The Witches of Cambridge (7 page)

“What are you thinking about?”

Cosima sighs and gives him a wistful smile. “Babies.”

Tommy strokes a strand of hair back from her face. “I thought so.”

“Am I that predictable?”

Tommy grins. “I’m afraid so.”

Cosima blushes. She still can’t really believe she got so lucky, that she still finds Tommy Rutherford to be the most beautiful boy in the world—more than ten years after they first met. But, since he’s tall, broad, blond with big lips and big blue eyes, she suspects a few other women might agree with her.

“Don’t worry, it’ll happen soon,” Tommy says, pulling her into a hug. “And, until it does, we’ll just have a jolly good time trying.”

“Yes,” she says, “of course we will.”

Cosima and Tommy sit on Midsummer Common, under a tree on the patch of grass where they first met. As is their tradition, Cosima has baked a plethora of goodies: sour cherry and chocolate cupcakes, goat’s cheese and pesto pizzas, orange oil cannoli, and—Tommy’s personal favorite—lemon and lavender cake. Cosima doesn’t simply bring leftovers from Gustare, she bakes everything specially, since each contains a secret ingredient selected to facilitate fertility. Despite the fact that Cosima and Tommy have been eating these special goodies nearly every Sunday since returning to England, the magical properties have yet to take effect.

Cosima fingers the hem of her dress, tipping her head down so her long black hair falls over her face. “I just wish, I wish it wasn’t taking so long. I mean, I don’t mind waiting—well, not too much—but every month that passes I get more scared that it might never happen.”

Tommy reaches for Cosima’s hands, holds them to his chest, and kisses her fingers over and over again. “I know you do, my love. But I promise you, it will be okay. You will get your dream. I just know it, I do.”

Cosima looks up from under her bangs. “Really?”

Tommy nods. “I know it.”

And, as Cosima looks into his big blue eyes and smiles, she feels a twinge of guilt over the secret she’s been keeping from him all these years, the one she knows she’ll never tell him. Because, if Tommy knew the great risks involved in Cosima getting pregnant, he’d never let her do it. Never. And she couldn’t bear that.

—

The first time Kat met George was at a summer party in Trinity College gardens. She was studying applied mathematics and set to get a first. She was young and beautiful, with long legs and long dark hair and every boy in the math department wanted to date her. Kat, being of a democratic state of mind, had given them all a chance but none really took her fancy. Henry Hamblion, being the least boring of the set, was granted license to take her out every Friday night and sometimes Saturdays too. They went to the cinema and to dinner, they kissed in her college bedroom with the lights off and sometimes went further, though Kat’s heart was never really in it.

She barely noticed George the first time. He was standing at the drinks table, choosing between the small selection of soft drinks on offer. Her eyes swept over him—short, round, and bespectacled, with a mess of mousy brown hair, wearing a gray cardigan with patches on the elbows—to settle on the dashing professor who’d taught her advanced trigonometry that term. Leaving Henry to discuss the golden circle with his classmates, Kat strode across the grass to snatch up Dr. Brown before someone else did. But, when she reached the rows of glasses filled with red wine, George stepped in front of her and, not looking up, spilled his orange juice down her T-shirt.

“Oh, gosh, oh gosh, I’m so, so,” he mumbled, “so sorry, I didn’t see you.”

“You weren’t looking.” Kat scowled at George, who was fumbling for a tissue in his pocket. He held it out, brushing it in the general direction of her breasts. She snatched it from him. “Stop! It’s fine, I’ll sort it out.”

“Yes, yes, of course, sorry.”

“Stop apologizing.”

“Sorry.” George blushed. “I mean, sorry. Gosh, I’ll shut up now.”

Kat ignored him, patting the tissue to her chest.

George dropped his hand as he stared fixedly at the ground. In the next moment, he glanced up to see that the T-shirt was already dry and the stain had evaporated.

Kat inwardly cursed herself, not having meant to do something so obvious. But sometimes such things happened when she wasn’t paying attention. George had stared at her chest and, just as Kat was about to swat his chin, he opened his mouth.

