THE COUPLE’S SECRET
B P WALTER

Published by AVON

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2019

Published in the UK as A Version of the Truth

Copyright © B.P. Walter 2019

Cover design © Patrick Kang, 2019

B.P. Walter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008309619

Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008328726

Version: 2018-11-26

To my parents

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading…

About the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue
Knightsbridge, London, 2018

I’m reaching for a Mulberry purse when I feel someone standing close behind me. Too close. I edge to the side and turn round to see a small, blonde-haired woman standing there.

‘Hello, Julianne,’ she says. She smiles at me warmly.

I glance around. There’s nobody else near us. She’s a bit younger than me, probably late thirties, and is wearing a big, fluffy, blue coat, even though it’s the height of summer outside. She starts to walk closer still and I take a step back.

‘Hi,’ I say, smiling back, worried she is someone I should know, although I don’t recognise her at all. ‘I’m so sorry, do I …?’ I feel her studying me, looking me up and down, almost like she’s sussing me out.

‘My name’s Myanna. I’m an investigative journalist for the TV production company Exploration Media UK. I was wondering if I could have a quick word with you?’

I stare at her. ‘How do you know my name? What’s this regarding?’ I’m still holding the purse and sense a shop assistant looking over at us. I feel like I’ve been caught in the act, doing something wrong.

‘It’s about your husband, James Knight. I need to talk to you. I was thinking we could go and get a coffee somewhere. Or maybe you could come into my office for a chat?’

My husband. Something about my husband. My mind is racing. Why does this woman know my name? And my husband’s name?

‘Please, Julianne. We really need to talk.’

The back of my neck is feeling hot and suddenly I want to get out of the shop, away from her.

‘This is all very strange,’ I say, and laugh a bit awkwardly. I take another look around to see if anyone else is listening, but we’re still very much alone, apart from the shop assistant, who is now tidying the centre clothes display.

‘Tell you what, take my card,’ the woman says, reaching into her bag and then holding her hand out towards me. ‘I don’t want to force you into anything, but I would really like us to meet. I think you might know what this is about. So, when you’re ready, just give me a call.’ Her voice softens. ‘And I’m sorry if I startled you. I’m on your side, Julianne.’

With that, she is gone, and I’m left standing in the Harrods accessories section, her card clasped between my fingers, wondering why it feels like the ground is moving beneath me.

Chapter 1
Julianne
Knightsbridge, London, 2019

I lay my hands on the kitchen work surface and let my head fall a bit, just enough so the strands of my hair stay clear of the water in the sink. The sense of exhaustion throbs through me. Christmas should be an enjoyable time, but this year it feels like a stress on the calendar. I do love it, I really do, all the lights on the trees and the cold, although it never gets as cold as my childhood in Chicago. I’ve always thought that when English people moan about the weather they should be transported to the Windy City in the middle of winter. Then they’d really feel cold. Some part of me misses it; the layering up as if you’re about to go on some huge expedition up a mountain when you’re actually just going to the library or the shops.

I hear movement behind me by the door of the kitchen. ‘Do you fancy a top-up of wine?’ I call out to my husband. ‘My mother will be arriving soon, so you’d better get in quickly before she drinks us out of house and home.’

I take a pan of vegetables off the AGA as I talk, the billowing steam coating my face in a sheen of moisture.

‘Mum?’

My son’s voice takes me by surprise. He’s looking at the floor and something about his face makes me stop. Has he been crying? His eyes look red. Not red enough for me to rush to him and ask him what’s wrong, but just slightly tinged at the corners. He may be approaching his eighteenth birthday, but it’s amazing what little details can wind back the years and remind you that, not so long ago, your tall man-in-training was just a small, frightened child. Maybe he’s unwell, or his hay fever has been flaring up again. Unlikely in December, though.

‘Oh, sorry, honey. I thought you were Dad. You can have some wine, too. One glass.’ I wink at him and smile. I’m well aware his classmates are probably knocking back beer, wine, vodka and God knows what else every night in the run-up to Christmas. Not my Stephen, though. He’s not one of those seventeen-year-olds.

‘I’m cool with a Coke.’ He walks to the fridge and gets himself a can. He pours it in silence and then turns back to face me.

‘Mum,’ he says again, then hesitates.

I keep my smile going, but feel a slight coldness in my stomach. That simple word can be said in a whole galaxy of different ways. With love when they say goodnight, with anger when you tell them they have to do their homework, with annoyance when you probe too far into their personal lives or ask about who they’re dating. And then there are the times when they say ‘Mum’ in a way that makes your blood freeze in your veins. It’s immediately clear: something is very wrong. My mind starts to run wild, offering me a slide show of different horror stories, each more dismaying than the last. Maybe he wants to drop out of doing his exams? Is he being bullied? Has he got himself mixed up in something awful or criminal?

‘Stephen, honey, what is it?’ I say. I want to go to him and hug him but have learnt from experience it’s best not to crowd a teenager when they are about to tell you a piece of information that’s clearly causing them concern. In their overtaxed brains, flight is often an attractive solution to dealing with a problem. It’s best to stand well clear until the danger of this has passed.

Stephen moves his head, looking at the floor, as if he’s trying to gather his words but failing to get them in order. I try to be patient but fail. ‘Is it to do with your exams after Christmas?’ I see his face tighten as a result and curse myself for starting the interrogation too soon.

‘It’s … it’s nothing to do with that.’ He shakes his head, like he’s trying to brush his own thoughts away. I continue to stare, trying to keep my imagination at bay and remain calm.

‘Boyfriend trouble? Is it a problem with Will, then? Have you two had a fight?’ He winces, though I’m not sure if this is because I’m wrong in my presumption or because of my use of the word ‘fight’. He’s always been quite brutal about my ‘Americanisms’, as he calls them.

‘No, nothing to do with him either. It’s about … it’s about … Dad.’

This catches me by surprise.

‘What do you mean?’ I say, letting out a small, odd-sounding laugh. ‘What’s Dad done? Has he upset you about something? I know he goes a bit crazy with the pressure and all his talk about Oxford, but that’s only because he wants the—’

‘The best for me, I know.’ He cuts me off. His eyes are staring somewhere above my shoulder, still not meeting my gaze. ‘I told you, it isn’t anything about exams.’

‘Then I don’t see what he’s done to upset you.’

‘It … it isn’t like that. Forget it. I’m sorry, it was stupid to bring it up now. Especially when you’re doing all this for tonight and have your dinner party on Monday …’

‘It’s only Grandma coming to dinner, not a CIA operation,’ I say, playing down my own stresses. ‘And “dinner party” might be a bit of an overstatement – it’s just Ally and Louise and Ernest.’ The mere thought of the three of them descending upon us for our usual Christmas gathering makes me feel instantly tired, but I don’t let it show. ‘Just tell me. I’m sure it’s nothing we can’t fix. Has he said something about me? Something I’ve done wrong? Have I upset him? God knows it can be easy to, sometimes.’

‘No, nothing like that.’

I feel myself getting exasperated. ‘Darling, you keep saying that but don’t actually say what it is about. How can I help if I don’t know what it is? Are you in trouble with the law? I’m going to keep guessing until you tell me.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m being stupid, it’s really nothing. Do you need any help with the plates and stuff?’ He gestures at the kitchen table.

‘No, it’s all under control,’ I say distractedly, wishing it were true and trying not to think how many more things need to be done before my mother arrives. Now he looks me in the eye and I see fear. It’s cold and stark and horrible, the look a mother hates to see in the eyes of her child. I move a few steps forward and take his shoulders in my hands, feel his warmth and the firm muscles beneath his Abercrombie sweater. ‘Tell me.’ I say it calmly but firmly and he opens his mouth to speak.

‘Could you … could you quickly come upstairs for a minute?’

My concerns about the unprepared food fall away quickly. ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Lead the way.’

As soon as we are upstairs, he leads me into his room and gestures at me to close the door. ‘Tell me now, what’s wrong.’ I walk to the other side of the room and sit down on his desk chair, facing him.

‘I shouldn’t have said anything,’ he mutters. He keeps glancing at the door as if it’s going to burst open at any moment.

The sentence frustrates me. How can he expect me to accept that as an answer?

‘Honey, Dad can’t hear us. I’m fairly sure he’s downstairs in the library, avoiding me in case I give him a job to do. We’re alone. And I’m not leaving until you tell me.’ I’m talking firmly now. Firm, but kind.

He finally looks me in the eye, takes a deep breath, apparently trying to choose his words carefully, and says: ‘I found something. Something a bit strange.’

‘Found what?’ My mind starts diving wildly to various different things he could have found. What does his father keep secret? Does he have a gun? That possibility is so unlikely it almost makes me laugh. Maybe evidence of an affair. That one sends a cold chill crawling across my skin.

‘It’s … it’s a bit hard to explain. They’re files. Files I found on Dropbox. In his folder.’

This takes me by surprise. ‘What? What do you mean? Why were you looking through his Dropbox folder?’

He sighs and rubs his eyes. This is clearly torture for him. I just want to hug him, but I’m scared of interrupting his explanation, so I sit still.

‘It’s … I think it’s something bad. Like, really bad.’

That cold chill is back. I really don’t like where this is going. A dark, menacing mass is forming in my head, as if it’s been let out of a deep, sickening recess of my mind.

‘What kind of thing are we talking about here?’

He stares at me and, for the first time this evening, I see resolve in his eyes. He’s going to tell me everything.

‘I think I’d better just show you.’

I nod, preparing for the worst.

‘Okay. Let me see.’

Chapter 2
Julianne
Knightsbridge, London, 2019

I can feel myself getting colder, an ice cube making its way down my neck, across my back, burning its icy stain into my blood.

‘I really don’t want to rush you, but I don’t think we have much time.’ I try to sound kind, rather than impatient, but waiting for Stephen to snap into action is making me tenser by the second.

His eyes are starting to overspill and I reach out to put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Please, Stephen, I need you to show me. Right now. It may not be what you think it is. You may have got the wrong idea.’

He just shakes his head.

‘Is that a ‘no’ as in you won’t explain, or ‘no’ as in you won’t show me, or ‘no’ as in you haven’t got the wrong idea?’ My smooth tone is breaking at the seams, my impatience to discover if the worst is true tearing me apart inside.

‘No, as in I don’t know. I’m not sure. I just know it’s been eating me up for two days now and I need to talk to you about it.’ After a pause, he goes to a bag by his bed and takes the device out of its leather case. I sit down on his desk chair while he perches on the bed and starts tapping away on the tablet, his face bathed in the blue-white glow of the screen.

‘And you don’t think this could be anything to do with his work?’ I say, partly to fill the silence.

‘I don’t know, that’s why I wanted to show you.’

I nod and wait. Overall, James keeps his work to himself, a lot of it bound up in such rigorous confidentiality it’s hard for him sometimes to even vaguely explain what project he’s working on. My mother once joked that he was like a spy – a bit of a James Bond – but I assured her the job of a head analyst and coordinator at a data services company is one full of spreadsheets, desk work and boardroom meetings rather than anything very exciting.

Stephen is offering me the iPad. I take hold of it and glance at the screen, a mass of files in front of me. From the ends of the file names, I can see they’re PDF documents. There’s something in this that comforts me. At the back of my mind, I think there was a part of me that expected to see .mov or .mp4. But these aren’t videos. That’s a good thing, surely? I scan down the list and then turn towards Stephen.

‘And these were in his Dropbox file?’ I ask.

‘In our Dropbox. The family one. The one we use to transfer photos and things and where I used to put my homework back when you wanted to check it over before submission. It’s Dad’s section of it. I clicked on it by mistake.’

This makes me feel ever so slightly better. If James had anything to hide, surely he’d be a little more savvy about protecting it than to upload it all to the family Dropbox account, the place I store family holiday snaps and copies of dull household documents like the TV insurance details?

