The Mating Season

The morning after, she was at the lake when I got there.

Standing at the bank, phone in hand, not using it. The swans were out on the far side and she was watching them. She heard me on the path and looked round and said nothing, just waited while I crossed the grass to her.

We stood side by side for a moment, looking at the water.

"Morning sexy," I said.

"Morning."

That was all, for a while.

The male swan was circling, close in, doing nothing urgent. The female held her position further out, turning slowly as he moved.

"She messaged me," Beth said. "This morning."

I knew who she meant.

"Just to say thank you," she said. "And that she'd had a good drive back."

"That's good."

"She was lovely." She said it as a fact, not warmly, just accurately. "I didn't expect to like her as a person. I thought it would be more er." She paused. "Transactional."

"She left a book on the bedside table," I said. "I noticed."

"*Rebecca*. Du Maurier. I saw it when she went to the bathroom." A pause. "Someone who reads du Maurier on b-business trips is generally going to be all right."

The swans moved. The male was closer to the bank now, close enough to see the yellow of his beak, the black mask of him. He circled and she turned and it was the same slow unhurried thing it always was, completely deliberate, the kind of thing that looks choreographed until you realise it's just been done long enough that they both know the steps.

"What did you talk about?" I asked. "When I was in the bathroom."

She'd known I'd ask eventually.

"She asked if you were okay, and I said yes. And she said: *you're very protective of him.*" A pause. "And she said: *that's fine. That's good, actually.*"

"Then you came back in the room."

We stood there. A coot moved along the far bank. The building works on the eastern side hadn't started yet, the estate still quiet in the early morning, just the birds and the water and the flat Cambridgeshire light coming in pale over the fields.

"Are you okay?" she said. Not the way people say it when they expect yes. The way she said things when she actually wanted to know.

"Yes, of course" I said. Then: "You know I think about stopping all this. In the small hours."

"Me too." She was quiet a moment. "But only then. In the daytime I don't."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know," she said. "Probably nothing good."

She put her earbud back in on the same side as always, not the one facing me. Kept the one out that might have heard me.

"Let's run eh?" she said.

We ran.

---

The text came three hours later, while I was at my desk failing to read a supplier's quote.

*Nice afternoon. Bring food. Lake at twelve.*

I looked at it for a moment. Then I rescheduled a twelve-thirty call, moved two emails from urgent to later, and went out at quarter to and bought things from the deli on the science park side of the road. Bread. Cheese, Homous. Something in a jar. A small bottle of white wine and fwo plastic glasses.

I hadn't packed a picnic since my children were small, which told me something about the intervening years that I didn't examine too closely.

---

She was already there, sitting on the bank in the thin April sun, shoes beside her on the grass, face turned toward the water. A summer dress, pale cotton, the first warm day that had properly earned it. A jacket folded beneath her. She heard me crossing the grass and looked round.

"Cornichons," she said, looking into the bag.

"They're for the cheese."

"Were they."

We ate. The lake was still and the sun made a flat bright path across it and the building works on the far side had reduced themselves to a low percussion that didn't quite reach us. Someone had mown the bank recently. The smell of it was particular and clean, the smell of spring deciding to stay.

She'd run nine miles in total that morning, three with me, and five miles out toward Cambridge and back, the kind where you stop thinking somewhere around mile four and don't start again until you're home. She asked about my week and I told her and she listened in the way she listened to everything, which was to say completely.

"Josh is back Friday," she said. "Through Monday."

"Nice."

"He wants to go to his parents in Suffolk on Saturday." She turned her wine glass slowly. "I've decided I'm not going. I'll tell him I've got a shift, which is nearly true. Sunday I have." She looked at the water. "He won't mind. He'll have his mum to himself. He loves that."

I didn't say anything. She didn't need me to.

The male swan had drifted closer while we were talking, moving along the near bank in that particular way of his, no apparent purpose, just keeping the orbit. The female was further out, aware of him, turning slowly in relation to the same fixed point.

Beth had her legs stretched out in front of her, bare feet on the grass. She'd had a pedicure recently. Deep coral, fresh and neat. I looked at the lake.

"You're very studiously not looking," she said.

"I'm looking at the swans."

"You're looking at my feet and trying not to."

I looked at her. She looked back, entirely level.

"Go on then," she said.

"Beth."

"We're at a lake," she said. "In April. With cornichons." The corner of her mouth moved. "Honestly, Andrew."

I reached over and lifted one foot by the ankle and held it in my lap and heard her exhale, quite deliberately, the way she did when she was choosing to stay calm. The coral nails, the particular arch of her, the warmth of her skin in the spring air. I held it and did nothing else and felt her watching my face.

"Your face," she said.

"Don't," I said.

"I'm just observing."

"I know you are."

She lay back on her elbows and I kept hold of her foot and after a moment pressed my mouth to the arch of it and heard her draw a slow breath.

