors and nurses, wrapping bandages around my teddies, if that’s what you mean,’ I said. ‘It happened a bit later for me, after my dad died. I was fifteen years old and he’d been ill for a while. Brain tumour the size of a satsuma. I desperately wanted to make him better, but I didn’t know how.’

  ‘And now you do?’

  ‘Not quite. I was too late for him, but I hope that one day I’ll be able to help others, if that doesn’t sound too worthy.’

  I knew it did but she didn’t seem to mind.

  ‘My mum’s not in the best of health right now,’ I continued. ‘She had me late – in her early forties – and Dad’s death has aged her terribly. I felt so helpless watching him get ill. I never want to have that feeling again.’

  She rested a hand on mine. Her touch was warm, electrifying. ‘I’m sorry about your father,’ she said. ‘It must have been hard.’

  ‘Even harder for my mum. She adored him. Everyone did. He worked as a fisherman out of Newlyn, first on the trawlers and then on an inshore day boat, hand-lining bass and mackerel, but he should have been a full-time artist. He could paint beautifully – two of his pictures are in the Tate at St Ives.’ (But his very best one is here, with me right now, hanging above my desk as I write this. Dad’s stormy abstract rendering of Cape Cornwall is my favourite. Mum insisted on me having it, and its shades of blue, grey and burnt orange keep me grounded whenever I’m missing her, him, Cornwall.) ‘He was an avid reader too,’ I added.

  She seemed impressed. ‘He would be so proud that his son is studying medicine at Cambridge.’

  I swallowed hard, tears welling. It’s one of my biggest regrets that Dad never knew I’d made it to Cambridge. He would have been the proudest man in Cornwall, and that’s saying something. ‘He was always telling me to get a good education, a proper job. He gave me a copy of Moby Dick for my twelfth birthday.’

  ‘Did you read it?’

  ‘Cover to cover. And Hemingway. And Conrad. One year Dad gave me Youth for Christmas. “Pass the bottle” – we always laughed at that line.’

  ‘You weren’t tempted to follow him into the fishing trade then?’ She smiled. I could see she was joking, and I was almost afraid to tell her the truth. It didn’t exactly show me in the best academic light.

  ‘Actually, I was. When he died, I dropped out of school and started work on a sixty-foot fishing vessel, a gill-netter, crewed by a bunch of young nutters. When we weren’t out at sea trying to catch turbot, we were off our faces in the pub. Dad would have been ashamed of how badly I went off the rails. I’d been good at school, everyone expected me to go on to university. But I was also angry with Dad for dying, even angrier with myself.’

  ‘For not being able to make him better?’

  I nodded. ‘I blamed myself.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said.

  ‘It won’t happen again.’

  ‘Because here you are, training to be a doctor.’

  ‘Here I am,’ I said, glancing around the restaurant.

  Clio smiled sympathetically, encouraging me to continue. And then her bare foot started to rub against my ankle. She must have slipped off her shoes. I was about to move my foot away, but I kept it there.

  ‘What made you change your mind?’ she asked.

  ‘It was Mum,’ I said. ‘I came home drunk one night with a plastic bag of John Dory – Mum’s favourite fish – and she was just staring out the window like she couldn’t even look at me. I remember her words exactly: “I went to the hospital today. Seen by this lovely young man, just a few years older than you. Born in St Austell, studied at Bristol University. And as I sat there, looking at his smart white coat and nice haircut, I thought he could be you in a few years.” And then she turned to face me, tapped the plastic bag, and said, “Thank you for this, Adam, but I don’t want you bringing me fresh fish any more.”’

  ‘Ouch,’ Clio said.

  ‘I was so angry, stormed out the house, but I knew she was right. I quit the fishing job the next day and signed up to night school. For the next two years, I studied for the necessary A-levels, did some work experience at the hospital in Truro, and applied to read medicine here.’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ she said, her toes working their way up my leg.

  ‘Not your normal route to doing medicine at Oxbridge,’ I continued. ‘I’m what they call a first-gen medic, which is still quite unusual. Medicine tends to run in families – like fishing. Most of my fellow students’ fathers and grandfathers were doctors.’

  ‘Like acting too,’ she said. It was her turn to look away.

  ‘Is that right?’ I asked, sensing the swell of emotion in her voice.

  ‘My father was an actor,’ she continued. ‘Quite famous in France.’

  ‘Is he still acting?’

  She stared down at the table. ‘He died,’ she said quietly.

  I waited for her to say more, to elaborate, but she didn’t.