‘Tap on one of the files listed here.’ His voice sounds strained, as if he’s trying to calm himself.

I look over at him. ‘If you’re really that worried, I can look at these later? We don’t have to do this now.’ As I say this, though, I know there’s no chance of me happily going back downstairs to carry on with the cooking. I need to know what this is about.

‘No, I’m fine,’ he says, and moves to the edge of the bed, crouching forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He looks like he’s about to take a particularly gruelling exam.

I focus back on the iPad and, as instructed, tap on the first in the list of files. They’re all unnamed, save for a list of seemingly random numbers and the file type. A document appears on the screen and I turn the device to view it in portrait mode.

A company logo is the only thing on the page. Clover Shore Construction is all it says, with a small clover leaf at the end of it. Underneath, in all-caps Times New Roman font, it says: BUSINESS PROPOSAL.

I flick the page with my hand and it changes, this time bringing up what looks like some kind of CV or personal profile, with a photo at the top of the page, followed by a name, date of birth and separate categories filled with bullet points. I look at the photo. It’s of a young woman. She isn’t looking into the camera; her eyes seem vacant, staring off into the distance. There’s something about her expression that I find quietly alarming. It’s as though she’s drunk or stoned and doesn’t quite know she’s having her photo taken. Although it’s a colour photo, her skin is pallid and grey, her dark hair untidy and her face drawn in and gaunt-looking.

‘Who is this?’ I say out loud, though more to myself than to Stephen.

‘Read the information. It’s pretty specific.’

I take a look and see what he means.

Name: Ashley Brooks

Date of Birth: 12 March 1989

Occupation: Officially unemployed, ex-stripper, occasional sex worker

Area: Ilford, East London

Reference: Daffodil

‘I’ve never heard of an Ashley Brooks,’ I say. ‘This is … this is very strange.’

‘It gets more detailed as it goes on,’ Stephen says.

I continue to read.

Lifestyle details:

 • Ashley is dependent on a variety of legal and illegal substances, including heroin and cocaine. Best knowledge indicates she’s been using since she was eighteen.

 • She’s rarely seen out of her flat. When she is, it’s usually to buy alcohol from the independent off-licence near her council flat in Ilford. She has been seen shouting expletives at random passers-by and crying in public.

 • She doesn’t own a car, nor has she been observed using public transport within the last six months.

 • She lives alone. Occasionally young men are seen delivering packages to her door – believed to be illicit substances. Sometimes they go inside, but usually do the transactions on the doorstep.

Crime:

 • She’s been twice observed having sex in public, once in the car park of the Billington Estate where she lives, and on another occasion was issued with a caution by police after being observed performing oral sex on a young man at a bus stop late at night.

 • She was arrested and charged with possession of a Class B drug in April 2012. She did not serve prison time.

 • She was arrested for drunk and disorderly behaviour near her flat in September 2016. She was released without charge.

I look up from the iPad at Stephen. He’s still looking at the floor.

‘How would anyone know all this if it didn’t come from the police or lawyers or somewhere?’

He shrugs. ‘I don’t know. That’s what makes it so strange.’

I look back down at the screen.

Support network:

 • Best knowledge suggests Ms Brooks has not been in contact with her mother or father for many years. Her mother is currently serving time in HMP Bronzefield in Surrey for GBH and the attempted murder of a man she was previously living with. Her daughter has never visited her.

 • It is not believed Ms Brooks has any close friends or acquaintances outside the group of men who deliver her drugs.

 • She does not have a consistent romantic interest or sexual partner.

 • She has no siblings.

Risk:

 • Ms Brooks is considered a low-risk potential investment.

 • Trial runs, completed by our staff, have been highly successful, embarked upon by men posing as tax officials, social services workers and gas-meter inspectors. These have been undertaken using both single and multiple participants. She has reported none of these incidents and her behaviour has not changed other than a potential increase in drug purchases. We believe it is highly unlikely any reports to police would be made after future appointments of this nature.

 • During a trial run, a blood sample was taken. Ms Brooks tested negative for HIV or hepatitis as of August 2019. In spite of this, use of contraception is always strongly advised.

I finish the page and stare back at Stephen. ‘I really don’t know what to say about this,’ I tell him. It’s the truth. I’m completely baffled and appalled. This Ms Brooks seems to have had important information meticulously detailed. Everything gathered together, from her lifestyle and sex life to her criminal record. And all of it points to a very vulnerable, unwell young woman.

‘I don’t know what this is, but I think … I think we best …’

‘Best what?’ asks Stephen, looking up at me, moving his eyes, apparently reluctantly, away from the floor.

‘I don’t know. It just seems so likely this is part of your dad’s work. I know it’s not pretty, but maybe they gather information for the police or some law enforcement agency …’

‘I don’t think he’s allowed to bring it home.’

He’s got me there. But then again, what do I know? Neither of us knows that much about the way James works in his current position at data-gathering company Varvello Analytics. The thing nagging at me, quietly but firmly at the back of my head, is that this is in our personal Dropbox. Not his work account. Not even his own personal account. If they were work documents, surely he would have had to transfer the files and password-protect them?

There’s another thing troubling me. ‘When you said to me that it was something bad … I sort of expected … I don’t know … something involving porn … or maybe … God, this sounds ridiculous … evidence of an affair …’

‘I’m sorry.’

I touch his arm, ‘No, no, it’s okay,’ I say, trying to sound comforting. ‘How many of these have you looked at?’

‘All of them.’

‘And they’re all like this? The same sort of thing?’

He nods.

I don’t know what to say to this at first. Then something falls into my head – a strange sensation, almost like déjà vu. That we’ve been here before. ‘You know a few years back, when you had all that stuff on your computer. All those images of naked women that kept opening every time you clicked on something …’

Stephen looks up sharply and cuts me off, ‘That was a virus.’

‘Yes, I know.’ I hold up a hand to offer reassurance, but he looks offended.

‘Are you saying you think this has something to do with me?’

‘No, I’m just trying to make sense of it. And it reminded me of it, that’s all. Could this be the same thing? A virus your dad has downloaded, maybe when he was buying something or downloading music? And he got a load of someone else’s content by mistake?’

Stephen shakes his head, ‘He downloads music from iTunes. I can’t imagine him buying anything from anywhere … well … dodgy. And anyway, why would the files turn up on our family Dropbox, in his folder?’

‘I … no … it doesn’t make sense. I just don’t understand how …’

I stop talking. Both Stephen and I have heard it. Someone is coming up the stairs. And there’s only one other person in the house. We look at each other, as if we’re two children about to be caught doing something we shouldn’t. I stay very still and hear the sound of my husband going into our shared bedroom, then the noise of a drawer opening and closing. He must just be looking for something or changing his sweater. The noise of him coming back out onto the landing causes Stephen’s eyes to widen in alarm, but I shake my head. It’s okay. The sound of his feet is growing distant and, after a few seconds, the creak of the stairs signals his retreat back down to the hallway.

I let out a breath I only now realise I’ve been holding the whole time, and turn back to the screen. Do I carry on after our close shave? Or give him back his iPad, tell myself it’s going to be fine and just talk to James later, ask him to explain, get everything out in the open? After nearly a minute of us sitting in silence, Stephen hunched over, watching me, I go back to the iPad and click on the second file.

It’s almost identical in layout to the first, except the photo is of a different woman – a young black girl. She’s smiling, holding a drink up to the camera. I cast my eye down her details.

Name: Carly Gale

Date of Birth: 1 April 1991

Occupation: Sex worker, former shop assistant, now officially unemployed

Area: Clapham, South-West London

Reference: Daisy

Another sex worker, I think, a chill moving down the back of my neck. I read through the rest of her details. She used to be employed in a clothes shop in Central London but after making an allegation of sexual assault against her manager left her job and hasn’t been employed since. She, too, has no support network to speak of. The phrase ‘trial run’ once again catches my eye. What does this refer to? Was this some kind of brothel agency? Was my husband seeing prostitutes?

 • No attempts to contact police have been made since the second trial run in February 2019. Ms Gale tested negative for HIV and hepatitis as of this second trial run. Participants are still strongly advised to use protection.

These aren’t prostitutes. This information is telling a far more sinister story. One I can’t get my head around right now, especially not with my teenage son watching me. The screen blurs suddenly and I think something’s gone wrong with the iPad, then realise it’s my eyes. Without me realising, they’ve filled with tears that now begin to stream down my face.

‘Mum?’ Stephen says.

‘I’m all right.’ I quickly brush them away. Then I hear the doorbell.

‘Julianne?’

Stephen’s face drains of colour as soon as he hears his father’s voice. I instantly hit the lock button on the iPad, like a child caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Fuck, I think to myself.

‘Julianne?’ I can tell he’s at the door to the kitchen, probably confused as to where I’ve got to. ‘Where are you?’ he calls up the stairs now.

‘We need to go back downstairs.’ I go to hand him back the iPad, then a thought strikes me.

‘Hang on just one minute.’ Without thinking too much about what I’m doing, I open the tablet again, navigate back to the folder of files and take a screenshot, capturing the full file path information.

‘What are you doing?’ Stephen asks.

‘Don’t worry about it now.’ I rush what I’m doing, clicking the home button and locating the Facebook Messenger tab on the menu screen, finding myself on the list of Stephen’s chats. I send the screenshot to myself.

‘We’ll talk about all of this later. We will. Just … just try not to think about it … There’ll be an explanation.’ I’m talking fast, trying to stifle the panic I can feel building within me. I give him back the tablet as I make for the door.

‘Okay,’ he says.

‘Julianne?’ James’s voice is louder this time. ‘Sorry, Diane, I’ll find out where she’s got to.’

In spite of my panic, there’s a familiar feeling of irritation bristling within me. Can’t he deal with his mother-in-law on his own for five minutes? Why do I always have to play the host?

‘I’m coming!’ I shout back, trying to sound normal. Walking the short distance across the landing and down the stairs feels like I’m doing the last leg of a double marathon. I keep thinking I’m going to stumble and fall, but I hold on tight to the handrail and press on, determined. Determined not to believe the worst. Determined to shake the horrible feeling that something, finally, is threatening to shake the foundations of what we’ve built together. Determined to remain convinced he’ll explain everything, clearly and calmly, and all of this will go away. He’ll tell me the documents are something he accidentally got sent. Or important documents from his work that somehow ended up in the wrong folder. He’ll tell me how sorry he is that I had to worry about all this, especially at Christmas, and that I should put it all out of my mind and forget about it. I think of the relief I will feel when I hear those words.

Chapter 3
Holly
Oxford, 1990

Oxford wasn’t for the likes of me, that’s what my father told me. He even repeated it as we were driving up towards the halls of residence. ‘We’re simple folk, you, me and your mum. Don’t forget these types have had it all. Don’t forget you’re different.’

I hopped out of the car first to speak to one of the stewards showing us where to park, asking the best way to negotiate the trailer through the tiny lane that snaked around Hawksmith Hall – my new home away from home. I’d been worried Dad would bring the trailer ever since he and Mum had started working out the logistics of taking me and my stuff up there on my first day. I knew he had a customer in a village just outside of Oxford – I’d almost missed my interview when he’d insisted on having his ‘business meeting’ first. Business meeting. More like ripping off an overenthusiastic collector. He had been working in the antiques business for about ten years, ever since the chemical factory had made him redundant. Old furniture, great big chests, mirrors, tables, all sorts really, anything you could use to furnish a home. He’d bought loads of books on the subject of antiques dealing. I’d been surprised there were that many, but apparently it was an area of interest for a lot of ‘retired people’. That was how he always put it: ‘retired’. Never ‘laid off’ or ‘redundant’.

