Maggie Blake went to pull the heavy drapes across the window of her sitting room. Catching sight of the full moon, she paused, looking out over the silvered rooftops towards the dreaming spires of central Oxford. St Scholastica's College was far enough out to feel a little aloof from the hurly-burly of the tourist-trap heart of the city, but from her suite of rooms on the third floor of Magnusson Hall she looked over gleaming slates punctuated by chimney pots, across the blank space of the University Parks towards Keble, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and beyond that, slivers of the crenellations, towers and stone facades of a variety of college and university buildings. She was one of the few remaining fellows of the college who lived within its walls and she was grateful for the privilege. It freed up more of her income to travel for pleasure, not purely at the dictates of her research grants. And she loved the view from this room, where she read and wrote and met the handful of postgraduate students she supervised.
Because this had been a day shot through with memories, she recalled the first time she had brought Mitja to her rooms. They'd both been war-weary, sleep-deprived and aching from two days in the back of a truck that had dropped them off on the Banbury Road in the small hours. The college had been still, only a couple of lights burning in student rooms. The bathetic quacking of a mallard duck had disturbed the peace as Maggie had fumbled her key into the front-door lock of Magnusson Hall, and Mitja had chuckled. 'Dinner,' he said softly.
They'd climbed the stairs slowly. Maggie remembered the straps of her rucksack biting into the tender places on her shoulders and the tremble in her quads as she'd headed up the final flight.
And then they were in her sitting room, and the moonlight bathed the panoramic skyline. Mitja dropped his bag like a sack of stones and made for the windows as if drawn by a tractor beam. He leaned his forehead against the glass and groaned. 'Do you remember when Dubrovnik was as beautiful as this?'
She wriggled out of her rucksack straps and crossed the room, wrapping her arms around him, leaning round his shoulder to see a little of the view she'd missed. 'I remember. The first time I saw the city at night, I thought it was like something from a fairy tale. The city walls. The grid of streets. The bulk of the cathedral like a treasure chest. The harbour glittering in the moonlight. The floodlights at Fort St Ivan reflected like columns in the water.'
'And now it's rubble. It's ruins.' He straightened up and pulled her round to his side, drawing her close with an arm tight across her back. 'I don't understand why my people never grow up. You English-'
She dug an elbow in his ribs. 'Scottish, remember?'
He shook his head, impatient. 'You see, you may be as bad as we are.' There was indulgence in his tone, but weariness too. 'OK, then. Those English had a civil war. But they got over it. You don't have cavaliers and Cromwell's men still hating each other and killing each other. They had their wars of roses as well, those English, but people from Yorkshire and Lancashire don't fight in the streets.'
'Only over football, I believe.' Maggie couldn't help being facetious; being back in Oxford was filling her with deep joy, like a reservoir recovering from a long drought.
'I am serious.'
'I know you are. But it's late and I am beyond tired. I have whisky. Shall we take a glass to bed?'
This time, he laughed. 'You know exactly how to make things better.'
They had taken the bottle to bed, but hadn't got past that first glass. The unfamiliar combination of warmth, comfort and the absence of fear made them easy prey for sleep, and not even the desire that sprang constantly between them could keep it at bay.
That night had been the start of a new phase in their relationship. Like every other phase, it had been complicated, tumultuous and glorious. No life plan Maggie had ever concocted had included anyone like Mitja. But then, it hadn't included underground universities or civil wars either.
Leaving the curtains open, Maggie sat down at her desk, deliberately angled at forty-five degrees to the window so she had to turn her head to get the full benefit of the view. She should be heading for bed. It had been a long and stressful day, the unwelcome party shading into an unwanted dinner for twenty, and she was physically tired. And yet her mind was still busy, jumping restlessly from one encounter to another, and always coming back to the one who wasn't there.
Without thinking about it, she ran her fingers over the touch pad and wakened her Mac. Maybe it was just the wine talking, but what if it was time to give in to the nagging voice at the back of her mind that kept suggesting she needed to write about her time in the Balkans? She'd addressed it professionally, of course. Balkan Geopolitics: An Archaeological Approach had become the standard textbook on the region. And the reader she'd edited that had dissected the media responses to the conflict had attracted mainstream attention on radio and TV as well as print. Maggie had written about the consequences of the siege of Dubrovnik. But she'd never written about what it had been like to live through it. She'd never told the story of how she came to be there, nor of the convoluted journey that had led her to Kosovo with its massacres and rape camps.
At first she'd shied away from telling that story because it was too fresh. Maggie wanted more distance from those traumatic events so she could set them in context. Then she'd held back because she couldn't write a narrative without placing Mitja front and centre, and she was living with him in Oxford by then. She knew he wouldn't approve of or agree with everything she had to say about those years shuttling back and forth between her life in Oxford and her life in a war zone. And she didn't want to sow discord between them.
And finally, she'd kept her silence because he was gone and she couldn't let go the hope that he'd come back. To make public things he'd be unhappy to read felt like too big a risk.
But the years had drifted past and there had been no word from Mitja. Not so much as a birthday greeting or a Christmas card. Nothing to acknowledge what they had been to each other. Just silence. A silence more profound than she'd ever known in the Balkans. 'There's nothing silent here,' he'd once said to her. 'Everything speaks, if you only know how to listen.' Well, this silence wasn't speaking, that was for sure. And there was no valid reason now for Maggie to hold her tongue. Even if she decided not to publish, there would be a satisfaction in setting things down. A chance to revisit her history and perhaps find a different angle, a new truth.
Even if she didn't know how the story ended.
