‘Like what?’

  ‘He’s from a rich family but has no money. His father cut him off when he refused to enter the family wine business and pursued his film studies instead.’

  ‘My heart bleeds.’

  ‘And he…’ Clio faltered, glancing around the restaurant.

  I raised my eyebrows, encouraging her to continue.

  ‘He’s got a younger brother.’ She hesitated. ‘The prodigal son, as far as his parents are concerned. Gabe can do no wrong, unlike Louis. Parents shouldn’t have favourites.’

  ‘Are they close?’ I asked. ‘Louis and Gabe?’

  It’s an unusual name. Short for Gabriel, presumably.

  ‘Like twins,’ she said. ‘Louis is very protective of him – Gabe’s not well right now.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Maybe it’s Louis’ way of getting back at his parents, I don’t know. It must infuriate them that their perfect son gets on so well with his bohemian brother. Do you have siblings?’

  ‘I’m an only child.’ Although I sometimes wish I had a brother or sister, right then it felt good to have something in common with Clio. ‘What’s wrong with his brother?’ The medic in me was curious.

  ‘I don’t know, exactly. Depression, I think.’

  ‘The pressures of being a prodigal son. Disappointing your parents.’

  ‘Where are you from, by the way?’ she asked, changing the subject again. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask. That cute accent. Is it Bristol?’

  ‘Cornwall,’ I replied. Cute? Nobody’s ever said that about my accent before. I was about to elaborate, tell her about Newlyn, its medieval harbour and modern fish market. How the Swordy feels like an extension of the sea, a place where fishermen adjust to life on land after weeks on a fishing vessel; the unique smell of diesel and pilchards that hangs over the town like an invisible cloud; the articulated lorries waiting to take hake and turbot upcountry; the way young people move away for work or uni but never quite leave, drawn back by family and an unfathomable sense of belonging. But before I could speak, I saw Louis outside, lens pressed to the restaurant window.

  My eyes must have widened because Clio spun round in her chair and was up and out of the restaurant before I knew it. I watched in disbelief as she argued in her bare feet with Louis beside the millpond. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could guess as she pushed him backwards in the chest, gesticulating wildly, until he walked away.

  Two minutes later, she was back in her seat opposite me, unembarrassed, despite her cheeks still flaming with anger. I’ve never met anyone with such passion before.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said, tucking into her ‘Home Computer’ pizza, which had arrived in her absence. ‘Sometimes he thinks he owns me.’

  ‘What did you say to him?’ I said, glancing around the restaurant. Everyone had seen what had happened, but she didn’t seem to care.

  ‘I told him I wanted some privacy and that he can shoot his shitty film later.’ I loved the way she said ‘shitty’, pronouncing it like ‘sheety’. She raised a glass to mine and leant in towards me. ‘Sometimes it’s nice to be off camera, don’t you think?’

  14

  ‘Oops, I rang the wrong bell,’ Clio says, standing outside the front door. It’s pouring. Hard, spring rain. ‘In fact, I rang two front doors before yours,’ she adds, pointing at the houses either side. She is soaked to the skin, her hair flattened, raincoat dripping.

  Adam glances down Maze Hill – they live halfway up on the left-hand side – and waves at Lynda, a neighbour, who is pretending to tidy a tub of lavender under her porch. Is the camera down by the station pointing towards them again?

  ‘Sorry again,’ Clio calls over to Lynda. And then to Adam, in a whisper, ‘She wasn’t very happy when I disturbed her. It’s not that late, is it? What time do you people go to bed in England?’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Adam asks, trying to calculate the harm Clio has already caused to his reputation, the collateral damage in the neighbourhood. Of all the doorbells to ring, she chose Lynda’s. A retired librarian, she doesn’t miss a thing in the street. She will text Tania, text everyone in south London about Clio’s arrival.

  ‘I came back to see my friends in Blackheath,’ Clio says. ‘I’m meant to be staying there tonight – but they’re not home yet. So I thought I would drop by, except I couldn’t remember which house is yours. I’ve brought some champagne.’