Once we finally got ourselves sorted in the car park and the trailer was safely out of the way next to a wall of bushes, I ventured in and up the stairs, carrying a bag in one hand and my key in the other. My parents followed behind me, lugging the heavier bags. I’d told them I would come back to get them but they were as keen as I was to see where I’d be staying. ‘Very nice,’ my mum kept saying as we climbed the stone steps to the first floor. ‘Thank God you got that grant, Holly,’ she said in a whisper, which still carried audibly through the corridor. ‘It’s good you get to experience a place like this.’

‘Mum, please,’ I murmured. I didn’t mind people knowing I hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but it wasn’t something I wanted broadcasting as I walked through the door. Besides, there must be a lot of people here who didn’t come from privilege. This was the 1990s. Class was something we were leaving behind, wasn’t it?

The room was spacious, if not exactly homely. It looked rather grand, as if someone had converted part of a cathedral into a living space. The bed was a single, but more than adequate, and the floor had a large, deep-red rug in the centre. In the far corner were a desk and chair. I placed the bag I was holding on the bed and turned to my parents, taking in their reactions.

‘Very nice,’ Mum kept saying. ‘Very, very nice.’

‘You’ll be comfy here,’ said Dad, as if he’d parked me in a B&B. I think he was rather overwhelmed by the whole thing. In fact, I knew he was by the way he kept looking around and then quickly focusing on the floor, as if someone might notice him staring.

‘Can you guys stay here while I get the last few bags from the car?’ I said, slightly worried about leaving them. They might wander.

‘Of course, love, but we can come and help.’

‘No, Dad, it’s fine,’ I said, backing out of the door. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

I left before they could protest any further and walked the short distance back to the car. When I got there, I saw three girls standing by it, looking at something. As I got closer, I could see they were peering over into the car and laughing. I felt rather nervous as I approached, worried they’d try to speak to me, and when they saw me they took a step back. One of them looked a bit embarrassed, as if she’d been caught out, but the other two had looks on their faces that weren’t quite as nice.

‘Is this yours?’ one of them asked.

I eyed her suspiciously and replied that, yes, it was and asked if there was a problem. One of the other girls laughed, while the one I was speaking to just looked back at the old car, partly splashed with mud, the boot slightly dented from a minor back-end collision a year ago. I saw her eyes flick to the trailer, the old, ripped covering my dad used to cover up whatever was being transported bundled in the back, and then they fell back on me. She didn’t say anything. Just looked me up and down one last time and walked away, the other two following her like sheep. I waited until they’d disappeared out of sight around the side of the building before opening the car. There were more bags left than I’d realised and I tutted to myself at the thought of having to come back again for the rest. I didn’t really want to admit how they’d made me feel in our half a minute of meeting, but the sense of unease I’d had ever since getting the letter of acceptance from Oxford had suddenly become a lot stronger.

Back in my room, my parents helped me unpack for a bit, but I could tell Dad was itching to head off to meet his antiques contact. Mum, on the other hand, had settled herself on the bed and was unballing my socks from the bag and folding them neatly. At one point a girl knocked on our door asking if we knew the way to somewhere called Gallery Heights as she’d been looking around for ages. I tried to answer quickly, but my dad got in first: ‘We’re not locals, love. Never been here in my life. Apart from when I was a teenager. Not at the university – God, no – but as a lad when I was working for the railways …’

‘Dad.’ I cut in to rescue the girl, who was looking at him as if he were a strange animal in a zoo. I turned to face her. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve only just arrived and I don’t really know the way around myself.’

The girl nodded. ‘Oh, no problem,’ she said stiffly, then vanished from the doorway.

After another awkward twenty minutes of unpacking and questions from Mum on where I’d be keeping my knickers and ‘lady things’, we all traipsed back down to the car to get my last two bags.

‘Full of books, I bet,’ Dad said, shaking his head, lifting one of the bags out. ‘Well, I suppose you proved they had some worth, getting into this place. Never understand how you have the patience, love.’ I’d heard this speech more times than I wanted to remember and didn’t respond now. All through my childhood I’d been treated like some weird outcast, as if spending one’s weekends buried in a novel were a sign of derangement. Mum frequently made comments about how I’d never really made an effort with ‘more traditional things’, like make-up and nice clothes. When I’d told her there wasn’t much point, as we couldn’t afford expensive make-up and nice clothes, she’d told me I was ungrateful. Maybe I was. Or maybe I was just angry at not being allowed the thing I alone enjoyed without being made to feel bad about it whenever someone else came into the room.

‘You guys can get going. I’m fine from here, honestly.’

Mum looked doubtful. ‘Are you sure?’

I nodded and tried to give her an encouraging smile. ‘Yes, very sure.’

She hugged me and then so did Dad, a little more awkwardly, and then they got in their car and drove off, Mum giving a little wave out of the window as she went.

It only took just over an hour to get the unpacking finished and organised neatly into drawers and the rather generous cupboard standing up against one of the stone walls. Its dark, mahogany doors made me think back to a similar kind of thing my grandfather had when I was a little girl. I used to play hide and seek with him, well aware he wouldn’t ever find me. He knew where I was, of course, but he let me win.

I sat down on the bed and scuffed my shoes on the rug. What now? I thought I should go and meet some other people. I knew there would be a gathering of some sort down in the common room, and we’d be given older students as sort of parents so we had a first port of call if we ever needed to talk to someone who knew the university back to front. I was about to get up when there was a knock on the door.

‘Come in,’ I called, then, realising it was on the latch, said, ‘Oh, hold on a moment.’ I ran to the door, hurriedly flattening down my hair as I did so in case I looked like a crazy blonde haystack. I unlocked the door and opened it to find a beaming girl’s face greeting me.

‘Hi,’ she said, very loudly – too loudly, I thought, considering I was standing right in front of her. ‘How’s it all going? Have you got unpacked yet? Absolute nightmare, isn’t it? I’ve only got through one and a half bags.’

She strode past me and stood, hands on her waist, looking about.

‘Oh my gosh, how tidy you are! We are going to be such friends, I know it. They say opposites attract and I am hands down the messiest person you’ve ever come across. Honestly, it’s scary.’

Her low, rather plummy voice was both reassuring in its confidence and intimidating in its speed. I smiled politely and thought I’d better take things back to simpler, more introductory areas of conversation. ‘Hi, I’m Holly.’

‘Oh, of course you are, of course you are. So sorry. What a lovely name, too. Holly. Holly.’ She said it out loud twice, as if trying it on for size, then nodded. ‘Good, good. I’m Aphrodite. My mum did classics. Obsessed with Greece. Bit of a freak. You can call me Ally, though. Everyone does. What kind of fucking sadist names their own child Aphrodite, eh?’

‘Umm, one obsessed with Greece, I suppose,’ I said feebly, hoping it sounded like a light-hearted response rather than an insult towards her mother.

‘You’ve got it in one. Totally bonkers, all of my family are. Though they think I’m stark raving mad for wanting to come here.’

I raised my eyebrows at this. Her accent was very upper class, but maybe that was just affected. Maybe she actually did come from a relatively normal family like mine. ‘Are you the first in your family to go to uni?’ I asked.

She looked at me as if I’d suddenly spoken to her in Japanese. ‘No, of course not. But they all went to sodding Cambridge. I’m the rebel who went to Oxford … well, Ernest and I. My brother, Ernest. We’re twins, but he is light years more intelligent than I am. Thinks I talk like a commoner.’

I laughed nervously, worrying what he’d think of my accent if he thought she sounded common.

‘He’s already here. In the year above. Started early. You’ll meet him. Everyone does at some point. Rampant shagger, my darling brother. He’d have his eye on you. Blonde hair, blue eyes, slim figure and a vagina. You’re ticking all the boxes so far, so watch out.’ She let out a low rumble of laughter. I was reminded of a gym teacher we had when I was seven. Miss Marks, I think her name was. Her laugh seemed to reverberate around the school hall, although this girl, Ally, seemed to carry off her low voice with sophistication rather than awkwardness. She was substantially taller than me, also blonde, though a darker tone, especially at the roots, and seemed to be able to command the room around her, even though I was the only audience she had.

‘So, have you met your mummy yet?’

For a second I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, then I understood. ‘Oh, the older student?’

‘Yes, the one to show you around, make sure you’re not crying yourself to sleep at night, that sort of thing.’

I shook my head. ‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Oh, that’s not good. They should have met you when you arrived. And your daddy. Or have they axed daddies? I’m not sure. Let’s go and find you one.’ She made it sound like we were going off to get an ice cream. I wasn’t even certain I wanted a ‘mummy’. I’d always been pretty good at finding my own way through things, but I didn’t want to look standoffish. Ally grabbed my hand and led me out of my room.

‘Don’t bother locking your door, nobody does around here. There’s a general rule: if you’ve locked your door, you’re having sex. Or a total essay-breakdown. My brother has those from time to time.’ She was leading me through the corridors, apparently confident in where she was going. ‘Ah! Here we are.’ A small gathering of students was in front of us, some of them looking lost, others holding clipboards. One of the clipboard girls smiled at Ally and said hello and the others nodded. Apparently everyone knew her. ‘Got an orphan here for you, Catherine; her name is Holly,’ Ally barked at her.

‘Oh God, have you been left without a parent, too?’ The girl called Catherine was looking down her clipboard. ‘I’m so sorry about this, there’s been such a mix-up with numbers. The person who helps organise all this is from the maths department, but you wouldn’t know it. Let’s see …’ She chewed on her pencil while I just smiled politely, trying not to look too demanding.

‘I don’t need anyone, honestly,’ I said quietly, but Catherine didn’t seem to hear.

‘Holly Rowe? Is that right?… Hmm, you’re supposed to be with Caitlin, but I don’t know where she’s … ah, here she is now.’

Another girl had appeared, as if from nowhere. Short, round and looking extremely cheerful, I couldn’t help but feel heartened by her presence. Here was someone I didn’t have to be intimidated by, I thought, then instantly despised myself for the value judgement. Was it a value judgement? I decided to ponder that later and offered my hand. ‘Hi, I’m Holly,’ I said, then realised I’d interrupted Catherine, who was halfway through asking Caitlin why she hadn’t been there to greet me on my arrival.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Caitlin said in a warm, kind-sounding voice with a slight northern slant. She shook my outstretched hand, still grinning. ‘I was double-booked, so to speak – given another girl in a different block, which is strange as I thought I’d made it clear …’

‘Well, I’m glad all this has been sorted,’ said Catherine curtly, then promptly left our little group and went to speak to another student on the other side of the hallway.

‘She’s a bit of a force of nature, Catherine,’ Ally said. ‘I think she hates me, but is too proud to show it. Probably because she fucked my brother and he didn’t get back in touch.’ I saw Caitlin blush at this. Ally turned to her and said, ‘You know what, I’m super-fine to take care of Holly if you wanted to get back to your other charge.’

I began saying that I didn’t need taking care of but Caitlin got in first. ‘I don’t think that would be allowed. You’re a first year and the whole point is …’

‘Oh, nonsense. I’ve been here heaps of times. My brother, Ernest, is a second-year here.’

Caitlin’s eyes widened a little. ‘You’re Ernest Kelman’s sister?’

‘Guilty as charged!’ Ally said brightly, then laughed loudly.

‘So that means your … your dad is …’

Ally rolled her eyes, as if to say here we go again. ‘Yes, dearest Daddy, also known as Clive Kelman, Tory MP. One of Auntie Maggie’s closest chums. Major prick in private, though don’t tell the Telegraph I said that.’

‘I … I won’t,’ Caitlin said, looking a little starstruck. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to look equally impressed, but politics had never been a strong interest of mine and the name didn’t mean anything. Still, the fact that her dad was an MP was interesting, regardless, if rather daunting. If the first person I’d met was the daughter of an MP, I didn’t like to think about the backgrounds of my other fellow students. Who would I meet next? The offspring of judges? Film stars? Minor royalty?

We headed back down the corridor towards my room, Caitlin’s concerns obliterated by Ally’s familial connections. She’d rushed off, giving me a small wave and an encouraging smile. We had almost reached my room when Ally stopped and approached one of the other doors. The sound of voices was emanating from it. Male voices. She seemed to be listening intently.

