Chapter 1
1
THE FIRST SUMMER – 2011
The first trip to Paris had been Tom’s idea.
He’d given her the envelope when she’d been sitting on the edge of his bed, slipping her trainers on, ready to disappear to class. Reaching past her, he’d pulled it from a drawer at the bedside and handed it over.
‘What’s this?’ she said. ‘Exam results or something?’
‘Open it.’ He grinned, confident of her reaction.
She hated opening presents in front of the giver, hated feeling their sharp, discerning eyes on her face, judging her reaction. She never got the expression right – the surprise of the gift inside, the shock of it, adjustment – it took time. ‘Are you disappointed?’ people would say, or ‘I’ve still got the receipt if you want to return it.’
This time, drawing out the tickets, she snorted. ‘Eurostar?’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘Why not?’
‘It must have cost a fortune!’
He laughed and lay back on his single bed, under a black poster with white lettering emblazoned with the words ‘PARENTAL WARNING: EXPLICIT LYRICS’. ‘But do you like?’ he asked.
‘Well,’ she coloured. ‘Of course. It just seems…’
‘What?’
‘A bit extravagant?’
‘They’re just train tickets.’
‘Yes, but to Paris.’
‘Yes. You said you wanted to go one day.’
‘They’re first class!’
‘Only the best,’ he said, a lazy smile crossing his features. She couldn’t get used to his relaxed stance on money. His parents had it apparently – she wasn’t yet sure whether that meant they lived in some elaborate country pad, or just that they were doing OK in middle-class suburbia. She suspected the former – it was something about his ease about money, the way he spent it, the way he talked about it as if it were no big deal.
She – attending Anglia Ruskin, the former polytechnic, rather than the ‘real Cambridge’ university in the same city – felt herself to be an ordinary student, living on beans and pasta and watching every penny. Poor. Budgeting. Counting out change to see if she could get chips on the way home from the uni bar. But it didn’t matter because she was the same as everyone else in her circle.
When she was with him though, things felt different. She was somehow reduced. He wouldn’t automatically order the cheapest thing on the menu, didn’t baulk when he went through the till at Sainsbury’s. Got two scoops on his ice cream in the park. It wasn’t that he was off buying expensive luxuries, but to her – in her third frugal year of an English degree – the carelessness with money felt foreign.
He got an allowance, whereas she topped up her student loan with two shifts a week at The Anchor. When he was short, he rang his dad for a bung. When she was short, she rang her parents for sympathy – the only thing they had plenty of.
It shouldn’t make her feel inferior – her almost certainly first-class English degree would set her up in a way his half-hearted philosophy third (albeit from ‘real Cambridge’) might not. But somehow, she always felt on the back foot.
‘I can’t… pay for mine,’ she said.
‘Soph. It’s a gift.’
She nodded. She knew that, really. But something inside her twisted. They’d been together for two months – it was early for this kind of gesture. But maybe in his world that’s what couples did. She felt him watching her. ‘Thank you,’ she said at last.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said casually.
She wondered whether it really did feel like nothing to him. Or whether he’d stressed over giving her the tickets. Whenever she bought something for a new boyfriend, she worried it might seem ‘too much’; that she might scare them off. She couldn’t imagine for a second that Tom had felt this way – would ever feel this way.
She showed them to Libby later as they sat in the fifteenth row of the lecture hall, watching an academic in an ill-fitting suit lecturing on seventeenth century poetry. Libby opened her mouth in an expression of surprise. ‘From Tom?’ she whispered.
Sophie nodded.
‘Lucky.’
She shrugged her response. She didn’t know how she felt about it yet.
‘He must really like you.’
She wasn’t sure about that either.
Sophie had barely remembered Tom when they’d bumped into each other in the small Internet cafe on Mill Road a week or so after the infamous party. She’d been sitting at a table reading Middlemarch and he’d joined her without even asking if it was OK, opening his own book and ordering a coffee before saying, ‘Oh, you don’t mind do you?’ in a way that gave her no real recourse to say that she did, that actually she was reading a set text and it was difficult to concentrate with his constant slurping and spoon-stirring.
