“Tell me,” he wanted to say, “everything in the whole world.” He didn’t, though. It would have been over-the-top. With a heart as out-sized as his, he had learned to resist acting upon it, for the most part.
He’d been told her name was Thomasina, but she introduced herself as Tommy.
“With a Y or an I?” he’d asked.
She had paused, as if he’d committed an audacity, then contracted her lips and eyes faintly and let slip a hint of a smile: “What do you think, blue-eyes?”
A grin had spread across his face before he could stop it. She leaned against the window casement as if she belonged there, the Garden Quad blazing green beyond, a lock of her auburn hair falling out of its clasp and across her forehead, like a boy in need of a haircut.
“I think,” he replied, “that it’s hard to imagine you reading maths.”
Her brow raised, slender and accusatory. “Oh, yes? Over my head?”
“Not a bit,” he answered. “Only, too circumscribed. You look more the secret agent. Languages, ancient and modern.”
“I suppose you’re pondering some witticism re. cunning linguists.”
“Never,” he smiled.
The host, his friend, interrupted to introduced two other boys, sincere drips passionate about philosophy. He could see Thomasina’s gaze detach. She pretended to converse with them, but he could tell she was putting up a front. He caught her glancing at the clock on the mantel, and an image crossed his mind—her hair cut properly, wearing a fifth former’s uniform, standing at the window of his former study and answering to the name of Tommy.
“I’m sure Lenin was the most thrilling raconteur,” she said, her irony too suppressed to disturb the drips. She turned, as if to include him in the conversation: “I always go weak at the knees around zealous Russians, don’t you?”
He stood up straight, his heart speeding at the unexpected attention. For she was indeed paying him attention, and had been, though he’d only just noticed. He lost control of his grin again as he recognized it, that quality he encountered so rarely – the fascination with figuring people out.
It was one of his hobbies, and he missed so painfully those evenings in his Housemaster’s study discussing the boys. His Housemaster had learned much under his tutelage, and he himself had enjoyed the challenge and satisfaction. Now, half-way into his third term at Varsity, he longed, suddenly, for that companionship, that common purpose. Other people seemed to accept the surface of things so readily.
“Heavens!” she exclaimed when one of the drips identified him as the star batsman everyone was wittering about. He suppressed the urge to administer a clip round the ear. “I’d no idea,” she said, turning to consult their host’s bookcase.
The drips waffled away, but his heart still labored. He’d heard the mockery in her remark even if they hadn’t; and he recognized it for what it was, barely suppressed boasting from one who not only had every idea about him, but had known long before the party.
He rested his elbow on a shelf above her head, boxing her elegantly into the niche by the cupboard. “I stand by secret agent,” he said in an undertone. “What fascinates me is which side you’re playing for, and who your grandmaster is.”
She flicked through a book as if he weren’t there. “What makes you think I’m not playing both sides, or all of them?”
“You’re doing what I’m doing, I think.”
“Yes,” she replied, still apparently absorbed in the volume. “There’s more to you than leg-before-wicket, we think.”
He turned away, surveying the room. The punch-bowl balanced on a table beside the drips. A simple jostle would introduce a most wicked diversion, the kind he hadn’t exercised in… he couldn’t recall precisely. Once, he would have weighed certain amusement against the threat of of the cane. Now, what price beckoned, and what reward?
She re-shelved the book and tucked the strand of hair behind her ear, sighing wearily and allowing her sleeve to graze his hip. He felt it, then, the unnerving arrival of irrational notions. He knew nothing about her save mathematics and her name, but he was certain, suddenly, of this: she liked people who made their own scrapes for themselves before they fell into them, and then got out without being fished for.
What is Bookends?
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