‘What is it?’ I said, looking at her and then at the door. ‘Whose room is that?’

‘It’s my room,’ she replied in a loud whisper.

‘Has someone broken in?’ I said, louder than I meant to, then cringed at how melodramatic it sounded.

‘Someone has certainly entered uninvited. I was just trying to work out who was with him. Oh dear, as if I didn’t know …’

I wanted to ask who she was referring to, but before I could she’d flung open the door forcefully and marched inside. I wasn’t sure if I was meant to follow, but was too intrigued to wait, so walked in after her.

‘Well. This is a pretty sight, isn’t it?’ Her hands were on her hips again.

Two boys were lying on her bed, laughing. One had a cigarette in his hand, the other a hardback book. There was something odd about the way they were lying together, side by side, on the single bed, their legs up against each other. I’d never seen boys behave like this, as if they had some deep-rooted familiarity. Both were extremely good-looking. One was blond, slim, with a distinct jawline, and was obviously Ally’s brother. The other was larger, though from muscle rather than fat, with dark hair and a face that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a movie poster. In fact, he could almost have passed for a younger Tom Cruise.

‘Sis!’ The blond one pulled himself up into a sitting position. Tom Cruise stayed horizontal, his eyes settling on us.

‘Don’t call me sis,’ she snapped.

‘Very well, Aphrodite.’

They both laughed.

‘Don’t give me that. Why are you on my bed?’

The blond boy adopted a look of great offence and clutched a hand to his white-shirted chest. ‘You wound me, sis. I thought you said to come and visit you whenever I liked.’

‘I said nothing of the kind.’ Ally now turned her cold eyes on the other boy. ‘James, I expected better of you.’

‘He led me astray,’ the boy said in a low, resonant tone. For some reason his voice sent a ripple down my shoulders. I shivered slightly and his eyes flicked over to me. ‘Are you cold?’ he said, smiling, as if he somehow knew he was having an effect on me.

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I said.

‘Introduce us to your friend, sis,’ the blond boy said, drawing on the cigarette.

Ally turned to me. ‘Holly, this is my prat of a brother, Ernest.’

I wasn’t sure if I should offer my hand, but he didn’t seem inclined to get off the bed any time soon, so I just waved. He smiled in return. A nice smile, making his otherwise hard face seem friendlier.

‘The other layabout is James, my brother’s best friend and occasional shag-buddy.’

Ernest’s smile became more of a smirk. ‘Still dining out on that joke, sis? Wasn’t funny the first time.’

‘Makes me laugh,’ she said.

The other boy was also smiling. ‘Not entirely a lie, though,’ he said, nudging Ernest with his elbow. He winked at me and I felt myself blushing.

‘Too much info,’ Ally said, tersely.

James pulled himself upright and stepped off the bed. He held out a hand to me and I took it. ‘James Knight. Very nice to meet you … Holly, was it?’

‘Yes,’ I said, trying to hold his gaze but finding it difficult. It felt as though his dark eyes were staring right past my face, reading my thoughts. It was an uncomfortable sensation, but electric somehow, and part of me didn’t want it to stop.

‘Well, isn’t that nice.’ He pulled his hand back. ‘Ernest and I need to leave his sister in peace now. But I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of you soon. A friend of Ally’s is a friend of ours.’ He said it as if it were a strict rule he was fully committed to. I just nodded, hoping I didn’t appear as uncomfortable as I felt. Eventually he said, ‘Come on, Ern. Let’s take our leave.’

Ernest got up off the bed, flattening his shirt down and patting his sister on the shoulder as he passed her.

‘Thanks for the secondhand cancer,’ she said, waving a hand in the air to clear the smoke. Once the door was closed she sat down on her bed with a sigh.

‘So that was Ernest.’

I smiled, standing awkwardly in front of her.

‘And James, of course. James is all right.’

‘Yes,’ I said, and realised I was smiling. ‘He certainly seemed to be.’

She glanced at me and laughed. ‘Oh, sure he’s gorgeous. Less of a womaniser than my brother, though. More choosy.’

I wondered if she was implying he was out of my league. I thought about asking if he was single, then worried that would sound too forward, as if I was actively interested. Which I was, I realised, with a lurch in the stomach. If only, I thought, then pulled myself together. It felt silly to imagine such things, having barely set foot in the place or met anyone new. I was tragically out of my depth – even a passing stranger on the street would have been able to tell as much, been able to spot my lack of experience, my awkward approach to socialising. In the future, I would wonder what it was I did during that afternoon that led to me being singled out from the rest, chosen, made to feel both special and alone. And, after a lot of introspection and clawing back over the past, I still don’t really have the answer. I was just being me. No mask, no pretence. Being myself. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you meet people for the first time. That’s one of the main rules. Isn’t it?

Chapter 4
Julianne
Knightsbridge, 2019

James is staring at me from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Where have you been?’ he asks.

‘I was … just talking to Stephen.’ It’s the truth at least, but I avoid his eyes as I say it. My mother is currently doing her best to avoid mine. She does this – it’s one of the little games she plays. Starves people of attention, makes them crave it, then turns the spotlight on to full beam and makes you want to shrink from view. At the moment she’s moving her scarf from one peg to another.

‘I don’t want it getting all crumpled and covered in stuff when people go in and out the door,’ she says by way of an explanation to the wall, making it sound like we regularly have a pack of mud-covered dogs going in and out of the house.

‘Hello, Mom. And there’s nobody else coming, so your scarf will be safe regardless of where it is.’

She lets out a ‘Hmmm’, her way of saying I’m not convinced, then finally leaves her scarf alone and turns to look at me. ‘Julianne, dearest, how have you been? You look … haggard.’

If anyone else had said this I’d be offended, but from my mother it’s only to be expected. ‘It’s only been two weeks since I last saw you. I can’t have changed that much.’

She shakes her head and looks at me as if staring at someone who’s just been told they’re terminal. ‘It just saddens me to see you run yourself so ragged. You’re probably doing too much again. Where’s that housekeeper of yours? What does she actually do? I swear she has a holiday every other day.’

‘It’s Cassie’s day off. Her first this week. And she isn’t always on holiday.’ I hear the closing of a door upstairs and jump slightly. Stephen must have gone back to his own room. My slight movement doesn’t escape my mother’s ever-observant eye.

‘Goodness, you’re twitchy. Maybe you should sit down.’

‘No, Mom, I need to go and finish the food.’

‘I can do that,’ James says, probably considering it the lesser of the two evils when compared with making small talk. He disappears off to the kitchen, leaving my mother smiling and shaking her head a little.

‘James is such a dear,’ she says.

I stare back blankly at her. My husband always gets the compliments, the praise, the terms of endearment. It’s probably because of all the money he’s given her over the years. Helping her buy a new property when we were married. The steady money she’s become used to, going out of our joint account and into hers every month. He’s her saviour, in many respects.

‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to when the man of the house has to tend to the cooking.’ She drops her gaze as she says this and continues to shake her head, as if slightly sad.

On some days I fight back. I pick her up on her sexism, her little digs, her many prejudices, her dated worldview. But today I haven’t got the energy. I just look at her, standing there in her crisp tailored blazer, as if she’s about to attend a boardroom meeting. She’s never set foot in a boardroom in her life, but dresses every day like she’s ready to negotiate a corporate merger or try to poach a big new client from a rival legal firm. ‘Dress for success’ is what she always used to teach me as a child. I can see her now, eyeing up my plain, dark-green, John Lewis own-brand cardigan, her lips curving down slightly at the sides. She doesn’t approve.

‘Come on into the lounge, Mom.’

I walk in ahead of her and immediately go to the drinks table. ‘Do you want anything?’

‘If you’re referring to a drink, Julianne, I will have a small sherry.’

I sigh as I pour the liquid into a glass and turn round to hand it to her. She’s appraising the Christmas tree, stepping back, slowly and deliberately, as one would in an art gallery when trying to take in a painting as a whole. She nods. ‘Very nice,’ she says. ‘Very … homely.’

‘Well, this is a home, so I guess something went right,’ I say.

‘I suppose.’

I don’t know what she means by that, but I’m not about to interrogate it right now. I sit down on one of the sofas before she does. After the tree, she continues her tour around the lounge, slowly turning, taking it all in, as if she hadn’t already seen everything hundreds of times before. She stops at the TV.

‘I did always tell you, Julianne, an excessively large television can seem a little … how shall I put it …?’

I can feel myself getting more tense by the second. ‘I don’t know, Mom, probably in your usual kind and generous way.’

She glances over at me, an eyebrow raised. ‘No need to get snippy, Julianne. Maybe you should have a drink yourself. Take the edge off.’

I continue to stare back at her and she turns away from the television. ‘I just fear a large television suggests that it has too much of an important place in your life.’

‘Or that we don’t all want to be squinting at some old twenty-two-incher as if this was still the 1990s. We’ve had that for over a year, Mom, and it’s not that much bigger than your new set. You’ve never had a problem with it before. You spent most of last Christmas glued to old musicals on it. In fact, I even think I remember you remarking how good that Blu-Ray boxset of yours looked on it compared to your previous old antique.’

She makes a tutting sound and shakes her head some more. ‘It was only an observation, Julianne. You don’t have to take everything as a personal attack.’ She moves over to the single sofa seat opposite me and sits down on the edge, straight-backed and looking less than comfortable. ‘Where is my favourite grandson?’

‘Your only grandson is upstairs finishing something. He’ll be down for dinner soon.’

‘Finishing something? Not schoolwork, four days before Christmas?’

‘It’s a big year for him, Mom. A levels, you know.’

‘No, I don’t know,’ she says, picking a nonexistent bit of fluff from her sleeve. ‘I don’t know how these schools work over here, and I never get much sense from you or James when I ask. I find the whole thing a bit incomprehensible compared to the American system.’

‘Mom, even that’s probably changed since you were there.’

‘Well, how would I know? Twenty-five years on, this whole place still feels like a mystery to me. I can barely understand the young people now. Some uncouth young man served me in Waitrose the other day and slurred his words so much I had to ask him five times to repeat himself.’

‘Maybe you’re going deaf.’

‘I certainly am not. Then he had the cheek to ask if I was over here for a holiday. I said to him I’d lived in this hellhole longer than he’d been alive.’

‘Richmond isn’t a hellhole, Mom.’

‘Well, it’s all right for you, living here, in the centre of things. Not banished to the suburbs with the waifs and strays.’

This is too much for me. I can’t be doing this right now. I’m struggling to remain calm, the mounting level of unease causing a dull nausea to ebb and flow around my body. I stand up and try my best not to shout. ‘Waifs and strays? Do you know what kind of a life you have compared to some people out there?’

As soon as I’ve said this, my mind darts to those documents. Those young women – the desperate state of their lives intricately detailed. I shiver involuntarily, but my mother doesn’t notice. She bats away my comment. ‘Oh, you don’t need to have a go at me, Julianne. Not this early in the evening. I’m aware I’m not one of those refugees you see crawling across Europe. I make do with what I have and I don’t complain.’

In another mood I might have found the sheer awfulness of what she’s just said funny, but today it riles me all the more. ‘Jesus Christ, can you hear yourself, Mom?’

She looks at me again, an expression of puzzlement and mild alarm stretching across her preserved skin. ‘Julianne, you seem to be quite emotional tonight. Would it be better if I left?’

I’m about to tell her, yes, it would be goddamn marvellous if she could just turn around and leave, but before I can say anything, James walks back in suddenly and my stomach lurches slightly. Diane smiles at him and picks up her sherry from the coffee table.

‘Not arguing, are we?’ he says, his eyes wandering in my direction.

