The Witches of Cambridge (13 page)

“Maybe they’ll rebel by not going to college at all.”

“Oh, no.” Eliot held his hand to his chest. “Don’t break my heart.”

Amandine giggled. “They might not be little swots like us. You have to prepare yourself for that possibility.”

Eliot let slip a little sigh. “I know. Anyway, I don’t care what they do, as long as they’re happy.”

“Liar.” Amandine laughed. “If they wanted to be rave DJs or dustbin men or…anything less than doctors or lawyers, you’d be miserable, let’s be honest.”

“Hey, that’s not true,” Eliot said. “Well, okay, maybe if one became a doctor and one became a lawyer, that might be all right.”

“I knew it.” Amandine reached across the table and touched his chin. “Are you finished? Because I do believe there’s a bed on a boat with our names embroidered on its sheets.”

“Yes,” Eliot said. “We’d better wash those sheets before we leave.”

He stood and reached for Amandine’s hand. She took it and, as she stood, she saw that look in his eye.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just wondering what I ever did to get so lucky with my life.”

“I don’t know,” Amandine said, as they walked slowly across the lawn together, stepping around the ducks, “by rights all lawyers should be burning somewhere very hot, shouldn’t they?”

“Yes,” Eliot said, pulling her into him until their lips touched. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Well then, I suppose I’d better enjoy all this while I still can.”

Amandine’s cheeks are wet with tears when the memory falls away from her. A moment later, she reaches up and rips the poster from the wall.

—

A knock on the door interrupts Amandine’s memories and she turns sharply, as though she’d just been caught doing something naughty.

“Come in.”

The door opens quickly and Noa nearly falls into the room.

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” she says, “I was, I was…traffic.”

Amandine frowns. Noa’s college is only ten minutes’ walk from Magdalene College. Nobody drives around the center of town, and students cycle everywhere, often on the pavements, much to the chagrin of the locals.

“No problem,” Amandine says, walking over to her desk. “Why don’t we get started?”

“Yep,” Noa says, slipping into her designated red leather chair and opening her book bag. “I focused on Manet this week, with some references to Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexandre Cabanel.”

“Excellent.” Amandine sits back in her chair, wondering how long she should wait before she can politely bring up the subject of her husband. “Would you like to read it out?”

Noa would not. She’s shy when it comes to public speaking, especially when she always worried about the inappropriate truths that might slip out of her mouth. But, even as she tries to decline, to ask for an alternative, she finds herself unable to grasp hold of the words.

“Sure,” Noa says, and begins mumbling her first few sentences, introducing her critique on Manet’s early works, but before she’s finished the paragraph, Amandine blurts out an interruption. Noa looks up.

“Sorry to interrupt, but I just have to ask…” Amandine pauses, trying to keep the note of desperation from creeping into her voice. “…Are you still willing to meet my husband? I was thinking”—she hurries on before Noa can answer—“that you could come to dinner next Saturday night?”

“I can,” Noa says, tentative, “but…”

“But?” Amandine feels hope starting to seep out of her fingertips. She clenches her fists. “You don’t want to? Of course, I—”

Noa shakes her head. “No, it’s not that. It’s just, I don’t know if it’d do any good.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Noa says, trying not to sound too happy about it, “I don’t think I can see people’s secrets anymore.”

Amandine clenches her fists so tightly that her knuckles blanch. “I don’t understand, how could it happen just like that?”

“I met a man who said he could take away my curse and somehow he did.”

“What? How? How do you know?”

Noa shrugs. “You’re the first person I’ve seen since last night and, well, I can’t see anything about you at all.”

“Really?”

Noa nods.

“Nothing at all?”

Noa nods again.

“Oh,” Amandine says. “Oh, bugger.”

And, with that, her last molecule of hope is gone.

A
MANDINE HAS CONTEMPLATED
all her options, those involving courage and honesty and those involving cowardice and dishonesty, and has decided to opt for the latter. So it is that she finds herself in Eliot’s private office in the middle of the afternoon, while the twins are at nursery and she should be in her own office at Magdalene marking exam papers on Renoir and Degas.

Amandine has only been in Eliot’s office on rare occasions, usually when she’s popping in to ask him something or, when they’d just moved into the house, to have sex on his desk. Generally though, she leaves the space as Eliot’s own, not letting the boys encroach either, just as none of them go into her attic office at the top of the house. So when she steps inside, Amandine feels a shot of guilt. It’s so strong that she almost shuts the door and turns back. But she knows that if she doesn’t do it now she’ll do it later. She has to. It’s either this or actually asking Eliot to tell her the truth.

It’s strange, Amandine thinks, that you can have lived with and loved someone for so long, have shared the most intimate moments of your life, have told them (nearly) everything about yourself and yet, one day, find that you’re incapable of asking them a simple question. But while the question “Are you having an affair?” is quite simple, the consequences of an answer in the affirmative are rather more complex and devastating.

Amandine can’t even contemplate what splitting up their household would do to the boys, let alone her own heart. Would she ever be able to trust and love another man again? Would she even want to? Probably not. Amandine has always considered herself like her mother, a one-man-in-a-lifetime kind of woman. Would she be able to forgive Eliot and forget? Amandine has no idea. The probability of even having to contemplate the question has always seemed so nonexistent before—less than the odds of winning the lottery—that she simply does not know.

