Chapter 11
11
On Wednesday, Pippa protested so much about her period cramps that Mrs. Wilder made her lie down with a hot-water bottle and declared it a day off from study. Faye, bored and aimless, declared her intention to drive to her favorite rosé vineyard in the countryside. I could come with her, if I wanted. Mrs. Wilder checked the wine cellar, said a few cases would be fine, and reminded us to be back in time to dress for dinner—family and a few friends, a nice restaurant down at the port to celebrate Mr. Wilder’s arrival for the holidays.
It was a beautiful drive, about an hour and a half. The lavender fields we passed were silvery green, waiting for spring. As we drove, Faye complained—some drama with the flighty aunt who lived in their Highgate house—but I could tell she was in a good mood. The more time I spent with her at the villa, the more unpredictable she felt to me, by turns inviting and aloof. But always, somehow, captivating.
Last night, I dreamed that I’d begun to look like her: my arms and legs and torso lengthening, fingers and facial features sharpening into delicate replicas. My hair deepening to a dark nut brown. And in the dream my mother saw me and said, “Anna, sweetheart, I almost didn’t recognize you.” When I woke up, I saw a young man crossing the moonlit yard from my window. He paused to pet the silent dog that trotted out to greet him, then knocked on Faye’s guesthouse door. Yellow light sliced across the willow trees when she opened it for him.
I wanted to ask her about it, on the drive, but I wasn’t sure how she’d react. When we pulled in and parked at the vineyard, there was one other car there: a lime-green time capsule from a seventies movie set. We parked next to it just as Callum stepped out.
“Where’d you get that thing?” Faye called to him, ogling the classic car.
“It’s a loaner. An old family friend, he doesn’t drive much anymore,” Callum said. “He’s always asking me to take it out when I’m here, to clear out the cobwebs.”
“I didn’t know you were coming,” I said, just so I wouldn’t keep standing there, silent and clueless.
“Not meant to be a surprise,” he said with a shrug. “Faye said I could tag along.”
“I didn’t think you’d want to,” she huffed, circling the car. “A Citro?n, what year?”
Someone from the vineyard emerged to greet us. This turned out to be the thirty-something daughter of the farm, and when she clocked the caliber of cars in the lot, I could practically see the cartoon dollar signs in her eyes. She was happy, of course, to give us a tour, though the vines themselves were pruned back to almost nothing, bare and twisted on the wooden frames. “Grapes only grow on first-year shoots,” she explained in her elegant accent. “Anything older, it’s only leaves.” The rest of the farm was idyllic: fields and pavilions, an enormous ancient farmhouse of yellow stone, a barn turned tasting room, a paddock with three silky brown horses. I went to the fence, but they pretended not to see me, munching their hay, tails drifting in the December breeze.
After, Callum got meat and cheese and bread from the Citro?n, and we sat at a long table in the cavernous tasting room, eating our picnic while the vineyard daughter brought us flights of wine. Just a few sips in each glass, every shade of pink, but more than enough to put the same pink in my cheeks.
“That’s why you have to bring food to these things,” Callum said. “Otherwise you can’t drive home.”
“Oh, she’d be more than happy to put us up for the night,” I said, nodding at our hostess. But I was glad he’d thought of it. The bread did its job; I was light, glowing, happy, but not tipsy.
We stayed so long that the afternoon sun slanted in through the barn windows, making pale honey-colored stripes on our table as it lowered toward sunset. Faye bought four cases, blond wooden crates the vineyard daughter helped us carry out to the car. Callum put the two bottles he bought in the trunk, started the car, then stepped out again to say goodbye. He and Faye parted in the way of British friends, a peck on each cheek, and then, suddenly, I got the same: Callum in front of me, bending slightly, touching those sharp statue-like cheekbones to my cheeks. His lips were light, quick, warm, gone, and I smiled and said the normal things—said goodbye; drive safe; yes, it had been worth the drive. But as we waited for him to pull out ahead of us, my mind was filtering back through the milliseconds, searching out the touch of those lips again.
