Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
The train ride to London was uneventful. Daniel, who was tired out from a weekend of walking, rowing and fresh air, spent most of the journey colouring in, and before they reached York, he’d fallen asleep. Stella and Benedict talked in hushed tones until they neared Peterborough station, where Benedict gathered their things, leaned over the table and took Stella’s hand.
‘Thank you for letting us share your trip to Durham. I hope we weren’t too much of an imposition?’
‘Not at all, and I was really glad of the company.’
‘I’ll see you in a fortnight. Less than a fortnight.’
With that, Benedict scooped up his sleeping son and carried him to the door once the train started to slow. Pressing her face to the window, Stella watched him striding down the platform. He couldn’t wave as his arms were full, but he turned and smiled, leaving her with the same melting feeling she’d had in the hotel room the previous night. Maybe it hadn’t just been the wine, after all.
Back in her London flat, Stella put the kettle on to boil and changed into her pyjamas. She brewed a cup of chamomile tea, drizzled in some honey and curled up on the sofa to reflect on her weekend. For so many years, she’d put off a trip home, never really feeling that she could face it, but she’d done it, at last. She’d never truly come to terms with losing her parents, but it had calmed her soul lighting candles at the cathedral and laying flowers outside her old home. Her memories of the city were happy ones and it had been good to share her childhood haunts with Benedict and his son. It wouldn’t have felt right had anyone else been there – not that she had anyone else to invite – but their shared sorrow created a sense of solidarity between them so their presence was a comfort, rather than a burden.
That wasn’t something she could say about many people in her life. She’d had friends over the years, and occasional boyfriends, but no one that had ever stuck because she was a permanently moving target. That was mostly deliberate – if she didn’t stay still long enough, she couldn’t form attachments to anyone and then she couldn’t be hurt when they invariably left her. It was an ingrained pattern by now, and she was aware that it wasn’t a healthy way to live: relying on no one and allowing no one to rely on her. A twenty-something orphan, independent to the point of being a hermit, and now this widowed astronomy professor and his six-year-old son had entered her life.
She was drawn to Benedict even though it was a terrible idea. The man was clearly still in mourning for his wife, then there was his son to think of, and Stella would be gone from London before too long. She was due to stay in Canada for six months and had been looking forward to that for ages but was now starting to feel less certain. If she gave enough notice, she could ditch the assignment and needn’t feel too guilty because it was a golden opportunity and there’d be a waiting list of people ready to take it on, so she’d hardly lose any reputation points, let alone risk being levelled down for it.
A few days later, Stella received a letter, which she almost ignored. Mail addressed to her was a rarity and she was used to piling up mail for the owner. But something about the large, shaky letters caught her eye and she smiled when she saw her name spelt with a back-to-front ‘S’. She took the envelope to the kitchen to open while she made some coffee.
Inside the envelope was a piece of paper, folded inexpertly into four, illustrated with a castle and three people: two tall and one small. The small person in the middle was Daniel, grinning up at the two big people. The Stella person was half the height of the Benedict person and several times wider, but she had lovely curly hair, a big smile and thick, spidery eyelashes. Benedict was very tall, very thin and wearing an astronaut suit. Stella laughed and turned the page over. On the back was a picture of a wobbly birthday cake bearing seven candles, with Daniel’s name underneath followed by seven kisses. There was also a smaller piece of paper, neatly written, with an Oxford address in the top right-hand corner.
Dear Stella,
Thank you for allowing us to join you on your trip to Durham. We had a lovely time and wanted to say thank you. It’s Daniel’s birthday the weekend after next, which I’m reliably informed falls in a new calendar month, so we wondered whether you’d be willing to give up your next lot of free time to come and stay with us. If you’re able to come, I could pick you up from the station on the Friday afternoon and drop you back there on the Sunday evening. I do hope you can come. It would be lovely to see you again, and Daniel is itching to introduce you to his teddy.