Amandine steps farther into the room and shuts the door behind her. Even though no one is in the house, nor will be for several hours, she feels the need to hide herself, as if in some strange way it lessens the impact of what she’s about to do.

None of Eliot’s desk drawers are locked, so Amandine searches through each one methodically, pacing herself (though she’s impatient to be over and done with this sordid task), being sure to check every single slip of paper for clues. For two hours she searches and finds nothing. Most of the papers are legal documents covered with terse and turgid prose that she just glances at to be sure they aren’t relevant. Fearful thoughts flash through her mind: the possibility of an extra will bequeathing money to mistresses, hidden bank accounts to subsidize a secret life, telephone records that validate her worst imaginings. And yet, as the sun starts to set, beginning its descent slowly behind the garden trees, Amandine has finally finished searching every piece of her husband’s private life and found no evidence of anything untoward.

Turning to the door, the beat of her heart at last starting to lighten, Amandine glances behind her to do one more sweep of the room. Nothing. She places her hand on the dull brass knob and begins to twist it open, but something stops her: a little warning light, a flickering of awareness tucked inside her mind. She turns back once again for another final sight-search of the room, taking her time, inch by inch.

A tiny triangle of paper is tucked under the chest of drawers in the corner, a little white flag of alarm calling out from the tidy room. A gulp of breath catches in Amandine’s throat and she holds it there while quickly crossing the carpet and snatching the cause for alarm off the floor. It is a slice of lined paper, torn from a notebook, ripped along one jagged edge. And along each and every line is written one word, over and over again, in a vast variety of styles:

—

“Hi, Cosi.”

“Hi, sis.” Cosima wipes flour-and-sugar-dusted fingers across her eyes. On seeing George standing next to Kat, she grins. “Hey, George.” Cosima picks up a little ball of sticky dough, studded with almond flakes and blueberries and holds it out to him: her fifteenth attempt to undo the spell. “Try this. Let me know how you like the recipe.”

George’s eyes light up. “Thanks.”

Marcello pokes his head out of the kitchen, his own huge brown eyes bright with triumph. “
Ciao
, Jorge!
Come stai?
I make some pizza sauce for you—with my new special spice. You will love!”

George looks up, cookie halfway to his mouth. “Really? Is it extra garlic? Or a touch more basil? I’ve been thinking you could try a touch of paprika in the Himalayan sea salt—”

“It’s a surprise,” Marcello says, grinning. “You’ll have to come and taste.” And, with a little wave of his hand, he pops back into the kitchen.

“Sis?” Cosima holds a ball of dough out to her sister.

“No, thanks.” Kat shakes her head.

“Come on, sis. Why don’t you have a couple of pistachio cream croissants? It looks like you need a sugar rush to cheer you up.”

Kat frowns, then glances at George—who has his eyes closed in a euphoria of cookie dough. When he swallows, George opens his eyes again. He fixes Cosima with a dazed, delighted gaze.

“You are…incredible. How does your baking get more and more delicious every time I taste it?”

Cosima sighs softly. She’ll have to try again. “Thanks, George.”

“Can I have another?”

Cosima shrugs, supposing there’s no harm in it. “Sure.”

She holds out another sweet treat. But, instead of taking it from her, George leans forward and opens his mouth. Cosima rolls her eyes slightly, but feeds it to him and then—in a movement so subtle almost anyone else would have missed it—George curls his tongue out over the biscuit so the edges brush against Cosima’s skin.

Kat’s eyes widen and a stone drops on her chest, knocking all the air out of her lungs. George’s eyes are half-closed, the shadow of a smile of pure bliss on his lips.

He is
in love
with her.

Kat stares at them both, breathless. How is this possible? It can’t be. And her sister only just split up with her husband. She’s not even divorced yet. Kat’s world is turning on its axis, flipping her over on her face. What the hell is happening?

George opens his eyes and gazes at Cosima.

“Delicious. Absolutely delicious.”

“Well,” Cosima says, raising a bemused eyebrow at Kat, as if sharing a sisterly joke, “you obviously
do
have supreme taste buds.”

Kat feels tears filling her eyes and darkness seeping into her chest.
Don’t. Don’t. Hold it together. Be strong. Be strong. Just for now. Just until you’re alone again
. And, because Kat has always been good at hiding her feelings—how else can you be secretly in love with your best friend for so long?—she manages it now. Kat knows that once she’s back in her rooms at Trinity College, once she’s slammed the door shut behind her, she’ll fall to the floor and sob. She will sob until her throat hurts nearly as much as her heart. But it doesn’t matter. It only matters that she doesn’t do it now.

Cosima’s still looking at George, so she doesn’t notice the despair in her sister’s eyes. And then—all of a sudden—she thinks:
Why not
? Instead of trying in vain to fight it, why not just surrender to it?

“Hey, George, why don’t you come back after closing tonight?” Cosima says. “I’ve got something to ask you. And I’ll make chocolate and pistachio cream cupcakes, if you’re still hungry after all your lunch.”

When George grins as if he’s five years old and has just been given a puppy for his birthday, and nods and says, yes, he’d love to, Kat just stares at them both. She wishes she could cast a forgetting spell to erase what just happened, to reverse time, to leave it all unsaid. If she could, she’d expunge the whole encounter, so they wouldn’t be meeting tonight, but since George has somehow—how did she miss it?—developed feelings for her sister, what would be the point? Unfortunately, Kat’s forgetting spells can only erase memories, not emotions.