Work Text:
The sun set before they reached Oxford again. It was just Aaron in the motorcar. Nicky had refused point blank to motor all the way back, although he had permitted Ella to give him a lift to the train station on account of Jem’s foot. It hadn’t been said, but if Ella could see the strain in Jem’s face when he was walking there was no doubt Nicky noticed. And he had made a horrible face and suggested that they drive, provided Ella agreed to go at a walking pace. Nicky being sweet shook Ella more than she cared to think about – she felt herself calcified somewhere in previous century, like she’d stopped growing and changing when Toby died, and had half expected Nicky to have done the same.
Neither she nor Aaron were truly hungry, after eating at Prue's house, so they didn't stop until the pale twilight blended with the road to a degree that Ella doubted her ability to drive safely through. She wondered what Aaron would say about the proprieties if she suggested stopping at an inn. They would, undoubtedly, be stared at, for his colour and her hair; for both their well-made clothes. The world, like Ella, hadn't changed in the last decade. She lived in London for a reason – Aaron surely did too.
Ella was considering how to approach the conversation – could they reach a town large enough to have something so gloriously impersonal as a hotel before the evening faded into dark? – when she slowed for a crossroads and found she recognized the turn-off. "My friend lives a few miles from here. Perhaps we could impose on her?"
Aaron held his silence for a few more moments before nodding once, almost nervously. Ella gratefully turn off the paved road and navigated the to a neat grey house with a beautiful garden and a homely light shining at the windows and through the door as a curious head emerged.
"Ella? Ella Feynsham, what are you doing here?"
Ella stepped out of the car and pulled off her scarf. Many men had undoubtedly told Fenella Carruth that time had stood still for her - she was still stunningly beautiful, still burbled with an infectious joy, still dressed in the highest kick of fashion. But since Fen had sworn off engagements and taken up target shooting as a hobby a few years before, Ella had felt some change in her old friend, something solider and more determined, but also happier. It was disorienting, seeing Fen's cheerful glow of pleasure and hope for fun after that afternoon with Prue, who was worn down and destroyed by Toby and Hugo and the rest of them. The first time Fen had dimpled at Ella, they'd been out for a walk with Toby, that last glorious summer before university when he had been uncomplicatedly happy. Fen, a few years their junior, had fallen in with any scheme that appealed to her hosts and followed Toby adoringly with her eyes. But somehow, she still sparkled.
Fen, as Ella had expected, was more than happy to host guests even turned up so unexpectedly. She didn't even ask why they were on the road at such an odd time of day, just drew them into the parlour calling out for her paid companion, Pat Merton. Miss Merton nodded briskly at Ella and offered a brief "How do you do?" before turning and introducing herself to Aaron, shaking his hand easily and welcoming him before nodding to Fen and going off to hunt down clean linens for the guest rooms.
It wasn't long before they retreated to bed. It had been a long while since that morning when they'd sat with Jem and Nicky and tried to piece together what had happened when they were young. Aaron took himself off to the room he had been offered and Ella hoped devotedly that he slept, well and soon. He had that drooping edge she remembered from Oxford, when he spent night after night staying up too late, trying to prove he knew more, multiple times more, than the other men at St Anselm's.
Ella found she couldn't sleep. After rolling this way and that for more time than she cared to think about, Ella slipped out of bed, wrapped herself in her shawl and wandered back to the parlour in hopes that the quiet country night would made her bed more appealing.
Fen was still up, curled into the couch with a book and the lamp turned low. When Ella hesitated in the doorway, Fen grinned her infectious grin and beckoned. Ella came to sit on the other end of the couch, flung once again back to university when she and Prue had sat up late in their beds, finding endless things to talk about. It was impossible to super-impose Prue on Fen, though, not the tired old woman Ella had met today, nor the intense and angular young one who had poured out her hopes and dreams to a younger and more optimistic Ella. Prue’s spiky edges and intense feelings simply wouldn't go into the same place as Fen's curves and curls. What would university have been like if Ella had had a friend like Fen there? Or if Prue had? But girls like Fen didn't go to university. Girls like Fen went to Town and got themselves husbands and didn't let a thought trouble them afterward. Except, of course, Fen hadn't.
“Dr. Oyede seems to be an old friend,” Fen offered, dimple hovering at the corner of her mouth, waiting for permission to tease.
“Yes. Someone I knew well once.”
“And plan to again?” The thing about Fen's teasing was that it was never cruel, never jokes you weren't supposed to find as amusing as she did. The summer of ‘92, Toby and Fen had laughed back and forth at one another, even when Toby made his jokes at Fen's expense. Ella, young and cruel in her own way, had laughed at those jokes and never really thought about how Fen never returned that cruelty.
