“Oh, right, only, this is where I’m going.”
“To church?”
“No,” she said, laughing. “My dad’s grave. I mean, if you wanna come, it’s okay and everything.” JJ felt his system grind up a gear as he got it, a sudden hammer-blow awareness of the obvious, that Bostridge was buried there, that there had been a funeral, that they visited his grave.
Surprisingly until now, even being among them, the link between him and the Bostridges had hardly seemed to matter, like it was nothing more than a metaphysical exercise to pass the time, no basis in reality. And in the family too it had seemed like no one was missing, that there were no gaps, but there was a gap and here he was facing it. “Perhaps I won’t,” he said, stumbling a little over the words. “I’m sure you’d rather be alone.”
“Okay,” she replied breezily, seeing his discomfort maybe. She laughed then and said, “It’s okay, you know. I won’t be like, overcome with emotion or anything. I just like to visit.” He could see that she wanted him to go with her, and felt embarrassed that he’d come across as so retentive, like he couldn’t have dealt with the possibility of her being upset at her father’s grave.
They walked along the side of the church, passing a few graves; most of them were to the rear though with trees among them, the leaves catching the breeze. As at the front there were tourists, studying the headstones, their voices occasionally audible against the papery rustling that rose and fell on a wind too slight to be felt.
Bostridge’s headstone was simple, understated, the barest facts and the simple quote “So we’ll go no more a-roving.” JJ recognized it, a poem by Byron, and wondered if it spoke of a man he couldn’t have imagined from their brief programmed encounter, a romantic, someone in whose imagination the world had been colored by his dreaming. That sounded more like the person Holden had described too, a person who, had he been removed from the visceral truth of it, might even have found his own death romantic. Perhaps if JJ hadn’t been there he’d have been able to see it that way too.
There were flowers in front of the headstone but Jem didn’t touch them or the stone itself, just stood at the foot of the grave, praying perhaps or speaking her thoughts to him or simply lost in thought, her face serenely composed, like time had suspended itself around her. JJ stood to the side and back a pace, conscious of intruding.
He studied her as she stood there, struck again by the way she looked, the way she was, the kind of prettiness that was hard to reduce to specifics. She was still a kid, beyond reach in his own way of things, but he was drawn to her all the same, drawn at a level hidden beyond reasoning, neurons firing along unfamiliar pathways. And maybe the way she looked was only part of it anyway, because there were plenty of young girls who were as beautiful, a shallow swell of beauty that was everywhere with girls of that age.
Briefly he wondered if the attraction was in the connection with Bostridge himself or even with the girl in Moscow, a girl who’d drawn him just as much, tapping into his psyche, burying an image of herself there, a girl he’d thought of too when he’d first seen Jem. It was a simpler attraction than that though, the kind of subconscious recognition of compatibility that happened all the time in ordinary lives, the fact that she was David Bostridge’s daughter merely a cruel trick of fate.
She turned and smiled, signifying that she was finished, and as they walked away said, “Would you like to go for a coffee or something?”
“Or something would be nice; I don’t drink coffee.”
“Me either,” she said, like it was a massive coincidence.
“Oh, and as long as it isn’t the Cheese Press or the Old Maple Tavern.”
“No, there is another place.” She laughed then and added as if to herself, “This town is so weird!” They went to a small cafe that also sold local crafts, pottery, carved ornaments; people browsed around them, looking at the goods on display as they talked and drank lemon tea.
They talked for a long while, background filling, getting to know each other. It was something he was used to, used to lying his way through, a lie that was like his own life but off-kilter, an information drift that left his real existence in the shadows. Even Aurianne had known only a rehearsed version of himself.