One evening back in August I left work early and took a train to the country. It was a Friday, warm with white clouds bearing down, and the storms that had so plagued the preceding weeks seemed finally over. After arriving at a small, busy station, I found a taxi without trouble – Annie had promised there wouldn’t be trouble. Earlier that month she’d invited me to come for dinner, the last weekend of the summer, for a reunion of sorts at her and Edward’s bungalow. She had spoken, drolly, about the meadows and the fields in their part of the country, and the drollness with which she’d spoken didn’t match the sight of the late-flourishing land I saw from the taxi window. The sight from the window didn’t match anything. The canopies of the trees were dark after the rains and the fields were heavy before the harvest, and the world seemed changed, altogether rampant.

It had been a decade since we’d been at university together. I had not been surprised by Annie’s insistence that we all come together, it had not surprised me that F’s return would be a reason to do this, but I hadn’t heard from any of them, not even F, since the winter. I’d been spending my evenings in the pool near my office, entering the changing rooms at nine each night, stripping alone and finding few other bodies in the water. I’d started swimming after F had moved to Italy, and I suppose it was for that reason I’d emailed him once to tell him how my biceps and my pecs were growing firm, how my body was feeling, in some ways, more certain. But he hadn’t replied, and recently I’d become ashamed and unsure of why I’d told him those things. Except I’d had the desire for someone to know. And there was a sense of joy, waiting just out of reach, as usual.

Annie opened the front door of the bungalow in a bright yellow apron and laughed to see me standing there. I was exactly on time, she said. There was a shadow at the end of the hall that turned out to be Edward with his arms raised, ready for an embrace that he’d forgotten by the time I reached him. They took me to the back of the house and through the dining room to the patio, where three plastic chairs were arranged facing westward. They seemed excited, agitated by the cooking maybe. Lena was there already, and she smiled when she saw me, and there was some fuss over getting me a glass and then a bottle of white wine was produced before Annie and Edward went back to the kitchen.

Lena was sitting on one of the plastic chairs facing towards the unkempt garden and the meadow beyond. I wasn’t sure what time F was supposed to arrive, but if she was concerned about seeing him, I gathered she wasn’t going to admit it. She was leaning forwards in her chair, looking at me with her chin down. I was tanned, she remarked, and when I told her I’d spent the summer in London she started talking about a recent trip to Greece. A breeze moved through the canopies of a group of ash trees that were about twenty yards from where we sat, at the edge of the meadow that bordered the bungalow’s garden. There was a thin stream, we’d been told, beneath them. There were no other houses on the horizon. Lena’s face seemed strained in the diminishing light. Possibly it was strained from the story she was telling about sea urchins, how she’d gone swimming in the sea with hundreds of their sharp bodies, but I couldn’t tell how she was actually feeling, what she might admit to herself.

Two years before, she’d asked to meet me after work by the Thames. At that point, I hadn’t seen her since before her and F’s break-up, which had been a month earlier, and I hadn’t heard anything either, yet, from him in Italy. On the phone, I’d assumed she was drunk from the way she whispered and from the fact that she was calling. She never called me. I went to meet her in a pub with wood panelling where she was waiting, her fair hair tucked into a black scarf looped about her neck, drinking a glass of red wine as if she’d been there for ages. I walked in wearing my suit, holding my silly briefcase. A few eyes turned to me, and I suppose it might’ve looked like a liaison of some kind. But she’d never really warmed to me.

I can’t remember what she said immediately in the pub, but I do remember that after a few minutes she stopped speaking and stared into the centre of the room, then looked down at her scarf as if someone else had wound it about her neck. She wanted to know if I’d heard how he’d left her. She lifted her chin. I hadn’t heard, not really, only that it was why he’d moved to Bologna. Well, he’d been cruel, she said, widening her eyes, which seemed to contain some shock, still – perhaps the fact that he’d done it, or that she found herself there telling me, of all people.

He’d done it in their favourite restaurant, she said. It was an old-fashioned place in Soho where the tables were greasy, and she said he leant forwards on the table to tell her that he’d never loved her, then he carried on eating, as if nothing had happened. When she asked what he meant, he put his knife down and leant forwards again on his elbows. He stared at her without a single further movement. He didn’t explain; he didn’t say anything. And she realised how sharp his elbows seemed on the table. How sharp the bone of the pork chop he was eating. She became stuck on that and was speaking violently now in the pub, about sharpness.

Then she grew quieter.

‘He was cruel,’ she said. ‘He’s capable of cruelty.’

Her mouth stiffened and she looked towards me.

‘Everybody is,’ I replied.

‘Not everyone. Not like him.’

She held my gaze from the corner of her eye.

‘Are they?’

I did not know what kind of answer she expected from me, if she expected an answer to that question. How was I to know if he was crueller than other people? How would I know? I thought. Her eyes narrowed, and she leant her head back against the wood panelling. On the table I held her hand – I was surprised that she let me.

They’d tried to be together, Lena and F, on and off, for eight years, right up until he’d gone away. He’d rarely spoken to me about their life together, but he would mention her sometimes when we were running on the marshes. He would tell me something about her behaviour as we ran side by side, our thighs shooting out beneath us like pistons, his voice bright and forceful through the wind and exertion. He would speak as if her behaviour happened to him at some distance. At times it was like he was playing a game where I had to guess what he’d done to provoke a given reaction: when she’d abandoned him on a night bus or cut through the collars of his shirts or ripped the pages from a copy of his debut novel. I never did guess. Out in the open, I could never put these things together. I would only listen, then say how it was weird of her, and he would smile and tell me I was right about that, and we’d keep running through the mud along the train lines.

