Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [46]
She was not among the throng at either of the weighing stations. A tractor was pulling a laden trailer out of the field. Was that her riding on the back of it? No, just a boy in a blue shirt. Clem stood, indecisive and achingly disappointed. She’d gone. Like a drunk surfacing from a stupor, he realized that he was being looked at and that he knew most of the faces around him. Half the Millfields estate was here today. God, what was he thinking of?
“Orright, young Clem? Lost someone, hev yer?”
That nosy cow Mrs. Parsons from Chaucer.
“No, I . . . No. I was just . . .”
He retreated hastily.
Halfway back, he looked over to where their camp was and saw — could it be? — a soft flash of blue. Just beyond the trees. Two brushstrokes of blue and one of black where the leaf shadow edged into the green-gold haze of wheat. Yes. His breath failed briefly. He made his legs move, made himself take care where he set his feet, crossing the rows. When he next looked up, the vision had gone. Dismay made him gasp and swear. And hurry. He stumbled up and through the gap between two of the ash trees. Their dense shade was like a moment of night, and his eyes were baffled for an instant. But then, there she was, sitting cross-legged but leaning back on her hands, on the narrow berm of dandelion-freckled and daisy-splashed grass beyond the tree line. The straw hat was on the ground beside her left knee. Her head was lifted away from him, and her eyes were closed. She was smiling. She seemed to be listening to the frantic debate being conducted by a parliament of greenfinches in the branches overhead.
He would remember all these things long after they’d been blown away. Scraps of talk, sound, would drift back like flakes of burned paper on a spiraling wind:
“You took your time.”
“I thought you’d gone. . . .”
The chirrupy hissing of grasshoppers.
“Yeah. A levels. Art, English, history. . . .”
Her comical grimace. “Brainy with it, then?”
A noisy exodus of skirling birds.
“. . . I dunno. Art school, probably.”
“Dirty devil. So you can look at girls sitting there in the nude? I don’t know how they can do it. . . .”
A whisper through the grain.
“No, not that. I want . . .”
“Are you any good at kissing?”
An intense silence, everything stilled, at the moment she took hold of his collar and pulled his face down.
The panicky thrill throughout his body with her mouth on his. Not knowing what to do with his hands, so keeping them pressed into the grass. Something, an ant perhaps, crawling on the stretched skin between his thumb and forefinger. Awkward twisting of his shoulders. Tongue? Hers doing it. Slithering into his mouth. Hot breath tasting of cigarette and strawberry juice and something else. Coarse distant laughter, like a pheasant’s call, coming from somewhere. Squirming to keep the hard thing in his jeans from touching her leg. Wanting the aching moment to go on and on and on, because he had no idea what she might expect him to do next.
And then a snappy rasp from behind them: Goz, with his back against a tree, lighting a ciggie.
“Funny sort of a widdle, comrade,” he said.
Clem pulled away from her, gasping, lost.
SHE WAS YOUNGER than he was, which would surprise him. He’d thought she was at least his age. She seemed it. But she was only just sixteen. She’d been born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1946, on an April night during which an unseasonably late snowfall muffled the city. Hers was a difficult birth. Afterward the senior obstetrician took her father aside and told him that it would be extremely unwise for his wife to have another child. Gerard took it badly. The Mortimer estates in England had been inherited by sons for countless generations. That he — or Nicole, rather — would break that continuous line troubled him enormously. He stood over his daughter’s hospital cot, gazing at her yellowish and clenched little face, and understood that he would have to be very careful about whom she would marry.
One of her earliest memories