“Good heavens.” He shook his head and snapped his shotgun open, crooking it over his forearm. “That’ll never do.”
I never found out if it was my inferior American phrasing he disliked or the platonic nature of my relationship with his son. When Freddy and I said good-bye to his folks in early January and prepared to return to Oxford, Mrs. Montgomery glared from the hallway while her husband shook my hand.
“Can we expect you next year?” he asked.
“She’ll be back with the Yanks by then,” chirped Freddy.
Both his mother and father exhaled visibly.
The strangest thing about Christmas, aside from the austerity of Freddy’s parents, was spending it without HP, but I got back to Hertford to find he’d sent me his version of a festive postcard. On the front of the card was a photo of the Cove library, as if it were some kind of heritage landmark, and HP had cut out a picture of Santa in the mall from the local paper and stuck it to the back of the card. Around the picture, in writing getting progressively smaller as he ran out of room, he’d written Merry Xmas from Cove, cultural hotspot. Dumping snow here, working hard, miss you in my truck. Fly back to me soon, little free bird. I stuck it to the pinboard above my desk.
As the months passed towards spring, we Skyped less. He was busy finishing up his year of coaching, or perhaps his dad was working him hard. I stayed busy with Freddy, fighting through hordes of Japanese tourists around St Giles’ and taking sardonic tours of the city in an open-top double-decker bus, Freddy disagreeing with everything the tour guide said on the loudspeaker.
It was a relief when a second postcard arrived from HP in April with a picture of the Hulk smashing something on the front. In HP’s scrawl was a single sentence, Hey gray eyes, check your windows. I had no idea what he was referencing until the night of April 30, when I woke to a scattering of small pebbles hitting my window at four o’clock in the morning and looked out to see HP and Ezra on the street below Hertford College.
Detective Novak holds up a palm like a policeman halting traffic.
“Your friends. They’re always male.” He checks his watch. “Don’t you find that interesting?”
“Like I said, I’ve always been a bit on the outside of things, and if a friend comes my way, it feels lucky.”
“So Freddy replaced HP on that trip? It seems like a pretty straight trade.”
“Are you psychoanalyzing me or something?”
Novak’s eyebrows shoot up. “It’s my job to ask questions, Angela.”
“I thought your job was to listen.”
Novak’s lucky I’m even talking to him. I could have clammed up from the very start, but I’m doing this for HP, who might well be going through hell right now. I’m doing this for him and for me: the truth is I’ve bottled up this travesty for years.
I missed HP desperately while I was at Oxford and there’s no way Freddy could replace him. I remember the immediate calm that came over me when I saw HP standing below the college holding a flower from the hydrangea bush.
“Can we crash?” he shouted.
“What are you doing?” I laughed. “Wait there.” I hurried to find a robe, stopping in front of the mirror for a second to pinch my cheeks and check my hair. After a quick scrub of toothpaste across my teeth, I jogged to the college gate, pushing open the tiny door and stepping through it onto the street. My body wasn’t fully through before HP grabbed me and swept me into a hug. His neck smelled like summer. He set me down and bent to look properly at my face.
“You any different?”
I’d cut my hair shorter, pixie-style, and I knew with the light from the streetlamp my cheekbones looked good. HP walked me around in a circle, giving me short, tentative kisses that pecked like questions. Are we still the same? Have the rules changed? Is this still as good as before? We didn’t have time to find out because Ezra cut in.
“We got free bourbon on the plane!” he announced. “That stewardess kept it flowing. I think she kind of dug us. Shitty movies, though.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“You didn’t get my postcard?” HP looked crestfallen. “Dammit! I laid off Skype just to set up the mystery. You didn’t get it?”
“Did you put a date on it, bonehead?” asked Ezra, slapping HP with his cap.
“Does today work for you?” HP took my hand and laid his squashed hydrangea into it, closing my fingers. “Come on, let’s stash our gear and you can show us the town.”
As it turned out, they’d picked the best daybreak of the year to arrive in Oxford. It was May Morning, a traditional celebration that had been going for over five hundred years, and every student in town was heading to Magdalen Bridge to hear the Hymnus Eucharisticus sung from the towers by boy choristers. The university year was coming to a close, and all the colleges would throw a grand May Ball to round out the celebrations. As we walked down High Street towards the Botanic Garden, the roads started to fill with bicycles. Some students hadn’t been to bed all night—you could tell from the haunted faces above the stripy scarves. HP and Ezra kept stopping to look up at buildings.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” HP said every twenty steps. “The walls have gargoyles. That’s ridiculously cool.”
They were jet-lagged, both of them, and fighting the fade, but the birds twittered in hedgerows as we walked past the Eastgate Hotel. The sky held a cobalt promise. At the bridge a crowd stood expectantly, their faces raised to the tower.
“What are we looking for?” Ezra yawned.
“Wait for the chimes.” I had both hands in my jacket pockets, but HP reached in and laced his fingers through mine. His hair had grown by a couple of inches and sat in a tousled scruff. He looked up like everyone else, but he had that familiar golden glint at his jawline and I pressed into him until he put his arm around me. I could feel the strength of his stomach through the lining of his clothes. I felt settled, happy, as if there’d been parts of myself I hadn’t known I’d missed until he brought them back for me. With the first strike of six from the clock tower, everything else fell silent. The boys looked down at me for a moment, only to swing their faces back skyward as the Magdalen College Choir broke into hymn, as they’d done on that day for more than five centuries. We all stood still listening to blackbirds and boy sopranos; even Ezra looked reverent.