The Mating Season

They say life is sometimes stranger than fiction, and I believe it, because no one would write a story that starts with two swans having sex on a Cambridgeshire lake at seven in the morning and ends the way this one does.

I'd been running the estate for about three weeks before I saw them.

The development had its own logic if you knew where to look. The marketing people called it a "village" but it wasn't, not really. It was eight hundred townhouses arranged around a series of man-made lakes and what the brochures called "green corridors," which was their way of saying the bits they hadn't built on yet. The roads had names — Barracks Way, Squadron Drive — that acknowledged what the place had been before the developers arrived. An old RAF station. Flat Cambridgeshire land, sky going on forever, the kind of place where you could see weather coming from twenty minutes away.

I liked it in the mornings. That was the honest truth. I worked at the science park across the road, had done for eleven years, and when I found out there was a traffic-free circuit through the new estate I'd started running it before I crossed the road to start my day. Six o'clock alarm, in the car by ten past, running by half past. My wife thought I was dedicated. I was, in my way. I just liked the quiet before the day started.

That morning it was the sixth of February. I know because I'd checked the weather on my phone before I left and it told me five degrees and I'd added a base layer under my running top. The sky was that specific shade of winter pale you get in the fens, white with the ghost of blue in it, the sun not properly up yet but the light there. My breath was visible. The lakes were flat and dark. A coot picked its way along the bank of the smaller one and didn't look up as I passed.

I saw them on the larger lake, a hundred metres ahead. I slowed without thinking about it.

There were two of them. Mute swans. The male was circling the female with his neck arched, his wings lifted slightly from his body, not open, just raised, held out from his sides the way a man might hold his arms when he's trying to look bigger than he is. The female held her neck flat along the water, long and low. He circled. She turned. It was unhurried, completely deliberate, the kind of thing that looks choreographed until you realise it's just been happening for long enough that they both know the steps.

I stopped to watch.

They formed a heart shape with their necks. I know that sounds sentimental but it's what they do, it's the actual thing, the two necks curving toward each other and touching and forming that shape. Then he was on her, brief and ungraceful, the water moving, her head going under for a moment. It was over in seconds. He slid off. They both raised up out of the water, wings wide, breasts pressed together, and called. Not the sound most people think of. Not a honk. Something lower and more private.

I was aware that I'd stopped running and was standing on a path at seven in the morning watching two swans have sex, and I was smiling.

"What are you looking at?"

I turned. She was perhaps fifteen metres behind me on the path. Late twenties, I'd have said, dark hair pulled back, wearing a pale blue running top and black leggings, white trainers. The leggings were good ones, the kind that left nothing approximate about her shape. Earbuds in, one hand holding her phone. She'd pulled one earbud out to speak. Her face was open, curious rather than suspicious, a small person with a directness to her.

"Swans," I said. "Mating. Just now."

She came and stood beside me. We both looked out at the lake. The swans were apart again, the male preening, the female drifting.

"I d-didn't know they did that," she said. "I thought they just." She paused, steadied herself. "Stayed together."

"They do. That's the point. They do all that first." I nodded at the lake. "The circling, the neck thing. Every time. Even when they've been paired for years."

She watched them for a moment. "That's nice, actually."

"I think so."

She was from the north. You could hear it in every vowel, the flatness of them, the way *that's* was almost *thaz*. Bolton, I'd have guessed, or somewhere in that direction. A different country from here, really, for all that it was still England.

"Are you from the estate?" she asked.

"No. I work at the science park. Just over there." I pointed in the general direction of the road. "I run here in the mornings. It's quieter than the roads."

"I've only been here three weeks," she said. "I d-don't know anybody." She said it without self-pity, just as a fact. "We moved down from Bolton."

"My partner. He's doing his PhD at the university. Was doing. He finished last year. He's in London now, working. Commutes from the station." She glanced at me. "So it's mostly just me in the house."

"The houses are nice," I said, which was sort of true and sort of not. They were well finished, the ones I'd seen. Big windows. But they had no gardens, only small patios, and they were close together in that way new builds always are, each one a fraction too near its neighbour.

