the green of the meadows far greener than anything you would expect to find without a heavy filter on it; fat bees buzz merrily among the meadowsweet and long grass, and the evenings last forever.
IN LONDON, YAZZIE had persuaded Cormac to come out with her to a new restaurant and he had said yes, because he didn’t know what else to do and Kim-Ange was mysteriously unavailable.
Kim-Ange was going for a walk with Piotr, who was both excited and slightly concerned about it.
And Lissa Westcott was going to the fair. She was in a blue dress that, for once, she was wearing without a coat or a cardigan. It was a plain dress, but it suited her, and she had left off the makeup apart from a little pink lipstick, and her hair was bouncing down her back, and she felt . . . not fine exactly. But, as Kim-Ange gave her the thumbs-up from the laptop in the corner of the room, she reminded herself again and again, It’s only Jake, it’s only Jake, then she couldn’t feel worse.
They were all of them out, in the warm of a British evening as beautiful as she makes them; hundreds of miles apart, but each with the same combination of butterflies and cheerfulness and a slight aura of dread and considering just canceling the entire thing and never mentioning it again and running away to the sea to be a sailor, which characterizes the process of dating. But they were all youngish, and it was a beautiful evening, and there was potential magic in the air, so you couldn’t be too worried for them, not really. Tonight, even for Lissa, the bad things felt a little further away, warded off by the magical sweetness of the air, a late spring’s caress, a new pair of boots; by expectation, possibilities, aftershave, and checking wristwatches and best earrings and chewing gum.
Chapter 51
The fair was easy to smell, coming in on the old farm track. The normal scents of pine and bracken in the air—with an undertone of cow that at first Lissa had been averse to but now rather liked—had been overtaken by smells that were familiar and strange all at once: the fairground mix of candy floss, popcorn, diesel, and dirty old engines.
Lissa remembered her mother hurrying her past it, refusing to let her go, completely uninterested in the entire affair. She recalled not wanting to catch the eye of the rougher girls in case they teased her later (which they did anyway, calling her stuck up, which was hard to disagree with because her mother was so very insistent that that’s exactly what she was).
And then another time, when she was a little older, she did exactly what her mother was so scared she would: pretended she was going around to Majabeen’s house to study, whereupon the two of them slipped out to “the library” and rushed down to the common, pooling their money, which was just enough to share candy floss and have one ride. The scrawny boy on the waltzers had a tooth missing, but to them he just looked even more exotic, like a pirate. He came and hung off the back of their car as they screamed their heads off. The evening was dark and the music was incredibly loud, and as she spun around and around, her neck hurting from the pressure, she couldn’t remember feeling more alive, more naughty.
Of course one of the girls from school saw them, and even though she was friendly enough, word got around and someone’s mum ran into her mum at Sainsbury’s and the worst came to the worst and she was grounded for a solid month.
It had been so worth it.
JAKE WAS STANDING there, wearing an open-necked blue shirt that suited his hair. He’d had it trimmed, Lissa noticed, for the occasion. It looked ridiculously sharp and contoured and gelled and she wasn’t crazy about it (fearing retributive ear cutting, Jake had gone into the nearest town, forty miles away, and gotten it done by somebody who hadn’t known him his entire life).
He grinned at her nervously. She looked lovely, her curls bouncing behind her and the smile he never normally saw in the daytime.
They awkwardly attempted a social kiss, which went a little wrong, and Jake would normally have taken her hand but, suddenly shy, he didn’t. Instead, he gallantly offered her his arm, and she took it rather tentatively.
“Okay,” he said. “So what do you want to