She’d got on the phone straight away and booked a table here, at Gee’s. Another opening door, this one literal. For years, especially since she’d been spending so much time in Park Town, Rowan had wanted to come to this restaurant in the beautiful old glasshouse on Banbury Road. It looked Parisian – the awnings and decorative ironwork; the round-topped wrought-iron archway at the pavement like an entrance to the Métro – but at the same time she imagined it as the greenhouse or orangery of a great English estate, the sort to which Victorians might have brought back exotic plants from the Grand Tour, citrus fruits and succulents. Above a low base-wall, everything was white-painted wood and glass, all light and air. If she walked by at night, when it twinkled with candlelight, it seemed like a carousel, the diners inside bright and happy, turning to silent music.
Adam, two years older, had been away at university then but tonight it was he who held the door open for her. He’d called at lunchtime to say that the reservation was made for eight o’clock but why didn’t they have a drink first? He was going to stay at the house and drive back to Cambridge in the morning. She’d been in her room when she’d heard his key in the door and then ‘Hello’ called up the stairs. As she’d come down, fastening the back of her earring, there had been an odd moment. He’d turned from the basket of Marianne’s post on the hall table and for a second or two he’d watched her. She grinned and said hello rather too loudly but it hadn’t dispersed the sudden strange tension.
It persisted now, as they handed their coats to the man at the door and took the two free stools at the little bar in the back room, Adam’s exaggerated courtesy a sign, she thought, that he was as self-conscious as she was, as careful not to bump arms or knees. They ordered gin and tonic and watched the barman make them as if the process were performance art. Adam tipped the rim of his glass gently against hers. ‘Cheers,’ he said, ‘and thank you again.’
She shook her head. ‘You really don’t have to.’ She nodded at a table tucked into the corner. ‘Your mother brought us here – Marianne and me – the night I got into the university. We sat there and had a glass of champagne before dinner. She was the first person I told – my dad was away – and she insisted on taking us out to celebrate.’
He smiled. ‘Sounds like Mum.’
‘It meant a lot to me, her support.’
‘She was a big fan of yours. Still is.’
Rowan frowned, embarrassed. ‘She felt sorry for me then, I should think.’
‘The opposite. I think she was very impressed by you, how self-sufficient you were. And driven. You probably reminded her of herself at that age.’
‘No, Marianne was the driven one. And look at me now. Jacqueline had published two books by my age – Mirror, Mirror and Bed, No Breakfast.’
Adam shrugged, smiling again. ‘You’re the same age as Mazz, thirty-two? I think you’ve got a bit of time.’
‘I hope so.’ She pulled a face.
He took another sip and the ice rattled as he put the glass down. Behind them, the restaurant was filling up, the hubbub of voices and silverware becoming a hum under the giant glass cloche. Rather than easing the tension, it seemed only to emphasise the silence whenever there was a break in their conversation. ‘Tell me about California,’ she said. ‘What were you doing out there?’
He described living in Berkeley, his teaching work and the research he’d done for his book while he’d been in the US. ‘I’m looking at how religious extremists – terrorists – structure their networks, fund themselves. What they’ve learned from organised crime. Gangs and cartels.’
‘Cartels? Really?’
He’d spent weeks in Colombia and Miami, he said, and she remembered how he’d taught himself Spanish in Sixth Form, the battered yellow dictionary that went everywhere in his back pocket. ‘But I wasn’t properly fluent until much later,’ he said. ‘I travelled in South America for a year after my doctorate; that’s when it really clicked.’
She pictured him in Medellín and the maximum-security prisons where he’d visited the gangsters. Someone who didn’t know him would surely predict disaster, this middle-class, hyper-educated Englishman amongst dangerous criminals, but he’d managed to persuade three members of a cartel to talk to him, he said. She wasn’t surprised: he shared Jacqueline’s same air of non-judgemental interest, integrity.
As they got down from the stools to go through to their table, they bumped elbows and Adam sprang away as if he’d been burned. They apologised at the same time.