Inés

The term ended on the Saturday morning. By noon the school was empty again, the way it had been at Christmas, the coach gone from the gravel at six with the Americans who were going home for Easter, which was most of them, and the English gone in cars down the drive in ones and twos with their suitcases and their parents. Theo had gone to London, to the Palace, to stay with the Duke and the Queen for the first week of the holidays, because the Queen had asked him, and because Niamh had said that she needed somebody tall to reach things. Kit had gone to Leeds. Will was at the farm, where the lambing was nearly done.

Inés had not gone anywhere.

She had said she would stay. She had said it in March, when the forms went round for the Easter flights, and Mr Abernathy had looked at her form and then at her over the roll book and said you’re not going home, Castañeda? and she had said no, sir, and he had said your aunt? and she had said my aunt’s in Ventura for Easter with my grandmother, sir, and my grandmother’s not well enough for visitors, and Mr Abernathy had looked at her a moment longer and said all right, and signed it.

So on the Saturday evening after the last night, with the school empty and the barn locked and the village quiet, Frederick came down the lane to the green at seven o’clock with Kimura somewhere behind him, and found Inés on the bench by the war memorial.

She was reading. Of course she was reading. The fat paperback with the ship on the cover, which she had been reading since the airport in August and had clearly read at least four times. She had her coat on and a scarf and her knees up and the book against her knees, and she did not look up when he sat down at the other end of the bench.

“I thought you’d gone to London,” she said.

“Tomorrow. Theo’s gone ahead.”

“I know. I saw him go. He had a bag of Agneta’s buns for your father.” She turned a page. “From Stockholm. In March. He’s been keeping them in his wardrobe.”

“They’ll be stale.”

“Your father won’t mind,” said Inés, and went on reading.

---

He sat on the bench.

It was a soft evening, the first one of the year. The light was going over the hill behind the church, slowly, yellow and then pink, and the air had something in it that had not been in it since September, something warm and green and slightly damp that came up off the grass of the green and the bank by the river where the daffodils had been picked for Mothering Sunday, and there were blackbirds in the churchyard, two of them, singing at each other from the tops of two yews as if they were having an argument they both enjoyed.

The churchyard wall was empty. Mrs Haverfield had gone in.

He had not come to say anything. He had come because the school was empty and the barn was locked and he had walked down the lane without deciding to, and Inés was here, and he did not mind. Inés was the one person in the class he had never once, in eighteen months, felt he had to say anything to. She did not need it. She read her book. She said what she thought, when she thought it, flatly, without decoration, the way she had said in the corridor at Ellicott on the first morning of junior year, eighteen months ago, to the King of fourteen countries, I didn’t hear you on the radio. In June. I was in Ventura. Nobody had a radio. I just want you to know that. In case everyone else here says they did.

He had liked her from that moment.

“You lit it beautifully,” he said.

“Thank you.” She turned a page.

“The light in the roof. On Hattie. Ms Roberts said she’d never seen anything like it in a school.”

“Ms Roberts says a lot of things.” Another page. “She’s leaving.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to miss her.” Inés said it the way she said everything, flatly, to the book. “She asked me to do something I didn’t know how to do and then she left me alone to do it. Nobody’s ever done that. Everybody always asks me to do things I already know how to do, because I’m good at them, and then they stand behind me and watch to make sure I do them right.” She turned another page, and Frederick saw that she was not reading at all, and had not been since he sat down. “She just gave me a screwdriver and went away.”

---

The blackbirds stopped.

There was a long silence on the green.

Then Inés closed the book, and put it on her knee, and looked at it, at the ship on the cover, and said, without looking round:

“It’s Jack, isn’t it.”

He did not say anything.

“Jack Fennell,” said Inés. “From the pub. You and Jack.” She looked at the ship. “You don’t have to say anything. I know it is. I’ve known since about January. I worked it out at the snow day. Everyone was on the slope, all four hundred of them, and you went down on your tray and went into the river, and everybody laughed, and you came up out of the river soaking wet, and you didn’t look at Theo, and you didn’t look at Will, you looked up the hill at the wall at the top, at the edge of the school, where the village starts. Where there was nobody.” She turned the book over on her knee. “And then about two minutes later there was somebody. In a red sweatshirt. On the wall. And you’d known he’d be there before he was.”

Frederick looked at the war memorial.

“And then I watched,” said Inés. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I just watch things. It’s what I do instead of talking. I watched at the pancake race. I watched at the play, on Wednesday, from up the ladder. I could see the whole barn from up there. I could see everybody’s face.” She looked at the book. “When you came on with the ears, I was looking at the second row, at him, because I was checking the light on the front of the stage, and I saw his face.” She stopped. “I’ve never seen anybody look at anybody like that. Except maybe my grandmother at my grandfather. In photographs.”

“Inés.”

