Helen and Daniel live at the bottom of the park, in the house she and Rory grew up in. That was the deal, when their parents died: the company went to Rory, Helen got the house, and Charlie retains a small slice of each, and got the rest of his inheritance in cash – cash that, word has it, he has mostly squandered.
When people admire Helen’s house, as they often do, Helen always tells them that Daniel only married her so he could get his grubby architect’s hands on it. She is joking, of course. She always squeezes his hand as she says it, I have noticed, and he always smiles, fondly, back at her. And yet, I have sometimes wondered whether there is a scratchy little grain of truth in there, somewhere. Not much, but enough to make Helen’s little joke not very funny.
‘It was packed in the park when I was there the other day, with Rachel,’ Helen is saying now. Rachel has been mentioned twice now. I haven’t heard her mention a Rachel before, and the statement feels designed to entice me to ask who she is, but somehow, I can’t bring myself to bite. Helen tries another line of attack.
‘It always gets me thinking of summers in Cambridge, when the park is full like that,’ she says. ‘You know, all the picnics everywhere. Everyone sitting on the grass.’
‘I thought the grass was all dead,’ Rory mutters.
‘Not all of it,’ Helen mumbles, stung by the sharpness in his tone.
We left Cambridge ten years ago. Yet Helen seems to lean on the memory of those summer days like a crutch. I don’t know why she must talk about it so endlessly, why it seems to matter so much more to her than it does to us.
‘God, it doesn’t feel like ten years ago, does it?’ Helen sighs wistfully. She prods at her brother. ‘Do you remember the time you stole that punt?’
Rory throws a final log into the fire pit then hauls himself up, brushing his hands on his jeans.
‘Borrowed,’ he corrects. ‘And I think you’ll find Daniel here was my accomplice.’ Rory slaps Daniel on the shoulder as he passes to sit back in his seat. Daniel’s blank expression is unchanged.
‘I don’t remember,’ Daniel says, after a pause, throwing the last of his nutshells into the bowl. ‘We went punting loads of times.’ The fire crackles in the silence.
I study Daniel’s face. This is an odd thing to say. It’s not unusual for Helen to remember things that some of us don’t. All kinds of flotsam seem to live in her memory. She embroiders things a bit sometimes, too, adding all sorts of pretty details that weren’t there before. But Daniel remembers that day, I’m sure of it. It had been like one of those perfect summer days – so perfect that you can’t be sure whether you trust your own memory, or whether you’ve mixed it up with a photo, or a film, and made the colours more brilliant than they really were.
The boys had snuck the college punt out of the boathouse – we weren’t supposed to use it, for some reason I can’t remember. A surprise, they said. After weeks in the silence and stale air of libraries and examination halls, it had been intoxicating to be drifting underneath a luminous blue sky. The smell of the grass on the banks, the sock, sock, sock of the punt hitting the riverbed, the reflections in the water. The boys had taken turns punting while Helen and I swigged from a bottle of cheap fizz they’d bought at the college bar. For Serena and me, finals were over, and Rory and Daniel had a long summer ahead before their MA year began. Life after university felt like a distant speck on the horizon, with all the time in between just a vast, delicious expanse of summertime.
Sun-soaked and tipsy, we’d laughed at Daniel’s skinny legs, at Rory getting so distracted posing with his shirt off that he forgot to duck at the bridge and nearly fell in. Then he did fall in, and got back on the punt, and pushed Daniel in, and then Rory had taken his clothes off – he was always taking his clothes off. Finally, we all got in, clothes abandoned. Even Helen. Giddy and drunk, we’d raced each other down the river. Rory had swum underneath Helen, picked her up on his shoulders, her mouth a little wet O of surprise. Rory! Put me down! I thought you were Daniel, she had screamed. We’d watched her from the other side. The water had been dark and cool. You couldn’t always tell.
When we got back to the halls that day, it had been later than we’d realised. My skin was still clammy and cold from the river water. My hair had been bleached by the sun; even Helen had coloured. We hadn’t bothered changing. Little constellations of freckles had appeared on Helen’s cheeks and I remember seeing Daniel kissing them, in the queue for the club. It had seemed intimate, so much so that it made me look away, gave me a strange feeling. I remember how I couldn’t wait a minute longer for Rory that night, that we’d collapsed into his single bed, a hot tangle of limbs. His sweat had tasted sharp and sweet, his body different then, hardened by hockey and squash. I still remember the feel of his arms, the weight of him. When we finally fell asleep, his arm underneath my neck, light had been leaking in through the sides of the curtains, the beginnings of birdsong stirring.