The Stars We Share Read online

  “We have to go on,” Aunt Constance says quietly. She looks down into her coffee. “They would want us to.”

  Alec blinks, the sharp welling of tears almost too much. What can he say to that?

  * * *

  • • •

  As they make their way to visit Fenbourne’s vicar late that afternoon, Alec trails behind his aunt and uncle, kicking at small stones with his sturdy new boots. His aunt’s cottage sits at the northern tip of the village, just within sight of the spires of St. Anne’s, and the lanes they cross as they walk into Fenbourne run toward an impossibly distant horizon. The adults talk, laughing sometimes when one brings up something the other only half remembers. Alec falls farther behind, bewildered by the wholly flat world around him, and the lowness of the sky. He turns his attention to watching the way Aunt Constance walks, the way she carries herself, the deep chestnut of her hair where it peeks out from beneath her hat. Her shoulders are straight under her brown velvet coat, and she strides almost like Uncle Roger. His mother had walked like that, too. When they reach St. Anne’s, his aunt points at the bell tower, and Uncle Roger nods and says something about ringing changes. Alec follows the lines of the church with his eyes, memorizing them and wishing for his notebook. Later he will draw the dark and light of the stones, the sweep of the willow tree over the churchyard, the way the spires jut into the sky.

  When his aunt and uncle step away from the church and cross to the vicarage, Aunt Constance puts out a hand to Alec. He takes it, startled by the strength of her grip. She pauses, bends a little at the waist, meets his gaze. He’s sure she’s going to say something—she has the look of having practiced a speech—but instead she smiles. He nods as if her smile is a covenant, overwhelmed. She has his mother’s dark eyes.

  There’s a massive bronze lion’s head on the door, and Uncle Roger lifts it as high as it goes and lets it fall with a gratifying metallic thump. Alec smiles, and his uncle winks at him.

  After a moment the door opens and a maid in a starched white apron appears. “Mrs. Fane.” She ducks her head.

  “Good afternoon, Mary,” Aunt Constance says. “I believe Mrs. Attwell is expecting us.”

  Mary ducks her head again and steps aside. Alec follows everyone into the house. It’s dark in the front hall, and almost as cold as it is outside. Mary leads them along a deep red carpet into the drawing room, where a woman stands, smiling, her hair pulled up into a complicated knot.

  “Constance,” she says. She and Alec’s aunt embrace.

  “Imogene,” Aunt Constance says, “you already know my brother, Captain Roger Tennant, and this is my nephew, Alec Oswin.”

  “I am so pleased to see you again, Captain Tennant,” Mrs. Attwell says.

  Uncle Roger bows gallantly over her hand. “The pleasure is mine.”

  “And, Alec,” Mrs. Attwell says. She looks down at him. “I am very pleased to meet you.”

  “Hello.” He puts out a tentative hand, which she shakes. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”

  Mrs. Attwell smiles, but it’s a sad smile, nowhere near her eyes. She and Aunt Constance sit together on the long sofa, talking about the local hospital, and Uncle Roger settles himself into a chair. Alec, left standing, has no idea what to do with himself. He drifts closer to his uncle, who grins at him as if they’re sharing a secret, but Alec doesn’t know what it is.

  Mary brings a silver tray laden with a tea service and sets it on a table near the sofa. She hovers, waiting.

  Mrs. Attwell nods. “Thank you, Mary.” As the maid turns to go, the older woman says, “Please tell Mr. Attwell our guests are here.”

  Mary slips out of the room, and Alec watches her go. In India most of the servants had been Hindu or Muslim men, except for his ayah and his mother’s maid. There had been a whole staff. At his aunt’s house there is only Mrs. Whittleton, cook and housekeeper both.

  The heavy wooden door opens again, but this time it’s not Mary. Instead a man wearing tweed over the black and white of his vicar’s garb bustles in, followed by a girl in a blue dress with a sailor collar. She regards Alec with interest.