“Oh,” he said. It wasn’t an exclamation of surprise or shock, but of understanding. “You—you’re like me.”

Of all the things Kat might have imagined he was about to say, that certainly hadn’t been one of them.

“What do you mean?”

George smiled a smile of deep recognition, of joy, of delight.

“You know,” he said. “You know exactly what I mean.”

—

Kat sits in her study in Trinity College. She’s had it adapted to her personal taste, so three walls are made of blackboard and covered from ceiling to floor with mathematical equations. Her favorite, the fundamental theorem of calculus, is framed in silver and glass above her desk:

Every inch of the other wall, above her desk, is lined with textbooks. On the fourth shelf, in the corner, sits a picture of Albert Einstein with wild white hair and sticking out his tongue that Kat remembers to study whenever she feels herself getting too serious—at least once an hour.

Kat is top of her field. She’s had more than fifty research papers published in the last ten years. At forty-one, she’s the youngest departmental head of applied mathematics at Cambridge University. And yet…it’s not as if Kat isn’t a beautiful woman. It’s not as if she isn’t still propositioned by men, even, sometimes, by her own students. Unfortunately, since Kat, aged twenty-one, gave her unrequited heart away to someone else, she hasn’t had much luck on the dating front. Even before that, her love life was slightly pitiful, as she’s always had the tendency to fall for unobtainable men. Kat’s first crush was on her math teacher, a tall, floppy-haired, bespectacled man who spoke so passionately about compound fractions that she wanted to listen to him for the rest of her life. It was an unrequited and unfulfilled desire. For Kat, it’s all been downhill from there.

Kat puts down the piece of white chalk she was pressing between her fingers and thinks about love. Why is it that her sister got so lucky and she got so unlucky? Why couldn’t she fall in love with someone who’d be a perfect fit? Or, at least, an approximate one? If only life were like a perfectly balanced mathematical equation. Sadly though, at least for one Rubens sister, it isn’t so. Which is exactly why Kat spends more of her time with equations than she does with people.

If Kat spent the rest of her days alone in the Department of Applied Mathematics, she’d be okay. Not exactly joyful, perhaps, but a lifetime of heartbreak and disappointment has taught Kat to keep her standards—and thus the probability for further heartbreak and disappointment—very, very low. Having learned her lessons in life early, Kat is spending the rest of her days (from her early forties to forever) being careful not to expect anything more than she already has, which, all things considered, is really quite a lot.

As a result of this careful lifestyle, Kat worries a great deal about those she loves. When Cosima wanted to open a café in the center of Cambridge, Kat urged her to reconsider, warning her sister that the town was already soaked with coffee shops, that 60 percent of small businesses failed within the first year, that she might not be able to cope with the work needed to make the café a success. And yet, to Kat’s great relief and surprise, in less than a year, Cosima had created a gorgeous little Italian café on the corner of Bene’t Street and Peas Hill and already made a great success of it.

Kat has to admit that she’s always underestimated her little sister, probably since she was the one (with the sporadic assistance of assorted nannies employed by their heartbroken father) changing Cosima’s diapers, wiping her bum, cleaning her spit-up, teaching her how to walk and wash and eat. And when you’ve done all that for a person perhaps you’ll always see them as someone who needs help, who can’t function alone in the big, bad world.

Occasionally, Kat detects the aftertaste of a spell in Cosima’s cooking—one to add extra flavor or mask the bitterness of being burned on a slice of cake or a pistachio croissant—but nothing too serious. As children, Kat had taught Cosima a few tricks now and then, including the odd baking spell, but her little sister had always been more interested in playing with her dolls than learning the magical properties of flowers and herbs. Cosima’s games always involved weddings starring Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, or Rapunzel marrying Prince Charming. Kat had watched, warning her against giving her whole heart to one man. Of course, her lucky little sister had found her Prince Charming; Kat just hadn’t found hers.