“I’m not going to tell anybody. That’s not why I’m saying it.” She turned at last and looked at him along the bench, with her flat dark eyes, in the last of the light. “I’m saying it because I think you’ve been carrying it on your own. Since November. With nobody to tell but Theo, and Theo’s lovely, Theo’s the best person I know, but Theo’s your Page, he’d carry anything you gave him, he’d carry it off a cliff. And your mother, and your father, who you told in March, I could tell when you came back from London, you looked like somebody had taken a rucksack off you.” She looked back at the book. “But nobody your age. Nobody who isn’t somehow yours.” She was quiet for a moment. “So I’m telling you I know. So there’s one person who knows who doesn’t belong to you. That’s all.”

Frederick sat on the bench.

He thought about Ready Token in the snow. I don’t know what it is. He thought about the sitting room at the top of the Palace with the clock four minutes slow and his father finding the word. He thought about Will in the boot room with a boot in his lap saying obviously. He thought that Inés was right, and that he had not known she was right until she said it, and that this was, in a way he could not have explained, the most honest thing anybody had said to him since the man from the BBC took off his cashmere scarf.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Don’t thank me. I haven’t done anything. I just watched.” She opened the book again, and looked at it, and closed it. “He’s nice.”

“Everybody says he’s got nice hands.”

“I didn’t look at his hands,” said Inés. “I looked at his face. When the ears went up.” She put the book down on the bench between them. “He looked like you were the only thing in the barn.”

---

The light had nearly gone. The sky over the church was the deep cold blue that Inés had put on the back wall of the stage for the wood, and the first star was in it, low, over the yews.

Inés picked up the book again.

She did not open it. She held it on her knee, with both hands, the way Theo had held an envelope on a low wall by the bike racks at Ellicott on the last day of junior year, and Frederick, who had seen that before, waited.

“That’s not fair,” said Inés.

“What isn’t?”

“That I know something about you and you don’t know anything about me.” She looked at the ship on the cover. “That’s not fair. I’ve been thinking about it since Wednesday. Up the ladder. If I was going to tell you I knew, I’d have to tell you something back. Otherwise it’s just me watching you. And I don’t want to be somebody who just watches people.” She opened the book.

Inside the front cover, tucked against the endpaper, there was an envelope.

Long, white, thick, good paper, with a crest on the flap that Frederick did not recognise, a shield with books on it and some kind of animal, and the postmark, when she held it out to him, said OXFORD and was dated in January.

“Read it,” said Inés.

He read it.

It was from a college. One of the old ones. It said that the college was pleased to offer Miss Inés Castañeda a place to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, beginning in October 2031, subject to the results of her final examinations at Ellicott High School, and that the offer carried with it a scholarship established in 1893 by a benefactor whose name Frederick did not know, for a student from overseas of exceptional promise and limited means, which would meet her fees and her keep in full for the three years of the course.

He read it twice.

He looked up.

Inés was looking at the war memorial.

“January,” he said.

“The fourteenth.”

“You applied.”

“In October. Mr Ferrante helped. He wrote the reference.” She looked at the memorial. “I went to the interview in December. On the train. On a Tuesday. I said I was going to the dentist in Cirencester. I went to Oxford and sat in a room with two old men and a young woman for forty minutes and they asked me about whether the Realm should have a written constitution and I said it already does and they said does it and I said the Charter and they said is that a constitution or a treaty and I said that’s the whole question, isn’t it, and the young woman laughed and the old men didn’t.” She stopped. “And then I came back on the train and went to chemistry.”

“And you didn’t tell anybody.”

“I told Mr Ferrante. He had to know, he wrote the reference. And I told my grandmother. On the telephone. In January. The day it came.” Inés’s voice went flat, flatter than usual, the way a road goes flat before a bend. “She didn’t hear. Not properly. She’s not well. She hasn’t been well since Christmas. She said Oxford, mija, is that near Ventura?, and I said no, Abuela, it’s in England, and she said oh, that’s a long way, and then she said does it have earthquakes, and I said no, and she said, good, then you’ll be safe.” Inés looked at the book on her knee. “That’s all she said. Then she was tired and my aunt took the phone.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“I haven’t said yes,” said Inés. “I have to say yes by the end of May. And I haven’t.” She turned the envelope over in her hands. “Because it’s three years. In England. Four thousand miles. And she’s eighty-four, and she’s not well, and she lived through 1988 in Reseda and got the money for the house and never knew it was anybody else’s until I told her, last year, on the phone, for my history final, and she said we didn’t know there was anybody else.” She looked up at last. “And if I go, and something happens, I won’t be there. I’ll be in a room in Oxford arguing with two old men about whether the Charter’s a treaty.”

“Would she want you to go?”

“Of course she’d want me to go. That’s not the question.” Inés put the envelope back inside the cover of the book, against the endpaper, very carefully, and closed it. “That’s never the question. Everybody always asks would she want you to, as though that settles it. She’d want me to go to the moon if somebody offered me a scholarship to the moon. She’d want me to go anywhere. That’s what grandmothers are for.” She looked at the ship. “The question is whether I can stand being somewhere else when it happens.”

---

They sat on the bench in the dark.