  She holds up a bottle. Her expensive tastes haven’t changed.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ Adam says, wishing she’d stop waving the champagne around as he ushers her through the door. ‘It’s chucking it down.’

  He hesitates, then calls across to Lynda. ‘Just an old friend of Tania’s,’ he says. ‘From university.’ He knows it’s a futile gesture. Glancing up and down the street, he’s about to go inside when he looks again at the camera. The lens is definitely angled up the road, towards him. He pushes the thought away and heads into the hall, closing the door behind him.

  Clio hands him the champagne – chilled, of course – and he shows her through to the kitchen. It felt awkward enough when she was here earlier in the day, but at least Tania was in the house. This time it feels far worse, wrong on so many levels. As soon as the rain stops, he’ll ask her to leave. They can chat in the kitchen, where everyone met before, where Tania made her feel welcome, gave Clio her blessing. As long as they stay somewhere well lit, it should be fine. And he needs to ask her something. It’s why he was going to text her to meet for a drink tonight. He wants to know about Freddie and his puppy-in-the-park story.

  ‘Where shall I put this?’ she asks, taking off her raincoat.

  ‘Anywhere,’ Adam says, avoiding direct eye contact. Soaked to the bone, Clio looks even more beautiful than she did earlier, her wet clothes accentuating the natural swells of her body. He’s such a typical man, his responses so predictable. ‘On the back of the chair.’

  He places the champagne in the middle of the table, as if it’s contaminated, in some sort of quarantine. Does she remember what happened the last time they drank champagne together? He can’t drink the bottle tonight with her. Not just the two of them, in his home. Tania’s home.

  She seems to sense his reluctance. ‘It’s not going to open itself,’ she says, nodding at the bottle.

  Relax. He just needs to play for time. And if it takes a drink, so be it. It still doesn’t feel right though as he places two champagne flutes on the polished granite island.

  ‘And do you have a towel?’ she asks.

  ‘In the bathroom.’ He points through to the hall. ‘First left at the top of the stairs.’

  He watches her leave the kitchen. Events are spiralling out of control. She shouldn’t be using their bathroom. Shouldn’t be here at all. But what else could he have done? Not let her into the house?

  He’s about to text Tania when Clio reappears.

  ‘I have a confession to make,’ she says, a towel around her shoulders as if she’s arriving poolside. It would have to be one of Tania’s special White Company fluffy towels. She leans against the sideboard and pats her face with it.

  ‘You do?’ he asks, curious.

  He starts to prise off the champagne cork. Is everything about to become clear – her arrival in his life after so many years? She has unfinished business, made a mistake at uni, wants to pick up where they left off. Sorry, it’s too late. He’s a happily married man.

  ‘I admit, it wasn’t a total coincidence that we met in the park today.’

  The cork pops.

  ‘It wasn’t?’ His heart thrums. He pours the champagne, trying to stop his hand from shaking. ‘How do you mean?’ He’s still struggling to look her in the eye. Doesn’t trust himself.

  ‘Are you nervous?’ she asks, laughing, as he overfills a glass.

  ‘Nervous? Why should I be nervous?’ He passes it to her. Eye contact. Christ, she looks good. He needs to get her out of the house as fast as possible.

  ‘A long time ago, I read an interview with you in a newspaper,’ she says, wandering over to the fridge. She peers inside again at Freddie’s lunchbox arrangements. The snack boxes are empty. Adam was hungry earlier and it had seemed a shame to waste it all, given Freddie was away. ‘You said how you liked to run in the park on a Saturday morning.’

  He remembers the article, a favour for a journalist friend who was writing about people running the London Marathon for the first time: ‘Marathon Virgins’, to coincide with the new sponsor. He and Tania were a case study. Had Clio spent the years after uni trawling the internet for him too?

  ‘So when I was coming to meet my friends in Blackheath today,’ she says, towelling the back of her hair, ‘I decided to take the train to Greenwich instead and walk through the park, in the hope that you might be there.’

  ‘And I was,’ Adam says. ‘Still running on Saturdays – just with a jogging pram these days.’

