Page 73 of Carry Me Home

‘You okay back there?’ His eyes find mine in the rearview mirror. ‘You’re quiet.’

‘Long day. The café.’

‘I know that voice. That’s the deflection voice.’

‘I don’t have a deflection voice.’

‘You have several. I’ve catalogued them.’ His eyes are warm in the mirror, teasing, and I look away first. I never look away first. ‘There’s the “I’m fine” voice, the “I’m tired” voice, and the “stop asking me questions, Tom” voice. You’re currently on number two.’

‘Maybe I’m actually tired.’

‘Maybe. But you weren’t tired five minutes ago when you were lecturing the dog about treat rationing.’

Cara laughs. ‘He does this to me too. The noticing thing. It’s unbearable.’

‘It’s invasive,’ I say, and I mean it lightly but it comes out with an edge I didn’t intend, and Tom’s eyes flick to the mirror again and then back to the road.

The car goes quiet. Cara fills it – easily, gracefully, the way she fills every silence. She talks about the film, about Trevor Howard, about how she’d once cried at a black-and-white film on a plane and the man next to her had offered her a handkerchief.

‘An actual handkerchief,’ she says. ‘Cloth. Monogrammed. Like a character from the film had climbed out of the screen and sat in 17B.’

I laugh because the story is funny and Cara is charming and I hate – I hate – that I can’t find a single thing wrong with her, that she is warm and clever and interesting and that Tom’s neck has relaxed since she started talking, the tension draining out of him because Cara makes things easy and I have apparently been making them hard.

The back seat of Tom’s car has never felt this far from the front.

Pencross puts the cinema in a field at the cliff edge – the kind of perfect English setting that looks accidental but isn’t: fairy lights strung between poles, a tea stand doing steady business, families on picnic blankets and couples sharing wine and a group of teenagers who’ll talk through the whole thing and get shushed by someone’s nan.

The screen is white and enormous against the darkening sky. There’s a shift of air – a collective settling, the hush before the lights go down. I used to love this feeling. The magic of it. Tonight it feels like standing outside a party I used to be invited to.

Tom carries the blankets. Cara carries a picnic basket she apparently packed while I was closing the café. I carry my cardigan and my mood and try not to examine either.

‘Here?’ Tom stops at a good spot. Not too close, not too far.

‘Perfect.’

He spreads one blanket. Then another. Side by side. Two blankets.

Not one. Not the one big blanket we’ve shared every summer for eleven years, shoulders touching, his warmth along my left side, close enough to whisper commentary and pass the popcorn and exist in the same small space.

Two blankets. A gap between them.

‘I thought you might want your own space,’ Tom says, catching whatever’s on my face. ‘You know, to stretch out.’

‘Very considerate.’

‘I try.’

Cara settles onto the first blanket, kicking off her sandals. Tom sits beside her – not touching, a few inches between them, but close. Together. A unit.

I sit on my blanket. The one beside them. The one with the gap.

I pull my cardigan around my shoulders and I look at the space where Tom usually sits – the specific patch of blanket where his arm would be, warm and solid, close enough that I could lean into him if I wanted and never once felt the need to explain why – and the space is empty.

The sun drops. The screen flickers to life. The opening credits roll.

I try to watch Brief Encounter. I’ve seen it four times. I know every scene, every line, every devastating shot of Celia Johnson’s face trying not to fall apart.

I don’t see any of it.