‘Not at all,’ Diane says smoothly, laying a hand on James’s shoulder as she leaves the room. ‘Julianne’s just expressing the stresses of the season. Christmas is always much harder on the women. But the girls in this family have always been headstrong. At least, they always have been in the past …’

She disappears in the direction of the dining room and I realise I’m standing in the middle of the room, my hands clenched into fists.

‘Dinner’s practically ready. You coming?’ James says.

‘Sure. Can’t wait for round two.’

He smiles at me encouragingly. ‘Try to go easy on her. It’s Christmas.’

‘Maybe one day she could just go a bit easier on me.’

He chuckles as if I’ve said something amusing, then goes out into the hallway and shouts up the stairs to Stephen. There’s no reply.

‘He’s just finishing up some work,’ I say and try to steer James towards the dining room, but he holds still.

‘He should have come down to greet his grandma.’ He looks faintly annoyed. When I don’t answer he looks back at me. I don’t say anything.

‘Julianne? Hello?’

I realise I’ve been staring blankly at him. ‘Er … sorry,’ I muster.

James is clearly puzzled. He turns back to the stairs, and for a second I think he’s going to march up them to find Stephen, but then he shrugs and walks away.

‘He’ll be down soon,’ I say, hoping I’m right.

Chapter 5
Holly
Oxford, 1990

The first month went by in a bit of a blur. There was a lot of enforced socialising, with societies and study groups and after-seminar catch-ups, where the really eager people, a group I had accidentally fallen into, stayed behind and went over what had been discussed in class. There were study sessions with tutors, too, sometimes one-to-one, but usually with a study partner. My partner was a small, red-haired boy named Peter. Like many people there, he was polite and generally friendly to me, while remaining a little distant. It took me a few weeks to realise he was part of ‘The Ally Club’, as I had come to call them.

Ever since the first night, Ally and I had been friends, though our meet-ups mostly consisted of watching television on her bed, her curled up in a big plush throw or baggy jumper and me seated a little awkwardly at the end. She was obsessed with the soap Neighbours (‘It’s about Australians’) and watched it religiously, recording every episode onto a video cassette during the day and then watching them, usually with me, on the evenings she wasn’t out. I was never sure where she went on these nights and she never volunteered the information, so I didn’t feel I could ask in case it sounded like I was hankering after an invite. I suspected she was spending time with her brother, or friends on her French and Philosophy course, but tried not to dwell on it. Thinking about Ally’s friends meant thinking about Ernest, and thinking about Ernest meant thinking about James. I’d had crushes on boys before; quite strong, all-encompassing crushes that never went anywhere, but always ended in me feeling down and discontented with my looks. I had never really thought of myself as vain, but I was far from confident in my appearance, even if my mum did insist on referring to me occasionally as her ‘little blonde beauty’. I didn’t want James to become a crush. He wasn’t my type, he was out of my league, and there was something about him that irritated me. That calm, entirely self-assured way he had been lying on his friend’s sister’s bed. Insolent, maybe? I wasn’t sure, but I was certain life would be simpler staying out of his way.

I first came to realise Ally had a sort of group when I was coming back from the cinema with Becky and Rachael, two girls from my Victorian Literature class. I hadn’t really made much of an effort to get to know them in the first few weeks, but I was flattered when they asked me if I wanted to go with them, and it was a film I’d been wanting to see, a gangster movie called Goodfellas. It was the type of movie my mother would have been appalled at but my father would have secretly enjoyed, before agreeing sternly with my mother that such violence was ‘quite unnecessary’. Becky and Rachael also seemed to find the violence unnecessary and spent most of the way home talking about how nasty the whole thing was. I’d really enjoyed it and was tempted to ask why they had gone to see a crime thriller with an 18 certificate if they both felt, to quote Becky, ‘sick at the sight of blood’. As we were passing our college library, Rachael said she just needed to dive in to return a book before it closed. It was early November and bitterly cold, so we sheltered in the hallway of the library, which wasn’t much warmer, while Rachael went up to the desk.

It was then I heard Ally’s laugh, quite unmistakable, that hearty, low rumble, building to a crescendo of enthusiastic mirth. I peered inside and saw the librarian at the desk glance irritably to her left at a group of students seated around a circular table near one of the bookshelves. There she was, sitting with her brother, one arm around the back of his chair. James was there too, and my stomach lurched as I took in his navy-blue jumper, pulled tightly over a light-pink Oxford shirt. Though close-fitting, his clothes didn’t seem to restrain him and he moved with a sense of casual fluidity as he bent down to take a book out of his bag and add it to the pile of tomes on their table. They seemed to be in the midst of a study session. Then there was Peter, smaller than both the others, who seemed absorbed in his reading, his hands up around his head as if he was trying to block out the surrounding chatter, a mop of ginger hair falling over his forehead.

‘Friends of yours?’

Becky had come to stand next to me. I realised I must have been staring and took a step back from the inner warmth of the library into the cold hallway. ‘No,’ I said, quickly, unsure why I felt suddenly pressured into giving an explanation. ‘Well, sort of … the girl, Ally, she’s in the room next to me.’

Becky nodded and said, ‘I know, I’ve seen her a few times. Her brother is rather handsome, isn’t he?’

I glanced back at Ernest Kelman, at his stylishly cut blond hair and bright-white shirt, looking almost identical to when I’d seen him last, lying casually next to James on his sister’s bed.

‘Yes, he is rather. Not my type, though.’

Becky laughed. ‘I know what you mean. There’s something a bit “Hooray Henry” about him, isn’t there? Wouldn’t say no to his friend, though.’ She raised her eyebrows and I realised she was looking at James, who was now away from the table, scanning the nearby bookshelves. It pained me to admit it to myself but I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of irritation when she said this, as if James’s attractiveness was to be appreciated by me and me alone. I gave a non-committal nod and turned my back to them, smiling at Rachael as she returned to meet us, tightening the scarf around her neck before we resumed our walk back to our respective halls.

Chapter 6
Holly
Oxford, 1990

‘Virginia Woolf is overrated.’ I heard myself say it, but I couldn’t quite believe it had come out of my mouth. I frequently participated in my study sessions with Peter and Dr Lawrence, but never in a such a blunt, potentially controversial way. I could feel Peter’s eyes staring at me. Dr Lawrence, meanwhile, smiled knowingly.

‘Maybe you could expand on that interesting analysis, Holly.’ He had a way of saying things that made me half-wonder if he was taking the piss, but his interjections were full of encouragement and a clear passion for his subject.

‘Well, she wraps everything up in these airy-fairy metaphors instead of actually saying what she should be saying: life is tough, you’ll never find a sense of belonging and, to be frank, the hunt for it isn’t worth the effort, even if you actually do find it.’ I paused and realised my voice had been getting steadily louder.

Dr Lawrence nodded. ‘Do go on.’

‘Well, that’s it, I think,’ I finished, lamely, and glanced at Peter. ‘Do you have anything to add?’

I wasn’t quite sure where my newfound confidence had come from, but I had started to enjoy it.

‘Umm, well …’ Peter was taken aback, and I noticed Dr Lawrence seemed mildly amused by the effect my words had had on him.

‘Let’s take a step back, shall we?’ he said, coming to Peter’s rescue. ‘Let’s think about the idea of symbolism in To the Lighthouse. Do either of you have any initial thoughts on that before we probe it further with some examples within the text?’

After the study session, Peter spoke to me. I had been struggling with my bag; the cover of Mrs Dalloway had become torn when I’d inadvertently shoved my dictionary in on top of it in a hurry. I was hoping Peter would just pack up and leave as he usually did, but today he lingered.

‘You seemed more alive today.’

It was an odd thing to say and it caused me to turn and look at him with more attention than I had in a while. ‘Er … thanks. Does that mean I look dead most of the time?’

He laughed, though the laugh wasn’t convincing, like a grunt. It was a strangely masculine sound, closer to something I’d imagine hearing from Ernest or James. I continued to stare at him, waiting for a proper answer, but it didn’t arrive. Finally he said, ‘I think we – I mean, I think you – should spend more time with us. With me, James, Ernest, Ally. I think you’d like it.’

‘I’d like it?’

‘Yes. You’re friends with Ally, aren’t you? You live practically on top of each other.’

This wasn’t exactly true. Despite having adjacent rooms, Ally’s social life meant our time together was usually spent brushing our teeth in the morning before lectures or chatting on the way out of the showers. Time snatched away from the day here and there and the odd episode of Neighbours – hardly the basis of a close friendship. For Peter’s benefit, however, I nodded.

‘We talk about things. Books mainly. Music, sometimes. Cinema, if James is holding court. He loves films. Always tries to battle against Ernest’s snobbery towards them.’

‘Ernest doesn’t like films?’

‘Oh, I don’t think it’s to do with not liking them, exactly. It’s more he feels they can’t be interrogated in as rigorous a way as, say, Kant or Hume, or the great novelists like Dickens and Austen.’

‘I think that’s crap.’

Peter laughed. ‘It may well be, but that’s Ernest for you. Not one to budge on his opinions, even if the opposite is clearly true. James likes films, though. I think you’ll get on with him. So long as you don’t mind your entertainment a little on the dark side.’

I thought of Becky and Rachael complaining about the violence in Goodfellas, whereas I had been left relatively unmoved.

‘I can do dark,’ I said, trying to sound confident. A confidence I hadn’t really earned. How did I know I could ‘do dark’? Something shifted within me uncomfortably, like I was just reaching out and touching a barely visible line I’d never really known was there. New horizons. Uncharted territory. I was intrigued.

‘Then you’ll probably get on with him rather well.’

When I got back to my room, I found Ally waiting for me at my door. I was disconcerted by this. Had Peter had time to contact her during my short walk over from Dr Lawrence’s office and tell her what a fool I’d made of myself during the seminar? She was smiling, though, in her usual, enthusiastic way, and her eyes seemed to glow with excitement. ‘We’re going to the Wimpy.’

At first I thought I’d misheard and just stared stupidly at her. She rolled her eyes, as if she could guess what I was thinking.

‘Oh, I know, I know. You’re probably thinking it’s not quite our style. I’m not completely unaware of the image Ernest and I must give off. We do go to fast-food chains on occasion. It’s not just caviar at The Ritz every day, you know.’

I found my voice again. ‘I know that. Sorry, I wasn’t … I didn’t mean …’

More smiles. More eye rolling. ‘Relax. So do you want to come?’

I couldn’t imagine anything weirder. Sitting on those dingy, scruffy chairs at those grease-stained tables with the always immaculate-looking Ernest and James while Ally laughed in her rumbling Sloane Square tones at whatever witty aside James had made about Proust. But I nodded and told her it would be lovely. She didn’t seem convinced, but she smiled sweetly and then grabbed my arm. ‘Come on, let’s go and get ready.’

Getting ready involved Ally trying on multiple cardigans of various colours and weaves while she mused and puzzled about the temperature outside, the velocity of the wind and the cardigan’s usefulness if she was going to be wearing a coat over it in any case. I passed the time by browsing Ally’s book collection. There were some of the usual suspects there. Dickens and Austen. A couple of Brontës. But there were some surprises, too. I tried to quiz her on her apparent love for Kingsley Amis, but got a snort of derision as a response: ‘That old misogynist! Can’t stand the man. I should really throw them out, if I’m honest, but it’s a little bit awkward.’ I asked her why it was awkward and she just tossed her head to dislodge a gold strand of hair that had got stuck between her eyes and said casually, ‘Oh, he’s a family friend.’

I found myself in a strange, scratchy mood, as if I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. There was something about the randomness of the invite to the Wimpy that unnerved me slightly and I kept flicking between deciding not to go and feeling quietly excited they’d decided to let me into their little gang. When I found myself thinking this latter thought I mentally kicked myself. We weren’t back in school. The idea of having cliques and gangs was supposed to go away when you were past the age of seventeen, surely?

