OK, BYE—Yeah, the way we felt about each other made it seem like there was more to me than I knew, or more to him than he knew. We liked that feeling, but most of the people who thought they knew me well, or thought they knew him well, they didn’t like it at all, thought we were pretending, or building up what was basically a physical thing into some spiritual link. I mean, there’s Ambrose with these ultra-vintage supermodel looks. I was at this palace in Lisbon last summer and there’s a portrait there, of a black courtier . . . this friend of a friend of a very good friend of a friend of Luis I type sort of guy . . . but he’s Ambrose Kercheval to the life, right down to the frock coat. Ambrose was just about allowed, and me, this scrappy girl who sprang out of a caravan and used her own head as a battering ram until those medical-school gates buckled, I was just about allowed. But the two together . . . My friends were polite with him, but after he’d gone, they’d tell me, That one’s a no no—he’s the opposite of lively, and his friends were kind . . . well, patronizing, really, and they’d ask him, What do you two talk about? Our vocab was so different we needed dictionaries or UN translators or something. Even now . . . you just go and tell Ambrose the title of any book or film or TV show I like and he’ll tell you, in detail, just why it makes his eyeballs bleed. Dad didn’t mind him, though. Loyal bugger, idn’ he, that’s what Dad used to say. Once he’s on your side, he don’t care what anybody else thinks. Oh, Ambrose was shocked, really, really shocked, the first time I took him to McDonald’s. He took me to his favorite Michelin-starred joint, and I was like what the fuck is this and how come there’s hardly any of it?
They’d met the summer before Kenzilea graduated from medical school; Ambrose was her friend’s piano teacher. Kenzilea, usually late for everything, somehow managed to be wondrously punctual when it came to meeting her friend for lunch on piano-lesson days, often arriving before the lesson ended and complimenting Ambrose on the ethereal music she’d heard drifting out of the window. Occasionally what Kenzilea had heard was a composition of Ambrose Kercheval’s, performed by Ambrose himself, but most of the time it was a recording of a better pianist that Ambrose wanted his student to hear. Kenzilea’s inability to tell the difference was something that Ambrose would’ve found impossible to overlook if he hadn’t been smitten at first sight. He saw her. It was like looking through her personal timeline, past and future, and going, Wow, yup, gosh, wow, WOW, wow, I want to be there too. Kenzilea saw him right back, and they went on like that until the evening an ex-boyfriend of Kenzilea’s saw them together. Kenzilea thinks of that evening as the turning point between things maybe being all right and definitively going wrong. What if she’d acknowledged that ex of hers, stopped and said, Hi, how’s it going, just been her “old” self instead of sweeping past him without a second glance and not answering when asked if he she knew him? Ambrose would never have ignored somebody he’d been close to. That ex-boyfriend of hers was going along on the other side of the road, on his own, and she was on her way home from a kunqu opera performance she’d watched with Ambrose and a few of his friends—it wasn’t a good time for an ex to pop up, not while Kenzilea was cloud-walking like one of the singers she’d just seen onstage (heel-toe-heel-toe, smooth soles, dainty slippers of air). As she did so, she listened to the others talking about the performance, and she put phrases together in her mind, thinking, OK, so this is the term for that, but then the ex-boyfriend shouted, Oi, Little! Kenzilea Little . . .
The ex-boyfriend was carrying a six-pack of cider and was already drinking one of the cans, and Kenzilea was ashamed of absolutely everything about this person. She couldn’t believe she’d ever thought she was in love with him. Him beside Ambrose—no, no, the disparity was horrendous.
After Kenzilea blanked that ex and her other friends got to know about it, a crusade began. Worried friends and insulted exes. What’s the matter? Am I too common? Would you blank me as well, Kenzilea? They gathered at her flat and laughed when she played them music they hadn’t heard before. Pathetic—you don’t even know what you’re listening to. You only think you like this because he does.
Nobody knows you like we do—that was the message. This fling with a piano-playing fop was a betrayal of her old self and her old friends, and they weren’t going to stand for it. Kenzilea was disloyal—she admits it, but that wasn’t learned from Ambrose; it was just how she was, and the trait had never really made itself clear to her and to her friends before. Or it hadn’t really mattered before. Gretel might have made an observation from the professional perspective of a changeling that sometimes people are so determined for their lives to stay the same that they end up changing everything. Three of Kenzilea’s friends—well, two exes and a friend—went to see Ambrose. They’d been drinking, and when he opened his front door, he greeted them jovially with the words Hello, Darren, Darren, and Darren . . . despite significant differences in physical characteristics, each one of the three men looked as if his name was Darren, and Ambrose felt he couldn’t avoid alluding to that fact.
“Darren, Darren, and Darren” shouldered their way into Ambrose’s flat and trapped his fingers under the lid of his piano again and again. They broke his hands. He couldn’t play or teach anymore, and the teaching had been more essential than the playing. These were the doings of Kenzilea’s old friends. After their visit to Ambrose, she couldn’t see him the way she had before, or if she did perceive that backward-and-forward timeline, all she saw in it was eternal deference to the cocky younger brother whose successes he could assist but not emulate. Ambrose lied to Kenzilea all the time, about inconsequential things, and he hid things, she didn’t even know what, and Kenzilea stayed on and stayed on, trying to repair her fickleness until her own son (and his) said, What are you still doing here? If you’re staying for my sake, don’t bother.
Gabriel came in at number six on Harriet’s list. He was willing to answer every question she asked him and to find answers if he didn’t already have them, but his queries regarding Druhástrana’s political system were beyond her, and that made her feel guilty . . . for not being able to satisfy that aspect of his curiosity and for not sharing it . . .
There were things Gabriel and Harriet had in common, though. One was a wish to be of use somehow. Gabriel was the most likely candidate for Head Boy come the school elections, and there’d never been a new pupil at their school who was made a prefect as quickly as Harriet was. Enthusiastic participation in extracurricular clubs and charity drives, the polite and personable enforcement of the school’s code of conduct, our Gingerbread Girl could do it all. She made many friendly acquaintances among the “illustrious sons and daughters of the illustrious,” as Margot dubbed them, but strange to say (and she doesn’t know why this should be the case when she remembers all her fellow Gingerbread Girls), she wouldn’t be immediately able to put names to the faces of anyone she met at that school if she ran into them again on the street today. Perhaps they wouldn’t recognize her either: Tamar had asked Harriet to dye her hair black while she lived with them, so that’s what she did.
Ari bought Harriet a bike, and Gabriel took her cycling around Whitby. The two of them climbed the 199 steps up from the town to the abbey, and they read the words of Caedmon’s hymn together. Sing it, please, Harriet asked, but, just like Caedmon, Gabriel said he didn’t know how. Standing among those much abandoned, much rebuilt ruins, Gabriel and Harriet tilted their heads as far back as they could go and regarded the roof of the heavens, seeking out the height at which lost music could be heard again.
Harriet had kept her wheat-sheaf ring on her engagement finger because that was the finger Gretel had chosen for it. Gabriel kept looking at the ring and thinking there was some romantic Druhástranian attachment he had no right to intrude on, and Harriet let that continue without amendment. Yeah, people get married really young over there . . .