Interzone 251 Read Online Free Page B

a secret that just you and I shared.”
    Once again I’m struck by how badly this doppelgänger of mine behaved. Connor and Elsa are old and trusted friends, the closest thing I have any longer to family. I suppose that makes Lindsay family, too. And she was old enough to be making her own decisions about what she did. Even so, I’ve betrayed their trust abominably, adulterously banging their darling only daughter in the garden shed. Or my doppelgänger did. I’m finding this very confusing to think about.
    “Late at night,” she says, “after the folks had gone to bed I tiptoed out to you in my white nightie and we made love for the one last time. If anyone had looked out of a back window and seen me in the garden, they’d have thought they were seeing a ghost.”
    The waiter sidles up to us. Neither of us has finished our meal. We indicate to him to take the plates away. I ask for a coffee, Lindsay for a tea. “Don’t bother bringing milk,” she says. “I like it the way nature intended.”
    He goes away.
    I’m shaking my head. I know there are tears in my eyes, tears I don’t want her to see. There’s a part of me, and it isn’t the eight-year-old boy any longer, that desperately, desperately wishes I could remember what Lindsay so clearly remembers. If it weren’t for my nutbrown maid in Bristol, the person who is everyone to me, I could imagine myself falling deeply for Lindsay and even believing it was love. Her beauty and her air of reserve are tugging at me. I’ve never once thought of two-timing Dverna – it’s an impossibility, like water running uphill – and I’m not thinking about it seriously even now, but the fact that I’m thinking about it
at all
says something about the effect Lindsay is having on me.
    “And you say it wasn’t you?” Her voice is very quiet now, so low I can barely pick it up amid the waves of other people’s conversation.
    “It wasn’t. It can’t have been. I was at home nursing my head and feeling sorry for myself. A summer flu. Dverna remembers it well.”
    “Dverna,” says Lindsay. “Who’s Dverna?”

    ***

    It’s later in the day. We’re out in the middle of the Serpentine on one of those rowing boats you can hire by the hour. I’m rowing. Lindsay is sitting in the stern looking as if she should be wearing a straw boater and wielding a parasol. I’m not going to catch the six-oh-three.
    She believes me now. At first she was incredulous that I could be married without her knowing anything about it, even more so when I told her she was at the wedding. It was only when I produced the little digital picture frame I carry with me and showed her the picture Dverna and I persuaded an old Frenchman to take of us the weekend we went to Cologne that she began to be persuaded. That was just before I paid the bill for our lunches. After we left the restaurant we ambled around the park, both rather selfconsciously not looking at the pairs of young lovers sprawling on the grass. Then, on an impulse, we hired this boat. It gives us a space that’s separated from the rest of the world.
    “I had this dream, Nick,” she’s saying, trailing her fingers in the water. “This very presumptuous dream. I wasn’t going to put any pressure on you, but I thought that maybe, just maybe, you’d say some of the things were true that you told me in Edinburgh, and you’d suggest we raise the bairn together. I’ve always thought you and I would end up together. Oh, I’m not saying I’ve been entirely chaste while I was waiting for our hour to come, but there haven’t been that many I’ve bedded, either. I don’t make a habit of throwing myself into men’s arms, the way I did with you. I seduced you – not that you needed much seducing – because I believed this was the way the script was written, and I was just following it. And now I find you already have your own lovely lady, that you’re following your own script. A different script. One that doesn’t have a