Apparently not, it seemed, as we set out on the short walk to the boys’ dorms. I could see other little packs making their way across the courtyard; small huddles of friends who had decided they belonged together. Whether through sports, studies, societies or just common interests, these people had decided they worked better as a team. We’re sociable animals by nature, of course, but the politics of friendship seemed to be emphasised here to a disproportionate degree; worse, perhaps, than when I was at school. The horrendous weather, which, combined with the spires and churches on the skyline, made it seem as if we’d slipped into a Hammer horror movie, meant Ally and I had to hold our coats hard to our chests for fear of them blowing open. The rain hadn’t started, but we both knew it wouldn’t be long, dreading the moment we would have to open our umbrellas and fight to keep them from being turned inside out with every gust that came our way.

When we reached the boys’ halls, I felt my stomach drop inside me, a feeling that only got worse as Ally marched down the corridor that led to their rooms. The thought of being in such close proximity to where they lived, where they slept, where they undressed – where James undressed – made me squirm slightly. Ally didn’t bother to knock, just barged into what I gathered was Ernest’s room. The place was shockingly messy, even messier than Ally’s. Clothes littered the floor – white shirts, mostly, which seemed to be Ernest’s trademark apparel, along with jumpers, underwear and stacks of books, many of which seemed to be written by obscure European philosophers and various other authors I had never heard of. On the desk was an extensive array of orange Penguin paperbacks and on the shelves were hardbacks from the Everyman’s Library series. It seemed that when he’d moved in there had been some effort to establish order, though these foundations had been tested over time.

‘See anything you like?’ said Ernest, who’d noticed me looking at the books. His face hadn’t quite spread out into a full sneer, but I was suspicious of the smile dancing around his lips.

‘Maybe,’ I said, then turned to Ally. ‘Is James’s room close? Are we meeting him and Peter at the restaurant?’

Ally was about to speak, but Ernest’s laughter cut her off. ‘Three things. First, I don’t think “restaurant” is usually a term employed in relation to the Wimpy, unless one is using it very loosely. Second, Peter has lost some book he desperately needs and is having a strop in the way only Peter knows how. He will indeed be meeting us there, if he finds his missing tome. And third, you might want to take a look at Sleeping Beauty in the bed over there. Better still, maybe you could give him a nudge for me. I’ve been trying to get him up for the past hour.’

I looked over at the bed and there was indeed, amidst an excessive amount of pillows, a human-size mass under the sheets, with the duvet pulled up so high that only a glimpse of brown hair could be seen nestled among the folds. I felt a jolt of something uncomfortable in my spine as I realised it was James, sleeping silently. I could see the rise and fall of his breathing, ever so slightly, in the shape of his shoulders.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, I thought you guys would be ready. I’m fucking starving.’ Ally stomped across to the bed and tore back the duvet. For one mortifying moment I found myself partly dreading, partly hoping, that he would be unclothed – perhaps even naked – under the covers, but he wasn’t. He was wearing pyjama bottoms and a navy-blue Oxford hoody.

‘Wake up.’ He recoiled from her harsh bark, moving closer to the wall, burrowing his head deeper into the mound of pillows. She got on the bed and began poking his back. ‘I want a bloody burger, and your idle behaviour isn’t going to stop me from getting it.’

Ernest was grinning, with his hands on his hips, watching his sister drag his friend from his bed. ‘We had a bit of a wild night last night,’ he said. ‘It takes poor James a little longer than most to recover. Delicate creature, he is.’

James was now sitting on the bed, rubbing his eyes. ‘I should go have a shower.’

‘No time for that. Didn’t you hear me? Me. Food. Want. Now. You look fine, anyway.’

‘Probably better than most of their clientele,’ Ernest drawled, rolling his eyes and smirking, though I kept my face neutral, refusing to be complicit in his casual snobbery.

‘Your trousers are around the floor somewhere, if you can find them,’ he said, but James shook his head and murmured something about jeans before wandering off out of Ernest’s room, presumably to his own to get some fresh attire.

It took about fifteen minutes for James to get ready. I spent most of it awkwardly perched on Ernest’s bed while Ally made complaints about her stomach and how she could feel the muscles contracting in protest due to extreme hunger. Ernest showed no sympathy and made a crude comment about James having a wank in the shower. Ally tutted at this and accused him of being vulgar. ‘Oh, he likes to knock one out in the mornings. Does it like clockwork.’ Ally reminded him that it was 5.30 p.m., which didn’t count as ‘the morning’, regardless of what time one woke up.

When he finally arrived, James did look a little more kempt, with his hair in a less-ruffled state and wearing a pair of dark-blue jeans. He’d swapped the hoody for a chunky burgundy jumper, which made him look like one of those dreamy-looking boys I’d seen once in a Ralph Lauren advertisement – boys who, I’d told myself at the time, weren’t real and had been crafted in an evil man-lab somewhere to make girls feel lightheaded and other boys feel jealous, resentful or sexually confused.

‘At bloody last,’ Ally huffed, and we all left Ernest’s room.

Conversation was attempted and then aborted as we walked around the corner to the fringes of the city centre. It was impossible to hear one’s own words, let alone those of anyone else, when the wind was screeching like a tortured farm animal and battering us from either side. The much-feared rain eventually arrived just as the warm, welcoming glow of the Wimpy came within sight, causing us to dash madly down the street and in through its little door before we got soaked to the skin.

The restaurant was almost empty, save for a woman and little boy in a dark corner at the end of the restaurant. She glanced around at me as we arrived, then turned back to the child, apparently trying to coax him into finishing the last of his chips.

‘Could we get a table for four, please? I’m afraid we haven’t booked. Is that a problem?’ This ridiculous question came from Ernest, who could barely contain his mirth at his own joke as he spoke to the bored-looking Asian lady behind the counter.

‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘Please sit where you like.’

‘You can be a bit of a dickhead, Ern,’ said James, though Ernest just beamed in response to this as if he considered it a compliment.

Peter was still nowhere to be seen, so we settled at the table nearest the window, away from the woman and child, and Ally began dishing out menus, grabbing extra ones from the tables nearby. I took the slightly sticky laminated sheet in my hand and looked through the options. Though I hadn’t been in a Wimpy for years, I wasn’t surprised to see only minimal changes had been made to the array of burgers, strangely plastic-looking sausages and other fried food. When the waitress came to take our order, I was slightly disconcerted when everyone ordered exactly the same thing: a cheeseburger and fries with a strawberry milkshake, as if it was some kind of set menu I wasn’t aware of. I almost changed my own choice so as not to be the odd one out, but stuck to my guns and ordered a burger with no cheese but tomato sauce, fries and a Coke.

Although I had been afraid of awkward silences, conversation came quite naturally, with Ally conducting everyone like an orchestra, asking me questions about my course in a way that enabled me to have a part in whatever they wanted to discuss. It turned out that, as with me, literature was their primary topic of conversation, as Peter had suggested. And I could see why he’d recommended I join in with them more after our discussion on To the Lighthouse; the group were apparently going through a bit of a Woolf phase. Mrs Dalloway seemed to be the focus today, with Ally declaring it ‘utter, pretentious claptrap’, while James and Ernest objected to her criticisms and said she ‘just didn’t get it’.

‘There’s no need to denigrate one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century simply because you have a short attention span.’ Ernest had a wicked smile on his face, knowing full well what would wind his sister up.

Ally almost spat her milkshake out of her nostrils. ‘I do not have a short attention span.’ She shifted in her seat irritably. ‘Where’s the food? They don’t usually take this long.’

‘I think you’ve just proved my point.’

‘Hunger has nothing to do with attention spans.’

‘And yet you used it to change the subject.’

Ally glared at him. ‘Peter’s still not here.’

‘Well spotted,’ said Ernest, peering over James’s shoulder at the rain-soaked night outside. ‘Perhaps he took one look at the weather and decided we weren’t worth it. Or he’s crying in one of the stacks of the library, having a little private funeral for the remnants of his essay.’

I took in Ernest’s fluid movements, his laughter, his playful barbs aimed at his sister. Some girls would like that type of thing, I thought as I watched him. But turning my attention to James, I felt a deep swell inside me, like a force rebelling against any attempts to tame it, and knew I wasn’t one of those girls. The quiet, serious type was my thing – a ‘thing’ I’d never really known I had until I met him for the first time. My lack of experience with boys was probably plain to see for people like Ally and Ernest who, by all accounts, enjoyed their respective sex lives in an unfussy, matter-of-fact kind of way. And when the topic of conversation turned, as it was always going to do, to the subject of sex, I found myself wanting to crawl under a rock somewhere. Or a table.

‘The problem is, she’s just never had it done to her,’ Ernest said, describing a girl he had gone home with a few nights before. ‘When I told her the name of it, she made this shrieking noise, as if she was repulsed.’

‘It does sound like some kind of infection, doesn’t it?’ said Ally, grimacing. ‘Cunnilingus. Cunn-i-ling-gus.’

‘It does if you say it like that.’ James grinned. Like me, he’d barely spoken throughout the whole dinner, just silently consumed his burger and chips, though leaving the two halves of the bun neatly on the side of his plate, having eaten the contents with a knife and fork. Ally rounded on him.

‘Ahh, so you have an opinion on this, do you?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Practise it much?’

James didn’t answer, instead picking up one of the fries that had fallen off Ernest’s plate and starting to move it around his own, mopping up a minuscule amount of tomato sauce from the edges.

‘His silence speaks volumes,’ said Ernest and winked at me.

‘Oh yes, sorry, I forgot. My brother doesn’t have a vagina, so of course James would have no interest in going down on one. A cock, on the other hand …’

‘Here we go.’ Ernest rolled his eyes. ‘I knew the Mrs Dalloway talks wouldn’t last long. Come on, let’s hear it, sis.’ He turned to me. ‘In case you haven’t already noticed, my sister likes nothing better than to imply James and I are sodomising the night away together. Just jealousy, I’d say. Plain and simple. She can’t bear the thought that I converse with and laugh with and breathe the same air as another individual other than herself.’

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or not, so I glanced at Ally, who had a look of triumph in her eye.

‘Sodomising the night away? Interesting turn of phrase, dearest brother. I don’t remember anyone saying anything about sodomy. Interesting that your mind should jump so quickly to penetrative sex. I was merely implying oral, but if you want to plunge straight in at the deep end, be my guest.’ She shot me a wicked smile, raising her eyebrows, enjoying the game. Her references to gay sex startled me somewhat. I wasn’t naïve – I knew some men did such things – but throughout my teens my parents had always implied men who had sex with men were disease-ridden AIDS sufferers who would soon perish as a result of their aberrant desires. This bothered me throughout the rest of our meal and, after Ally had got bored and all the fries had been eaten, the quick trudge in the drizzle back to our respective dorms. Ally seemed to be treating it all as a bit of a laugh, though I wasn’t entirely sure if her comments were manifestations of her own prejudices towards gay men, or if they were actually based on a glimmer of truth, and she just enjoyed torturing the two boys with this knowledge. Presumably the boys had slept together last night, if James had been in Ernest’s bed for most of the day. Perhaps their friendship wasn’t purely platonic. But Ally had also implied Ernest was a prolific ‘shagger’ of ladies, and that I was (or at least appeared to be, on the outside) just his type. I’d heard some people liked both genders, but to me this seemed even farther removed from my everyday life than homosexuals pure and simple. The idea of not being restricted by gender frightened me slightly, though I didn’t quite know why. It had a rather thrilling, anarchic quality to it, as if the constraints on gender that dominated the lives of the many didn’t apply to them. They were free.

Ally and I got back to our halls first and she waved goodbye to the two boys without properly looking at them. I was surprised at the abrupt ending to the evening. It was still only 7.15. Hardly a wild night out for a bunch of students. Maybe they were all going to congregate later on when I was safely back in my room. They might swap notes on how well they thought I’d done. I was cross I hadn’t had more time to really assert myself or make my presence seem worthwhile. Instead of an active participant, I’d become a passive spectator, watching Ally trade quips with her brother about his sexual preferences. My mind was dwelling on this in such detail that I didn’t realise, as we were walking towards our rooms, that Ally was in the full flow of conversation.

