Chapter 3
My course allowed a one-year placement in our third year, and I was spending a lot of time preparing for the thing I wanted more than anything – to be placed with an MP in Westminster, but with options to work at a party headquarters, in a constituency office or other political organisation.
But so did every other damned student on the course.
Places were limited and there was a fierce rivalry amongst those of us who’d opted for this dream.
Of course, as my dad had warned me, there’d always be those who got a place because of who they knew.
If your uncle or your father’s business associate happened to know an MP, or your mother played golf and lunched with the wife of said MP, you were halfway there.
Seeing as my mum couldn’t tell you where the nearest golf course was, and my dad, on account of his being a Polish Jew, would have been turned down flat by members of any club, I was going to have to fight particularly hard, and on my own merits, to secure a place in London in the summer.
Frank was sitting opposite me, head deep in his notes, his spidery handwriting flying across the page as he attempted to get to grips with the coursework.
He’d looked up and across at me every couple of minutes, his grey eyes peering over his small old-fashioned spectacles, his breathing stertorous, needing to know I was still there.
I was reading an especially interesting piece about the justice system, breaking off when Frank uttered a belittling ‘pillock’ while sniffing with obvious disdain as he did so.
‘Sorry?’ I frowned. ‘What?’
Frank indicated, with a nod of his head, a newcomer to the library, making his way with a pile of books towards a table a couple of metres away, shrugging off a navy jacket and settling down with his back to us.
It was a particularly lovely back, I had to admit.
Encased in a navy sweater over a checked shirt – very preppy – I had to stop myself staring, especially as Frank was following my gaze, his eyebrows raised.
‘Privileged!’ He sniffed disparagingly.
‘Who?’
‘You know, the guy who’s just come in.’ He turned his head slightly in the other’s direction, his tone scoffing.
‘Oh? And you know that, do you? You know him?’
‘Well, his sort always are, aren’t they?’
‘His sort? What on earth is his sort?’
‘Oh, come on, Anna. You know exactly what I mean. Wealthy, privileged, think the world owes them a living…’
‘Frank, have I ever told you?’ I shook my head at him. ‘You’re bloody judgemental. Now, I do get where you’re coming from, and I can assure you, I’ve no interest in getting to know someone like him…’
‘Someone like him?’ Frank crowed the words, leaning back on the hard wooden chair in some triumph.
‘And you think I’m judgemental?’ He broke off as the man in question walked towards us, heading for the library section which housed books on history.
He gave me an uninterested look as he walked past and then stopped, reversing a couple of steps until he was standing at my side.
‘So sorry, I didn’t realise it was you… you look… erm… different…?’
‘No mask, no orange tabard, hair not tied up in a washerwoman scarf. And you certainly look different with your clothes on.’
Frank’s eyes were wide, his head moving from the man at my side and back to me, as though at Wimbledon.
The man grinned, holding out a hand. ‘Theo. You’d left before I could get my clothes on…’
Frank’s eyes were out on stalks.
‘…and able to apologise for your having to catch me in the buff.’
I took his hand. It was warm and tanned, an ink stain on the left thumb testament to his use of a fountain pen, rather than the ballpoint pen everyone else I knew used for making notes.
‘Anna,’ I replied, unsure what else to say.
I wasn’t used to such formal introductions in the middle of a hitherto silent library.
Heads were turning, but whether that was because Theo appeared to have some sort of following here at Leeds, or because we were disturbing the sanctity of library peace, I wasn’t sure.
Theo grinned down at me again before making his way back to the book section that had been his intended destination.
‘Pillock,’ Frank muttered once more under his breath.
‘Who?’ I shook my head at Frank. ‘Him or me?’
‘You?’ Frank looked aghast and I wanted to laugh. ‘Not you. No, Anna, of course not you. You know I’d never call you names like that.’ He paused. ‘You do know what he is?’
‘What he is? As opposed to who he is?’
‘He’s almost royalty.’
‘Is he?’ The Queen didn’t have another son, did she?
Because this Theo bloke was a hell of a lot better looking than Prince Charles and the other two whose names I couldn’t, having little interest in the royal family, recall for a minute.
‘What do you mean almost?’ I leaned in, interested in this if nothing else.
‘Theo Mandeville’s father is some second or third cousin, twice removed, of the Queen. Or something like that.’
‘I think you’ll find we all are if you go back far enough.