"There's a runner," she said. "Far side."

I looked up. Bright yellow top, steady pace, two hundred metres off, not looking toward us.

"He can't see anything," I said.

"No," she said. "I know."

She lay back fully and put one arm across her face, the sun full on her. The dress was light enough that the April light was doing something to it, the shape of her visible through the thin cotton in the particular way that kind of afternoon manages. I set her foot down and moved beside her and she turned toward me and we kissed, slow and with tongues, the wine warm in it.

"There's a big tree there," she said, against my mouth.

I looked. Eight feet back from the bank, a good ash, broad and solid. She'd have clocked it when she arrived. She clocked everything.

I got up and took her hand and she came with her shoes left on the grass, barefoot across the bank, and I walked her to the tree and turned her to face the lake. She put both hands flat against the bark without being told.

The runner on the far side was still moving. The swans held their orbit on the water.

I reached around and ran my hands slowly down over the front of her dress, feeling the warmth of her through the thin cotton, and she pressed back against me. I gathered the hem and lifted it and moved my hand between her legs and found nothing but warmth, which answered the question I hadn't asked. The sound she made was low enough that it didn't travel. She pressed back harder into my hand.

I worked slowly. Both her palms flat against the bark, her head dropped forward, and she let me set the pace without trying to change it.

The dog appeared on the near path before I heard the owner. A spaniel, nose down, moving at its own unhurried speed. Beth saw it first. She went still under my hand.

I kept going. Same pressure. Same pace.

The owner came into view, a woman, older, looking at her phone. She moved along the path at an easy walk, the dog ranging ahead of her, and they were twenty metres off when the spaniel's head came up and it looked toward the tree. The woman called it back without looking up from her phone.

Beth's hands tightened on the bark.

I kept my hand exactly where it was and felt her breathing go shallow, the effort of staying still, the effort of staying quiet. Twenty metres. Fifteen. Ten.

They passed. The woman didn't notice us. The dog found something else to interest it and they moved on toward the far end of the bank, unhurried, getting smaller.

Beth's breath came out in a long controlled rush.

I slipped my fingers inside her and she gripped the bark hard, both hands. Her hips found a rhythm and I followed it. She reached one hand back and wrapped it around my wrist, not to stop me, just to feel the movement of it, as if she needed to account for every part of what was happening to her.

She came with her forehead pressed against the bark, hands flat against it, legs going properly unsteady, a sound pressed into the wood that didn't become anything. I held her there until she steadied.

She stood still a moment. Then she straightened, let the dress fall, and turned to look at me. The composed surface of her briefly and entirely absent. The actual thing underneath showing plainly.

"Fuck that felt good Andrew."

She smoothed the front of her dress. Looked at the lake. The swans were still there, still in their slow orbit, indifferent to all of it.

Then she reached under the hem of her dress and stepped out of her knickers without ceremony and held them out.

"Put those somewhere private," she said.

I put them in my jacket pocket.

She walked back to the bank and sat down and picked up her wine glass as though we'd simply been for a walk, and after a moment I sat beside her and she passed me the bottle and I poured what was left and we sat in the April sun and said nothing for a while, which was its own kind of conversation.

"Every time," she said quietly. She was watching the swans. "As if it's the first time."

"Yes," I said.

She leaned slightly against my shoulder. Not much. Just the weight of it, briefly there.

---

We walked to the café afterward, her shoes back on, my jacket over my arm. She'd mentioned scones before we'd got through half the cheese, which I took as a sign of confidence in how the afternoon would go.

There was a short queue. The woman in front had a pushchair and was trying to fold it one-handed and Beth held the door without being asked, because she was that kind of person.

I stood beside her in the queue with my hands in my jacket pockets.

My fingers found the warm cotton. She glanced at me sideways. I looked at the menu board.

"Fruit scone," she said. "I think."

"Savoury for me," I said.

"Very you," she said.

She ordered. I paid, which she pretended to object to and didn't. We took the corner table by the window.

I thought about her hands on the bark. The dog walker looking at her phone. The coral nails against the April grass. The weight of her shoulder against mine on the bank. I thought about Amanda at home doing nothing wrong, having done nothing wrong, as she never did.

"Are you sure you are okay?" Beth said.

Same question as the morning. Same way of asking it.

"Yes," I said. "I think so."

She looked at me steadily. Then she broke off a piece of scone and slid half across the table toward me, the same easy gesture she'd made with the lemon drizzle that first time, months ago, in the pale winter light of a different season.

I took it.

Outside the window the lake was still and the swans were there, far out, two pale shapes moving in their slow and particular orbit. Always within that certain distance. Always aware.

We sat and drank our coffee and looked at the water and said nothing, which was fine, which was more than fine, which was the whole point of it. The last ordinary day of April, the swans doing what they always did, the season settled around us, and we were here.

That was simply true and not worth examining further.

---

*End of Chapter Four*