"They're fine," she said, and the slight flatness of it told me she found them something less than that. "I'm Beth."

"Andrew."

She put her earbud back in on the same side, not the one facing me, which I noticed. Kept the one out that might have let her hear me.

"Did they r-really do the heart thing?" she asked. "With their necks."

"Yeah, they really did... like they shape the towels on a bed in some naff hotel."

She laughed andlooked at the lake again. The swans were far out now, moving apart. "I hope they don't ruin it," she said. "All this." She gestured vaguely at the fields, the open sky, the line of trees in the distance. "Eight hundred houses and they're still building. And it costs. Eight hundred thousand for a townhouse with no garden. And they call it the countryside."

"That's Cambridgeshire," I said. "You're four miles from Cambridge. You're always going to pay for that."

"Where I'm from you could buy a whole street."

"Where I'm from too, originally." I wasn't lying. I'd grown up in Bury. Thirty years in the south-east had ironed most of it out but the instinct was still there. "It does your head in when you first get here."

She smiled at that, properly, and it changed her face in a way I noticed without meaning to.

We ran in the same direction for a while after that, not together exactly, but at a similar pace, and we talked in the way you can when you're running, in short stretches, comfortable with the gaps. She'd been a nurse in Bolton. She wasn't working here yet, hadn't registered with an agency, was still finding her feet. Her partner, Josh, she'd say eventually, was down most of the week, sometimes not. She had the house to herself more than she didn't.

At the point where the path split she went left and I went right.

"Nice to m-meet you," she said. "Andrew."

"And you."

I ran the rest of the circuit and crossed the road to work and sat at my desk and answered emails, and I thought about the swans more than I thought about her, if I'm honest. At that point.

---

I saw her again four days later.

Same lake. Same time. She was standing on the bank looking out at the water and she turned when she heard me coming. She'd remembered me. You can tell by how someone turns when they hear footsteps, whether they brace or whether they're already expecting someone in particular.

"They're back," she said.

They were. The same pair, or what looked like the same pair, out on the flat water. Not mating this time, just drifting together in that way swans do, always within a certain radius of each other, always aware.

"Have you been watching them?" I asked.

"A bit." She was wearing a red running top this time, black leggings, hair loose, which seemed wrong for running. Maybe she'd been walking. Either way she was fit in the unselfconscious way runners are, lean through the hips, good legs. "I looked them up. After last time. Mute swans, you said."

"Yes."

"They m-mate for life. Mostly. If one dies the other one." She stopped. "Sometimes they don't take another mate."

"Sometimes they do," I said. "They're not entirely above it."

She laughed. It was a short laugh, surprised out of her. "That's very cynical."

"Realistic," I said. "They're still animals."

The swans drifted. The male turned his head and looked at us with that particular sideways arrogance swans have, as if we were the intruders, which I suppose we were.

"Have you been here?" I asked. "Every morning."

"Most of them. I d-don't have much else to do."

She said it without any drama in it, which made it worse somehow. Not a complaint. A statement of circumstance. She was twenty-nine years old, I'd find out later, three hundred miles from her family, in a house that wasn't quite hers yet, in a place she hadn't chosen, waiting for a man who came home at the end of the week smelling of London and fell asleep on the sofa by nine.

I didn't know any of that yet. I just knew she was standing by a lake at seven in the morning because there was nothing else pulling her anywhere.

"Have you found the café?" she asked. "On the estate. The community one. It's in the old building near the gates."

"I've seen it. Never been in."

"It's actually quite good." She paused. "I mean. It's n-not much. But the coffee's decent. And it's warm." She looked at me, and there was something slightly careful in it. "I go sometimes. Lunchtime. If you wanted. I mean you're just across the road."

"I could do that," I said. "Later this week, if you're around."

"Yes," she said. "I'm always around."

She put her earbud in and ran off in the direction of the newer part of the estate, the part that was still building, where the air smelled of raw timber and you could hear pneumatic drills starting up if you ran that way after eight.

