“Justin was on the library tour the next day. He hung back a step or two behind the group, and I wouldn’t even have noticed him if it hadn’t been for the fact that he had a hideous cold. Every sixty seconds or so he came out with this enormous, explosive, wet sneeze, and everyone would jump and then snicker, and he would turn an extraordinary shade of beetroot and try to disappear into his handkerchief. He was obviously excruciatingly shy. At the end of the tour Abby turned around to him, as if we’d known one another all our lives, and said, ‘We’re going for lunch, are you coming?’ I’ve seldom seen anyone look so startled. His mouth popped open and he mumbled something that could have meant anything, but he went over to the Buttery with us. By the end of lunch he was actually speaking in full sentences-and interesting ones, too. We’d read a lot of the same things, he had some insights into John Donne that had never occurred to me… It hit me, that afternoon, that I liked him; that I liked both of them. That, for the first time in my life, I was enjoying the company of others. You don’t strike me as the kind of person who’s ever had difficulty making friends; I’m not sure you can understand quite what a revelation that was.
“It took us until classes started, the next week, to find Rafe. The three of us were sitting at the back of a lecture room, waiting for the lecturer to show up, when all of a sudden the door beside us flew open and there was Rafe: dripping with rain, hair plastered to his head, fists clenched, obviously straight out of some traffic mess and in a horrible mood. It was a pretty dramatic entrance. Abby said, ‘Check it out, it’s King Lear,’ and Rafe whipped around on her and snarled-you know how he gets-‘How did you get here, then-in Daddy’s limo? Or on your broomstick?’ Justin and I were taken aback, but Abby just laughed and said, ‘By hot-air balloon,’ and pushed a chair towards him. And after a moment he sat down and muttered, ‘Sorry.’ And that was that.”
Daniel smiled, down at the leaf, a private little smile as tender and amazed as a lover’s. “How did we ever put up with one another? Abby talking nineteen to the dozen to hide her shyness, Justin half smothered under his, Rafe biting people’s heads off right and left; and me. I was terribly serious, I know. It wasn’t until that year, really, that I learned how to laugh…”
“And Lexie?” I asked, very softly. “How did you find her?”
“Lexie,” Daniel said. The smile rippled across his face like wind on water, deepened. “Do you know, I can’t even remember the first time we met her? Abby probably can; you should ask her. All I remember is that, by the time we had been postgrads for a few weeks, she seemed to have been there forever.”
He put the leaf down gently on the bench beside him and wiped his fingers on his handkerchief. “It always took my breath away,” he said, “that the five of us could have found one another-against such odds, through all the layers of armored fortifications each of us had set up. A lot of it was Abby, of course; I’ve never known what instinct led her so unerringly, I’m not sure she knows herself, but you can see why I’ve trusted her judgment ever since. But still: it would have been so heart-stoppingly easy for us to miss one another, for me or Abby to show up an hour later for registration, for Justin to refuse our invitation, for Rafe to be just that little bit snippier so that we backed off and left him alone. Do you see now why I believe in miracles? I used to imagine time folding over, the shades of our future selves slipping back to the crucial moments to tap each of us on the shoulder and whisper: Look, there, look! That man, that woman: they’re for you; that’s your life, your future, fidgeting in that line, dripping on the carpet, shuffling in that doorway. Don’t miss it. How else could such a thing have happened?”
He bent down and picked up our butts from the paving stones, one by one. “In all my life,” he said simply, “these are the only four people I have ever loved.” Then he stood up and walked off across the grass towards the house, with the bottle and the glass dangling from one hand and the cigarette butts cupped in the other.
The others came back still heavy-eyed and headachy and in a prickly mood. The film had been crap, they said, some awful thing with a random Baldwin brother having endless supposedly comic misunderstandings with someone who looked like Teri Hatcher but wasn’t; the cinema had been full of kids who were clearly below the age limit and who had spent the whole two hours texting each other and eating crackly things and kicking the back of Justin’s seat. Rafe and Justin were still very obviously not talking, and now Rafe and Abby apparently weren’t either. Dinner was leftover lasagna, crunchy on top and scorched on the bottom and eaten in tense silence. No one had bothered to make a salad to go with it, or to light the fire.
