CHAPTER 6
The next day began for Emma as though her world had not just been rocked off its axis.
The Great Hall echoed with the clink of cutlery.
Nat was crunching his way through a bowl of sugar-coated cereal.
Emma slid her phone from her pocket. No messages yet.
She shouldn’t have expected to hear from Jasper right away, of course.
She stabbed at her porridge with her spoon.
Nat was agog to hear the details. When she told him about meeting Jasper, he looked closely at her face and just smiled. Much as she’d tried to make her voice sound offhand, she knew her cheeks were burning.
She pressed her hands to her face, hoping to cool it. “I never expected—It was all just so…” Magical, she managed to stop herself from saying.
“It is so much fun to see you like this.” Nat slurped the last milk from his bowl. “Usually it’s me who’s stupid with love. I quite like being the superior, sensible one, for a change.”
Emma snorted. “You will never be the sensible one.”
“We’ll see. Now.” Nat clasped her shoulder. “Lectures, at last! Come on, we don’t want to be late.”
“Don’t we?” Emma muttered. But she let Nat chivvy her from the Great Hall.
After the quiet of Gabriel College, city life outside hit them with an open-handed smack.
Thirty colleges made up the University. And since colleges were only places to sleep and eat, that meant further buildings for lecture halls and classrooms, laboratories and museums. All filled with students and professors and staff, streaming from one to another until well after dark.
The city was some distance from London, and not a tenth of its size, but its streets teemed with just as much chaos.
Streams of bicycles whirred past, incurring the wrath of cars and pedestrians alike. Groups of students wreathed the pavements, trailing chatter.
“Got a tute on Thursda—”
“Told you he had my gown, the—”
“—puked on the bursar—”
Seemingly intoxicated by the pearly September morning, Nat flung his arms wide. Passing cyclists swerved. “Is it mad that I missed—nay, yearned for lectures when the flood got them canceled?”
“Yes,” said Emma flatly. “Mad as mad.”
“Chaucer, Beowulf, anything,” Nat continued dreamily, floating down the pavement. “But to come back to two hours on the sonnets with Professor Lindman? The gods do smile upon us mortals sometimes.”
“And I have three back-to-back classes I know I’m going to fall asleep in.”
“I thought it was better this year? Elective year and all.”
“Law is never better. I thought land law might be more interesting, but…” Emma shrugged.
“You know, there’s no shame in changing course, if something doesn’t suit you.”
But Emma shook her head and ducked away, leaving her friend at the corner between the law and English faculties.
Emma did not fall asleep during her classes. Instead, she let her mind drift. Imagined peaceful green hours in the river, fish flashing by her ankles. A Guilder deer stepping down the bank to drink, fooled by her stillness. The long glance they would share.
Class must have ended. She hadn’t heard a thing.
Emma gathered her books and dodged the exodus from the lecture theatre.
Flood gossip was the spice on every tongue.
A fresher who’d drunk floodwater on a dare—and started claiming that the University’s statues were alive—had just been carted off to hospital.
The Wessex chaplain, while supposedly logging water damage, had been discovered dreamily painting tree runes across the walls of their Christopher Wren chapel.
And the Fenchurch rowing team had apparently bailed the last water from their boathouse that morning, and found their fiberglass boats sprouting branches of tender new holly.
Emma smiled inwardly. People did love to embroider stories.
She drifted across the square to the church crypt café. Nat had saved their regular table. For Emma, the same thing every time. For Nat, whatever sounded newest and strangest on the menu.
He banged the table. “Em, you’ll never guess what happened this morning. The wildest thing.”
“Wilder than those people trying to walk through the wall next to the secondhand bookshop last week?” Emma helped herself to a forkful of Nat’s broccoli. He never ate it. “Because that’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. This term’s barely begun, and it’s already the weirdest one yet.”
“I can’t imagine how drunk they must have been.
Their costumes were amazing, though, don’t you think?
They almost looked real, the wings and hooves and all.
Must have been an incredible fancy dress party.
” He snorted. “I liked the one who asked if you wanted to bargain your hair for a month of good dreams.”
Emma shuddered and patted her hair. “I did not.”