Although F and I emailed from time to time while he was in Italy, I did not tell him about my drink with Lena. I did not want to reveal what she’d told me of how he’d left her, or mention that word cruel, which she had spoken and then been quiet about. He and I did not speak as much as I would’ve liked, anyway, and I did not want to cause any issues. I could read him – that was what I’d always felt – I could read him better than other people. But he was not always readable.

When he finally emerged onto the patio, the clouds had broken at the horizon, and a harsh, orange light was falling over us. He came out of the French doors and we turned, and I saw that Lena’s expression became, briefly, ugly.

‘Was it bad?’ he said, bending down to kiss her cheek.

‘Not so bad, no.’

So they’d spoken before, I thought, more recently than I had spoken to either of them, and there was something here she hadn’t mentioned to me – the journey possibly or her work. He embraced me for several seconds then stood before us, and we both had to shade our eyes to look up at him. He was just taller than me, and he was a lot taller than Lena. He was wearing a loose white shirt, navy trousers. His hair was blonder.

As we continued looking at him, he raised one eyebrow while at the same time closing the eye diagonally beneath it, a jaunty sort of action – a type of wink – and I was amazed that he might feel jaunty. Nothing about the situation felt jaunty to me, but after he’d done that, the winking thing, it was as if he’d been there first, as if I’d interrupted them. The breeze moved through the ash trees, and through his hair, and he smiled at us and then at the garden. He asked us to show him.

‘What?’ she said.

‘The garden, anything.’

‘But you don’t care,’ she replied, pulling her eyebrows together.

I stayed on the patio. They walked around the edge of the garden, Lena pointing out to F what Edward had pointed out to her earlier, and F, after a while, began asking questions. What would be put where, what could be grown, what would be discarded. Would they have flower beds or a vegetable patch, would they have trouble with moles, did they fancy a pond – what could they manage? For some reason it became funny. Even from a distance I knew it had become funny. Even before I heard Lena laughing. That was a trick of his. That was how he slipped inside any situation. I felt the evening swing on its hinge. The two of them were standing at the end of the garden, gazing towards the ash trees, beyond which the sun was sinking. There was the washing sound of the wind in the grasses of the meadow, which led to the low, brown undulation of the fields beyond it.

For dinner we came inside and ate two broad, grey fish. The French doors remained open to the patio, and I’d been encouraged to take the head of the table, which meant Lena and F were together, with their backs to the darkening garden. They didn’t speak to each other directly apart from some shy, polite comments. He had a high colour to his cheeks, an impatient manner. Annie was coming back and forth from the kitchen with plates and glasses, and Edward was talking about rolling his ankle.

‘So now everything scares me,’ he said.

From the table we could see through the doorway into the kitchen, and every time Annie leant down to check inside the oven, the dimples on the backs of her knees were revealed as the skirt of her satin dress lifted. Edward kept looking up at the sound of the oven door to appraise her bared legs before turning back to wipe his lips with his napkin. Annie looked younger than when I’d last seen her. Edward seemed restless since they’d moved to the country.

And why are you so restless and why is she so elegant? I wanted to ask him. And what do you see when her back is turned, what do you think of?

Annie placed a bowl of potatoes in front of me.

‘How’s your flat?’ she said to Lena.

‘It keeps cool.’ She seemed to consider this. ‘The garden door’s right by my bed, so I’ve been sleeping with it open.’

‘That’s not how I pictured it,’ F said.

‘Should you sleep with the door open?’

Lena didn’t reply to Annie but seemed on the verge of asking F how he did picture it, yet then she didn’t. She looked away from him, pulling her lips together, and I recalled her doing the same when we were at the pub, as if she were trying to do the opposite of speaking.

Edward began talking about all the people we knew who’d got married, who had lives he found curious or banal, homes he found beautiful or ugly. We became loud discussing these people while we ate, and I saw that sometimes F would glance at Lena and rather than look back, she’d run her tongue over her teeth and check her bun, which was fastened at the midpoint of her head. If they shifted, the tablecloth moved, and I could see their feet were very close together.

What I had expected, I suppose, was some evidence that evening of the same anger she had shown in the pub. It did not seem at all obvious what she was feeling, sitting beside F at the table. In some ways she seemed happy. I didn’t think she was happy; I thought she was in love, but I didn’t know what that told me, if it told me anything. I didn’t know what love should look like.

Once we finished eating, F, who had been speaking vaguely about his second book, pushed his plate away from him and started talking about the town where he’d been living in Italy, just outside Bologna. The white wine had run out, so Edward offered us red, and the bottle was passed around the table as F told us briefly about the history of the town, and I recalled looking its name up online after he’d gone there, scrolling through the photos of its old streets, of its churches. He said it was maze-like, but at the town’s centre was a large, open square, and this was where he’d rented his apartment, in a building with many other apartments above and below it. He would sit up writing his book most nights, because that was when he could write the most, and every night he would hear the woman who lived below fighting with her lover.

‘She was German,’ he said, ‘but the guy was Italian, so that’s how they spoke to each other.’

‘And you could understand them?’ Lena said.

‘I could.’

He brought his wine glass to his lips but then put it down again without drinking.