Accidents Happen (15 page)

‘What?’

‘Come on.’

Before she could stop him, he jumped on his – without a helmet, she noticed queasily – and set off to the end of the street, where the road turned into an alley that she knew led to the river.

‘Where are you . . .?’ Kate called out.

‘Come on!’ he shouted back.

Before she could reply, Jago disappeared. Kate looked around her. Damn. If she didn’t follow him, she might lose him altogether and he’d think she’d gone off without saying goodbye. Shakily, she unlocked her bike, put on her helmet, checking it quickly for cracks, and rode down the pavement towards the alley.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The evening light was fading as Kate emerged onto the riverbank. The sky was the colour of a light bruise. Two fishermen were packing up for the evening. Kate turned right, then left, and saw Jago waiting for her fifty yards up ahead on his bike.

‘Where are you . . .?’ she repeated, but he just turned and started cycling again, with a gesture for her to follow.

What was he doing?

Filled with apprehension, Kate went after him, pushing hard on the pedals to negotiate the bumpy towpath. Going away from Oxford, the path was quieter. She cycled past a dog walker; two students jogging together with swinging ponytails under baseball caps; and a lone rower on the river heading for home, his oars creating rippling silver pyramids in the water.

She kept expecting Jago to stop, but he didn’t. Kate panted with the exertion of cycling so fast. This was ridiculous. She looked behind her. They must be a mile from the pub now. What was he doing? In a minute they’d be outside Oxford, in the countryside.

‘Stop, please,’ she mouthed at his back, but Jago was already disappearing around a bend.

It was too far to go back now alone. So she turned on her lights and pushed on, hoping he’d be waiting.

Eventually they stopped passing anyone. Just three solitary canal boats moored for the evening, smoke drifting from their chimneys; a heron on the bank. She cycled on, taking in the unfamiliar sights. She never came out here on her bike. After her embarrassing hysteria on the pavement tonight, she had to admit that the ride through the still evening felt oddly calming. It was beautiful out here on the river at this time. She turned behind her to see a disappearing sun cracked orange along the horizon, turning the ferns and ducks black against it. A meditative pace took over in the motions in her legs. An unusual lightness filled her body.

She was leaving Oxford behind, for whatever reason she wasn’t sure yet, but she was leaving it. And in doing so, she became aware of it falling away from her, even for a short time, the trouble with Richard, and Helen, Jack and Saskia caught up in the opposite direction of the river’s current. For a few exhilarating seconds, Kate realized she wanted to cycle like this all night.

In the end, it was another five minutes before Jago started to slow down. She saw him up ahead, in the dying light, coming to a stop.

‘Here!’ he shouted, and disappeared. She arrived thirty seconds later to find a gate off the towpath. She dismounted and pushed her bike through, onto what appeared to be a single-track country road, overhung with branches, with a few gated houses set discreetly back from the road, a forest behind them.

Jago was already back on his bike, cycling ahead.

Kate jumped on hers again. Right. Now she could catch him. Tell him to stop.

She pedalled fast, only to see Jago turn right again, this time down an even narrower lane with a rough, unserviced surface. He pulled over after fifty yards.

Kate came up behind him in the dark.

‘What are you doing? I had no idea you were going . . .’ She panted. ‘Where are we?’

Jago put his finger to his lips as he dismounted.

‘What?’ she whispered.

‘There.’ He pointed at the ditch. He put his bike in it and walked off before she could protest. There was only one streetlight back at the top of the lane, so she could hardly see his face, just the curve of his cheek from behind, as he walked towards a gate.

‘This way,’ he said quietly, pointing up at the ten-foot-high arched bars.

‘No!’ she gasped. ‘No way!’

But Jago completely ignored her, put his foot on the first iron railing of the gate and hoisted himself up.

‘What the . . .’ Kate grunted, throwing down her bike beside his and following him. By the time she reached him, he was halfway up the gate. She peered. Through the iron railings lay a sprawling country hall, Gothic peaks silhouetted in the sky.

‘Jago. What are you DOING?’

‘Ssh,’ he replied, again holding his finger over his lips. He reached the top of the gate, put his leg over, and headed down the other side. ‘Come on,’ he said, as he reached her at eye level through the railings. His eyes dared her.

