Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner (read book txt) 📗

crowd. Since Rory and I had been seeing each other, she’d started waving to me sometimes, shyly, in the queue for hall, or in the bar, where she and her friends never seemed to be able to get a table. She waved to me on King’s Parade while she was cycling past me once, and nearly wobbled off her bike.

Anyway, I agreed to go, and when Rory and I got to the station, Helen was there, grinning and waving. She was bundled tightly in a winter coat, a thick scarf wound like a neck brace at her throat. ‘Hi, Serena,’ she gushed. Helen had already bought the tickets, and she doled them out to us from her mittened hands, like a teacher shepherding a school expedition. ‘This is Daniel. Have you met Daniel? He’s studying architecture with Rory.’ She motioned to the tall, quiet boy standing next to her, dark overcoat buttoned up like a pallbearer. Daniel locked his dark eyes on mine, held out a wiry hand, hair flopping over his glasses.

It seemed like a long time before we finally reached Greenwich. Rory and I walked silently, hand in gloved hand, under the soft glimmer of Victorian gas lamps dotted along the edge of the park. The trees rustled, their brown leaves falling like crinkling paper bags. When we passed the pub at the end of their road, a blast of warm air escaped from the door, the cackle of laughter, the snap of a roaring fire. I noticed the walls enclosing Greenwich Park were studded with tiny doors. It felt so mysterious to me. Their street seemed hidden away, as if lost in time, perfectly preserved, untouched.

And then their home, with its perfect symmetry, the box hedges, the matchstick-straight black railings. The yellow glow of log fires and lamplight shining from its tall Georgian windows – windows that gazed straight out over the park. It looked like a painting.

‘Here we are.’ Helen was beaming. She couldn’t disguise the catch in her voice; of pride, of nervousness, of wanting us to love it. She kept glancing at me, as if my approval mattered to her almost as much as her boyfriend’s. Neither Daniel nor I said anything. I couldn’t believe this was really their home.

Helen rang the bell, and moments later they were upon us: the mother kissing me on both cheeks, pulling an awkward Daniel into a bony hug with her long slender arms, then steering us all into the kitchen.

The father, Richard – apparently some sort of famous architect, though I’d never heard of him – was in there, on his hands and knees. He was attempting to relight the ancient-looking gas oven with a pipe hanging out of one side of his mouth while still holding a glass of port. I came to suspect it was not his first of the evening. He rose to his feet to hug Rory and Helen. Then he pumped Daniel’s arm before beamingly thrusting a gin and tonic into my hand and planting a hot kiss on my cheek.

All evening, Daniel and I were treated as if we were their long-lost children. We were fed profusely, and solicitous questions were fired in our direction. Daniel kept having to bring his hand to cover his mouth to answer without displaying a mouthful of food. Every detail of Daniel’s dull upbringing was deemed utterly fascinating, my every half-formed insight into law – my subject of study – met with enthusiastic assent. And how were we finding life in Cambridge? Was I keeping Rory under control? Had Daniel witnessed him actually turning up to any of his architecture lectures?

Even Charlie was nice to us. On the train there, Helen had warned us darkly about this ‘difficult’ younger brother, who refused to apply to university and who lived in a twilight world of Call of Duty and marijuana in the uppermost bedroom. To me, though, he seemed pleasant enough, telling me about his plans for a music course at the local college, passing me the bread, asking Daniel thoughtfully about the football team he supported – although it was painfully obvious that this was a rugby family.

As the night went on, I realised Daniel was being treated with particularly lavish attention. Everyone was in raptures over the middling bottle of wine he had brought with him, over his shyly stated thoughts on architecture. Even Rory was at it, I noticed. Slapping this shy, diffident boy on the back, making out his jokes were funnier than they were. Over the course of the evening, he was enthusiastically invited to an entire calendar of family occasions – the country for Christmas, Courchevel at Easter, sailing in the summer holidays.

I tried to work out if he was finding it at all strange, how eager they all seemed for the evening to be wonderful, for him to be pleased with everything we ate, drank and saw. Looking at his face, I think he just didn’t know what to make of it, of their exuberance, the decadence of it all, the platter of riches he was being offered. A few times, I noticed him glancing over, as if pleading for help.

When Daniel had quietly asked Helen about the time of the last train, Richard had waved his question away, insisted we all delay our return to Cambridge until the next day. Daniel protested stutteringly about a supervision first thing that he wouldn’t have time to rearrange, but the look on Richard’s face had silenced him.

Months later, when Helen and I had formed our obligatory friendship, she blushingly told me the story of what had happened later that night. How she had crawled down Daniel’s body in her childhood bedroom and taken him into her mouth. I imagined poor Daniel, staring at the teddy bears on Helen’s shelves, the branches of the horse chestnut tree tapping against the tall windows. Helen had giggled at the memory of how he had voiced concern about the noise, about her parents hearing them.