After half an hour driving through fields and hills and small villages, we turned onto a broader highway, still devoid of cars. And then, ahead of us, the unmissable green sports car was on the shoulder of the road, Callum next to it, phone held up to the sky.
“Shit,” I said as Faye pulled in behind him.
“I can’t get a signal, can you?” he said when we got out. There was a frantic edge in his voice. My phone almost never had service in France. Faye checked hers and shook her head. Most of the drive had been like that, the area too remote.
“What happened?” she asked. “Do you have a flat or something?”
Callum flung a hand back at what Faye had missed, though I had not: a thin eddy of steam rising from the hood. “The gauges went mad, and then it was smoking,” he said, pacing now, eyes wide, phone held aloft. “I think I’ve killed it.”
“You can ride with us. When we get back to town, we can call someone to come get it,” Faye said.
“You can’t just leave a car like this on the side of the road, Faye. It’s not even mine. I promised I’d take care of it.”
Her nostrils flared. No one ever challenged Faye. “Well, we can’t do anything just hanging around. We have plans tonight.” She turned to go, waving me on.
Was she being serious? “We can’t just leave him here,” I said. “It’ll be dark soon, something could happen.”
Faye stopped and faced me. “I am not a tow truck. I can’t fix this. And we can’t miss dinner.”
“I can miss dinner,” I said before I’d even thought it. I shouldn’t, of course. It would very much behoove me to be there, meeting the man who was, ultimately, paying for me to be here.
“You can’t just bail,” Faye said. “It’s a special chef’s table, a planned menu, all paid in advance.”
Callum folded his arms on the low roof of the car, then let his forehead rest on them, face out of sight. “Just go, both of you,” he said. His voice was strangled, almost breathless. A prickle of recognition ran up my spine.
“No,” I said. “I’m not going to just leave you here on the side of the road.”
He looked up finally, and what I saw on his face—worry, anxiety tipping toward desperation—echoed through me. I’d stood on plenty of roadsides in my life, unsafe and alone, when my old Cavalier quit on me. From the look of it, Callum was barely holding it together.
Faye was heading again for her car. “We can’t do anything standing here. We’ll call someone in town. They’ll come and get him.”
“That could take hours,” I said. “He could be here all night.” Probably neither of these people had ever waited for a tow in their lives.
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
I threw up my hands in frustration. “A tow truck isn’t room service, Faye. The garages in town might be closed when you get there. The least I can do is stay.”
Faye huffed, opening the car door. “Fine. I’ll call the garage when I get home. And let Mum know you’ll miss dinner.”
Gravel flew up when she drove off. Callum said nothing but started pacing again. Without Faye there to inflame things, I could see I’d been right: he was nearing full panic.
“Hey,” I said, crossing to intercept him. “Just stop for a minute, okay?” I’d never reached for him before, but I put my hand on his arm and held it till he turned toward me. “What’s going on?”
“What if I did something to it, to the car? What if I ruined it?” He looked at me, but I could tell he wasn’t really seeing me. His mind was reeling through the worst-case scenarios. Stacking them up as certainties. When my mom panicked like this, it was always the same: her blood sugar was plummeting, refusing to stabilize, dangerously low. She chewed her huge, chalky sugar tablets, tested, then tested again. Her eyes on the needle-prick of blood sliding onto the test strip, the meter’s numbers still dropping. She chewed more tablets, washed them down with Coke, stared at the numbers again. And all the while I talked to her, tried to pull her attention back to me. Reminded her, again and again, that we’d done this before. It’d been fine all the other times, and it would be fine this time, too. It just took time for her levels to respond. She’d be okay. We’d all be okay. No seizure, no ambulance, no IVs, no ER bill.
To Callum, I said gently, “I’m sure it didn’t break down because of your driving. It’s old and needs upkeep. You said so earlier, remember?”
He shook me off and turned toward the car again. “You don’t know that.”
With Mom it had been easy to identify the panic: low blood sugar is a medical emergency. I had to figure out why Callum was upset. It couldn’t just be the car.