—

“What’s the occasion?” Cosima asks, grinning. After a busy shift at the café, she’s stepped through her front door—sweaty and exhausted—to find the kitchen table set with candles and a bottle of Bollinger chilling on ice next to a bouquet of yellow roses.

Cosima drops her coat on the sofa. “What have I done to deserve this?”

In all the years that they’ve been together, Tommy has never cooked more than tomato pasta or cheese on toast. Not that Cosima ever minded—he’s more than made up for his deficiencies in the kitchen by his dedication in the bedroom—but she’s deeply touched he’s made the effort tonight.

Tommy pokes his head out of the kitchen. “Just sit down, my love, your steak en croute is on its way.”

Cosima raises an eyebrow. “
Steak en croute
?”

Tommy grins. “I bought a book. So far, so good. It’ll be edible, at least.”

Cosima sits at the table, smoothing a red linen napkin across her lap. “So, are you going to keep me in suspense?”

“What?” Tommy calls from the kitchen. “Can’t a man cook his wife dinner once in a while, just as an act of love and devotion?”

Cosima laughs. “Some men, yes, but you’ve never done it before in your life. You tend to have…other ways of expressing your devotion. And this champagne must have cost a couple of hundred quid, so—”

“Three hundred and forty five, actually.”

“What?” Cosima squeals. “Oh, my God. What’s going on?”

Suddenly the shriek of the smoke alarm blares through the little flat. Cosima jumps up from her chair and Tommy runs out of the kitchen, smoke billowing out behind him. Frantically waving a dishcloth to clear the air, Tommy runs around the kitchen table while Cosima laughs, yanking the alarm off the wall and pulling out the batteries.

“Thank goodness for that.” Tommy sighs into the silence. He leans over his knees to catch his breath. “I’m so bloody unfit, it’s ridiculous.”

Cosima peeks into the kitchen to examine the charred steak. She returns to Tommy and pats his back. “Honey, I think we’d best skip dinner and take the champagne straight to the bedroom. Then you can tell me your news.”

Tommy stands, still holding his tea-towel, and grins at her. “BBC Films just optioned my book. For rather a lot of money.”

Cosima gapes at him. “Really? Oh, my God, that’s amazing! Congratulations! I’m so happy, I’m so happy for you.”

“For us, Cosi, this means we can buy the flat outright and you can own your café and—”

“Seriously?” Cosima gasps. “That is a
lot
of money.”

Tommy grins. “That’s what I said.”

“We could use it to pay for IVF, so we don’t have to wait forever.”

Tommy pulls Cosima into a tight hug and kisses her. “Whatever you want, my darling, whatever you want.”

Cosima is sighing a sigh of deep contentment, and thinking that this is the happiest moment of her life so far, when a phone begins to ring. Tommy roots around in his jeans. When he sees the number, he frowns.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” he says, stepping away, “I’ve got to take this. It’s…my editor.”

Cosima nods as he walks out of the living room and into the hallway, and starts unwrapping the champagne. The cork pops across the room when she hears Tommy exclaim then begin saying “Oh, God” over and over again. Still holding the bottle, Cosima hurries into the hallway to find Tommy leaning against the staircase, tears falling down his cheeks.

“What’s happened, my love, what’s going on?” Cosima rushes up to her husband and hugs him. “What’s wrong?”

Tommy pulls away, shaking his head.

“What is it?” Cosima persists. “What’s wrong?”

Tommy crumples onto the stairs. After several very long minutes, he wipes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and looks up at her.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispers. “I’ve done something unforgivable.”

Silence stretches out between them.

“What is it? What have you done?” But, even as she says the words, Cosima knows. She can’t believe it, not for a second, but she knows.

Tommy drops his head to his knees. “It was over. A long time…months ago. It was just a silly flirtation. Nothing was going to happen…”

“But, but, but it did,” Cosima says, unable to understand how she can still speak while her world is falling apart. “Didn’t it?”

Slowly, Tommy nods.