  So it wasn’t such a complete coincidence after all. She wanted to see him, engineered an encounter. But what about Freddie? Finding him was too much of a chance. She’s not telling the whole truth. Freddie’s only five, makes up stories all the time, but he wouldn’t just say something like that about Clio and the puppy. Should he ask her now? He watches, bides his time as she takes a tour of the kitchen, looking at the pictures drawn by Freddie on the pinboard beside the fridge. Puppies, the lot of them.

  ‘Will Tania mind that I am here?’ she asks quietly, her back still to him.

  He swallows hard. Will Tania mind? Of course she will, even though she trusts him. ‘Why should she?’ he asks, failing to sound casual.

  Tania’s initial encouragement to have a drink with Clio had felt forced. And she wouldn’t have imagined that the drink would be a bottle of champagne in their own home, while she was away with the children. He would mind if the situation was reversed. Mind terribly.

  Clio turns and shrugs. ‘Some women might have a problem with it.’ She looks at a photo of Tania on the kitchen dresser. ‘I like her. You’re very lucky. She’s beautiful.’

  ‘I know. Very beautiful.’

  Clio’s phone pings and she glances at a text. A moment of respite, time out.

  What is she really doing here? He takes a long draught of champagne. A part of him wants to drink the bottle with Clio and see what happens. But an alarm bell is also ringing in his head, so loudly and insistently that only a fool would ignore it. And he’s not a fool any more. He was once, at university, a naive young man, but not now. He’s a successful consultant paediatrician, married with two children. And he’s learnt to avoid women like Clio, knows their game. Except he doesn’t know Clio’s.

  ‘Would she mind if I stayed the night?’ she asks, putting down her phone.

  ‘The night?’ Adam repeats, almost choking on his champagne.

  A flash of lightning, followed by a crack of thunder. It’s as if they are back on stage together, all those years ago. Lines from Doctor Faustus pop into his head out of nowhere.

  Now that the gloomy shadow of the earth,

  Longing to view Orion’s drizzling look,

  Leaps from the Antarctic world unto the sky,

  And dims the welkin with her pitchy breath,

  Faustus, begin thine incantations

  It’s the first time Doctor Faustus has conjured evil spirits, the beginning of his journey to hell. Adam’s brain was a sponge back then, soaking up Marlowe’s lines in between memorising endocrinology mnemonics. These days he can hardly remember his own name.

  ‘That sounded close,’ he says, glancing outside.

  Clio seems unmoved by the dramatic weather, the pathetic fallacy. ‘My friends in Blackheath,’ she says, glancing at her phone again, ‘they’re not coming back until very late now. They want me to join them, but my crazy clubbing days are over.’

  What has he done to deserve this? His life has been going along well, particularly at work, where he’s flying. He and Tania have been arguing, but it’s nothing major, just the usual bickering of a married couple with two children under five. Trying to balance their lives and careers. Not a lot of sex, admittedly, but that’s fine too, given the circumstances. And now this. How have things gone from a chance meeting in a park with a friend from uni to her wanting to stay the night? Not just any old friend either. He could ask her to leave, walk the streets of Greenwich in the rain. Or he could suggest that she join her clubbing friends. Neither sounds very charitable.

  ‘You can wait here in the kitchen until they get back,’ he says, trying to set a practical, no-nonsense course of action. The kitchen is a safe place.

  ‘I am so tired,’ she says, stretching as she peers into the sitting room. ‘I don’t mind sleeping on the sofa. I have an early train to Paris in the morning. Can I charge my phone?’

  He nods, watching her walk over to her bag and pull out a charger.

  ‘Freddie’s drawings are so cute,’ she says as she plugs in the phone beside the pinboard.

  Why is she doing this to him? An image of them in bed together comes and goes. He needs to stick to the script, ask her about Freddie, where she found him, but her arrival at his front door has thrown him. It would have been so much more manageable if they had met in town for a drink, on neutral territory.

