“There’s nothing wrong with you.”

That’s what I said, but somehow I failed to show it. My shoulders remained angled against his cautious touch and my arms were folded across my chest. In the kitchen, a thin ribbon of steam was rising from the kettle, and I thought of Dad waiting for his cup of tea.

“I think I need to get away from here,” I said. “Just for a while. Perhaps that’s all it is.”

Tom stood still, staring at his feet. I could hardly bear to look at him.

“I’m sorry,” I said—addressing my long-lost self as much as Tom—but he shook his head as if to say no need.

I was going to deal with work emails that night when I got to bed, but I wrote a few disjointed lines instead:

Windows with half-closed blinds, like sultry eyes

We swim into the night, our legs (pale legs?) like flickering (?) fish

Our legs flashing like fish in/through the dark water

A girl in pieces on a chessboard floor

I threw myself back on the bed and closed my eyes. I was in love with an ungraspable idea, a woozy dream, a place, an afternoon, a house. I sat up again and reached for my pencil.

Let me lie on the thick/green/lush grass

The white-fringed (white-crested?) sea beneath me

The white-pillared house above

I know that sounds effete but I don’t mean “love” in estate-agent speak. I wasn’t pondering Byrne Hall’s potential as a family home, or admiring it as a good example of Queen Anne architecture, or any of that. My feelings were darker and stranger. They were more like the feelings I used to have for Tom.

3

The night before I travelled to Byrne Hall—a week after my conversation with Tom—it occurred to me to write about Stella. It was only an idea, but it came to mind so suddenly and unexpectedly that I flicked my lamp on and sat up in bed with my heart hammering, as if I’d heard a strange noise or seen a dark figure enter my room.

My notebooks were gathering dust at the back of the wardrobe. When she died I’d parcelled them up with string—the spiral-bound jotters, and the exercise books, and the fancy ones people had bought me as birthday presents—expecting to chuck them away, unread, during the clear-out that never happened.

I brought them back to bed with me now and undid the string. Some creaked along their spines as I opened them, some unfurled of their own accord, their pages soft and clammy. I reread my poems through splayed fingers, cringing at my immature earnestness. There was space left in one of the jotters, so I turned to a fresh page and wrote the date in pencil.

That was it, though I sat and waited for a good hour. Nothing else occurred to me. After a while I tied my old ambitions up, slid them under the bed, and switched the light off. It was stupid to have got them out again, like picking at a half-healed scab.