  “Captain,” the man says, “Mrs. Fane. I’m so glad to see you.” His watery blue eyes cruise over Alec. “Well, young man, I am awfully glad to make your acquaintance, although I very much regret the circumstances.”

  “Thank you,” Alec says.

  Mrs. Attwell turns to the girl. “June, darling, why don’t you show Alec the conservatory?”

  June nods, her eyes still on Alec. There is something about her gaze that holds him in place. Not just the color of her eyes, but their steadiness. They remind him of a piece of ocean glass he found for his mother when they went to the sea at Kerala.

  “My name is June Attwell,” she says, as she leads him out of the drawing room.

  “I’m Alec Oswin.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I know.”

  He treads quietly behind her, ever deeper into the house, trying to remember the way back to the others, distracted by the rows of portraits hung along the hallways.

  “My mother says you’re from India.” She pauses beneath a picture of a stag, the oils dark and heathered, and looks him over again. “You don’t look it.”

  “I’ve never been to England until now,” he says, although this does not answer what feels like a question. “It’s awfully gray.”

  June leans hard on a golden-glassed door. “Not everywhere,” she says, as the door slowly opens. Alec follows her into the bright, open space, gravel paths and greenery dappled red and gold and blue by panels fit at random into the mullioned glass of the walls and ceiling. It takes him a moment to realize that he’s finally starting to feel warm again.

  She watches him patiently, as if she can feel how much he wants to curl up under the massive leaves of an unexpected palm. It’s not India, it doesn’t smell like India, but it’s not the watery blur of the Fens either. He might cry.

  June smiles. “Come look.” She moves along the paths so surely, the dark fall of her hair curling down against the broad collar of her dress. When she stops, she points down into a low marble fountain, where carp the color of sunrise swim just beneath the surface. “I call that big one Loomis because he looks like my father’s deacon.”

  Alec laughs, surprising himself. June grins.

  They stand together quietly, watching the carp.

  “Tell me about India, Alec.”

  He closes his eyes, concentrating on the smell of green things growing around him. “I don’t know how,” he says at last.

  “Well,” she says, “in books, there’s ever so much jungle and wild animals. And soldiers.”

  He thinks about it. “Sometimes.”

  She waits, bending to pick up small handfuls of the pea-sized gravel and arranges it in shapes on the lip of the fountain.

  “In the Himalayas, there is always snow,” he says, “and leopards.”

  June stops making shapes. “Have you seen them?”

  “Yes,” he says. There is a hill station at Gulmarg where the summer is full of flowers, and in the winter the snow there drifts as tall as his father, the Himalayas rising in the distance. “Here there is so much mud. There’s mud there too, but it’s not the same.” He pauses, thinking of the old men he saw from the car, catching eels and chopping at sedges. “Is all of England like this?”

  “I expect not,” June says. “I’ve only ever been as far as Cambridge. Perhaps one day we’ll find out about the rest.”

  “Perhaps,” he says. He likes the we.

  June nods, and shifts a piece of gravel from one shape to another. She stares at the pattern for a moment, looks at Alec, frowns. “My father says you don’t have a mother or father anymore.”

  He almost cries out. He concentrates on breathing, trying to count the stones on the fountain, watching the fish.

  Her eyes pained, Jun
e says, “Mother says I ask too many questions.”

  Does she? Alec doesn’t know. He has known her only a few minutes, but it feels like longer. For a split second he thinks he will ask his ayah if she can explain, and then he remembers everything again. It hurts.

  “My mother died,” he says. “They all did.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. Her frown deepens. “Your aunt’s husband died in the War, in Palestine.”

  Alec starts to speak, stops. He keeps forgetting that Aunt Constance has lost people, too.

  “Well,” June says, “shall we get some cake?”

  It’s impossible to keep up with her, but he wants to try. When June looks at him, he can feel his edges. He hasn’t felt this real in months. Since before his parents died.

  She nods again, as if she’s reached a conclusion. “To the kitchen, then, Alec. Let’s see what Cook is doing.”