“Tell me what’s happening,” I said, putting my hand on his arm again. We were standing in front of the hood, the smoke just barely there now. “Explain it to me.”
“Why?”
“Please,” I said quietly.
He breathed out, a slow, heavy exhale. “The family friend who lent it to me, he’s pretty old. He doesn’t have a lot. Money, sure, but his wife died last year.” Callum turned to look at me, his back to the car now. “His kids are grown up, they have their lives, they don’t visit. He’s too old to go to them. This car—it’s kind of all he has. He visits it in the garage. Polishes the chrome by hand, every week, even though it never goes anywhere.” He let his head drop. “And I’ve killed it.”
“I’m sure whatever’s wrong, it’s not that serious,” I said. “Everything’s fixable.”
“Is it really?”
“It is when you have money,” I said. “A car this old has been through dozens of repairs. What’s one more?”
Callum’s lips lifted into the smallest smile. “You think so? This isn’t really my area of expertise.”
I had to laugh. “Well, you’re in luck, it’s definitely mine. Reliable cars weren’t exactly a fixture in my family.”
He smiled again, a real smile. His shoulders had dropped, his whole body opening, relaxing. “Probably you’re right,” he said. “I just don’t know how I’m going to tell him.”
“He’ll understand. I’m sure your visits mean more to him than a few car repairs, anyway.”
“I appreciate you staying with me,” he said, moving to lean on the bumper. “Otherwise I’d just be sitting here, panicking all night.”
I put my coat on and sat next to him. The day’s warmth was fading fast, but the heat from the hood felt good. That was when I smelled it: a sweet, chemical scent, something like toasted marshmallows and window cleaner. The smell coolant makes when it leaks on hot engine parts.
I jumped up. “Would you pop the hood? Just for a minute.”
Callum raised his eyebrows. “Is this the part where you tell me you’re a mechanic?”
I shrugged. “I’ve owned a lot of old-ass cars.”
Callum opened the door and reached in to release the latch. I felt around for the hook under the edge of the hood, and by the time I found it, Callum was next to me, helping me lift and prop it open on the support arm.
I looked down to where the coolant tank had been on my Cavalier, but this one was smaller and up on the driver’s side, just above the wheel well—a clear plastic jug, plainly empty.
“Looks like you’re out of coolant,” I said, pointing at it.
Callum stared at me. “You just happen to know what’s wrong?”
I laughed. It was lucky, really. “I know nothing about cars. But this happens a lot with older models. Shit leaks. Lean in, smell it.”
He bent under the hood with me.
“That sweet smell. The car I drove all through college, it had a banged-up radiator, a really slow leak. I had to top off the coolant once a week, keep an eye on it all the time. I used to call it my thirsty car.”
“Will it be okay? How bad is that?”
“The engine overheats without it. Obviously, I don’t know for sure that’s what’s wrong, but I’d think as long as you didn’t drive it for miles and miles after it started smoking, the car should be fine.”
His face slackened, his whole body practically drooping with relief. “I didn’t, no. I pulled over right away.”
“Then you did the right thing. If we had a jug of coolant, we could fill it up. Once it’s cooled down and the tank’s safe to open.”
Callum went to the trunk, searching fruitlessly behind the wine bottles and spare tire. “Can we use wine?” he joked. “Maybe French cars exclusively drink rosé.”
“Honestly, just water would probably be enough to get us back to town.”
He straightened up from the trunk, and we looked at each other for a moment.
“I wonder what French cars think of natural spring water?” he said with a little laugh, bending again to collect the wine bottles. He’d seen it, like I had—just before we’d turned onto this highway, there’d been a small river running right up along the road. You noticed it because the road got windier, following it.
We each had a sip of the very nice wine before pouring it out onto the roadside gravel. “To Anna—student, tutor, undercover mechanic,” Callum said, toasting his bottle to me.
“Let’s wait and see if I’m actually right,” I said. “Maybe I missed my calling. I’m sure being into cars is more lucrative than being into books.”
