The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey Page B

down. “I’d be happy to give you a go.”
    “Cameron,” said Annabel. She gave my name all three syllables, and reached up a hot, sticky hand.
     
    Years later Fiona told me that that was the moment when she began to fall in love with me, when she saw me walking off hand in hand with Annabel toward the swings. What did the two of us talk about on that first meeting? Her hamster, or school, or how her mother was teaching her chess, I have no recollection. I do recall Annabel’s giddy delight as I pushed her higher and higher. A woman pushing a much smaller child on the next swing said, “Your daughter’s very fearless.”
    “Just a friend,” I said.
    Annabel and I played until even she had had enough. As we started back to the picnic, she looked up at me from beneath her dark eyelashes and asked if I would carry her. Unthinkingly I hoisted her up. She wrapped her legs around me with practiced ease, and rested her flushed cheek on my shoulder; I felt she had delivered her entire self into my keeping. I would have carried her, happily, for hours, days. I was twenty-seven years old and, until that moment, I had no idea what my heart was capable of.
    Since I left home I had had a number of girlfriends, several at university, more afterward. I had slept with them, taken holidays in Venice and the Dordogne, I had even lived with one for six months, but I had never been sorry when the relationship ended, had always been puzzled by the arguments, the vehemence. Things had worked for a while, now they didn’t. What was the problem? Which was, of course, the problem. You’re like a machine, one girl said. Another called me a cold fish.
    The cucumber sandwiches were gone by the time Annabel and I reached the picnic, but plenty of cakes and scones remained. The hosts, Annabel’s parents, offered me food as if I had returned from a long journey. They were old friends of Fiona’s. She had grown up with Sheila in Lancashire and been on holiday several times with her and Giles. They were one of those couples I met frequently at that time where the woman did something virtuous and poorly paid—in Sheila’s case
     
    social work—and the man did something businesslike and lucrative— in Giles’s case, advertising. They had two other children besides Annabel, both younger.
    Reunited with her parents, Annabel ignored me. She ate two slices of the lopsided chocolate cake Fiona had brought and played with the son of another couple, a quiet boy with a purple birthmark on his left ear. At one point, chasing him round the edge of the rug, she knocked over my tea. It spilled harmlessly onto the grass but Sheila grabbed her arm. “Calm down, Annabel. You spilled Cameron’s tea. Say you’re sorry.”
    “That’s okay,” I said. “I was finished.”
    “Sorry,” said Annabel, not even looking at me.
    Giles took a photograph of the group and I followed suit. As a boy, I’d had an old Brownie that I seldom used: the developing was so expensive and the results frequently disappointing. Soon after I moved to London, though, I had bought a 35-millimeter camera that I was gradually learning to use. Now I photographed our picnic from different angles before turning to take a picture of the children, who were searching the grass for four-leaf clovers. I took half a dozen. In the last shot Annabel is looking up at me, smiling; every eyelash is distinct. Later I gave a framed copy of that photograph to Sheila and Giles.
    I put the camera away. Giles produced a bottle of gin, someone else had brought tonic, and we segued into cocktail hour. I drank two strong ones and listened idly to a conversation about Crete: the beaches, the labyrinth. Fiona sat beside me, contributing anecdotes from her visit there the previous spring. Then one of the children fell asleep and people stood up and began to reclaim their possessions. Without discussion, Fiona caught the bus home with me and we slept together. I liked her body, her small breasts, her