‘… I just thought it would be nice for you to see us all together. We’re not exactly a frightening bunch. I know Ern can be a bit, well, spikey occasionally, but that’s just his insecurities showing through. He collects them, don’t you know? Like some people collect stamps or rare novels, he collects insecurities. Intellect is the main one. It’s like he’s absolutely terrified one day everyone – teachers, professors, friends, the world – will discover he’s actually just ‘rather bright’ rather than ‘insanely brilliant’. There’s a big difference between the two, of course, and Ernest is traumatised by the knowledge that if anyone dug too deeply they’d probably place him in the former category.’

She unlocked her door and walked in still talking, presuming I would follow.

‘Anyway, I don’t know why he’s worried. He’ll get what he’s always wanted – a seat in the Commons. Daddy’s practically got it all sorted for him. He’ll have no trouble winning a place.’

I made a vague sound, somewhere between affirmation and ‘do go on’.

‘Yes, well, he’ll just need to get a first, of course. Daddy’s rather firm about that. And it’s not a question of how clever he is; it’s more about whether he actually does what he’s told. Studies the things he’s supposed to study, not the nonsense he’s more interested in.’

‘Surely he should focus on his interests?’ I said, unsure why I was standing up for him.

‘Hmm, you sound like my mother.’ Ally rolled her eyes and collapsed onto her bed, causing the springs in the mattress to twang noisily.

Being likened to someone so close, at least biologically, to Ally must, I decided, be a positive thing, so I smiled and peered around awkwardly at the untidy room.

‘Oh, please, Holly, sit down. You’re making me tense just standing there.’ She gave one of her bark-like laughs.

I started to think about what it would be like to lie down next to Ally in the same way Ernest and James did. Our bodies touching, the strands of our hair intermingling. The thought didn’t repulse me, but at the same time I felt there were other people I’d rather do that with. Wondering whether this might be the harbinger of a lesbian experimentation phase – a rather candid art teacher at my school had once implied all girls went through something of this nature at university – I opted to sit in a restrained fashion at the edge of Ally’s bed, careful not to let my body touch hers.

‘Let’s talk about sex, Holly.’

Ally’s words sent a jolt of concern through me. I didn’t believe in mind-reading, but it was amazing how sometimes people could hit the mark. I must have jumped, because she laid a hand on my arm and said, ‘Don’t flinch. Oh goodness, anyone would think I’d offered you heroin.’ She was smiling and looked relaxed, so I nodded.

‘Holly, you seem, well, I hate to say this, but … quite innocent.’

‘I am innocent,’ I said. Then, worried this might sound a little strange, I added, ‘I mean, I’ve had limited experience.’

Another laugh. ‘That’s not so unusual. You’re only eighteen.’

‘Nineteen in five months,’ I murmured.

‘Does it bother you, being a virgin?’

Though she was clearly trying to be kind, it sounded as if she was actually asking, Do you mind being disabled?

‘I … I don’t really know.’ I tried to choose my words carefully, but I felt my heart beating a loud, relentless chant in my chest and was keen to drown out the noise of it. ‘I’ve done some stuff. But not everything. There was a party once. And then another time at a picnic. But I had hayfever and needed an antihistamine.’ I doubted this added detail was necessary, but it seemed like a legitimate mitigating factor. Who’d want to have sex while being plagued by three-minute-long sneezing fits and streaming eyes?

‘Oh, poor you. That must have been awkward. Did you not have any male friends you could, you know, experiment with? A few of Ernest’s school chums came in handy for me. So to speak.’ She winked.

‘I did have friends who were boys. I was very close to one of them: George. We did everything together, for a bit.’ Ally’s eyes widened, and I rushed to clarify. ‘Everything school-wise. Nothing like that. That would have been weird.’

‘Would it? Sometimes friends can be good. Stops it getting too romantic. It’s like a barrier, a prearranged stop sign that helps you both stay on the same page. Although my first time – well, first sexual experience – was a sort of date, at the opera of all places. Tosca. I was fifteen. We were in a box watching the performance and my mother was keen for me to sit next to this boy called Archibald. Well, he liked to be called Archie but his parents thought that common. So, anyway, Archibald is an aristrocrat, which explains my mother’s reason for wanting us to be close. We were just getting to the torture scene when I felt his hand creeping up my thigh. We were slightly to the side, hidden – or at least I hope we were – from the view of my parents and his parents. I didn’t stop him. He kept on and I felt my knickers getting wet. He slid in so easily. God, it felt good. I came incredibly quickly, much faster than I had ever done by myself. I had to keep silent, though. To this day I’ve been rather proud of how I did that. A little concentration and the odd well-placed yawn go a long way.’

I felt slightly dazed by this level of oversharing, completely at a loss as to how to respond. If that had been me (which was unlikely, since my parents were always commenting on how pricey tickets to the local am-dram performances were), I think I’d probably have been too shocked and embarrassed to ever tell anyone. But Ally said it so coolly, in her no-nonsense, matter-of-fact way. I was quietly in awe of her.

‘James would probably fuck you, you know. If I asked him to. Do you want me to mention it?’

I gasped. ‘What?’

Ally laughed again, and this time I felt a prickle of annoyance. Was she playing with me? Trying to make me feel uncomfortable?

‘Oh, come on, Holly. You’ve got to lose the big V at some point. It might as well be to a man you clearly have the major hots for. So many girls fancy James. Many would kill – literally kill – for the chance. I swear some have got close to murder in the past. He’s left a trail of broken hearts in his wake. And broken hearts can be a dangerous thing. I’m sure you’ve read enough tragic love stories to know that.’

I was feeling very awkward now. ‘I think … I think I should go back to my room now.’ I made no immediate move to go, but Ally looked alarmed.

‘Oh goodness, I’ve upset you.’

‘You haven’t. I’m just not used to talking about this stuff.’

Ally surveyed me, as if thinking deeply about something. ‘Yes, I can see that.’

We sat in silence for a few seconds, her looking at me while twisting one of her locks of blonde hair around an index finger.

‘Bedtime,’ I said, and gave Ally a smile in case she thought I was offended. ‘I know it’s early but …’

‘It’s time.’ She nodded, returned the smile, and sat up on her bed. She gave me a hug at the door. There was something strange about the hug that I couldn’t quite work out. A mixture of comfort and acceptance. I felt I had passed a test in some way. Proved I was interesting enough to warrant her attention, perhaps? Or maybe the opposite. That I was innocuous and plain and wouldn’t change their equilibrium too much, so hey, they might as well have this boring poor girl as a friend. Or maybe I was just overthinking it. I said goodnight to Ally and went next door to my room.

Chapter 7
Julianne
Knightsbridge, 2019

Dinner isn’t going well. If I were being honest with myself, I would admit I’d made a pasta bake partly to piss my mother off a little, as I knew she’d regard it as unsophisticated. But as I carved a chunk of the slightly overcooked congealed mass out of the bowl and a flap of solid cheese flopped onto her plate, I wished I’d gone with oysters.

‘My, you’ve certainly been busy,’ Diane says, moving a few tough bits of pasta to the side with her fork. ‘Every room looks as festive as could be. Must have taken you a lot of time and energy.’

‘A bit,’ I say, then turn round as I hear a noise behind me.

‘Ah, it’s my favourite grandson.’ She stands up to embrace Stephen as he walks into the room.

‘We started because we didn’t know if you were coming,’ James says in a voice that makes it clear he doesn’t approve.

‘I explained you were busy finishing up some work,’ I cut in quickly.

‘I’m sorry, yes, French coursework.’

‘They work you too hard,’ Mom says, pinching Stephen’s cheek. ‘Both the teachers and your parents.’ As she sits back down and Stephen goes to take the chair next to his father, a ripple of sadness runs through me. She never thought I was being worked too hard when I was up until one in the morning writing essay after essay, doing more than all my friends, desperately trying to get into one of the world’s most prestigious universities in a country I didn’t know. She didn’t tell me to have a break or suggest I should take Christmas off. No matter what I did, it was never enough. If I so much as watched a single episode of a soap opera or read a magazine, I was made to feel like I was shirking. Little comments would be made at the dinner table, suggesting television ‘was all I cared about these days’ or that she should donate some of my schoolbooks to Goodwill ‘because I hardly ever opened them any more’. I’d sit there with the tears close behind my eyes, trying to ignore her. Some things never change.

‘Stephen needs to work hard,’ James says. ‘He’s aiming for the best. Of course, if he’d gone to Eton like we originally planned, things might be more certain.’

When I married him, I’d been quietly confident we wouldn’t turn into one of those couples who make digs at each other across the dinner table – bring up old disagreements to wound the other. My parents did that throughout my childhood. And now, here’s James, making a little jibe about my problem with Eton. It’s deliberate. And it hurts.

‘Oh, I couldn’t agree more,’ Diane says. ‘There’s a reason it’s world-famous. But it’s amazing what he’s done to pull himself above the rest at that new-fangled place he’s at.’

I almost choke on my food. ‘Westminster is older than Eton, Mom. As if that matters. Especially to you.’

She looks affronted. ‘Of course my grandson’s education matters to me. And I did think the decision was made a little rashly. After all, James does know about these things.’

‘Well, it was all years ago now,’ James says. ‘And nobody doubts Westminster is a great school.’ He gives me one of his warm smiles, probably worried he’s upset me. I automatically send one back his way without thinking. Usually he’s pretty good at presenting a united front when my mother’s here. I just wish he was doing better today.

‘You do realise you’re all talking about me like I’m not here.’ Stephen’s looking sullenly into his food.

James lets out a laugh. ‘I’m sorry, you’re right. You must excuse us. It must be tiresome to have your old folks wittering on about you.’

‘Less of the old!’ I say, trying to sound more cheerful than I feel. James gives me a chuckle in response but Stephen and his grandmother remain stonily silent. I even see Diane raise one of her perfectly plucked eyebrows a little, as if to say, Well, you’re not exactly young. She then turns to talk to Stephen and asks, ‘What are you planning to do with your Christmas holiday?’

He looks disconcerted by the question, as if it’s a trap he might fall into. Taking a fleeting look at his father, he proceeds to give a mumbled list of his homework assignments, social arrangements with his school friends, and how he plans to stay at his boyfriend’s house in the gap between Boxing Day and New Year.

‘How is William?’ James asks. ‘We haven’t seen him for weeks. Busy revising, is he? He’s determined to get into Oxford, Diane. Such a hard worker.’

‘Just like Stephen is,’ I say, coming to his defence before his father’s digs become too blatant.

‘Well, I imagine Stephen’s a dead cert for Oxford, too. First my daughter, then my grandson, both off to the best university in the world. I’m so proud just at the thought of it.’

That niggle in my head is back again. The sense of resentment that only now, decades later, can my mother suggest she is ‘proud’ I got in to Oxford. On the day I found out I’d won a place, she’d acted like it was merely another big task she could tick off her to-do list. Daughter into Oxford: check.

‘I think,’ I say, choosing my words carefully, ‘that Stephen is keen to go to the college that suits his skills the best and offers the course he most likes. He won’t be going anywhere just because Will is.’

My mother looks so horrified it’s almost comical. ‘Julianne, are you telling me you’re actively trying to dissuade the boy from attending the greatest—’

‘Oh, spare me the greatest university in the world talk, Mom. There are plenty of other great universities.’

I can see James moving food around his plate with sharp stabs of his fork. I’ve pissed him off now.

Stephen looks around at us. ‘You’re all doing it again. I’m still here you know.’

Nobody laughs this time. My mom is looking around her as if trying to suss out where in the argument she could fit in. ‘I’m sensing some tension,’ she says eventually.

‘How observant of you,’ I reply, not looking at her.