I watched her go a second longer than I needed to, then ran the other way.

---

My wife's name is Amanda. We've been married twenty-three years. She's a project manager, works from home most of the week. We have two kids: one at York doing Chemistry, one doing A-levels at the sixth form college. We have a house in Cherry Hinton that we bought for a reasonable amount fifteen years ago and is now worth an unreasonable amount, the way everything is around here.

We're not unhappy. That's the truest thing I can say about us. We're not unhappy, and we're also not, quite, the thing we were. There's a distance in the day-to-day that neither of us mentions, a way of moving around each other that's become entirely habitual. She knows what I'll want for dinner before I do. I know exactly the arc of her moods across a week. We're kind to each other. We're good parents. We're also two people who've worn the same groove so smooth and deep that sometimes I stand in our kitchen on a Sunday morning and feel like I'm reading from a script I've long since memorised.

I didn't tell Amanda about Beth. There was nothing to tell. But I noticed that I said nothing, which is its own kind of information.

---

The café was in the old guard house, a low red brick building that survived the development by being listed. Inside it was warm and smelled of coffee and something baking. Six or seven tables. A woman behind the counter who knew Beth by name and brought her the same thing without being asked, which told me she came here more than occasionally.

"Flat white?" I said.

"It's all I have," Beth said. "I can't do the sweet ones. All those people walking round with drinks that taste like d-desserts."

"Agreed."

I got mine and sat across from her. She was in a dark skirt, thin black tights, a cream jumper, her hair loose. Without the context of the path she looked slightly different. More settled. More ordinary, and more, simultaneously, not.

I'd been noticing her legs since the first morning on the path and now here they were in thin tights, the fabric sheer enough to see the warmth of her skin beneath. There's something about a woman's legs in good thin tights that I've never entirely got past, which I recognised as slightly absurd in a man of fifty-two and didn't particularly try to reason my way out of.

She had brown eyes. I hadn't been close enough before to see what colour they were.

"How long have you been in Cambridge?" she asked.

"Thirty years. Give or take. I came for university and never left. Which sounds worse than it is."

"I'm from Bolton."

"I know. You said."

"Everyone down here says *oh, Bolton* like that." She did a face, slightly pinched, politely curious. "Like they're trying to place it."

"I know where Bolton is. I'm from Bury."

She looked at me. "You're n-not."

"I am so."

"You sound completely southern and soft."

"I know. It happened gradually. My mum still pulls me up on it when I go back home."

She smiled at that. We talked about the north with the ease of two people for whom it's a country you love and have left and feel slightly guilty about having left. The cold there, the directness of people, the way you could walk into a pub and be in a conversation by the time you'd got your pint. She missed her mum. She said it simply, the way she said most things, no performance around it.

"Josh." That was his name. She said it naturally, in the context of something else. "Josh keeps saying once he's established at the firm we'll go back. Or at least up to Leeds or Manchester. But." She turned her cup on the table. "That's a long time away."

"Is he happy? In London?"

"Yes," she said, and she said it in a way that made it clear she thought his being happy in London was slightly the problem.

I looked at her across the table. The light through the old building's windows was the thin winter kind, specific and pale. There was something about her face that was very direct, without being hard. She looked at you when she talked.

"Do you have children?" she asked.

"Two. Eighteen and twenty-one. Do you want kids?"

"Not yet." She paused. "J-Josh wants to wait. Until he's more settled."

The way she said it, not bitterly, but with a small precise weight on the word *he's*, said most of what I needed to know.

She was quiet for a moment, turning her cup.

"Can I say something slightly strange?" she said.

"Yeah course, go on."

"I've always." She paused, chose the words carefully. "Older men. I've always been drawn to them. Since I was really young. There's something." She stopped again, not the stutter this time, just finding it. "The younger ones I've been with were all over the place. Didn't know what they wanted. Didn't really listen. But older men." She looked at me steadily. "They know what they're doing. They know how to be with a woman. Or the good ones do. And they actually listen, or they've p-perfected the art of looking like they listen, which amounts to the same thing."