‘Absolutely not,’ she mouthed furiously.

‘OK. Stay there, then.’

‘Jago!’ But he had already begun to melt into the darkness beyond.

What was he doing?

Kate peered behind her at the lane, and then at the forest. She wasn’t bloody staying here by herself or cycling back down that empty dark towpath alone. Crossly, she reached up to the bars and pulled herself up and over. As she scrambled down the other side unsteadily, she saw Jago emerge out of the shadows to take her waist gently and help her dismount.

‘Quick,’ he whispered, grabbing her hand again. ‘Before anyone sees us.’

‘Who?’

He didn’t reply. Her heart thumping, she allowed her hand to settle into his, despite feeling self-conscious at the touch of his skin. Pulling her firmly, as he had done in the pub, Jago skirted the boundary hedge, staying in the shadows, away from the gentle light cast from the ground-floor windows of the grand hall on to a manicured lawn.

Kate inhaled deeply. The air was fresh and warm, filled with the scent of blossom and cut grass.

‘I think it’s round the back,’ Jago said.

He led her along the hedge till they cleared the illuminated patch of lawn, then bent down and scurried like a soldier on manoeuvres towards some stone steps. She copied him, entering a network of vegetable and flower beds.

‘There it is.’ She heard him exclaim quietly.

In front of them appeared a square pond surrounded by an old stone wall. Lilies floated in black, silky water.

‘Glow worms!’ Kate pointed in delight at tiny green lights glowing in the gaps of the wall.

Jago smiled. He let go of her hand and pulled out a jumper from his bag, and laid it on the grass. He motioned her to sit on it, then sat down beside her. He sighed contentedly then lay back on the grass.

‘What is this place?’ she whispered. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘It’s cool, isn’t it? Someone at Balliol told me about it.’

‘But what is it?’

He winked. ‘Now that, I’m not going to tell you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ve taken you somewhere you know nothing about, so you can’t calculate anything that’s going to happen.’

Kate tried to make out his expression in the dark to see what he meant.

‘I’ve decided to do a guerrilla experiment on you – the kind of thing my department head keeps threatening to sack me for.’ He threw her a look. ‘He thinks I’m “unorthodox”, by the way. We’re going to sit here without you knowing anything.’

She blinked. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Kate?’ Jago said, sitting up on his elbows. ‘You’re sitting in a strange garden with a guy you know nothing about, miles from anywhere. No one knows you’re here.’

She glanced at him warily. ‘And . . .’

‘Are you scared?’

She watched the reflection of the moon in his pupils and waited for the fear to come. She shook her head slowly. ‘No.’

‘And why do you think that is?’

She paused. ‘Because I haven’t had time to think about it.’

‘And there you go.’

He sighed and lay back down.

Neither of them spoke for a while.

Kate let her eyes adjust to the dark. She scanned the garden, making out the trailing branches of a weeping willow and a statue that lay behind it in the shadows.

‘Well, it is beautiful. Whatever it is.’

‘“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul”,’ Jago murmured.

‘Hmm?’

A rustle told her that he was turning to face her.

‘Nothing. Kate, can I ask what happened? To your husband.’

She sat forward and picked up a twig.

‘Or should I not ask?’

The glow worms shone like fairies on the pond wall. She dug the twig into the grooves on the sole of her shoe, dislodging dried mud. She imagined trying to tell him, but knew she couldn’t. She shook her head.

‘Sorry,’ Jago said. ‘I’m being nosy.’

‘It’s fine. I just don’t really talk about it.’

‘Why?’

She glanced at him sideways. He still wasn’t giving up.

She continue to pick at her shoe.

‘Well, I used to. I just found it didn’t help. People would say the wrong thing. Not on purpose, but they just did. They’d say: “How do you feel?”, really kindly. And after a while I realized that, yes, they did care about me, but underneath they were actually more terrified by what had happened to me. What they actually wanted to know was not “How do you feel?” but “How bad do you feel? How bad is it? Will I be able to endure it if it happens to me?”’

She paused. Jago said nothing. His silence was like Sylvia’s, relaxed and unhurried. It made her want to talk more.

