LITMIR.BIZ

       PROLOGUE

      Spring had arrived in Langford early that year. A sprinkling of bluebells carpeted the lanes, and daffodils nodded proudly in the breeze which rolled in from the hills behind the small town. As Tess Tennant raced up the hill from the bus stop, she caught sight of her mother and her mother’s friend Philippa, outside the Tennants’ house. They were laughing in the bright sunshine.

      ‘Hello, Tess darling!’ Emily Tennant called out to her daughter, who ground to a halt, panting. ‘I was just telling Philippa your news.’

      ‘You haven’t told Adam yet, have you?’ Tess said, between breaths. She unhooked herself from her school bag, trying to look nonchalant and grown-up; she was almost eighteen now, after all. By the time Cleopatra was eighteen, she was ruling Egypt with her brother. By the time she was twenty-two, she’d got rid of her brother, seduced Caesar and had his baby. Of course, she was dead at thirty-nine, and had wrecked Egypt with civil war, so perhaps she wasn’t someone one should slavishly emulate—but she’d been to Rome, got to shag Mark Antony in the process and wear some awesome gold jewellery as well as being super-empowered and all that, so it wasn’t all bad.

      ‘No, of course not,’ said Philippa, brushing her wild dark hair away from her face as she smiled at Tess. ‘But well done, sweetheart. That’s wonderful. He’s going to be so pleased for you.’

      ‘He’s got a scholarship to Cambridge,’ Tess said, brushing her hands through her hair. ‘He won’t remember who we are in a few months’ time, he’ll be too important. He’ll be going to posh college dinners with E.V. Rieu and Oliver Taplin, people like that.’

      ‘E.V. Rieu died in 1972,’ said a voice behind her. ‘I’d be extremely surprised if he rocked up to dinner.’ Tess turned around to see Adam, her best and oldest friend, standing in front of her with an expectant look on his face.

      ‘I got in,’ she said, beaming. ‘I’m going. I’m going to UCL. If I get three Bs.’

      ‘Oh, my God,’ Adam said, a wide grin breaking out over his face. He threw his arms round her. ‘That’s completely, completely brilliant. You are totally bloody brilliant.’

      ‘Come in and have some tea,’ Tess’s mother called out to them, as Philippa smiled at them, hugging each other tightly.

      ‘No, thanks, maybe later though,’ said Tess. Adam released her, draping his arm round her shoulder and squeezing her tight. ‘Hurrah,’ she whispered happily. ‘The meadows?’

      ‘Yep,’ he said, nodding.

      ‘Oh,’ said Philippa, pleased. ‘Bye, you two! Have a nice time! Get me some garlic on the way back, Adam. Have a—oh, yes. Bye!’

      As they walked down the lane together, Adam rolled his eyes at Tess. They both knew their mothers were watching them.

      ‘For someone who despises the conventions of marriage, your mum is surprisingly bourgeois,’ Tess said (she was doing Politics A level).

      ‘It’s weird, isn’t it,’ said Adam, chewing on a piece of grass. ‘So mysterious and bohemian, and yet she wants her teenage son to go off with the girl next door.’

      No one knew where Philippa Smith had come from. She had arrived in town nineteen years ago like Mary Poppins, on a wild, windy day in early spring. She was moving into the cottage opposite the Tennants: Frank was a GP and he and Emily had one child, Stephanie, who was nearly two. Philippa was nearly eight months’ pregnant, Emily barely showing.

      She had been teaching in Dublin, she told them, and the father of the baby was Irish, a fellow lecturer at the college where she worked. She spoke of him without rancour, but she wasn’t going to see him again. Beyond that, Philippa said nothing more about herself. She had no apparent family or friends; she barely scraped a living marking A—and O-level exams and writing textbooks on early English history. Parts of Langford were scandalized; but Emily, who had a young child and had moved with Frank from London to live in this small, strange town, adored her immediately. Philippa accepted her neighbours’ friendship—their invitations to join them for pot luck, their casual enquiries checking that she was all right—up to a point, and then she would retreat back to her draughty cottage and her books. For someone with virtually nothing—no family, no other friends, no back-story—she was strangely imperious.

      Philippa had her baby son, Adam, six weeks after she moved to Langford; Tessa (to use her full name) was born a couple of months after that, and it was always accepted that the two babies would grow up in each other’s pockets. The sight, however, of the blond, tall Adam, and his determined blue-eyed sidekick with black hair that bobbed round her head like a halo, trotting hand in hand towards the shop around the corner, was irresistible. It was impossible not to smile, put one’s head on one side, and say, ‘Aah…aren’t they adorable?’ And when they were thirteen, and Adam was still tall and a darker blond, now a weekly boarder at a good school thanks to a combination of scholarship and sponsorship, and Tess was still small and stocky and determined, but both of them were shyer, it was rather affecting to see them putting their childhood closeness behind them, behaving slightly awkwardly around each other. People had stopped wondering where Philippa came from, and instead smiled fondly when her sweet-natured, shy son appeared anywhere with Frank and Emily’s daughter.

      ‘I think someone’s got a little crush on someone…’ a well-meaning person would hiss, delightedly, as Tess ambled casually over to Adam, shyly, at a drinks party to say hi.

      ‘You can tell he’s awfully fond of her,’ someone else would say. ‘Look at them!’

      Tess and Adam had long accepted there was nothing they could do about it. It wasn’t their parents. It was the whole bloody town: Mrs Sayers the primary school secretary, Mrs Tey the solicitor’s wife, the lady at the newsagent’s—even Mick, who ran Langford’s best pub, the Feathers, had been heard to say, ‘They make a sweet little pair, don’t they?’

      It was one of the reasons Tess was desperate to get out.

      The water meadows were flooded in winter, but as spring arrived and the water receded they began to dry out so that, even in the full heat of summer, the grass was always lush and green, the butterflies colourful and plentiful, the honey bees always busy. On this sunny April day they could sit on the tree by the river, swinging their legs over the bubbling water, drink the beer Adam kept in the knothole and smoke illicit cigarettes, the butts of which they were always careful to collect and remove when they left. Not just to save their own hides, but because they were country children and, along with other things like never leaving a gate open, they would sooner eat a cigarette butt than leave it lying in a field. Especially the water meadows. They’d been used in a Merchant Ivory film and the Prince of Wales had visited them last year. Everyone in Langford was proud of them.

      Adam

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