Yours sincerely, Benedict and Daniel
Yours sincerely? It had been going so well until the formal sign-off, which was only marginally better than Yours faithfully or Kind regards (which in Stella’s experience no one ever meant kindly). Evidently, she’d misread things. Talk about being friend-zoned. Well, that might not be a bad thing – no commitment, no messy feelings and easy to leave behind when it was time to move on. It looked like Canada was still on the cards after all. She picked up her phone to text but decided it would be better to reply in kind. In her satchel, she had some good-quality paper and coloured ink that she used for special clients who wanted hand-drawn birth charts. Carefully folding a sheet of paper into four, she chewed her pen for a second or two before drawing a happy lion with a large fluffy mane, complete with spectacles and dimples. Inside the card she drew the symbol for Leo and wrote:
Dear Daniel,
I would love to come to your birthday party.
Lots of love from Stella x x x x x x x
On a second piece of paper, she wrote to inform Benedict of her arrival time, mirroring his formal Yours sincerely . She put each piece of paper into separate envelopes and addressed them. It would have been easier and cheaper to put them both in the same envelope, but it was exciting for kids to get their own post.
Every year, Stella’s parents had posted her cards to her so they’d arrive on the morning of her birthday. In the children’s home, she’d always felt a prick of disappointment when she came downstairs and saw her cards neatly stacked behind the mantel clock. It was ungrateful of her when the staff and other kids had been kind enough to give her cards, but deep down, she knew it was her parents that she was missing and not the fact that they mailed her cards.
When she came back from the postbox, Stella sat down to cast a horoscope for Daniel. She had a good idea of his place and time of birth from little things Benedict had said, and now she knew the exact date. She would draw a special chart illustrated with lions, and when she got to Oxford, she’d spend some time telling the little boy about the planets’ different personalities the same way her mother had taught her when she was small. The sun was the father, the moon was the mother, Mars the warrior, Venus the maiden, Mercury the messenger, Jupiter the kindly teacher, and Saturn keeping watch over all as Old Father Time, until the arrival of Uranus the rebel, Neptune the magician and Pluto the destroyer.It might be fun for him to learn about another side to the planets, apart from just their physical qualities.
She’d buy him a present as well, but what to get? Just like his father, he was interested in space and rockets, so he might like an orrery: a small working model of the solar system, complete with moving planets. She looked online for a stockist and was pleased to find that one of the big museums near South Kensington had a couple in their shop. She could order it online but going to the museum would get her out of the house for a couple of hours and she could examine it in person
As she was about to set off to South Ken, Stella was struck by athought: an orrery was really nothing more thaneducational apparatus disguised as a toy. Daniel was the son of a professor, he had no mother and he’d been brought up in a university town. Stella was willing to bet that all the gifts Daniel had ever been given would be educational apparatus disguised as toys, so instead of the museum shop, she headed for Regent Street to visit Hamleys.
The seven-storey toyshop was such a wonderful place that she regretted not bringing the boy himself to choose his own present, but that would mean turning up for his party empty-handed, so she’d do her best to choose for him. The shop floors were festooned with a bewildering array of toys: dolls, teddies, cars, trucks, trains, wooden toys, electronic toys, building toys, soft toys and noisy toys. There was far too much choice and it was hard to know where to begin as she knew no children apart from Daniel.
The problem was solved for her when two small boys raced past, pursued by their parents. She followed them to see what all the excitement was about. The excitement was about a dull-looking circle of red and white fabric on the floor. Stella was about to move away, until a toy demonstrator loosened a restraining strap, which caused the circle to pop up into a red and white space rocket, complete with engines and an observation window. The two brothers had a whale of a time testing the pop-up tent. It would make a perfect gift for Daniel, so Stella took one from the rack. She needed one more thing and asked the demonstrator for help.
Mission accomplished, the cashier parcelled her purchases up and Stella took them home, smug that she’d managed to find two gifts that Daniel would love. Now all she had to do was try not to count the days until her trip to Oxford to see the city of dreaming spires. It was a romantic name and she wondered whether the city would live up to it, or whether it would prove to be nothing more than a fancy backdrop for a purely platonic relationship.