12
We both simply stare at each other for a moment.
‘Come upstairs,’ Adam says, moving back from the door so I can come inside. ‘I could do with a coffee – I’ve only just woken up. I was up really late last night.’
‘You looked so exhausted,’ I say as Adam bolts the shop door again behind me. ‘When I left here last night, I thought you’d be asleep within minutes.’
‘What sort of things?’ I ask as I follow him to the back of the shop and then up the stairs to his flat. I’ve been in both Luca and Orla’s little flats before, so I know what to expect as I get to the top of the stairs.
But Adam’s flat looks nothing like theirs do.
‘What have you done up here?’ I ask, looking around me as Adam walks through to the kitchen part of an open-plan living area.
‘Not an awful lot. A bit of decorating to modernise it, that’s all.
Most of it was like this already. There’s not a lot I can do to the building when it’s listed, is there?
’ He begins to fill the water container of an expensive-looking coffee maker.
‘I have to say I was inspired by what you’d managed to do with your place when I was designing it.
Even if it’s probably a third of the size. ’
The large open-plan room is light and airy, with a pale modern kitchen and cream-coloured walls.
At the front of the large space is a comfortable lounge area that overlooks Clockmaker Court.
It has a large AirForce-blue velvet sofa with an extension at one end for putting your feet up.
This sits alongside a mix of solid-wood furniture and newer IKEA-type flat-pack.
‘I’m honoured,’ I say, meaning it. ‘This flat must have been opened up at some stage from what was here originally, though. They’ve left all the original mouldings up on the ceiling and around the doors – perhaps that’s how they got away with it.
It’s much more open-plan than either Luca or Orla’s flats above their shops.
They seem tiny and cramped in comparison to this. ’
‘Looks like I struck it lucky, then. Obviously it’s nothing compared to your place. But I don’t have a lot of stuff and I’ve been able to get everything I need in here with ease. Coffee?’
‘Yes, please.’
Adam starts up the grinder on the coffee maker, so our conversation is paused momentarily.
I look around the room again. In the corner there are a few unpacked moving boxes next to a table covered in a pile of books.
There are some photos in frames standing on an elegant mantelpiece above an open fireplace. I go over and take a look at them.
‘These are lovely.’
Adam looks across at me as the grinding ceases and the first cup of coffee begins to pour.
‘The newer frames are a few of the old photos we found when we cleared the house out. There’s one of me and some friends one New Year’s Eve, and the last photo I have of me and my mum before she passed away.
The new one of me and Mum we found in the suitcase is there too. ’
My gaze lingers on the photos of Adam as a child. He has the same cheeky grin and look of mischief in his eyes as he has now.
‘I’m glad you got all the photos we found framed. They look good.’
Adam nods as the coffee grinder starts up again and a second cup of coffee pours into a new mug.
I walk over to the window and glance out at the view of the court below, and, as I always do when I first enter an old building, I wonder who might have stood here before me, in this same spot, looking at the very same view.
‘Your usual?’ Adam asks.
‘Yes, please.’
‘Did you never want to live over your shop?’ Adam begins frothing milk for the coffees. ‘It’s an amazing commute!’
Adam’s kitchen is separated from the lounge by a sort of breakfast bar with stools underneath.
‘The opportunity never came up,’ I say, walking over to it and pulling out a stool to sit on.
‘It had already been developed into offices by the time I took over. I moved in with my grandparents at the house I live in now when I began helping them out with the shop, and I just stayed there as things … well, as things changed.’
‘What were you doing before you came to Cambridge?’ Adam expertly pours frothy milk over the top of the two coffees.
‘Er … not a lot. After I finished university, I was doing some odd jobs and stuff. Trying to find my way in the world – you know?’
‘Yeah.’ Adam passes me a beautiful-looking coffee. ‘Been there. But you would have finished uni in what … 2009, 2010, if you’re thirty-six?’
‘2010. I had a gap year after my A levels.’
‘What did you do – anything exciting?’