We locked the car and started up the road. Half a mile to the river maybe, not long, the trees leaning over us, almost watchful. “I did sort of wonder if your dad was a mechanic,” Callum said.
“He’s not. But he’s handy—he can fix anything, even car stuff. Makes sense he always thought the things I was good at were useless. Book-smart and street-dumb, you know?”
Callum grimaced. “Did he want you to be a doctor or something?”
“Sure, or a lawyer, or an engineer maybe. Something concrete and useful and financially secure.” I shrugged and shook my head. “I was his greatest disappointment in a lifetime of disappointments. Betrayed all the promise of my early report cards by failing to turn academic success into financial success.”
“That feels a little mercenary.”
I shrugged. “Don’t parents always want their kids to be better off than them? More secure?”
It wasn’t like I didn’t understand it. In my father’s eyes, my only job was to take with both hands whatever the world would allow me—education, opportunity, everything—fist over fist, until I had climbed so high that nothing could touch me anymore. None of the things that had crushed him and Mom against the first of the month: co-pays and prescriptions and premiums, car repairs and groceries and gas. So I would never have to hesitate over the astounding cost of a girl’s Little League softball jersey that might be worn a season or two at most.
“Sure,” Callum said. “But you have to let kids go their own way, too.”
I suddenly felt how revealing the conversation had become. “Well, I did eventually, didn’t I? Here I am, hitchhiking in France,” I joked, waving my empty wine bottle in front of us. But what would it feel like to be here, if I’d left with my father’s blessing? If I’d felt from him a fraction of the faith Mom had had when we looked through the brochures and magazine spreads together? Those years had taught Mom and me to be hopeful and taught him to be hard.
Time to change the topic. “What about you? Did you always want to be a lawyer?” I asked.
Callum laughed and shook his head. “That’s an American term. I’ll be a barrister when I’m done.”
I rolled my eyes at him, but really I was thinking of how good a smirk looked on that curved bottom lip of his. “Okay, did you always want to be a barrister, then?”
“No, actually, I thought I would do politics for a long time. But I don’t know—as I got older, really saw how things worked, it didn’t seem like a real profession anymore. Or like a place I knew I could do good, be useful. I still have a long way to go—this year is just my bar training—but I’ve already done some good internships, so at least I know I enjoy the work.”
We turned onto the side road and climbed down the mossy bank to the river. Callum stepped out on a rock, and I handed him the bottles one by one. He handed them back to me, ice-cold and glistening. By the time we made it back to the road, it was starting to get dark, just a soft glow in one corner of the sky, mostly blocked by the trees arching over us. The bottles were so cold, I had to hold them with just the tips of my fingers.
“Well, now that we’ve done my studies, we have to do yours,” Callum said, clinking his bottle into mine as we walked, the gravel skittering out from our shoes.
“Not sure there’s much to tell. Just a bookworm trying to take it full-time.”
“Sure, but why British lit?”
“What’s wrong with British lit?”
He shrugged. “I’ve always thought Americans found our writers a bit too stiff and starched. Our movies, too, all that Merchant Ivory stuff. It’s not cool, as the kids would say.”
I laughed. “I fell in love with British writers way before I knew what cool was. Austen, of course. She was my gateway drug.”
“A romantic, then?”
“It’s more than that.” I looked over at him, trying to make out his face in the gloom. Did he really care? I was about to make a very broad, sweeping statement, not very academic. “A lot of American writing can be very bootstrappy, you know? That focus on individual choice and fate and forging your destiny. British writers do write about those things, too, but I think they do it more honestly. They tell the truth.”
“What truth?”
“That where you come from matters, that money and class are real. Those things eliminate and elevate people. They have power.”
“I can see why that would resonate with you,” Callum said.
His voice was only curious, but the comment still stung a little. The fact that he had clocked me so easily—lower class, with my junk cars and street smarts. It zinged through me, a sharp reminder that I was talking too easily, sharing too much. Wasn’t I trying to live differently here, start fresh? The last thing I wanted was for this handsome, funny, snarky man to see me as just some sob story.
