I would get to know it all well: the courtyard with the remains of a once-fine rose garden; the walled kitchen garden where a few fig trees, spliced against the crumbling walls, dropped their fruit onto stone pathways where it split and rotted; the derelict greenhouses full of empty snail shells, spiders, and broken glass. My gaze passed over the tangled orchard of apple trees and the remains of a rotting summerhouse. Further away, bordering the property at the back, was a copse and then the pale yellow of barley fields which rose to the horizon. Then I glimpsed the glint of sun on water and saw, to the left, at the bottom of the sloping lawn, a small lake, half choked with reeds, and there on its far side, a folly, a little white-pillared replica of a Greek temple.

Marcus kissed me, a quick, juddery kiss as we held on to the chimneys. Down below, a wood pigeon flew to a perch atop the pear tree and when I looked up toward the sun, the sky was clear as glass, and specked with tiny flying insects. The shingles were like scales under my feet, like the scales of a great dragon. The shimmery feeling was back, and I did not think I could contain it. It tempted me to flinch, as though the joy of it would break my heart. For a second I thought Marcus was going to say something and I turned to look at him, at his gleaming face, wet with sweat from the climb, and ever so briefly he appeared to me like a stranger. But before he spoke, if he even intended to, I saw the white flash of Peter’s waving hand and looked down to see, standing next to Peter, a real stranger looking up at us, face shadowed by the hand that was shielding his eyes from the sun.

CHAPTER 3

WEDDING

Just before he disappeared, I invited Peter to a wedding. He came, but arrived so late I’d given up on him coming at all. Dinner lay in ruins, the father of the bride was inching toward the summit of his speech, when suddenly I caught sight of him, slipping around the edge of the room toward me. The wedding was at the Savoy, in the Lancaster Ballroom, and the room was a sea of pink roses, of gleaming points of light flickering from candle to crystal to chandelier. Waiting staff dipped among the tables, and the mirrored walls made it seem like there were more of them than there were, more of everything. For a moment I lost sight of Peter, then he was there, right beside me, the same dark hair and widow’s peak, the aquiline nose and bone-white skin.