"How did you know that they were wrong for you? The men you didn't marry?" Ella asked. She'd never wanted to ask before, because Fen had been so gloriously incurious after Toby died. They had very little in common, never had, but in the first years Ella spent in London, Fen's company was the only kind she could tolerate outside of work because Fen would look at her, clear eyed and worried, and then burst forth with a spat of gossip and never, ever ask what Ella thought or felt about Toby’s murder. In turn, Ella had never asked Fen about any of her broken engagements.
Fen shrugged. "Most of them loved my father's money more than they loved me. And I didn't feel about any of them the way I felt about Pat, so I expect that had a lot to do with it. I suppose I could have kept trying to find a man, but men are awfully exhausting, you know. They don’t like to pay attention to what people actually think, in the general way of things." Fen gave her inviting gurgle. "Before tonight, I did sometimes wonder if you felt the same way about men as a species – preferring women, you know. Not me, obviously, of course you'd go for the serious type, but women in general.”
“No.” Ella paused and parsed through that babbling chatter again and added, mildly surprised, “You and Miss Merton? Really?” Pat Merton had come into Fen’s life around the end of her last broken engagement, it was true, but she was a rather dull woman, always fading into the background against Fen’s ebullient joie de vivre. Ella had always assumed Fen had selected her as a companion because she wasn’t pushy and Fen’s father had made a companion a condition of independent living.
“Ella! You never noticed? You used to be so good at guessing those kind of things!”
“No, Toby was good at it, and he like to gloat to me about it.”
“Something changed. Something about Toby’s death.” Fen had always had Toby’s gift of pulling secrets out the air, knowing things in an indefinable way that had nothing to do with research.
“How can you tell?”
“You’re talking about him voluntarily. And you look... lighter?” Fen gave a half giggle. “I want to say less determined, but honestly a less determined Ella Feynsham is still more determined than anyone else in the room so I don’t think I should phrase it that way."
"I -- a few weeks ago, one of my friends from back then started digging into it all over again. I was terribly angry at him for bringing it all up again at first, but these past few days I've learned some things that make me think. I don't know. I miss Toby and I'm glad he's dead and I wish I could go back to a time before, when I wouldn't have been glad about it."
“Going backward’s no ambition,” Fen said, with a decisive shake of her head. “You can’t really want to know less, can you?”
Put that way, Ella couldn’t disagree. Every failed hypothesis was a step toward greater human knowledge. Everything she’d learned about Toby in the past week was something that was as true as Mendeleev’s ideal gas law and the idea of unknowing it was horrifying. “Jem – my friend – he brought us all back together again, all Toby’s friends. And we talked about things. About things we did and about things Toby and other people did. I was fighting with Toby when he was killed, you see. I feel like I’ve spent the last decade in the middle of that fight, unable to get the last word and unable to move on. I think maybe I can now.”
“I’m glad,” Fen said simply. “I was scared for you when he died; I remember the two of you that first summer, always together, always smarter and more beautiful than everyone else in the room. It felt unbalanced to think of you without him, and I’m just someone you met at a house party once.”
“He was…” Ella paused. “He was magical, sometimes. Fun and funny and delightful. But at university, I liked him less. He liked me less. I think maybe we would have found our way back to each other, given more time. But maybe not. Aaron thought not, and there are reasons I think he has better intuition than I do.”
Fen nodded, watching Ella thoughtfully in the flickering light.
“My friends are much better off without Toby,” Ella found herself adding, thinking of Nicky and Jem falling into each other in Nicky’s rooms, catharsis almost tangible in the air. “I probably am too.” It was hard to say. For a decade, Ella has shied away from thinking those words, as if the thought of them was the reason Toby had died. “I think I set us on a better path today,” she added, think of Prue crying into her lap in a shabby-genteel bedroom. “I think I helped that others. I hope so.”
“And what about yourself?” Fen asked, big eyes curious. They didn’t know one another’s friends well, except for the mutual circle of the WSPU; and Ella had never talked about her university friends to people she knew in London, just as she never talked about Toby. “Were you helped?”
“Yes,” said Ella on a breath before she could even think of it. “The world feels like it might change again, and I’m glad of it.”
“Will I get to meet Dr. Oyede again?” Fen added, with a roguish sparkle, and Ella thought again of trying to talk to Prue about Aaron when they were young and foolish. Young Prue, happy for Ella but a little wistful as she categorized her own dreams as impossible. Ella had not known how to be a friend to Prue then. Maybe she could learn how. Maybe she could introduce Fen to Prue, despite the fact that they had nothing in common aside from having maybe been a little in love with Toby once. More fool they.
“I expect so,” Ella said, a little wondering at the hope of it. Aaron hadn’t said anything to her about seeing one another again. But he had elected to motor back to Oxford with her. His eyes on her skin still felt like a caress. Jem said he’d stuck to her alibi despite believing the worst for years. Likely, maybe they would. “I think you’ll like him,” she added, as if Fen didn’t automatically like everyone unless they gave her a very good reason not to. But Aaron was special, and Fen was perceptive, and surely they would like each just as Ella liked both of them.