I shook my hair out of my face, forced my shoulders down and back. “Anyway,” I said lightly, “it’s a good course, at Queen Mary, and I’ll be finished by September.”
“After you write the Passably Decent British Dissertation,” he said.
“Yes, the small matter of the massive research paper,” I laughed. “First thing when I get back to London, I have to decide on a topic. It feels too open-ended. What do you write about when you can write about anything?”
“You play the hits.”
I shook my head. “It’s not like I can write about Austen. Nothing new under the sun there.”
“Well, you know,” he said, leaning closer, lowering his voice conspiratorially. His breath on my ear sent a jolt through my stomach. “Mum might still have some of my old GCSE book reports. I’d let you copy.”
I laughed so loudly the empty road echoed with it, and Callum did, too. I felt like the trees were listening, silent eavesdroppers to our conversation. Witnesses to the color in my cheeks that had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with Callum. “God, it’s quiet out here,” I said. “I haven’t found anywhere this quiet in London. And believe me, I’ve tried.”
“No, even out on the Heath, it’s not wilderness,” he agreed. “You’ve got to give up on Parliament Hill. Have you tried Hyde Park? I’ve found some quiet nooks there, believe it or not.”
I looked at him, his face barely a silhouette in the dark. “How did you know I go to Parliament Hill?” Faye knew I lived in North London, but I’d never mentioned the park.
I heard his breath catch a little, just for a moment, but his silhouette was impassive. “Everyone in London goes there,” he laughed. The sound in the cold air was brittle and false.
But then the car was in front of us and we had work to do: opening the hood again, checking the engine and tank were cooled, opening the lid, pouring in our icy river water. We got back into the car, and Callum turned the key very slowly, his face tight, waiting for something terrible to happen. But the engine turned over normally, the lights came on, and the ancient gauges settled into a safe range. He sighed and crashed back against the seat, heavy with relief. “You’re a miracle worker, Anna. A Citro?n whisperer. I really owe you.”
I waited until we were back on the highway, the black stripe of road disappearing beneath us. “You know, you’re right: you do owe me,” I said lightly. “So what aren’t you telling me, about the Heath?”
He was quiet for a few seconds, the only sounds the purring sports car and his fingertips drumming on the steering wheel. Nervous, uncertain. Not at all like him, I thought, but really, what did I know? This was only the third time we’d met.
“Sorry, I didn’t know how to say this without sounding creepy,” he said.
I had to laugh. “Well, maybe not the best start, then.”
In the glow of the dashboard lights, I watched his half smile, still wary. “I saw you once, up on Parliament Hill,” he said. “This summer. I sort of recognized you when we met at Bar Sube.”
“Really?” I said. “That’s so random.” Not an intelligent response, but I didn’t know what the correct reaction was. I saw dozens of people every time I went up to the Heath, alone or with Liv and Andre. I would never recognize any of them again on the streets of London, let alone in a foreign country. “Was I with friends? Were we being loud or something?” British people constantly complained that Americans were too loud.
Callum shrugged and shook his head. “You were alone, just reading a book. Or really, you were sitting with a book open in front of you, but you never looked down at it. Glued to the city view.”
I’d had many nice summer days on Parliament Hill, but when I went there alone, it was usually because I needed to be cured of something. Something only the sight of London, the promise of it, could heal. What had he seen, there, watching me?
“God, what a tourist,” I joked, feeling somehow exposed. “Must’ve been when I first moved. I’m much better at blending in now.”
He smiled and shook his head, eyes on the road. “I doubt you’ll ever blend in.”
We merged onto a busier highway, and I settled back in my seat, enjoying the way it held me, enjoying the heat of the car after the cold night. Enjoying the warmth of Callum next to me, wondering if we’d ever be so close, so alone, again. Pointless, of course—the best I could hope for, from him, was another kiss on each cheek next time I saw him in town, or out with Faye. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy it: the little rush of it, each time. It didn’t seem like he’d really given me the whole story about Parliament Hill, but I also didn’t want to put him on the spot. And really, why poke holes in it? What a simple, miraculous thing: to be remembered.