“We should really start rehearsing—don’t you have a lecture at two thirty?” Unfortunately, I did.
“Oh God,” I said. “Do you mind if I watch the time on your phone? I don’t know where mine is.”
I took it from her and settled in at the kitchen island. “You’re low battery,” I said, pulling a cord from my pocket. “I’ll charge it for you. Whenever you’re ready—go ahead!”
Her Ophelia monologue was excellent. “‘As if he had been loosed out of hell / To speak of horrors,’” she whispered, a hand up as though Hamlet’s pale face were there before her. Ophelia was a vulnerable character, a girl driven to madness through her beloved’s disregard, and I hadn’t thought someone as self-possessed as Anwen could pry herself open that way. And yet, in my living room, her red curls crackling around her, I had the sense I had whenever I watched someone transform, onstage or elsewhere. That a quiet door had been opened somewhere, that a wind was coming through.
I performed mine for her—from after Ophelia had lost her mind, when she rants and sings in Hamlet’s fourth act—but I did my worst version, all rolling eyes and mock-rended clothes. I wanted to see what kind of notes Anwen would give me, if she would be honest.
She wasn’t. She told me I was “great,” cast another careful look around my flat, and exited, as it were, stage left.
I had approximately ten minutes to do the following things:
Ensure that the text messages between Anwen and Theo that I downloaded off her phone (when I’d taken it to charge; she really should have been more careful) had made it safely to my inbox.
Confirm the appointment I had just made for tomorrow morning.
Decide what the girlfriend version of myself would possibly wear to dinner with Watson that night.
A dinner. Somewhere nice.
What version of myself could I construct before then that could be even passably acceptable?
Nine
I WAS EARLY FOR DINNER, SUPPOSING THAT WATSON would be late, as he so often was.
The restaurant he’d chosen wasn’t a fancy place, though I will be the first to admit that my standards weren’t exactly standard. I had spent my childhood attending stifled, terrifying dinners at any number of Michelin-starred restaurants across Europe. I had beheaded many tiny cauliflowers and broccolinis while my father stared me down across a white tablecloth. This was not that. Neither was it counter service. It was the sort of place where the waiters wore white shirts tucked into denim, and the menu featured no fewer than four tarted-up versions of macaroni and cheese. At least that was what I could tell from the website, which I’d scanned (rather nervously) in the back of the taxi.
I would arrive early. I would settle into our table. Watson would approach. I would then say, “Hello, Watson,” and then I could ask him about his day.
This is how people behaved. For two hours, I could behave like a person.
Only Watson was not late. He was waiting for me on a bench in the vestibule, toeing the gray-washed hardwood floor.
“Holmes,” he said, standing as I walked through the door. “I think our table’s ready.”
“Hello, Watson,” I said. (That much I could manage.)
He had on his brown leather jacket and a white shirt, open at the collar. He looked very much like himself. Was that a good thing? Should I have imagined he looked different? I searched myself for the sort of response I was meant to have in this scenario, a first proper date with the boy that I cared for. Should he have a golden sheen around him? An inner glow? Should he be looking at me as though I were a treasure, or a princess? Biting his lip? Averting his eyes?
Should I be imagining us doing this—dining out at strangely posh comfort-food restaurants—for the rest of our lives?
I was spiraling. I took myself back to what was in front of me. Watson looked handsome, in the way he always did, which is to say clean but not manicured. The only difference was that he smelled a bit like cologne. Something, again, clean, like water if water had been supercharged into having a smell. Perhaps he’d made an effort. Was that exciting?
I was excited, I supposed, in the way in which I wanted to throw up from nerves.
I realized then that I had been standing in front of Watson for forty-five seconds without saying a single word.
“Miss?” The hostess hovered behind him. “Um. Your table’s ready?”
“You look a little like you’ve short-circuited,” he said, smiling, and took my hand gently as we followed her to the back corner of the restaurant.
Brick walls. A leather banquette. A votive candle on the table, and a sprig of lavender in a mason jar. The silverware was not silver but copper, polished to a shine. For a moment I was terrified that Watson might do something wretched like pull out my chair, but he gestured instead toward the booth side of the table. I slid in and immediately pulled up my feet. Sometimes it helped to make oneself more compact in combat situations.
Across from me, Watson fiddled with his watch, pulling it out from the cuff of his jacket and then sliding it back in. “How did it go?” he asked. “With Anwen?”
“Good,” I said brightly. “Fine.”
“Did you learn anything?”
“Not really.” That was untrue, but I didn’t want to be my clinical self just now. The rest of the world got that self. Tonight, I wanted for once to be the Charlotte beneath all the Holmes.
Whoever that was.
“Oh,” he said. His disappointed eyes met mine for a second before dropping again.
If our date were a test, I was failing. I had no idea how to do it right but still knew I was doing it wrong. I had no real examples for this sort of thing. Books? I didn’t read fiction. Television? The characters in Friends were hopelessly mean to the people they dated, and besides, I only watched that show to watch Joey, who was very attractive even while consuming entire pizzas. I thought back to the films that Leander and I had watched when I was convalescing these past months—screwball comedies from the 1940s, brightly lit mid-2000s films about “crashing” weddings to meet girls, the odd Transformers movie or two—and despaired. I should have curled my hair. I should be touching my face. I should be tastefully revealing bits of my past in anecdote form, until he found something with which he connected or which he found hopelessly charming.
Aha, I thought, and leaned forward. “Have I told you about the time that my aunt Araminta tried to teach me to handle the hives at her apiary?”
“No,” Watson said. “It’s a big one, right? Her apiary?”
“Hundreds of thousands of bees. She tends them herself. The honey, when she jars it, is a beautiful amber color. Some of it’s flavored—she has a tarragon one that’s quite sharp, and a lavender.” I touched the little bloom in the jar. “She does the infusions out in her workshop. It’s the original one, built about a century ago.”
“Sherlock’s, then.” He was watching me, now. Watson always had a fascination with my family history. Was it terrible to exploit that?
The villa, as my ancestor had called it, wasn’t far from the manor where I had grown up. His was a southern-facing set of buildings that overlooked the chalky cliffs that led down to the Channel. The cottage itself wasn’t particularly grand; it had a garret stuffed with books, many dating back to the turn of the last century, and the kitchen was one of those prodigious old caverns with an Aga stove and a tabletop for rolling out biscuits. Araminta made wonderful biscuits, made still better by the honey that dripped down into the little crevices of dough, and as a child I had gone down the lane—when issued an invitation; I had always been required an invitation—to eat those and look out over the sea.