“I should probably apologise to her,” said Robin. “I didn’t intend to have my family invade your property.”
“Bel’s probably delighted. She wanted a balanced table.” Edwin managed to swallow the acerbic edge to his own tone before he said, “I see the urge to just rush in headlong runs in the Blyth family.”
“Maud’s been after me to let her go to Newnham College, and she thinks I’m shirking the answer.” He rubbed at his hairline, mussing some brown strands. “She’s right.”
A large part of Edwin wanted to pull the conversation back to practicalities and research, but this felt like one of those discomforts that had to be pushed through in the name of discovery, like the hundreds of times he’d made his own hand spasm painfully while he was working on nerve-spells. Friends, Robin had said. Friends were allowed to discuss things that were important.
“I know what it’s like to want that terribly,” he offered.
“You were probably born with a book in each hand,” said Robin. “I never thought of her as that sort.”
“Maybe she deserves a chance to try.”
Robin’s hand had moved and was resting over Edwin’s ankle. His thumb made two thoughtful circles over the bone there, barely felt through the wool of Edwin’s sock. Edwin’s foot tingled as though waking from sleep. Robin exhaled through his nose and said, “Our parents would never have let her.”
“You don’t talk about your parents much.”
“I am—trying very hard not to speak ill of the dead.”
“Sod that,” said Edwin, clear and low. It startled a laugh from Robin. “You told Mrs. Sutton you were raised by liars.”
Another few slow circles of Robin’s thumb. A shadow flickered in his expression. Edwin wondered, from nowhere, what it would look like if Robin’s heart was breaking. It was a terrible thought to have. He had it anyway.
“I made a pact with Maud,” said Robin after a few heartbeats. “She knocked on my bedroom door one night, after one of Father and Mother’s charity dinners. She’d been lying awake for hours. She asked me if I thought our parents really cared for her. They were so nice to Mrs. Calthorpe tonight, but I heard them talk about her when the Duncans were here last week, saying such awful things. Do you think they talk about me, when I’m not there?” Robin pressed his mouth tight. “I promised her, that night, and she promised me. We made a pact to always say what we meant. Never to lie.”
Edwin tried to imagine never lying to his siblings. Never being lied to. The image shivered and collapsed.
“You’re right. I should give Maud a chance, if we can afford it,” said Robin. “I want her to have what she wants out of life.”
“Because you couldn’t?” It seemed the obvious question.
“I don’t mind—no honestly,” with half a smile. “What else was I going to do? I’ve no great gifts. I wasn’t clearly destined for anything in particular.”
“Then why the civil service?” Edwin asked. “If it wasn’t about the wage, to begin with. Why did your parents want that for you?”
“It was the service half that mattered. I doubt they cared a penny about what kind of government work I actually did, so long as they could talk about me as something else they’d donated to the British Empire out of the goodness of their hearts. I thought about the military, but I’d have had to move away from Maudie.”
And he wanted to be there for her. To protect her. It was excruciatingly congruent with everything that Edwin knew of Robin’s character.
Edwin’s leg cramped and he stretched it out, farther into Robin’s half of the window seat. Robin’s hand settled at once on Edwin’s calf, adjusting absently so that Edwin’s ankle lay across his thighs. There was nothing suggestive about the posture, but Edwin’s heart still thumped. He looked at Robin’s fingers, sinking into the memory of the previous evening’s events for a quick, hot moment, like a metal tea infuser held briefly in a pot of water.
He said, not letting himself overthink it, “You turned out very decent, considering how they probably treated you.”
“They didn’t,” said Robin. “Nothing like the way your father spoke about you the first night here. They were cruel to other people, but . . . I honestly think they saw us, me and Maud, as something like that man you cut out of paper. An extension of them.” He spoke as though piecing the thought together for the first time. “Things to be moved around in whatever way would make them appear in the best light. We had to be real to one another, because I don’t think we were real to them.”