‘I went travelling with a friend. Boyfriend, actually,’ I say, thinking about Jake for the first time in ages.
‘Cool – where?’
‘European cities, mostly. Neither of us were quite the backpacking kind so we stayed in B and Bs. We’d both saved a bit working part-time beforehand, and we found bits and pieces of work while we were moving around.
’ Happy times, I think to myself. If only we’d been able to have many more years of them …
‘I used to enjoy the travelling part of my job. I saw a lot of the world that way,’ Adam says, leaning on the countertop while he sips his coffee.
‘So, after uni, what did you do? You said you’d only been in Cambridge for about ten years, so what happened between 2010 and 2014? Did you stay with this Jake?’
I feel my heart begin to beat hard and I swallow.
‘Lovely though this trip down memory lane is,’ I say hurriedly, stirring my coffee as I swiftly change the subject away from these particular years, ‘you still have a great big metal door in the middle of your shop. I think we should talk about Ben and what kept you up into the early hours of the morning, don’t you? ’
Adam nods. ‘We probably should, yes. Especially if you don’t want to talk about yourself …’
I ignore this. ‘So, what have you found?’
‘This.’ Adam goes over to the table at the side of the sofa and lifts some of the books, then carries them over to where I’m sitting and puts them on the worktop in front of me.
‘When I packed these up for the shop, I thought they were just leather-bound volumes of the classics. I’d brought a few of them up here to sort through and read, so after you left last night, I had a shower and made myself some food.
There was nothing on TV, so I thought I’d maybe start reading one of them before I went to bed. ’
The image of Adam sitting up here reading a literary classic before bed is not one I ever expected to pop into my head. It just doesn’t sit with the image I have of him. Although the juxtaposition of these two images is confusing to me, for some reason I also find them comforting too.
‘But when I picked up this copy of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities , and opened it expecting to read about Paris and London during the French Revolution, I was surprised to find this …’
He opens up the leather-bound book and lays it in front of me. But instead of the usual pages full of prose, there’s a series of what look like mathematical equations.
‘They’re on every page,’ he says when I glance up at him for an explanation. ‘There’s also diagrams too. I can’t make head nor tail of them. So, I went to Great Expectations instead.’
‘Was that the same?’
Adam shakes his head. ‘Nope, that was just a book with the actual story inside. I looked in some more Charles Dickens books and there was nothing unusual in any of them. So, I went downstairs and pulled out some more of these ‘classics’ in case there were any others like this. I almost gave up looking when I didn’t find anything after a few minutes, but then I stumbled upon a series of Shakespeare volumes in similar leather covers, and when I opened a copy of Twelfth Night , the same thing happened.
It was full of handwritten mathematical equations and hand-drawn diagrams.’
‘But why hide them in the covers of these books?’
‘It gets better,’ Adam says, laying the copy of Twelfth Night out in front of me. ‘To cut a long story short, eventually I found eight more books exactly like them. All classics, but instead of the actual book between the covers, they all had handwritten notes hidden inside.’
‘That must have taken you ages – no wonder you were up so late.’
‘I would probably still be doing it now, if I hadn’t figured out the link between them.’
‘Other than them being classics?’
Adam nods. ‘The link is they all have numbers in the title!’
‘Really?’
‘Uh-huh, and after I’d been through things like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Catch-22 , and they were just the books with no notes in, I realised that not only were the titles numeric, but they were specifically the numbers found on a clock.’
‘Why a clock?’
‘I don’t know, but look.’ He lifts a book from the pile. ‘ One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie. Took me ages to find that one, I can tell you.’
I nod. ‘Not one of her more well-known novels if you’re not a Christie fan.’
‘Usual cover on the outside, but inside, no book, only more notes. I’ve already shown you A Tale of Two Cities , so next is The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, then The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.’
As he puts each book down in front of me, I quickly open the cover to find the similar diagrams, equations and handwritten notes in each one.
‘A couple of children’s classics next – which again took me a while to find, because I wasn’t looking for children’s books to begin with.