"I'm not sure that's entirely a compliment."

"It's mostly one," she said, and the corner of her mouth moved.

We sat there for well over an hour. I had a second coffee. She had a piece of the lemon drizzle and offered me half, which I took. Outside the windows the building work went on, cranes moving, the slow accretion of the estate expanding itself.

"Thank you for coming," she said, when I stood to go.

"Don't thank me. It was an excellent lemon drizzle. Who says you can't have your cake and eat it!"

She laughed. That same surprised laugh, short and genuine. I'd come to think of it as something I was after, that sound, which was when I should probably have noticed what was happening.

I didn't say anything about meeting again. She didn't either. But we both knew we would.

---

It took about three weeks from that first coffee.

We ran together on the mornings when our timing lined up, which was most of them. I started arriving at the same time on purpose and I knew she did too because on the mornings I was five minutes late I'd find her at the lake, not moving, waiting in the way people wait when they're trying to look like they're not waiting.

We went to the café twice a week, most weeks, at lunchtime. I told Amanda I was eating at the office. I told myself that was still broadly true, which it was, technically, as I crossed the road and ate next to nothing and drove back afterward.

The talking came easily, which was new for me. Not because I'm not sociable, I am, but because this was different from the talking I did at work or at home. She asked real questions and waited for the actual answers. She told me real things in return. About her parents' marriage, which had been difficult. About her stutter, which she'd had since she was a child and which got worse when she was anxious or overtired, and how she'd spent years getting to a point where it was manageable and she mostly didn't think about it. About what she'd wanted to do before nursing, which was art, and how she still drew sometimes, in notebooks, just for herself.

I told her about the running. How I'd started it in my early forties for the usual reasons, mid-life, creaking, the sense of time doing something specific, and how I'd fallen into it properly and done a few marathons, including London, and now couldn't imagine not doing it. How it was the part of my day that felt most like mine.

I told her, one lunchtime in March when the light had changed and you could sit near the window without being cold, that my marriage was comfortable in a way I couldn't quite explain, and that comfortable was a word that had two meanings.

She looked at me for a moment.

"Yes," she said. "I know all that"

We didn't touch. We talked. We ran. We had coffee and she ate lemon drizzle and I paid most of the time, which she pretended to object to and didn't.

It was a lunchtime in the third week of March when I walked her back from the café. First time I'd gone past the gate, into the actual housing part of the estate itself, and we both knew it was different, the geography of it, me in her space rather than the neutral ground of the path or the café.

She lived on one of the internal streets, brick townhouses, three storeys, windows that needed net curtains but didn't have them yet. She was wearing a dark skirt that day, a little above the knee, thin black tights, and I'd been aware of it all the way from the café without saying anything. A pot by the door with something just starting to come up in it. She'd told me she'd been trying to garden the patio, which was small but hers.

We stood at her door and she had her keys out.

"Do you want to come in?" she said.

She said it very flat, without any particular inflection, the stutter not touching it at all. She looked at me directly.

"Yes," I said.

---

She'd done things with the house. It was a new build, white walls, fitted everything, the kind of place that arrives blank, and she'd put things on the walls and on the shelves. Prints, a couple of her own drawings framed, proper things, careful and specific, buildings and birds, a sketch of what I recognised as the lake. Books in shelves rather than stacked. A throw on the sofa in a rust colour. She'd made the place hers in the way people do when they're not sure how long they'll be somewhere, carefully, so it can be undone.

There was a full-length mirror on the wall at the bottom of the stairs, angled slightly. I noticed it and said nothing.

"Tea?" she said.

She filled the kettle and I stood in the kitchen doorway and we talked about the drawing she'd done of the lake, which was hanging in the hall, and I asked when she'd done it and she said January, not long after they'd moved in, she'd gone out early one morning and sat on the bank with a sketchbook.

She made the tea and handed me mine and we were standing close together in the kitchen, closer than we had been before, and she looked up at me and I looked at her and we both held it for a moment.