She lay back down. I put my head next to hers on the pillow. Her face was as gentle as ever. My eyes moved over hers. I felt I had to say something, to explain.
“I—” I stopped again. She put a gentle hand on my arm.
“It’s okay,” she said, “really. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to say anything.” She let a long moment lap between us. “But you could tell me anything, you know. Anything. I swear I’d never tell a soul.”
“Go on, then.” I slipped the chain off my neck and placed it in the palm of her hand, folding her fingers over its tiny dolphin. “Swear.”
She grinned. “Fine. I, Robyn Bee, do hereby swear—”
“Solemnly swear—”
“Do hereby solemnly swear that you, Willa Martenwood, could tell me anything—”
“Anything?”
“Anything, and I would never tell another soul.”
“Thank you,” I said, smiling. She dropped my necklace back into my hand. I put it back on and we lay down again, two heads on one pillow. “That means a lot.”
I could have told her anything.
I could have told her everything.
I just never did.
***
The day school finished for the summer, Robyn’s mother picked us up in a battered blue Defender, and in the two hours it took to drive to their home I honestly don’t think she drew breath. Sometimes she talked to us, sometimes to passing sheep and the flocks of pheasants that periodically flooded the road; at other times to the Land Rover itself, Bertie.
I’d never ridden in a Defender before. The three of us sat rammed together on a bench seat in the front, and there were bits of moss growing on the inside of the windows and holes in the floor where you could literally see straight through to the road. The thing lurched wildly as it went round corners, and we went with it. I clung on to Robyn until she pointed out a handle on the dash she called the Oh shit bar, then I clung on to that.
Before long we were off the main roads and on to single-track lanes. We crossed river after river, sometimes on ancient stone bridges, and sometimes actually plunging through the water, Bertie reeling like a drunk over the riverbed’s rocks. We wound our way through valleys so thick with trees the landscape looked almost Jurassic; everywhere was hung with vines and drifts of lichen, and the forest floor was thick with ferns.
Then Mrs. Bee was saying, “Come on, Bertie, you bastard,” and, as the oaks gave way to open moorland, we began the final ascent to the house, up the steepest hill imaginable, on a stony unmade track.
And then there were dogs barking and running alongside, and we drew up outside a lone stone cottage with a slate roof. Straight off two men appeared from the house. The tall thin one with curly graying hair, a big nose and wide grin I guessed must be Robyn’s father, and the other her brother, a young man with a shy smile and a limp. All of them were talking and hugging, and the two dogs were jumping at Robyn and practically howling with joy when she bent down to kiss the top of their heads. Then her dad and brother were hauling our bags into the house and we followed, scattering cats, ducks and a goat in our wake.
I swear to God we must have gone back in time. The house was somehow alive, as if the actual physical building was living and breathing. Chickens and dogs marched through the kitchen, and there were hundreds of bats in the attic that streamed out from under the eaves at dusk. It wasn’t a big place, and everything seemed to spill from the inside to the out: there were pots of geraniums and herbs by the back door, boots and dog beds, even the scent of the kitchen escaped into the garden—the smell of yeast and coffee and cinnamon and apples. Upstairs, the bedsheets smelt of marzipan, the towels of cucumber. And not only did they not lock up at night, they didn’t even shut the front door. Outside, there were long views in every direction.
Everything was old, in fact the bathtub was seriously ancient. The loo flushed with a chain, and the plumbing was treated like some sort of prehistoric creature in need of special care, a job which Robyn’s dad, Chris, performed regularly with a wrench and a bucket, coaxing the pipes to splutter and gurgle their way back to life. Nothing was wasted in that household. Scraps went to the animals or the compost, and everything else was repurposed as seed trays or flower vases or saved for later, just in case. Everything had some sort of value, it seemed. Even the smallest thing mattered.
Meals appeared at a kitchen table that was hewn from a long plank of pale oak with an undulating surface, like a sea on a calm afternoon. Robyn’s dad had made it. In fact, it turned out he’d made pretty much everything in that house and nothing was what you’d call perfect, no surface was flat. All the wood was full of dips and knots and bumps. Not one of the legs was square.
“You shouldn’t overwork wood,” he told me, spotting me running my hands over the kitchen worktops one morning. “It takes away its soul.”