  ‘Shall we have some champagne?’ she asked, switching back to her normal theatrical self. I hadn’t drunk champagne since my mum bought a bottle from the Co-op in Newlyn to celebrate my getting into Cambridge. ‘Drink to Doctor Faustus and his pact with the devil?’

  ‘Why not?’ I said. I wasn’t used to all this emotional sharing. Our date needed to lighten up.

  12

  Adam paces up and down the kitchen of their Greenwich home. Tania’s not away very often, but when she is, Adam reverts to bachelor mode. He wanders around the house in boxer shorts and T-shirt, eats too many chocolate digestives, too much peanut-butter toast, watches all those violent movies she doesn’t like and buys oven chips from the corner shop. But tonight he can’t settle. Not since getting the video down from the attic. Not since Clio’s appearance in the park. To meet like that after twenty-odd years could have been a coincidence. Just about. But for Freddie to have gone missing and be found by her of all people – it’s too much.

  He sits down at the kitchen island and searches for ‘Clio Baudin’. It feels strange, wrong. It always does. He tells himself it’s different this time, legitimate. Nothing. He types in ‘Louis Farr’. Again, nothing, even when he adds ‘Cornwall’ and ‘Polzeath’. He trawls Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Not a trace. It’s as if they both never existed. Did they change their names after leaving Cambridge? He adds ‘the aesthetics of evil in modern cinema’ into the mix, searches for everything he can possibly think of. So much for Louis being the next big thing in cinema. Unless he’s become an underground filmmaker and taken it literally.

  He glances at his watch. Tania will be putting Freddie to bed any minute. A thankless task. He’s sure to have slept in the car, like Tilly. He will be excited to see his grandparents too, despite his earlier protests. They adore him. A minute later, he’s chatting to Tania, asking about the drive down, how her parents are.

  ‘Can I have a quick word with Freddie?’ he says. ‘I need to ask him something.’

  ‘I’ve only just put him to bed, Adam.’ She sounds tired, even more than usual. And she knows he has form when it comes to revving up Freddie before bedtime.

  ‘I’m guessing he’s not asleep, having slept the entire way,’ he says.

  ‘Anyone would think you work with kids. At least it was a peaceful journey. I’ll take the phone up now. But please don’t over-excite him. What do you want to ask him anyway?’

  ‘It’s a secret. Someone important’s got a birthday very soon.’

  Tania will be a year closer to forty next week. Something else that won’t help.

  ‘I was trying to forget,’ she says. ‘Here he is.’

  ‘Daddy!’ Freddie shouts, so loud that Adam has to hold the phone away.

  ‘Hello, monkey. I hope you’re being good.’

  Freddie gives him a rapid-fire, nonsensical account of what he’s done since their arrival, and then he stops as suddenly as he started. ‘Mummy’s sad.’

  Adam doesn’t want to picture her face if she’s still in the room with Freddie. ‘Is she with you now?’

  ‘Gone downstairs.’

  ‘Are you looking after her for me? Like I asked?’

  ‘When are you coming?’

  Adam closes his eyes. ‘You know in the park today, when that nice lady, Clio, found you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Freddie says, distractedly.

  ‘Were you a long way from Mummy?’

  ‘Hmmm, I was in the sandpit, where Mummy told me to stay.’

  Adam sits up, adjusting the phone in his hand.

  ‘In the sandpit? But I found you up on the hill, outside the playground.’

  ‘She wanted to show me a puppy.’

  ‘A puppy?’ Adam’s stomach goes into freefall. Freddie’s been desperate to have a puppy, ever since his friend got one. ‘And she took you from the sandpit, out of the playground, to show you this puppy?’

  Silence.

  ‘Freddie?’

  ‘I’m tired.’

  Adam hasn’t got long. ‘I know you are, monkey. Did Clio have a puppy with her?’

  He definitely didn’t see her with one in the park.

  ‘No. She said it had gone away.’

  ‘Was that why you were sad? When I found you. Because the puppy had gone?’

  ‘Will she have one next time?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Adam said, his mind racing. Next time? What does he mean? Did Clio say she would be back? ‘Do you want to go downstairs now, give the phone back to Mummy?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And I’ll see you very soon. We mustn’t forget Mummy’s birthday present.’

  ‘Can she have a puppy?’

  Dear God. It’s only a matter of time before they give in and get a dog. Maybe it’s what Tania needs. Maybe not.

  ‘Not this birthday. You are getting her those special bubbles for her bath, remember?’ And a promise not to climb in with her when she’s trying to relax. ‘Can you take the phone down to Mummy?’

  ‘I was going to get the phone from him, rather than him come back downstairs again,’ Tania says, irritated, a few moments later.