Five Children and It by E. Nesbit, and Now We Are Six by A.
A. Milne. Then we have Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.
E. Lawrence. Around the World in Eight y Days by Jules Verne – that was one of the last ones I found – the eight disguised in the eighty really threw me off the scent.
And, finally, in a similar vein, The Thirty- Nine Steps by John Buchan. ’
‘I can’t believe you found all these books on your own,’ I tell him, looking at the pile in front of me. ‘I’m seriously impressed by your literary knowledge.’
‘Thanks. I had a little help from Google, of course, but I nearly got them all.’
‘So what are we missing?’ I check the books again. ‘Just numbers ten and eleven?’
‘Yep, they’ve got me stumped.’
I think for a moment. ‘Ten … ten …’
‘I couldn’t think of one,’ Adam says. ‘Not what I’d call a classic anyway. Titles with ten in them are nearly all modern books.’
I look at the books on the counter again. ‘These are all old books, aren’t they? When they were published, I mean. What’s the newest – the Agatha Christie?’
‘Yeah, I think so,’ Adam says, looking at the books again.
‘Hmm …’ I say, trying to recall classic novels. ‘Nothing is springing to mind for me either.’ I begin to run through some classic authors and the titles of their books – Dickens, Austen, the Bronte sisters … ‘Wait! I might have one …’ I say, as a title pops into my head. ‘I’ll be right back!’
I rush downstairs and search the shelves, and, just as I hoped, I find it. ‘I have it!’ I tell Adam as I breathlessly enter the kitchen again brandishing a hardback copy of a book.
‘What is it?’ Adam asks with his brow furrowed. ‘You’ve done better than me if you’ve found our missing ten.’
‘ The Ten ant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte!’ I say triumphantly, like someone giving the right answer on a television quiz game. ‘And it has all the handwritten notes again like the others do.’
Adam takes the book from me and thumbs quickly through it.
‘Amazing! Well done. Now if you can come up with the answer for our missing eleven, we’ve got the full set.’
I think again for a few moments, but infuriatingly nothing springs to mind.
‘No, sorry. I’ll have to come back to you on that one. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head.’ I look at our pile of books. ‘So, what are all these notes that have been written inside? Can you understand them?’
‘I think from my limited knowledge and memory from school, they might be physics equations. There’s talk of relativity and mass – those names ring a bell from science classes.’
‘They do for me too. But science wasn’t really my thing at school either. I do know who might be able to help us, though – Barney. He works in physics at the Cavendish Laboratory!’
‘So he does!’ Adam says keenly. ‘Shall we go and show him the books when we’ve drunk our coffee?’
‘Worth a shot. But I must insist on something before that.’
‘What?’
‘You have a shower and get dressed first?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Adam says, running his hand through his ruffled hair, making it look even more dishevelled instead of tidier.
‘I completely forgot in all our excitement. I must look like a right mess!’ He grins apologetically and pulls a sort of puppy-dog expression asking for forgiveness. ‘You stay here. I’ll be right back.’
‘No need to apologise,’ I murmur under my breath as Adam jogs off, presumably towards the bathroom. ‘No need at all.’
Seeing Adam in his nightwear looking dishevelled and a bit sleepy this morning made, for some silly reason, my stomach do weird things and my mind go to places that I’ve been desperately trying to get it back from ever since.
And now, seeing him run his hands through his hair like that has brought me right back to square one again.
Why is Adam so damn attractive to me right now? He really isn’t my type at all.
I take a few deep breaths as I sit at the kitchen counter finishing my coffee.
There’s far too much going on right now to be thinking the kind of thoughts you are, Eve , I try to tell myself sternly.
The last thing you need right now is to stumble into another relationship.
But as hard as I try to shake Adam out of my mind, he just keeps popping right back again – with that same silly grin he’s had on his face since he was a child, and those same deep blue eyes that twinkle in such a way that my heart beats that little bit faster whenever he’s near …