Page 39 of Oleander

I didn’t like this. Any of it. Didn’t Gideon think to call the cottage when he didn’t hear back from Luke? I felt angry and sick and I wanted to scream at him that Caspien needed someone who cared about him properly.

“What about his tutor? Wasn’t he here today?”

Gideon gently closed the door to Caspien’s room. “Oh, well. He quit. Quite suddenly actually – some personal issue back home, a bereavement, I think – so we are in-between. I am searching for a replacement now to get us to the end of the school year. Next year will be another issue. Perhaps even Kingsland would be suitable.”

My mouth fell open. Caspien at Kingsland. Atmyschool. The thought was terrifying. I’d see him every day. We’d likely travel to and from school together. We’d definitely have subjects together. It would be either the best or the worst thing to happen since we drove up to Deveraux House at the start of summer.

“Thank you for looking after him, Jude. I’m eternally grateful.”

“I didn’t do anything...” I made a sandwich and poured some juice. Neither of which he’d touched.

“No, I know that’s not true. It would have meant a lot to have you here.” Gideon gave me a look. “You’re important to him, Jude. I hope you know that.”

I could only stare back at him. Important to Caspien? I doubted that very much. But tonighthadfelt different. Very different. My mind was stuck on the way he’d clung to me.Needy and soft, like Iwasimportant. How he’d felt in my arms. How vulnerable he’d sounded when he’d asked if I really came to see him because I wanted to. I liked that feeling a lot.

Maybe since I’d never felt that important to anyone, not since my parents died, not really. And for Caspien to be the one to make me feel like that was as inconceivable as it was shocking.

Ten

Caspien’s sixteenth birthday was on Sunday. It was a quiet lunch which Beth and Luke (and I, honestly) were surprised to have been invited to. Gideon had extended the invitation on Thursday, so I’d passed it on.Just a small thing with those closest to him, Gideon had said. I assumed then that he meant closest geographically.

He was in the library when I turned up for study night the Thursday after his ‘episode’.

His nose was deep in a book with a French title and a painting of a young boy on the cover. He didn’t look up as I sat down across from him at the table and pulled out my laptop and textbook. All trace of sickness or whatever had been on him on Tuesday evening was gone. His hair was bright and shiny, and his skin a smooth pink gold.

“Are you okay?” I asked when the silence got too much to bear.

Over his book, his eyes found mine. A frown creased the space between his brows.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” His words were sharp and hard, all trace of the softness he’d had the last time I saw him gone.

I’d wanted to call yesterday to check on him, but something had held me back. And this, I realised, was that something.

I put my bag on the floor and opened my laptop.

“No reason...”

And that had been it.

The three of us walked up from the cottage to the main house on the afternoon of the 30th November. I’d gone into town the day before to get him a gift, and it was only as I walked up and thought about how he might receive it that I realised I’d left it on my dresser.

“I forgot his gift,” I said.

Luke shook his head and laughed while Beth tutted before reaching into her bag to give me her set of keys.

“Don’t dawdle,” she warned.

“With the way you walk? I’ll still beat you there,” I threw over my shoulder as I jogged backwards toward the cottage.

My gift was where I left it, and I scooped it up and hurried back downstairs.

Those closest people to Caspien were apparently Gideon, me, Luke, Beth, Tarbert and Elspeth and some child of Gideon’s cousin who had come to stay for the weekend. Finlay, his name was. A scrawny boy with glasses, a brace, and a shock of reddish-brown hair.

In all the months I’d known them, I’d never heard Finlay’s name mentioned once by either Gideon or Caspien. Yet there he was, sprawled on the rug in the main living room, shoving a cupcake into his mouth like he belonged there.

Gideon had already given Caspien a pile of designer clothing, a new iPad, a silver bracelet engraved with his initials, and a new leather saddle for Falstaff. Luke and Beth had given him a voucher for an online bookstore, and now it was my turn to hand him my gift.

I felt stupid and nervous. Why had I insisted on getting him an individual gift? Luke and Beth’s voucher would have been more than enough from all of us. I never got Alfie or Josh gifts. And Caspien and I weren’t even proper friends. We were somethingelse. It was weird. I regretted it immeasurably the moment he turned expectant blue eyes on me.