You know, to the Norman Conquest. And I can’t imagine how you know, or are at all interested in this, Frank.
Right,’ I went on, closing my books and searching for my backpack with my feet.
‘I’ve had enough. Thank God we’re not cleaning again tomorrow.
Got a day off until Friday.’ I stood as Frank started to pack up his own things.
‘So, a quick drink?’ he asked hopefully. ‘To discuss our next move?’
‘Our next move?’ I looked him up and down suspiciously.
‘The next march! The next protest! Apparently – and I’ve only just been given this information so keep it under wraps…
’ Frank tapped his nose confidentially, his eyes gleaming at the chance of imparting exciting news, ‘there’s thinking out there that Thatcher’s planning to invite P.
W. Botha on a state visit to the UK next year.
Any march, any protest can only illustrate London’s place as a locus of global radicalism. ’
‘Right, OK, Frank, mum’s the word. I really need to have an early night. I’ll see you in lectures in the morning.’
‘Yes, but…’ Frank was hurriedly packing his biros into his pencil case. ‘Anna…?’
I gave him a cheery, if apologetic, wave and headed for the bus stop. There was only so much I could take of Frank at any one go.
The wind was blowing an absolute gale, the rain coming down almost horizontally, and for a split second I considered reversing my steps back into the warmth of the library.
But I knew I’d have to face Frank, who was probably eager to escort me home at some point and, besides, I was starving hungry.
My umbrella, already missing a spoke, blew inside out as I tried to pull it over my head.
My hands were numb with cold and, with not a soul standing at my usual stop, I realised I’d just missed a bus.
Bugger. No shelter to huddle under either.
I reached for the hood on my coat before remembering this particular coat was sans hood. Bugger to the power of ten.
I considered, but only for a second, sticking out my thumb and hitching a lift up to Headingley, but the spectre of the Yorkshire Ripper and his victim Jacqueline Hill, the first-year Leeds University student he’d murdered just two years or so earlier, would be forever stamped on the psyche of every female, young and old, in the Yorkshire area.
I was brought back from my thoughts and anger over a female’s denied right to walk the city streets in the dark when a vehicle, driving at speed, sent up a spray of filthy icy water from the puddle at the side of the bus stop.
‘Shit!’ This was all I needed. ‘Wanker,’ I shouted after the speeding vehicle, while attempting to mop myself down with the wet broken umbrella, the only bit of material I had to hand.
I stepped back as another car approached, a veritable tsunami of puddle water rolling towards me once more.
The car, a Mini like Fliss’s, but this one black and in somewhat better condition than hers, came to a halt, brake lights showing before the vehicle began reversing back towards me.
A window wound down and a disembodied cultured voice spoke. ‘Gosh, so sorry about that.’
Did anyone say Gosh these days? Obviously, they did.
‘You’re soaked. So sorry.’
‘It wasn’t you!’ I sniffed. ‘But it could have been. I’d had a dress rehearsal just a few seconds earlier.’
‘A dress rehearsal…? Oh, I see what you mean.’ The driver laughed. ‘Can I give you a lift?’
‘You don’t know where I’m going,’ I said, water trickling down my neck.
‘But you know where I’m going,’ he insisted.
I peered in at Theo Mandeville. ‘You don’t have any bad habits, do you? You know, like the Ripper had? I promised my mum I would never hitch a lift with a strange man. Or strange woman, come to that. I mean, you can’t be too sure these days, can you?’
He laughed again, leaning over to open the passenger door. ‘Do you always talk so much? For heaven’s sake, get in. You’re soaked. And you’re totally safe with me.’
‘You’re forgetting, the first time I saw you, you jumped out at me with no clothes on.’
‘And you’re forgetting, I jumped out of the bath, and not at you. Look, it’s cold with this door and window open. Do you want a lift or not? Look at your poor hands. They’re white with cold. Do you not have any gloves?’
‘I lose them all the time. I should sew them on to elastic and thread them through my coat like my mum did when I was little.’
Theo smiled at that and then, as I finally sat down in the passenger seat, reached into the glove compartment of the Mini before handing me a pair of black woollen gloves. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘put these on.’
‘Thank you.’ My hands were so numb it took a few seconds to actually pull on the gloves which were very big on me, but nevertheless very welcome. ‘I’m up in Headingley.’
‘I know.’