Afterward there were sandwiches in the back of The Green Knight. People from school sliding looks over. They were there. Say they don’t know anything. That she was just wandering about out there on her own and fell over.

Em’s mum came over and hugged all three of us.

“You’ll come by the house, won’t you?”

I promised that I would. Knew I wouldn’t.

“She’d made you all Christmas presents. She’d done tapes for you.”

When we left, she came and hugged me again, crying, her round face wet and wobbling. “I think she was out there hiding them again, so you could have another go at that game. That would be like her, wouldn’t it? Doing something nice for you all. What will we do without her, Andy? What will we do without our Em?”

I got in the van, into the back next to Peter, and Marcus drove us to the station at Great Bedwyn in silence.

As Peter slipped away, up the steps and onto the platform, I could see his eagerness to be off and I envied him. Back in Oxford no one had heard of Em, and its libraries and lecture halls and greens would be untainted by her and by the grief of those who had loved her, and at times he would, I imagined, be able to forget any of it had ever happened.

The darkness was coming in as we drove back in the rain, down the Roman road, through the ancient forest. I was in the passenger seat. At the lights in town, I stole a glance at Marcus and could see a tear flexing from the surface of his eyeball, until the light changed from red to green and he blinked and it broke. He didn’t take me home, he drove on, taking the Swindon road to Chiseldon and then up to Barbury Castle.

The car park was empty. It would close in another hour if the caretaker could drag himself away from his cottage to padlock the gate. The windscreen misted up, obscuring the view of the winter wheat, the dun hedgerows, the bulk of the aerodrome and beside it the gray cracked tarmac of the runway from where Mrs. East’s pilots had taken off on their wartime bombing missions. Beyond the mist, raindrops fell and ran together to create ripples of descending water. When the joint was rolled, I plucked it from his fingers and got out, briefly feeling the wet slap of the wind before I slid open the side door and got into the back. After a minute, I heard him open his door and get out on the driver’s side. He was gone minutes and when he finally came in, his hair and face were wet with rain.

Marcus gave me a smile that was just a movement of the lips. I sparked up and we smoked, passing the joint to and fro, but that wasn’t what we were there for. The rain fell on the roof and the radio, tuned as always to Radio One, played deeply inappropriate songs—Ricky Martin was “Livin’ La Vida Loca.” Britney Spears was “Born to Make You Happy.”