‘Then,’ she continued, ‘after an hour of me talking, you’d see them thinking, “God, get me out of here. This is depressing.” Not that I could blame them. I’d see them five minutes later chatting on the pavement to a friend about getting their highlights done. Back in the real world.’ She glanced back at Jago. ‘Where I felt I couldn’t go any more. And it was difficult. So I stopped.’

Kate turned her attention to the mud at the bottom of her other shoe, digging the twig into the grooves, waiting for him to change the subject.

Jago, however, stayed silent. They sat two feet apart, side by side on the damp grass, listening to the trickle of water from the pond, and a splash of fish jumping.

He plucked a piece of grass and put it in his mouth. ‘OK, but can I ask if that’s when it happened? This obsession with numbers. Because of your husband dying?’

Inside, Kate felt all the words she’d prepared so carefully for Sylvia pushing hard to escape from her again, desperate for release now that someone was finally willing to listen. Even if it were to a man she’d only just met.

Jago was lying, chewing grass, like a chilled-out student at a festival. If he had worries of his own, they didn’t show. What would it be like to be like that? What would it be like to spend time with someone like that, with an easy, boyish laugh?

She leaned forwards and dug methodically back along each groove of her trainer again. ‘I feel like I’m in a therapy session.’

Jago grunted. ‘Really? My ex-girlfriend would think that was hilarious. Apparently I am officially “the worst fucking listener in the world”.’

Kate glanced over curiously. Ex-girlfriend. ‘Ha. Well, trust me, you’re better than the so-called therapist I saw this week.’

‘Oh, really? So what’s the answer . . .?’

Awkwardly, she rested back on the grass beside him, aware of how strange it felt to lie beside a man again, even two feet apart. How long had it been since she had done this, just been with someone, just talking?

‘No. I think I’d already started obsessing about this stuff before then.’

‘Oh. How come?’

She looked ruefully at the dark sky. ‘Oh, because my parents were killed in a weird accident.’

Jago hesitated. ‘Seriously?’

‘Uhuh. About five years before Hugo died.’

‘And is that difficult to talk about too or . . .’

‘No. It was a long time ago. On the night of our wedding, actually.’

Jago turned, his face astonished. ‘Are you making this up?’

‘Wish I was.’

‘And that’s when it started?’

‘Well, I do remember obsessing about the accident.’

‘What happened?’

She shrugged. ‘That was the thing. It was just really bad luck. My parents were in a taxi coming back from the reception. They were travelling up the mountain road to our house in Shropshire and they came round a bend and drove straight into the body of this big stag that had been shot by a poacher. It must have escaped, then collapsed on the road. And I remember wondering what the chances were of the stag dying right on that road. I mean, why not by the side of the road, or not on a bend? Why at night, and not during the day when the driver might have seen it? Why on the night of my wedding? I mean, I found out afterwards that fifteen people die each year in Britain in traffic accidents caused by deer. Fifteen out of sixty million. So why
my
parents?’

Jago shifted. ‘And, what? They hit it . . .?’

Kate nodded. ‘They were going about fifty miles per hour. Probably too fast. The taxi swung sideways across the road and overturned down the hill into the river. The taxi driver, Stan, from our village, was in his sixties, and I remember a doctor telling me that reaction times slow with age. That if he had been in his fifties, like my dad, his reaction time would have been 50 per cent quicker. And I kept wondering, if my dad had been driving, if that millisecond of difference would have changed everything. I was angry at Stan for a long time. I had been at school with his granddaughter, and I couldn’t speak to her again.’

Jago whistled. ‘Wow. I don’t know what to say.’

Kate pushed her hair behind her ears. She wanted to talk more. It was good to talk like this. ‘Don’t worry. Really. There’s nothing to say.’

‘God, you’ve had some bad luck, Kate.’

She faced him, resting on her elbow. ‘Ah, now there’s a question. So tell me, do statisticians believe in luck?’

She watched his silhouette in the moonlight. He had a neat-shaped head and sharp cheekbones that suited a crewcut.

‘What? In a mathematical sense? No. I mean, you will always have people at either end of statistical calculations. The one who gets struck by lightning seven times. The person who wins the lottery four times. But, no. It’s totally random. There is no formula for luck.’