  ‘Do you need to ring Tania?’ she asks. Is his confusion that obvious? ‘Check she’s OK with this? I don’t mind speaking with her.’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’ Christ, the last thing he wants is Tania to talk with Clio. It was confusing enough when they got on so well earlier.

  ‘Consent is very important,’ she says, coming over to him. She places the palm of her hand on his chest, as if she’s listening for his heartbeat. Holding her champagne in the other hand, she looks up into his eyes. ‘I always told Louis when I was going to sleep with someone else.’

  15

  May 1998

  We were both drunk by the time we climbed into the punt. Stuffed too, after our meal at Sweeney Todd’s. We’d made the mistake of ordering a ‘Rupture Rapture’ to share for dessert – ‘a perverse landslide of six flavours of ice cream, whipped cream, cherries, peaches, nuts, wafers and chocolate flakes’ – and wanted to walk it off with a stroll along the river. When I suggested that we head back the way we’d come and take a punt to Grantchester Meadows, she leapt at the opportunity, as Louis had predicted, particularly when I produced from my rucksack a small bottle of vodka and a carton of grapefruit juice.

  Clio had forgotten about Louis, having emphatically told him to keep away, but I was sure that he was around somewhere, filming us from afar as we set off in our punt. It was his original idea, after all, to go punting; his idea too to ply Clio with vodka. He wouldn’t pass up the chance to shoot something so filmic as two young students making their merry way upriver to Grantchester.

  ‘Do you want a go?’ I asked as I pushed us along the Backs, past King’s College and its sloping lawns running up to the famous chapel, and on towards Silver Street Bridge. A gentle wind was blowing in from the south.

  ‘I like watching you do it,’ she said, reclining in the bottom of the punt.

  She was sitting on a bed of cushions with her back to our direction of travel, facing me, her legs barely covered by her red slip dress. It was hard to know where to look. I enjoyed being back on the water again, even if it was a far cry from the sea. I’d not been in a punt since I took Mum down the Cam in my first few weeks here. Mum beamed the whole way, so proud to be in Cambridge, on a punt propelled by me, her medical student son. The sun shone and the fresh autumn air had seemed to do her fragile health the power of good.

  The outdoors suited Clio too. Her cheeks were pink, a light breeze ruffling her dark, lustrous hair. I was about to bend down and kiss her, unable to resist any longer, when I heard the unmistakeable noise of someone nearby falling into the water. My hands froze on the punt pole. The sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea – Melville’s words still haunted me as much as the noise itself.

  ‘You OK?’ Clio asked. ‘Look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ She’d sat up to see what was going on – a sodden student was being hauled back into a punt by his laughing mates – but she was now eyeing me with concern.

  I flashed her a smile that quickly faded, chased away by a stab of emotion – and that sickening noise in my head again. I could still hear the splash so clearly.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said quickly and started to punt again.

  But I couldn’t get the sound out of my head: not just the splash, but everything that had led up to it. The banter inside the pub, the sudden silence when the strangers walked in, their jeers on the North Pier later. It was all coming back now, the horror of what had happened next.

  ‘You can tell me,’ she said, leaning forward to squeeze my leg.

  ‘It reminds me of a night in Newlyn, that’s all,’ I said hesitantly. ‘When some posh idiots chucked a friend of mine into the harbour. He couldn’t swim.’

  ‘What reminds you?’

  ‘That sound.’ I gestured in the direction of the nearby punt, where the drunken student was now safely on board again.

  She looked across the water and back at me. ‘Was he OK? Your friend?’

  I shook my head and turned away.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, concentrating on the river, shocked by how raw it still felt, how difficult it was proving to explain.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she added. ‘Sometimes it’s better we don’t share everything.’

  I looked at her, turned away again.

  It was as we were approaching Queens’ College that I saw him, recognised his distinctive red hair. The same student who’d told me in the ADC Bar that Louis was evil. He was walking across Mathematical Bridge, its complex lattice of woodwork bleached pale in the dazzling May sunlight, and hadn’t seen our punt. As I watched him, a woman came running up from behind, finally drawing level with him, and they talked for a few seconds.