  1931, Fenbourne

  The River Lark cuts a neat line across the northern half of Fenbourne. June likes to stand on the banks of the river and watch the water curl past. At home she has a map of what the village used to look like, before they dredged the Lark and changed its course. When she watches the Lark now she thinks about the ways even a river can change direction, and about the more distant rivers Alec has told her about. She would like to see the Ganges, or a bright cold stream making its way from the Himalayan snow to the plains. Right now the River Lark is her river, the water coursing green and brown through her veins, or it might as well be. Will these currents eventually be replaced by others, by a twisted set of rapids or a broad, smooth stream? Perhaps someday. People tell her parents that she is too clever by half. Sometimes they mean she’s destined for something bigger than Fenbourne, or she hopes they do. Sometimes they mean something else.

  Today she’s on her way to a spot where the light hangs differently against the water, just south of the bridge that crosses the Lark and connects the northern tip of Fenbourne to the rest of the village. The week before she had seen an unusually large pike in the shallows where the riverbank has been cut away, and she wants to see it again before someone catches it. She’s brought a blanket to sit on, in case the pike makes her wait.

  When she gets to her spot, though, she finds Alec there, almost knee-deep in the shallows, his shoes and socks wadded up against the old bricks of the bridge. He’s singing to himself—it sounds like some kind of dubious music hall tune, echoing off the bricks. She should have known he would be there, and she smiles, trying not to be cross about the fact that he has almost certainly frightened off the pike. He is so occupied with whatever he’s looking for under the bridge that he doesn’t see her at first. She waits.

  After a moment, he emerges from the shadow, the August sun lighting his hair like white gold, and stops mid-verse. He blinks up at her. “June!”

  “Hallo, Alec.”

  “Do you remember the first time we skated here?”

  June puts her head to one side. Of course she remembers. “Yes.”

  He grins at her. “Come and look?”

  She spreads out the blanket on the almost flat place she likes on the bank, shaded by the bridge on one side and by an alder sapling on the other. She hadn’t planned to actually go into the river, but why not? It’s a warm day. She slips off her socks and shoes and puts them neatly on a corner of the blanket.

  Alec puts out a hand and helps her step into the water. It’s cool against her legs, and she tucks away a hint of remorse that there will be mud on the hem of her skirt. She follows him as he wades back into the shadows, gesturing at the rough bricks arching over their heads. June looks up.

  “Oh, Alec!”

  She gives him an affectionate smile, and they stand together, the river coursing past their calves, and look at the constellations he’s drawn fresh against the dark underside of the bridge. The first time he’d done it had been that first winter nearly four years ago. The Lark had frozen, and June had taught Alec how to ice-skate. They had explored the riverbanks and canals for a mile in both directions out of Fenbourne, Alec awkward at first in his skates, and then suddenly sure of himself. By the second winter, he’d joined the boys who waited all year for the fens to freeze so they could race. But that first winter, when they were eight years old, he had come out by himself on the ice one morning and drawn the stars he remembered from his journey west, and that afternoon he had shown them to June.

  “I fixed them for you,” he says bashfully.

  “But how?”

  He grins at her. “Tall enough now.”

  “Oh,” she says. She steps back and looks at him more carefully. Of course she’s noticed how much he’s grown over the years; she sees him nearly every day. But she had not realized that where he had once been eight and not tall enough to reach the arch without the added height of ice and borrowed skates, he is now a week away from twelve and able to put his palm to the lowest row of stars. She tilts her head. “But . . .”

  “I borrowed a punt for the higher ones,” he says. “Frank Burleigh let me take it for a day.”

  Frank Burleigh is the smith’s son, much older than June and Alec. He seems an unlikely ally. And, as if he can see that realization on June’s face, Alec blushes and looks away.

  “I told him I needed it for a surprise, but he made me give him tuppence.” He shrugs. “Don’t tell Aunt Constance.”