‘I’m sorry, Diane,’ James says. ‘We can’t be much fun tonight. Julianne is clearly stressed with Christmas and everything …’

‘Am I?’ I say, looking at him. ‘You’ve decided that, have you?’

‘… and Stephen,’ he says, ignoring me. ‘I think he must be getting worried about his mountains of coursework.’

Stephen shakes his head. ‘I’m not that worried.’

‘Then why, may I ask, have you been sitting at this table like a grumpy teenager all evening?’

James is doing his strict-parent voice now. I’ve never understood why Stephen takes it so seriously and rarely answers back when his father gets angry. To me, it sounds like someone in a play, just pretending, speaking the lines they think they should say without being totally sure how they should be saying them. He’s never been the loud, forthright one – that’s partly the reason I fell for him, back when I was just nineteen. He was more the quiet, brooding type, exerting a quiet confidence rather than a forceful one. The more show-offy bursts of emotion he’d left to his friends, Ally and Ernest.

Stephen doesn’t immediately respond to his father, but carries on staring at his food. I’m growing steadily more worried about him. While I’m desperate to talk to James about what I’ve just seen on his computer, I would very much prefer Stephen not to be present and, if possible, minimise his part in the whole thing. The thought of my mother being within hearing distance is mortifying.

‘I’ve … I’ve just got a lot to think about,’ Stephen says, and then carries on eating his food.

Silence resumes for the rest of the meal.

After dinner, my mother is keen to gravitate towards the lounge pretty quickly, and it becomes clear, as she locates the Christmas bumper issue of the Radio Times, that there’s a showing of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel she’s keen to see. She often stays to watch something with us on TV after dinner, but it’s rarely longer than an hour and a full-length feature film is certainly not the norm. ‘It’s rather long,’ I say, looking at the listing in the magazine, noticing that, with commercials, it will run for two and a half hours.

‘Oh, it’s a glorious film,’ James says, settling down in his usual spot on the one-seater. Back when we first bought the house, he and I used to snuggle together on the sofa, sometimes with toddler Stephen between us. As the years had gone by, however, it’d become just Stephen and I sitting together at each end of the long sofa, and James on his own at the other side of the room. Thinking about it now, I wonder when that happened. When did he first make the move to sit alone? I can’t place the moment in my head. The change just seems to have slipped into my life without my noticing it.

‘I’ve been wanting to see it for ages, ever since Susana at the swimming club told me how much she and her husband love it. It’s become one of their favourites, apparently. I was worried I was going to miss it when you invited me round to dinner; then I thought it might be nice for us to watch it together.’

A flash of panic courses through me. I’m not sure I have the energy to watch something right now. I need to clear my head. Get things sorted. Talk to my husband. As I turn towards the television screen, my mind flicks back once again to that clinically cold list of details about those young women, their haunting faces, their lack of family or friends or proper employment. I know people live like that. I know not everyone is as lucky as I am. But who would want to collect all that information and pool it into one horrible document?

‘You don’t mind, do you, Julianne? I’d hate to miss it.’

My mother’s voice snaps me back to the present. She’s brandishing the TV remote at me. I’m tempted to remind her of the state-of-the-art Sky Q facilities she has at home and how, if she was so desperate to see this particular film, she could have easily recorded it. Instead, I resign myself to another few hours of her company and try to get myself in the frame of mind to watch Judi Dench and Bill Nighy smile and joke their way across India, knowing it’s the last thing I want to do.

Chapter 8
Holly
Oxford, 1990

My dad once told me that friends come and go and you never really know which ones mean the most until they abandon you. Strong words for a father to tell his seven-year-old child, but that was my father for you: inappropriate and unaware. My mother overheard him and came to tell me that Daddy had actually had a bit of a mix-up and forgotten to mention that most people grow up to have a great group of friends they can have a fun time with. Dad stood back as Mum set about correcting his statement, looking slightly puzzled. When my mum walked back into the kitchen – we had been standing in the corridor, me swinging precariously from one of the lower banisters – he had sighed deeply and then just said, ‘Maybe I was wrong. I’m sure you’ll work all this out for yourself, little Holly.’

Although I probably wouldn’t say this conversation caused me to be a loner throughout the rest of my childhood and most of my teenage years, it was probably a contributing factor. I always found I could never quite trust someone enough, whether it was Stephanie and George in art class, who liked to chat endlessly about popstars and trashy movies, or Greg, the first boy I thought that, in another world, I could have dated. None of them managed to install a framework of trust within me. There was no pattern of reliability; not because they continually let me down – more because I never gave them much of a chance not to.

When Ally suggested she thought I should spend more time with her, Ernest, James and Peter, I saw this as proof my mother had been right, but also, at the same time, a challenge to the gods of fate to see if my father would be right as well. I did test them privately on this, when I used the communal telephone in the hallway. Mum got one version of the story: I had met a lovely group of people, very posh but not bad posh, and I was having a good time discussing my interests with them, most of which they shared, and we had nice outings and food together (‘The Wimpy! I know, so strange, but really fun’) and I thought there might be something of a romance blossoming between one of the boys, James, and me. That last bit was pure exaggeration. My feelings for James had grown more intense by the day, to the point where I had started to pull out a couple of strands of my hair to take away my nerves each time I went somewhere I knew he would be. Not enough for there to be bald spots on my head. Just one or two. I found it helped. But I didn’t tell Mum that part.

Dad, on the other hand, received a different version of Holly’s Time at Oxford University. He was told that I’d sort of befriended a group of posh people I didn’t think he would like. I didn’t like them much either, but I was focusing mostly on my studies and they were good for me to sound ideas off. No, I wouldn’t be bringing any of them home over the Christmas holidays, he didn’t have to worry about that. Boyfriend? No, there wasn’t anything much like that on the horizon. Maybe a boy I liked, but it wasn’t anything worth mentioning.

Some people might have found the way I approached occasional phone calls home to my parents odd, but it worked for me. Each conversation was crafted so it lasted long enough to make the call worth the money but not so long as to bore any of the parties involved. The details that would most impress Mum were emphasised and the parts that would least appeal to Dad were played down or excised completely. All in all, I did a pretty good job of giving each of them what they wanted.

So when I found myself going on my third outing as part of ‘The Ally Club’, as I continued to call it in my head, I found I was judging conversations and how people reacted to me through the dual perspective of my parents. Or, rather, through my own filtering mechanism, deciding how I would relay the event to each of them if I were to call them when I returned home (which I wouldn’t be doing, since I had phoned them only four days previously).

We were going to Blackwells, in Broad Street. I knew it was a famous bookshop – I had been there with my parents when we’d looked round the university and read the little plaque on the wall saying it had been opened in 1879 – but I still nodded and seemed interested when Ernest told me this. He was frequently doing this; treating me as if I needed the world explaining to me (and not even just the posh aspects of the world; sometimes things as mundane, though curiously unmanly, as how best to get stains off clothes). I usually just smiled and nodded and said the right things. I’d always been good at doing that. And that’s why I quite enjoyed occasionally doing the complete opposite and challenging what people said. A lot of pleasure could be derived from being the mouse that roared.

Ally and I had arranged to get a milkshake from a small café before meeting the boys at the bookshop. The purpose of the visit was to stock up on reading material for the Christmas holidays. Over their school breaks, Ernest and James had always held a competition: which of the two could read the most pieces of literature. They had devised a points-based scoring system, too. Five points per book under six hundred pages. Ten points per book over six hundred. Two points would be deducted if the book had been written after the turn of the century, with the exception of those that had won either the Booker or the Pulitzer, or were by authors who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Five points would also be deducted from the total amount if the participant failed to include a ‘reasonable spread’ of genres, periods of writing and nationalities. Ally gave me a thorough explanation of all this on our way to buy the milkshakes and while we drank them. ‘Apparently the teachers at Eton egged them on, rather. Kept recommending books they should add to their lists. They like competition, Etonians. They’d turn everything into a game if they could. God, they even turn masturbating into a competitive sport.’

I realised I’d pulled a face at the word ‘masturbating’ but Ally seemed spurred on by it. I got the feeling she’d come to like shocking me. ‘Oh yes, apparently they all stand around in a circle with a biscuit on a table in the middle. Then they pump away at themselves and the first person to spill his seed, so to speak, is the winner. The last person is, well …’

‘Well, what?’

‘The loser.’

I grimaced. ‘And what happens to the biscuit?’ I said, thinking I could probably guess the answer.

‘The loser has to eat it.’

‘That doesn’t sound very appetising.’

Ally chuckled. ‘I don’t think it’s meant to be. Just a bit of fun, I’m sure.’

‘Can’t you get AIDS that way?’

She tilted her head to one side and took a sip of her milkshake, apparently considering this. ‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure, to be honest. I doubt it. Otherwise I think most MPs would be on their deathbeds!’

She laughed loudly at her own joke.

‘So, do you know which books they’ll be picking this time?’ I said, keen to get the conversation away from boys consuming their own, and others’, semen.

‘Well, they have a bit of trouble now, since they’ve read so much already, so there’s naturally a bit of double-dipping. They haven’t really found a way to control that side of things, so they just try to make sure their lists are made up of a healthy majority of titles they haven’t read before, and the ones they have they aren’t supposed to have read for a good few years.’

The book lover in me liked the sound of this, although I knew I wouldn’t be able to compete with Ernest and James in a million years. They both seemed to swallow literature, or inhale it like a long drag on a cigarette, relishing it as they went. I read for pleasure, first and foremost, whereas they seemed to see it primarily as a form of self-nourishment.

‘Do you ever join in?’ I asked.

‘Christ, no. I wouldn’t be able to keep up. It would be a humiliation.’

Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Ally with a book, or even properly studying. Perhaps she was one of those people who just sailed through coursework and exams without ever really having to try. There had been a couple of girls in my school like that. I’d envied them greatly.

We tried to enter Blackwells, but didn’t get very far. A young bookseller, in the midst of neatly arranging copies of a Stephen King novel on a small table, looked up and told us we’d need to finish our milkshakes before we came any further. Ally rolled her eyes at him and for a minute I wondered if she’d ignore him and just march in, but to my relief she stepped back outside. A few minutes later, having discarded our empty milkshake cups in a wastepaper basket the bookseller had helpfully offered us, we walked purposefully, with me following Ally’s lead, through the store towards the back. It was a vast shop, and went further back than I remembered. We found the section marked ‘Classics’ pretty quickly. I noticed it was divided up into ‘English Literature’, ‘World Classics’ and ‘Modern Classics’. Each one was full of a vast array of volumes, most of them sporting the black or light-turquoise spines that characterised a sizeable chunk of Penguin’s publishing output. There were hefty, more academic volumes of famous novels mixed in too, no doubt containing annotations, guides to the text, essays, lists of further reading and various other extras. I was about to start perusing the shelves properly when Ally tugged at my arm.

‘Come on, round here.’

She steered me around the corner of one of the shelves towards a small alcove with a table and set of armchairs. Ernest and James sat side by side on one of them, the former lounging back, his head buried in an extremely large book which I recognised as The Count of Monte Cristo. James, on the other hand, was leaning forward, running an index finger down what appeared to be a long list, written in a leather-bound exercise book.

‘Ding dong merrily, my little Christmas readers!’ Ally said loudly. I glanced around, slightly embarrassed, but there wasn’t another person in sight and the alcove was well-hidden from view of the main part of the shop.

‘It isn’t Christmas. It’s October, sis.’

Ernest didn’t even bother to lower the book as he spoke. James’s reaction was friendlier. ‘But she is indeed right that we are here with Christmas in mind.’ He nodded towards the empty sofa in front of him and then looked back at us. ‘Sit down, you two. You can join in the fun.’ Not for the first time, his eyes lingered on me slightly longer than Ally. I could feel myself reddening, so sat down quickly on the sofa, with Ally following suit slightly less gracefully.

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