‘Just trying to read,’ she’d said.
‘I won’t distract you, don’t worry,’ he’d said before proceeding to distract her constantly – especially frustrating as she was already struggling to get through the enormous tome and had come to the cafe in the hope it would help her focus.
By the end of the hour, he had her number and she wasn’t 100 per cent sure exactly how it had all happened.
‘Smooth operator,’ Libby had said when she’d told her. ‘Are you going to see him again?’
‘He probably won’t ring.’ She’d shrugged, embarrassed that she desperately wanted him to. Even though he was annoying. Even though he’d made her even more behind with her work with his incessant (albeit charming) chatter. Even though she resented him for making her feel something when she was so determined not to.
He’d called her that evening. And now, somehow, they were in this fledgling relationship where all her newly acquired, near-adult confidence seemed to disappear. He had an aura about him, something about privilege maybe, and it was hard to fully read him sometimes. She wasn’t sure exactly what they were to each other even now, whether it was a fling to him or something more. And she hated that he had her wondering like this – like a lovelorn schoolgirl rather than the woman she was determined to be.
Being at different unis, they had no friends in common whom she could ask about him, no ex-girlfriends in her circle whose ears she could whisper into. The students from the two universities – and within them their colleges and departments – seemed to cluster together, sharing halls and houses and lecture notes with their own and forming tight-knit groups with friends who had become, over the short, intense years, like family.
Their first date had been to the theatre – a rather tired, student-led production of The Importance of Being Earnest, followed by drinks at The Anchor, sitting on a little bridge over the Cam and watching the river sparkle below. ‘So, what made you choose English?’ he’d asked her.
She’d shrugged. ‘I love reading. Books. Language. What about you? Why philosophy?’
He’d laughed. ‘I’m a whore for Socrates,’ he’d told her. Then, ‘Nah. Just didn’t know what else to do, if I’m honest. And there was a place, so…’
‘Right.’
He was fun, she’d decided after he’d kissed her goodbye and she’d walked home along the back streets of Mill Road. He’d sent a text message asking her out again and she’d typed ‘OK’.
Their second date had almost been their last. A picnic on Parker’s Piece – a large area of green that stretched between her university and the city centre. He’d brought sparkling wine and two glasses, she’d brought some ‘nibbly bits’ then felt embarrassed when he’d laughed at her calling them that.
But they’d got on well, again, and she’d begun to feel herself relax in his company. He was funny, told a good anecdote and she found herself laughing freely. Until he’d said it. ‘You know your laugh reminds me of something?’
‘What?’ she’d asked, almost priming herself for a compliment.
‘A pig.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah. You snort like a pig when you laugh.’ He’d told her this as if she would take it as – what? A compliment? A joke? But she’d flushed – she knew she had an unusual laugh, a tendency to draw air through her nose and snort when really amused. But she hated any attention being brought to it.
‘Oh, come on, Miss Piggy!’ he’d said. ‘I think it’s cute.’ He’d nuzzled against her, making snorting noises, opening his eyes wide and trying to appease her.
‘It’s not funny.’
‘Sorry.’ He’d sat up then.
An awkward silence had come over the pair of them as they had sat together, tearing bits off the French stick, sipping at their wine. And she’d thought to herself that if he asked her out again, she wouldn’t say yes.
Then he’d shifted closer to her again, put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him. ‘I really am sorry, you know. What an idiot!’ he’d said. ‘I just… I was trying to make you laugh. I love your laugh. I do, honestly.’
It wasn’t his words that had soothed her as much as his touch. The smell of him as she nestled closer. And she realised that when she was in his arms, she’d forgive him almost anything.
Now they spent most nights together in his digs, went for drinks or food in the town several evenings a week. Spent far too long on the phone when they weren’t together. At twenty, it was the most serious relationship she’d ever been in.
Even so, going away on holiday together seemed significant.
She’d tucked the envelope back into her rucksack, pulling it out later in her bedroom – slightly curled after being caught under her lunchbox – and smoothed it on her desk. Don’t overthink it , she told herself. After all, she had always wanted to go to Paris.