Page 44 of All Summer Long

‘You remember my dad’s camera?’

Robinson nodded. He remembered just fine, the way that she’d huffed and puffed that box out of the cellar and refused his offers of help even though it was obvious she could use it.

‘I put that camera away when he died, and it’s taken me eight whole years to find the guts to open the box again. I wanted to follow in his footsteps, to be a photographer, to make him proud, and then he died and I shut a huge part of myself away in that box with his camera, you know?’ Alice was sitting up now, the sheet tucked under her arms. ‘I let his death change me, and define me, even though I knew it would have killed him all over again if he knew.’ Alice swept her hair over one shoulder and held one of his hands in both of her own.

‘These last few weeks, since I’ve been taking pictures again … they’re better, Robinson.I’mbetter. I don’t think I’d realised how much I’d lost, and I regret all of that wasted time, all of those photographs I didn’t take.’

Thinking on it, he’d barely seen her without her camera slung around her neck when she was out working in the woods lately, and it seemed such a natural extension of her that he hadn’t paid attention.

‘What I’m trying to say is that stopping doing something you love as a knee-jerk reaction to being hurt doesn’t work, Robinson. It just hurts you more in the long run.’

Outside in the woods a solitary owl hooted, and inside the tree house Alice fell silent and looked at him with those big, honest eyes of hers. She was killing him. Robinson’s emotions cycled through the instinctive urge to come out fighting from the corner she’d backed him into and the urge to hug her close for sharing something so personal because it reflected his own feelings so closely. He landed up on the overriding emotion that sat in the driving seat of his life most of the time these days. Fear. Being here in England with Alice quietened the roar, but it was always there, and right now it was like she’d kicked the angry lion in his head. He was frightened of how hard and fast his life had spiralled out of control, and she was right. His knee-jerk reaction had been to turn his back on everything that he loved, shut down, press reset, be someone else because being Robinson Duff got too hard.

He pulled himself up in bed and sat against the bedstead, dragging the pillows behind him. Eight years was a hell of a long time not to do something that came as naturally as breathing.

‘Pass me my guitar?’

Alice slid out of bed, hyper aware that she was naked but too scared to grab anything to cover herself in case she slowed things down and broke the spell. His guitar was a solid weight in her hands, black patent wood with a dark, heavy leather strap with his name emblazoned down its length in white swirly script. She’d seen it before in the pictures on the net at Niamh’s cottage, back when Robinson first arrived in Borne, and she handled it with the reverence it deserved; there were people out there who would maim and kill for the chance to be near it or the man who owned it.

Holding it in both hands, she crossed back to the bed and held it out to him.

‘Hold it right there and hand me your camera, Goldilocks. That’s one image I never want to forget.’

Alice shook her head. ‘Not a chance.’

‘Pity,’ he murmured, shooting her a small, intimate wink as he took the guitar from her hands. Alice slid back into bed, sitting cross-legged facing him, the quilt pulled safely up under her armpits again. Robinson leaned forward and slung the strap over his shoulder then settled back against the pillows, illuminated by a moonbeam with the guitar against his bare, tanned chest.

‘You look so sexy, cowboy.’ She said it because he did, incredibly so, but also because she wanted to make this as easy as she could on him. He might look the epitome of relaxed but she knew him well enough to know different. He looked down at the instrument, moving his hands slowly over it in a way that reminded her of how he touched her; intimate, focused, connected.

And then he lifted his eyes to hers, vulnerable and raw, and she had to force her hands to stay in her lap because every instinct in her wanted to take the guitar from him, to say sorry, to pull him back under the covers and make him forget. Had she done the wrong thing by forcing his hand? Should she have waited? Would she have appreciated someone doing the exact same thing for her, or would she have resented the person who made her do something she didn’t feel ready to do? And, oh God, was she hastening his departure from her life? What was she anyway, some kind of evangelical Oprah-style life coach, it worked for me and it’ll work for you too? She went to reach out and offer to put the guitar back down, and at that precise same moment Robinson’s fingers moved over the strings and he started to play the most hauntingly beautiful melody she’d ever heard in her whole entire life.

She wanted to close her eyes but found she couldn’t look away from him. His dipped head hid his expression from her, his gaze lowered to his guitar, and out of nowhere she was almost jealous of the communion. He had her rapt, caught up in the music with him, in awe of how the small movements of his fingers over the strings could create something so effortlessly beautiful. His head came up at last, his eyes closed as he played, and it was difficult to discern if his mouth was set in pain or pleasure. She didn’t know what he was playing, but even without words it was a love song. Who was he playing for? Where had he gone in his head? His lips parted on a sigh as he played, fragile music to fall in love to. It said words he would never say to her, and his cheeks were damp with tears, yet still he played on, lost. Alice could only watch him, full of wonder, and behind her ribs invisible needles stitched the holes in her heart and made it whole so she could use it again.

When the song came to an end, he opened his eyes, his dark lashes spiked, and slowly, slowly, he came back.

‘That was incredible,’ she said, her voice hoarse and barely there in the quiet room.

Robinson lowered his head and lifted the strap over his head then turned away from her and placed the guitar carefully against the wall beside the bed. Was he angry? Was he distressed? Was he hurt? Please, don’t let me have hurt him more than he was already hurting, she thought, utterly still as she watched his back.

And then he turned around and moved back beneath the covers. ‘Come here,’ he said, low and gravel-rich, and Alice could only imagine how good he would sound when he sang as well as played. She could see why women all over the world were halfway in love with Robinson Duff. Right at that moment she was too, and she melted against him, his skin on hers.

‘It’s afterwards,’ he said, filling his hands with her hair, and she rolled over on top him and kissed his still-damp eyelids.

‘I know,’ she said, and then neither of them said anything else for a while. Afterwards, truly afterwards, as she closed her eyes and they tumbled towards sleep, she heard him whisper thank you.

The summer rolled on endlessly, another week of warm days banging in nails and making big plans, until the weekend rolled in redolent and welcoming, beckoning for them to come and laze around on deckchairs and drink Pimm’s.

‘Robinson.’ Alice shook him gently by the shoulder to wake him. ‘Robinson, wake up.’

He opened one eye and looked at her blearily, then opened them both and squinted at his watch.

‘Alice, it’s barely seven in the morning and it’s Sunday.’ His eyes moved down over her white sun top and denim cut-offs and then back up again to her face. ‘I vote you get undressed again and come back to bed.’

Shaking her head, Alice flung open the Airstream door to let the sunshine in. ‘No can do.’ She picked up a mug of coffee and held it out to him. Robinson scrubbed his hands over his hair and sat up, taking the mug from her, still half asleep.

‘No?’ he said.

Alice perched on the end of the bed, her own coffee cradled in her hands.

---