For a house in the middle of nowhere, it wasn’t a quiet place at all. It was full of noise and had a regular stream of visitors too, some of whom had made the climb because they’d spotted the word teas faraway on the roof of the pottery and others who arrived simply by word of mouth. Whoever they were, Robyn’s mum, Caro, coaxed stories out of them. We met a group of dinner ladies from Truro, an archaeologist from Hexham, a professor of physics from Kansas, a stripper from Southend. Caro was fascinated by everyone. If they liked dogs, they were welcome.
Every once in a while someone would arrive who didn’t speak English, and those were always the visitors that Robyn and I enjoyed the best. Not only did their appearance entail Caro performing a series of increasingly complicated mimes, but when they came to pay they’d be completely bemused by her absolute refusal to accept even a single penny for the tea and cake. Then, after that, it just got worse. Before they were allowed to leave, Caro would produce a tatty old exercise book for them to write in. On the first page she’d written please assist future visitors by writing this is not a tea shop in your own language below—
“Mum,” Robyn said one night as she flicked through its pages, “you do realize you only ever give this book to people who don’t actually have a clue what they’re being asked to do, right? Look at this entry, somebody’s just written Bizarre.”
***
The next month just went. I barely had time to think about home. We were somehow always busy. It was only at the end of my second week that I realized they didn’t actually have a TV—Absolutely no point, Robyn said, there’s no reception.
In the evenings, after supper, the whole family just sat around the kitchen table and talked, or sometimes played cards for buttons and coins. Big debates happened there too, discussions on art, politics, music, current affairs, anything really. Other things too, specific things, some of which I’d never even heard of before: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the Bechdel Test, Hooper’s Law, Schrödinger’s Cat, Dunbar’s Number, the Barnum Effect; and, once, argued passionately by Chris and with more examples than you’d think strictly necessary, Frank Zappa’s musical genius. Mostly these discussions were started by Caro in a passing comment delivered casually, a small thing thrown into a ring. But just as quickly each idea got picked up and passed around. Every point was acknowledged, then instantly challenged. I soon realized you had to think fast and back up your arguments with good evidence, or else Robyn’s brother, Michael, would pick them to bits with a precision that was needle-sharp. Robyn’s dad, I thought, listening intently with his head cocked on one side, looked a bit like a raven, but he spoke like a priest, adding his own thoughts to ours in a voice that was measured and soft. Nobody ever lost their temper. Nobody shouted. Nobody stormed out. It took me a while to understand no one ever got angry about anything. If I’d have figured them out sooner, I would have owned up to accidentally breaking a bowl. I should have said something straight off, of course, but Laika and I knew better than to own up to anything. Nonetheless, I felt a deep shame for letting the moment pass. They were so generous about it. They must have known it was me.
***
That family. Caro, who always claimed to be exasperated by the ramblers that appeared at the door, but who then insisted they stop for tea and who had, in fact, already baked something, in anticipation of their arrival. Chris, who lived in plaid shirts with worn collars, and who seemed genuinely interested in everything we had to say. Beautiful, hesitant Michael, who, for someone so unbelievably clever, was the only person in the house who didn’t seem to have clocked that Robyn and I were sleeping together. Robyn’s parents never said anything, but I just knew they knew. It was nice, not having to explain, to just feel accepted. There wasn’t a chance I’d be telling my own mum and dad.
They were both so kind. Not only had Chris spent an entire afternoon teaching me how to throw a pot, and later how to glaze and fire it raku-style, but the night before I left he gave me a gift from his pottery too. It was a tall, round pitcher with an elegant curving handle and a deep green glaze, the color of the Atlantic, he said. It was by far the most beautiful thing I’d ever been given in my entire life.
“Make sure you use it,” Chris said to me. “Put flowers in it or water for the table, anything, I don’t mind. Just promise me you’ll actually use it. Art’s meant to have a purpose.”
“He’s a potter,” Caro said; “he makes functional objects. He would say that.”
The sky on my last night with the Bee family was dark and clear, so after the firing we just sat outside in deck chairs. I’d never seen such amazing stars in my entire life.
“No light pollution here,” Caro said, as Michael pointed out the three stars of the Summer Triangle, Deneb, Vega and Altair. Later, we just sat in silence and watched the slow turning of the sky. Yap, their tiny terrier, was curled into a soft comma in the middle of my lap. I buried my hands under his warm little body.
“But where is everybody?” Chris said, in a strangely emphatic voice, widening his eyes.
Michael laughed, then looked at my blank face. “He’s quoting the origin of the Fermi Paradox.”
“The what?”
“The Fermi Paradox, after Enrico Fermi. That’s what he said about the problem with aliens, allegedly.”