Nat beamed. “Well, my thing today is far wilder. The theatre just called. They’re recasting Tolstoy in The Life of Tolstoy. The lead, Em! The director just found out that Atticus gave her chlamydia, apparently, so he’s out on his arse. Auditions tonight.”
“No!” said Emma. “Well, you should have got the part the first time round, anyway.”
Nat made her a bow over his broccoli. “This humble player dares to agree.”
Emma caught amused glances at their table.
She sometimes wondered if the other café regulars found them an odd pairing.
Nat so vibrant and dramatic, she so muted and practical.
She might have thought so herself, once.
Meeting her best friend had been a matter of pure chance.
Or, as Nat liked to put it, the universe shoving two unlikely souls together for their own good.
In her first year, on her very first day at the University, Emma had tripped over a pair of impossibly long legs.
They were stretched out behind a tree in the Gabriel College gardens.
And because they were exactly, inconveniently placed where nobody would expect legs to be, both Emma and her bicycle had gone flying.
“That was not,” an unruffled voice had said, “what I expected you to do.”
Sharp eyes glinted behind wire-framed glasses. The hands that put his paperback aside were gentle, even pausing to put in a bookmark. The side part in his Afro was carefully straight.
“Well, you’re not the first and will not be the last to find me in the way of things. It is, alas”—a dramatic hand gesture—“my inescapable destiny.”
He stood, an operation not unlike a daddy longlegs trying to free itself from a pat of butter. Emma took the hand he offered to scramble up.
“Nat Oluwole. Not Nate. And if you call me Nathaniel, we will have strong words. Other than that, it’s generally a pleasure to make my acquaintance.” He picked up her bike and handed it to her.
Emma had felt the first real smile since she’d returned to England curve across her face.
Nat never ate a main course where dessert was available.
His room was plastered with posters for obscure art-house films from the seventies.
His father had risen to the highest echelons of that august British institution, the Church of England.
But in the hushed corridors of power, over the clerical sherry parties and biscuits with parishioners, Femi Oluwole had found that to be Nigerian was to be considered too loud, too vivid.
Too different. He had hushed his voice, banished even the stray Yoruba word from his vocabulary, filled his conversation with Wodehouse and Elgar.
And he was surprised at how entirely he was then welcomed into the fold of insiders.
To the bishop’s hat and the pulpit of Durham Cathedral.
And so he had been anxious for his children to be as English as possible: boarding school, riding lessons, and a diet of toad-in-the-hole and roly-poly pudding.
Nat’s extensive Nigerian family might have looked askance at the gangly youth in a Dickensian suit at family weddings, among a sea of cousins in agbadas or bright blazers.
But the bishop gazed upon his two clever, well-connected children, who spoke only English and had never tasted jollof, and was satisfied he had made them safe.
Safe, however, was not a state Nat lived in comfortably.
He had steadfastly hated every minute at Eton, fallen off every horse he had ever been put on, and, piece by piece, was trying to build himself a Nigerian education.
An auntie slipped him some recipes on the side.
And so, when he wasn’t rehearsing at the theatre, he was trying to teach himself to cook Yoruba food.
The first time, he had looked at the recipe with a muttered “surely not,” then shaken his head and dumped in the prescribed whole pot of hot pepper.
He and Emma had gone through a gallon of milk each to quench the fire in their throats, laughing and crying alternately.
But now his okra jollof was legendary, and Emma’s spirits lifted when the scent of ewedu soup floated through the tower.
Still, Emma would have eaten anything he put in front of her.
It was so nice, finally, to have a real friend.
They had settled into a routine for their days that even their entry into second year had not shaken. And Tuesdays did not usually involve them turning right as they left the crypt café. Still less, heading over the Regent’s Bridge.
“Nat, where are we going? We’ll end up at the University Library this way.”
“Wondered when you’d notice,” Nat said cheerfully. “Yes, I need to pick up some books, since it was cut off by the floods last week. I don’t know what you have against the place—”
“Never been. Don’t want to go.”
Nat whirled around. “What do you mean, you’ve never been to the Library?”
“I don’t see the point.”
“But that’s impossible. The set texts for your course—and extra reading—”
He looked quite ill.