  Adam listens as she tells Freddie to go back to bed. ‘Sorry. I wanted to check something with you. Has Freddie mentioned anything about a puppy today?’

  ‘No more than usual. I thought we were trying not to mention the P-word.’

  ‘We are, but did he say anything about Clio having a puppy?’

  ‘Clio? I don’t think so. She didn’t have one, did she? Unless it was hidden in her handbag. You know, one of those posh little Parisian pooches.’

  ‘Freddie said that Clio found him in the sandpit, that she had a puppy to show him.’

  ‘But I thought you found Freddie with her outside the playground?’

  ‘I know. I did.’

  ‘Maybe Freddie’s confused. You know what he’s like.’

  ‘It doesn’t add up.’ He doesn’t want to worry Tania unnecessarily. ‘I think I’m going to see her tonight. For that drink. Ask her where she found Freddie.’

  ‘OK.’ A pause. ‘You don’t need to make excuses to see an old girlfriend from uni, Adam. If you want to go for a drink with her, just say you’re going for a drink. That’s fine. We’re all adults.’

  Adam closes his eyes. Her tone has changed again, hardened.

  ‘I’m not making excuses,’ he says. ‘And she was never my girlfriend. It doesn’t make any sense, that’s all. Her turning up in the park today like that. After all these years.’ Silence on the line. ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Tania says. ‘Tilly’s crying.’

  She hangs up and he leaves the phone by his ear for a second. And then the front doorbell rings. It’s almost 7 p.m., too late for a delivery. He walks into the hall and peers through the eyehole.

  It’s Clio.

  13

  May 1998

  ‘It’s nice to meet like this,’ Clio said, once the champagne had arrived and we had ordered our pizzas from Sweeney Todd’s jokey, lavishly illustrated menu: a ‘Home Computer’ for her (‘bits of ham, chips of pineapple, discs of salami’) and ‘Another Season of Dallas’ for me (pepperoni, pimentos and chillies). Clio ordered a ‘preposterous’ side portion of chips too. Sadly there were rumours that the restaurant, something of a Cambridge institution, was about to be swallowed up and become a Bella Pasta. She insisted lunch was on her, as a thank you for putting up with her for the past month. It was also a reminder that we were on completely different budgets at uni. I never ate out like this. Or drank champagne.

  ‘As I said in my card, I feel we’ve hardly spoken,’ she said. ‘Which is insane, given what we’ve just been through together.’

  ‘Same,’ I said, worried that I was beginning to lose the power of speech. We were in new territory, speaking our own lines rather than Marlowe’s, but I hoped the alcohol would help. ‘Do you see yourself having children one day?’ I managed to ask.

  ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ she said, laughing.

  I glanced around at the family of four, the two young children, hoping they’d accept my smile as an apology for the sweary language.

  ‘I would make a terrible mother,’ Clio continued. ‘Can you imagine?’

  I could, as it happened, but I didn’t say anything. One of the actors joked the other day that I should ditch the degree and become a house husband. Just because I seem to have a way with children and can cook meals that don’t come in a tin. Mum would have been proud if she’d overheard – all my domestic skills come from her – but she’d also know I wouldn’t be brave enough. Too steeped in patriarchal traditions, though she would never put it like that. She would have been disappointed too. Dad worked himself to the bone on his boat, leaving at dawn and returning late at night, while Mum brought me up. The least I could do was go out and get a decent job in return.

  ‘I’ve seen what motherhood does to women,’ Clio continued. ‘What happens to them.’

  ‘Physically, you mean?’

  ‘How others behave towards them.’

  I was about to ask her what she meant, but she changed the subject.

  ‘It would be nice to hang out more like this,’ she said, sipping on her champagne.

  Her foot had come to rest on my ankle. For the first time, Clio’s dark eyes locked onto mine and we held each other’s gaze. I drank deeply from my own glass, felt the alcohol melt away my inhibitions. Our director had asked us not to socialise outside rehearsals. He was keen to ‘curate the chemistry’ between us, insisting that we remain in character while we were all together, and we had largely abided by his request.

  ‘Are you and Louis an item, then?’ I asked, before I could stop the words from tumbling out of my mouth. I needed to know.

  ‘An “item”?’ she asked, cocking her head to one side as if I’d just used an unknown, foreign word. Or had I made a hideous faux pas? ‘Sometimes we sleep together, if that’s what you mean, but not so much recently. He calls me his muse, which I used to find flattering, but now it’s just annoying. I think we are coming to the end of our relationship. He’s got a lot of issues, shall we say.’