  “I certainly won’t,” June says. He is so impetuous, and she wishes he would think things through. What if a sudden summer storm had swelled the current and something had happened? Well. That does not bear thinking about. She looks at him, at the anxious creases on his forehead as he waits to see if she will scold him or praise him. “Oh, Alec. Thank you.”

  His face goes pink with relief. June smiles and goes back to looking at the stars. In Aunt Constance’s parlor, there is a globe, and June has not forgotten the afternoon she spent there with Alec showing her his India, and the long sail to England. All those places, and she knows how much the shipboard stars meant to him. She feels it somewhere deep in her heart that he keeps giving them to her, one way or another.

  1933, Fenbourne

  That summer it seems as though everywhere Alec goes there are small stands of rock—slate, most often, or the smooth gray pebbles that he has taught June to skip across the surface of the Lark—always waiting. Here, one at the corner of the churchyard wall where it juts into the lane. There, one in the shade of the yew the postmistress refuses to trim. Alec knows the cairns are for him, that June does not perform random acts, that there is a message in the precision with which she has laid them out. He hasn’t seen her often enough; they are only lately back in Fenbourne for the summer, and the Attwells have kept June as busy in these weeks as Aunt Constance and Roger, here on a month of leave from Kashmir, have kept him. But the cairns are always somewhere they’ve recently seen each other, somewhere she knows he’ll be again. Always, he knows, for him.

  But knowing is different from understanding. He knows what he wants the stones to tell him. He knows that he feels June’s presence differently now, that how he missed her when they went away to school last autumn is not how he will miss her when he goes back to St. Paul’s in September. And he knows that the week before, when he’d squared off with his cricket bat on the pitch just outside the village, the grass defiantly emerald despite the beginnings of drought, he had turned back from the arc of the ball as it soared across the river and found June in the small crowd, her eyes and her smile on him.

  He is still not used to the racket and bustle of London, although he has learned to make his way through it. He wants to tell June that she is how he does it, that it is by finding the small treasures that he wants to share with her—a cat painted on the wall of a pub, the tremble of light on the old glass of the window in his bedroom, the way snow and ice cathedraled along the Thames during that hideous cold winter—that he navigates the space she does not inhabit.

&
nbsp; He wants to tell her that he would rather she inhabit all the space there is.

  * * *

  • • •

  He’s contemplating the newest cairn—quartz, pale pink and shimmering against several layers of sheared-off sandstone—when his afternoon breaks open with the sound of hooves. He looks up, shading his eyes, although he knows who it is; Roger has brought a horse with him to Fenbourne, an Arabian mare with delicate ears and wicked eyes. And nobody races through the village like Roger and Noor, the midsummer sun warming the deep bay of her coat. Twice now Roger’s been seen keeping company with Melody Keswick, the youngest daughter of the local squire, but Aunt Constance says that Melody is not made for India any more than Roger is for England.

  “Afternoon, Alec,” Roger says. “I’ve been looking for you.” He leans forward, holding Noor in check with his knees, and offers her a lump of sugar from his pocket.

  Alec greets him and stands, mostly so Roger won’t notice the cairn and ask him about it.

  Roger smiles, the horse restive beneath him. “You should come out with me sometime.”

  “I’d like that,” Alec says. He doesn’t know if the galloping impresses Melody Keswick, but he can’t help but wonder if it might impress June. He eyes Noor, tossing her head in the sunshine, and Roger, keeping his seat without apparent effort. The horses at the stables in the village are a docile bunch; who there could keep up with Noor and Roger? But he is bold enough for a faster horse, and he knows it. Sometimes when he watches Roger on Noor he can imagine himself crouched over the arched neck of a horse like Roger’s, letting her guide them over hedgerows and ditches. The idea of the speed, the endless motion, calls to him.

  “I daresay you’d like the course at Brooklands,” Roger says. “Motorcars and racing and so forth.” He grins at Alec, then shifts in the saddle, looking out over the landscape as if he’s trying to decide what to ask Noor to jump next. “I’m going down there for a few days tomorrow, if you’d like to come along. You seem as though you might not mind some excitement.”