Field Notes on Love(2)

The man—an eccentric billionaire who made his fortune through a chain of upscale coffee shops—had gotten his start at the University of Surrey, and was elated at the thought of the publicity that would one day be generated by having the sextuplets there. When he died a few years ago, he left the scholarship in the hands of the university council, and they’ve been equally enthusiastic, making all sorts of plans for their arrival.

It’s only Hugo who isn’t thrilled. He knows he’s a complete monster for being anything less than grateful. It’s just that he hates the thought of accepting something so big simply because of the unlikely circumstances of his birth. Especially when his whole life has been about that.

    “Look, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” Margaret is saying. “About us. About why we’re—”

“Not an us anymore?”

She flinches. “I know I’ve been hard on you, but I don’t want you to think this is happening just because you’ve been moping all summer. Or because of the distance. It’s more that—well, I suppose it feels like it’s time, doesn’t it?”

Hugo scrubs at his eyes, still trying to absorb all this, and when he looks up again, Margaret’s face has softened. She moves over to sit beside him on the bed, and he automatically leans into her, their shoulders pressed together. They’re both quiet for a moment, and he tries to focus his thoughts, which are zipping around in his head. Somewhere inside him, buried so deep he’s never thought to examine it, is the knowledge that she’s right about them, and his heart sinks because he’s somehow the last to know everything, even his own feelings.

“What about the trip?” he asks, and she looks almost relieved, as though she’s been given permission to move on to the business end of things. Three years, Hugo thinks. Three whole years, and here they are, working out their future like a long-married couple debating the fine points of a divorce. Margaret picks at a loose thread on her jumper, which is gray with little foxes on it. Hugo realizes it’s the same one she wore on their third date, when they’d gone to the cinema and kissed for the first time during a fight scene.

It’s only now occurring to him that maybe that was a sign.

“I think you should still go,” she says, and he looks up in surprise. The whole thing had been her idea. Margaret thought a train trip would be a romantic way to see America, where she’d be spending the next four years. She was the one who found the promotion online and booked the tickets, surprising Hugo for his birthday a few months back. They were meant to go from New York to California, with a few stops in between. And then Hugo would drop her off at Stanford before returning to Surrey, the place where he’d lived his whole life and was apparently never leaving.

    “Why me?” he asks, staring at her. “Why not you?”

“Well, you’re the one staying behind. So I figured it might be nice for you to…” She pauses when she notices his expression, and her pale skin flushes a deep pink. “Sorry. I’m mucking this up, aren’t I?”

“No,” he says, thinking of the plans they’d been making all summer, the photos of the train, sleek and silver, moving west across America. “It’s just—how could I go without you?”

“You’re a bit hopeless sometimes, it’s true,” she says with a smile, “but I think you could probably manage to get there in one piece.”

She reaches for her bag, which is slumped on the floor near his desk, and hands him a blue folder with the name of a travel company embossed across the front. When he takes it, their fingers brush, and suddenly his head is swimming with doubts. But then she leans forward to kiss him on the cheek before standing up, and something about the gesture—the sheer friendliness of it—reminds him of why this is happening and steadies him again.

“I hope you’ll still come see me,” she says. “When you get to California.”

“Sure,” he answers without really thinking about it, and the trip starts to rearrange itself in his head: instead of sitting beside Margaret, the two of them talking softly as the train rattles through the night, it’s only him now, inching his way across a strange country alone.

    Alone, he thinks, closing his eyes.

Hugo can scarcely imagine what that feels like. He shares a bedroom with Alfie and a bathroom with George and Oscar too. At the kitchen table, he’s wedged between Poppy and Isla, and when they watch TV, he’s somehow always the last to dive for a sofa, which means he usually ends up on the floor with a cushion. On rare holidays, they all pile into a cottage in Devon that belongs to a friend of Mum’s, and the farthest he’s ever been from home—the only place he’s really been at all—was Paris for a school trip, which meant all his brothers and sisters were there, too, making the weekend brighter and funnier but also more crowded, the six of them laughing and tripping along the cobblestone streets, a built-in team, a six-piece band, an entire unit of their own.

Alone, he thinks again, and his chest feels light.

He stands up to fold Margaret into a hug, his throat thick. For a long time, they hold each other, neither quite ready to let go. Then, finally, he kisses her check and says, “I love you.” She leans back to look at him and he cracks a grin. “In a way.”

“Too soon,” she says, but she’s laughing too.