“Not me, mate.” I’d gone too far. It was out of character for me to bait him, but I had to get him off Polly and Liv. “I want to talk about something else,” I said. “The only things you’re willing to be serious about are your brother and your work, so let’s talk about them.” I pumped these words out in a rapid staccato.

“I don’t want to be serious right now,” he pouted. Then, “Fine, we’ll talk about work.”

“How’s your thesis?” I asked. This was a more normal conversation.

“It’s all right,” he said. “My thesis is all right. I’ll be ready to submit soon.”

“It’s about time!” I said, joking. I could finish this year too, but I’d probably drag it out. People don’t think I’ve got laziness in me, but that’s because thoroughness and laziness can look so much alike.

Thoroughness can be a cover for numerous less desirable things.

I shouldn’t have gone on to analyse the handwriting on Gretchen’s photos. But I’d gone on to “see the job through,” as my father had said to me a fair few times in my life, despite not being home terribly much. It was my personal sense of tidiness and completion that drove me to sort out the handwritings after Liv had left; compassion and responsibility, which is what I thought it was, would have involved observing Gretchen more carefully.

I take words at face value. Gretchen had said she wanted to know everything. I don’t do well overriding what people say about themselves. I don’t put body language and tone of voice over words themselves. I should, I know that now.

“You’re a real shit, you know that?” Peter said, still hurt that I’d brought up his brother like that. But he wasn’t going anywhere. He hadn’t shifted his weight, or leaned forward as if to stand.

I decided to respond to that, instead of the words.

“It’s not just Polly or Liv. It’s…”

He prompted, “What?”

“Kepler.”

“Johannes Kepler?”

I nodded and he laughed at me.

“The cosmologist? From how many hundreds of years ago?”

Four hundred years ago. Kepler had defended the Copernican theory of a sun-centred universe. Circular orbits didn’t work out; they couldn’t explain the path Mars followed in the sky, seeming to backtrack on itself. Another kind of orbit might. He set out to prove that the orbits of the five known planets followed the shapes of Euclid ’s nested solids. This, to him, would have been a divine signature, proof that a sun-centred universe wasn’t godless or random.

What he found instead were ellipses.

Elliptical orbits are one of the greatest, most perfect discoveries in scientific history. They explained Mars’s apparent retrograde motion, the last scientific obstacle to a sun-centred system, and did so without any convoluted mechanics. Yet he despised them. They were too… I think “natural” might be the word. He’d been looking for a perfect crystal and had found a beating heart instead.

“You know,” I rambled. “Retrograde. Ellipses. The truth wasn’t exactly as he’d pictured it. So he hated it.”

I’d found truth for Gretchen. She didn’t want it.

“Are you drunk?”

“No.”

“You’re not all here.”

“I had an uncle who drowned,” I said. This had little to do with the flow or point of the conversation. But I said it.

It was the intensity of Gretchen’s faulty memories, I think, that triggered the thought. It was the way my mother always told me how much I used to look like my uncle; but, from the pictures I’d seen of him, I don’t think I ever did.

“I never knew that,” said Peter.

“It was before I was born.”

He picked up the paper coffee cup and rolled it between his hands. “Are you going to be all right? I’m supposed to meet someone. But if you want to talk about Polly or Liv, or your uncle, or Kepler…”

“No. No, thanks. Really.”

“Just a bit of advice, though, all right? Whatever you’re not talking about-it’s not as bad as you’re making it.”

He would know, wouldn’t he. He’s always got a new girlfriend.

“Is it the woman from Fitzbillies?” I asked, flicking my fingers against the cup.

“I’ll phone her this weekend. Tonight I’m meeting an old friend. We were a pair back in the old days.”

Old days? Undergrad, maybe? “I’m really sorry that I mentioned your brother.”

“I know. It’s done.”

“No, I’m really, truly sorry…” Regret and sentimentality inflated within me. “That’s not how to treat a friend.” I meant that in so many ways. I’d been poison to so many people in the space of two days.

“Nick. You’re drunk. You should go home.”

“That’s what Richard said.” Hours ago. Maybe by now the Chander girls would be in their room, doing homework or reading in bed. I wasn’t up to facing their usual enthusiasm.

I got up.

Peter’s phone rang. While he chatted and organised his laptop bag, I looked hard at that rowboat scribble on the whiteboard. The colours were vivid-red, green, and sunbright yellow.

I remembered Wesley, a blind boy Peter and I had both known from a summer cricket camp. He’d been blind in the same way as Gretchen: able to see in his earliest years and then losing it. He couldn’t play real games with us-it would have been too dangerous for him. But he could train. He was a decent bowler, actually. He couldn’t tell what was going on in the field, but he could see people as “blobs.” As for throwing the ball, he was excellent.

We’d been roommates. He confided to me back then that his memory of colours was fading. The red he had that summer was less bright than the red he’d had five years before. I didn’t see how he could know it was less bright, since he would have to mentally compare it with the bright colour to notice. He repeated that he didn’t have the bright colour anymore-he couldn’t call it up in his mind-but he knew its absence. He knew that the red he used then wasn’t fiery or sharp or any other kind of feeling word that one might use to capture the saturation of a colour. He knew it like someone knows they don’t remember when they were one year old, or where they left their keys. So his memories were literally fading like an old photograph. Not a metaphor like most people mean-the details going away-but the colour actually draining. And these memories were his visual vocabulary, so his visual present and future and even his imagination were drained as well. I presume that Gretchen had had a similar experience. It put her attachment to her youth, and to the brightness of her early life, in perspective.

“Shall I go first, as a lookout?” Peter joked. I’d almost let myself forget that Polly’s mother was looking for me.

I laughed. Maybe I should have said yes.

I’d forgotten what the Georgian buildings on St. Andrews Street look like. They’d been covered for months, three cranes sticking out like antennae, while the new shopping mall was being constructed behind their facades.

I could have crossed at Emmanuel, but in my cowardice I craved the shelter of the scaffolding. I turned left down the pavement alongside the construction site and kept under it until I had to cross the street. More construction obscured me there, between Christ’s College and the bus station. I’d been under cover since coming out of Downing Street. The open green of Christ’s Pieces stretched in front of me. I hesitated to step out from the covered alley.

“Don’t be an idiot,” I said out loud. I made myself step onto the path.

Approaching footsteps beat behind me, under the alley’s temporary roof. I quickened my pace to keep ahead of them. Once into the park, I looked over my shoulder, but couldn’t make out more than a silhouette.

It was a woman. I don’t think she was a student; at least, she didn’t come across as studenty. Maybe it was the hair. The hair seemed like it belonged to someone’s mother. Polly’s mother.

I walked faster.

She was as quick as me, quicker. The distance between us shortened, despite my longer legs.