He thought about it for a long time. He thought about telling her that she should go, which was what he believed, and which was what everybody would tell her, and which she already knew everybody would tell her, and which was, therefore, useless. He thought about telling her that he understood, which was true, in a way; he had been somewhere else when it happened, once, in a geometry class at two in the afternoon, and he had been somewhere else for four days in September before that, in a palace, waiting for a telephone. But it was not the same. It was not the same at all, and she would know it was not, and she would say so, flatly, and be right.

He thought about Señora Ruelas, under a table, in the dark, in June two years ago, with the house coming down, saying you are still too thin.

“Señora Ruelas wrote to me,” he said. “At Christmas. The woman on Twenty-Second Street. Who was under the table.”

Inés looked at him.

“She’s in her eighties. Her house fell down. She was under her kitchen table with me while it did.” He looked at the war memorial. “And her son built it back, and she put the table back exactly where it was, and she measured, and she wrote to me in England to tell me so. And she said you are still too thin. And she said come when it has walls. And she knew I couldn’t come. She knew I was four thousand miles away. She wrote anyway.” He thought about it. “She didn’t write come home. She wrote come when it has walls. Which means come when you can, and I’ll still be here, and if I’m not, the table will be.”

Inés did not say anything.

“I don’t know if that helps,” said Frederick.

“No,” said Inés. She was quiet for a long time. “It does, actually.” She looked at the book on her knee. “It does a bit.”

The church clock struck eight. The sound went out across the green and the river and came back off the side of the valley, the way the fireworks had on Bonfire Night.

Inés stood up.

She put the book under her arm. She looked down at him on the bench.

“I haven’t decided,” she said. “I want you to know that. I’m not deciding tonight. I’m not deciding because of you, or because of Señora Ruelas, or because of anything anybody says. I’m going to decide by the end of May, on my own, like I decided to apply, on my own.” She shifted the book. “I just wanted you to know about it. Because now you know something about me, and I know something about you, and we’re even.”

“We’re even.”

“Good.” She turned to go. Then she stopped, and turned back. “Frederick.”

He looked up. Nobody in the class called him Frederick. They called him Hanover, because Mr Abernathy did, or Fred, because the English did.

“Can I say something? Honestly?”

“You always do.”

“You hide,” said Inés. “Not about Jack. About everything. You stand in the middle of everything and smile and let everybody think you’re fine, and you’re always fine, and nobody ever checks.” She looked at him in the dark. “You did it under the table. You did it in the geometry class. You did it on the phone to the Prime Minister when the ground was moving. You were fine. You were always fine.” She paused. “I’m just saying. Somebody should check. And Theo can’t, because he’s yours, and Jack can’t, because he’s in love with you, and your parents can’t, because they’re your parents.” She turned away. “So I’m going to. Every so often. Until June. And you’re going to tell me the truth.”

“All right.”

“Are you fine?”

He thought about it. On the bench, on the green, in the dark, with the first star over the yews and the school empty and a lambing shed and a donkey’s head and a crossroads in the snow and four thousand miles and June.

“No,” he said. “Not completely.”

Inés nodded.

“Good,” she said. “That’s the right answer.” And went away up the lane toward the school in the dark with the book under her arm, without looking back.

---

On the churchyard wall, when he got up, there was somebody.

He had not heard her come out. She had come out of number nine Church Lane while they were talking, in her coat, without her headscarf, with her white hair loose, which he had never seen, and sat down on the wall by the lych-gate in the dark with her stick, and Ernest asleep at her feet, and had been sitting there, he realised, for some time.

“She’s a clever girl,” said Mrs Haverfield.

“Yes.”

“Is she going to Oxford?”

He looked at her.

“I’m ninety-nine,” said Mrs Haverfield. “I’m not deaf.” She looked across the green at the lane where Inés had gone. “My Robert went to Oxford. My brother. Robert Cole. In 1938. On a scholarship. First Cole ever.” She looked at the church. “He came back in 1939 to join up. He’s on the board.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“He wrote to me from Oxford every Sunday,” said Mrs Haverfield. “For a year. I was seven. He wrote me a letter every Sunday about the buildings and the river and the people and the bells, and I’ve still got every one of them, in a biscuit tin, under my bed.” She lifted her chin. “Tell her that.”

“Tell her what?”

“Tell her to write to her grandmother every Sunday,” said Mrs Haverfield. “About the buildings and the river and the bells. Whatever happens. And her grandmother’ll have them. In a tin.” She put both hands on her stick. “That’s what you do, when you’re the one who goes. You write every Sunday. And then the one who stays has got something to keep.”

She stood up.

“Goodnight, sir.”

“Goodnight, Mrs Haverfield.”

She went back across the lane to the green door of number nine, very slowly, with her stick, and Ernest woke up and went after her, and the door closed, and the light went on in the front window behind the lace curtain, and Frederick stood alone on the green in the dark.

---

In the blue notebook he wrote:

End of Lent. Inés knows. She worked it out at the snow day. Oxford, in January, in the book with the ship. She hasn’t decided. I said I wasn’t fine. She said that was the right answer. Mrs Haverfield’s brother Robert went to Oxford in 1938. Cole, R. Every Sunday. A tin.

And then, at the bottom of the page, after a long time:

Somebody’s checking.