She’d said yes but without any expectation, and when she’d seen him over Christmas at Fyfield Road, they hadn’t mentioned it. Her impression of the afternoon as a self-contained bubble of time outside the usual stream crystallised but then, two weeks after the new term started, she’d gone to the lodge to check her mail and found a hand-delivered note in her pigeonhole: Lunch, redux – Lamb & Flag, Tuesday at one?
She’d accepted the invitation – he hadn’t flirted with her at the White Horse, there had been nothing inappropriate – and then spent two days beforehand questioning her decision: hurting or offending Jacqueline or Marianne was the very last thing she’d wanted. As soon as she’d walked into the Lamb and Flag, however, she’d seen that she had nothing to worry about. Seb had brought Steven, the new protégé he’d been talking about in hyperbole for the past year. ‘I thought you two should meet,’ he said, taking their orders for a first round. ‘You’ll get on like a house on fire.’
Entering the Covered Market from the High Street, one saw its fragrant side, the gift shop and the jeweller, the florist and the special-occasion cake-maker. Ben’s Cookies filled the narrow alleys with the scent of melting chocolate. Coming in from Market Street at the back, though, you encountered a different, grubbier face, one closer, Rowan always thought, to how it must have looked in the seventeen hundreds when it first opened. The usual scurf of sprouts and onionskins lined the gutter by the entrance, and inside, the air had a rich animal-vegetable smell of ripe cheese, damp greens, cooking pasties, the fishmonger’s and, underneath it all, the iron tang of the butcher’s where deer carcasses hung on hooks outside, their flanks furry as children’s toys as you brushed past, their necks circles of bloodied bone and cartilage.
She’d told Cory to meet her at Morton’s, one of the cafés at the heart of the market. She’d lived in Oxford for more than twenty years but it seemed she could still be confused by the aisles that ran the length of the place. Thinking of other things, she took the wrong one and had to double-back past the barbershop and the place with all the tie-dye that reeked of incense.
Late as she was, she was the first to arrive so she took a table facing the door and ordered some coffee. As she picked up her phone to check the time, it buzzed in her hand.
A text from Peter Turk: Lent M cufflinks for party & want to retrieve them b4 her things sorted. Can I come & collect?
Can find and put in post, she typed. What do they look like?
A few seconds later: Not to worry, coming up to Ox anyway.
She was surprised; he hadn’t mentioned it on the phone. When?
Sat – coming to visit my mum. Rock ’n’ roll!
The waitress brought the coffee. Cory was ten minutes late now and, remembering how punctual he’d been yesterday afternoon, Rowan couldn’t help enjoying the idea that he might be lost somewhere in the maze of alleyways, cursing her for not choosing somewhere easier. As she had the thought, though, the bell chimed above the door and she saw him come in.
The waitress approached but he pointed to Rowan and made his way over, pulling the chair out and sitting down almost before he’d said hello. ‘I like this place,’ he said. ‘The market.’
‘You’ve been here before?’
‘No.’
‘Really? I thought Marianne would have brought you. She liked it, too.’
‘We didn’t go out too much.’ An upward flick of the eyebrows.
Touché? she wondered.
‘Coffee, please,’ he said without turning to look at the waitress who’d come up behind him.
‘Which hotel are you staying at?’ Rowan asked.
‘The Old Parsonage.’
‘That’s lovely.’
‘As an American, of course,’ he said, eyebrow lifting again, ‘I get a kick out of old places, the idea that parsons were in there doing their thing before George Washington was a twinkle in his daddy’s eye.’
‘How long have you been in the UK?’
‘Since two thousand twelve.’ His coffee arrived and he turned to say thank you.
‘What brought you?’
‘Curiosity.’
She smiled to encourage him but he said nothing more. ‘About what?’ she prompted.
‘Everything. Living overseas – I’d never done it. London, which I love. Your history, the culture. I like National Trust houses – what an amazing organisation that is.’
‘You live in London?’
‘I do.’
‘But you worked with Marianne here for the most part, you said.’
‘Yes.’ He looked at her and Rowan thought she saw amusement in his eyes: I know where this is heading.
‘Did you stay at the Old Parsonage then?’ she said anyway.
The amusement vanished and he looked down, breaking eye contact. Again, she thought, his face was carefully composed to give nothing away. The silence stretched but she resisted the instinct to speak into the void. His move.