Mum and Dad don’t seem to have noticed. Like Gran, they haven’t met him yet so they may not recognise him from his picture on the uni website that I’ve shown them. Gran’s got a memory like an elephant though, so I know she knows who he is.
My parents are sniffing and wiping their eyes and doing thumbs-up signs at me as I pass. I hold my award up for them to see and Dad snaps a photo. They’re prouder than I’ve seen them since the day I got my acceptance letter. Apart from that I don’t think I’ve actually done anything for them to be proud about.
I know they’re grateful that I help clean up at the family bakery at the end of their long days’ work, and they’re always telling me how they’d be lost if I wasn’t Gran’s carer. I protest that it’s fine, never wanting them to feel guilty about it, and I tell them yet again that we’re family so we stick together no matter what, but I know how much they worry about me. They knew that my greatest ambition had always been to study English at university and it was them who encouraged me to give it a try. They know how big this is for me – the first self-improvement, just-for-me kind of thing I’ve ever done. They saw how much determination and courage it took for me to do it in the first place, but I did it – a few years later than most, granted, but I enjoyed every second of my degree. In many ways it’s been my first and only excursion into the real world.
I find my seat again. The Chancellor has finished handing out degree certificates and is giving an address about how this is ‘only the beginning’ for us graduates. I don’t feel as though he’s talking to me, though. This is actually the end of my adventure. Now I’ve stretched my wings and scratched the itch that was my love – no, myobsession– with English literature, I’ll be heading straight back to how things were before, and that’s fine by me, honestly.
I’ll still be looking after Gran, keeping her company, making her meals and reading to her. Mum and Dad will still work from three until three every day in the bakery downstairs. I’ll go in and clean the place like I do most afternoons – earning my keep at home – and then we’ll all settle down to evenings in front of the telly with my parents exhausted and ready for bed by half seven and Gran doing her online bingo. Only now, instead of studying at night or occasionally sneaking off to Mack’s at nine o’clock, there might be the prospect of more romantic dates on the horizon. Oranydates, for that matter. Mack and I have never actually been out in public together yet.
I try not to sigh at the lovely possibilities this opens up: kissing under street lights on snowy walks this winter or holding hands in the cinema queue pretend-bickering over whether we should order salty or sweet popcorn, and he’ll let me have my way because salty is the only option for cinema snacks, and we’ll laugh and look at each other in a soppy way that’ll leave anyone seeing us under no illusions that we arethemost starry-eyed couple of all time.
Then there’ll be holidays – or more likely stolen weekends away, although they won’t be easy to fit into our schedules, I imagine, what with Mack working all hours at the uni and Gran’s medication to keep up around the clock and the fact she’d be totally lost and lonely without me if I were to nip off to a couples’ resort for cocktails, spa treatments and fancy dining with Mack. But maybe we’ll be able to get away over the Bank Holidays when the bakery’s shut and Mum and Dad can take over my responsibilities at home.
Oops!Everybody’s suddenly standing up and we’re all clapping for some reason. Wake up, Jude! Ah, we’re supposed to applaud our lecturers, thanking them for all the attention they’ve given us during our studies. I’m whistling and clapping exaggeratedly, arms up over my head when Mack finally glimpses at me and, in the hubbub of the erupting auditorium, he throws me a lusty wink that heats my blood and now it’s me having to look away, blushing.
When I look back, he’s poised and elegant again. His sleek golden-blond hair, now turning a little dusty with age, is swept aside like a real-life Ken doll. He adjusts his glasses and coolly crosses his legs, observing the graduates lining the front rows. He’s smiling – well, as much as he ever smiles at work.
He’s very serious in public. ‘Gravitas,’ he calls it. ‘Important to maintain my reputation as a serious philosopher around the faculty.’
Only I know that he’s amusing in private when he’s relaxed and we’ve opened a bottle from his never-ending wine supply (only ever the best Barolo from his vintner brother in Oxford). He gets rosy-cheeked and lets me loosen his tie and I’ll cook while he rehearses his lectures for the days ahead. After dinner, we’ll lazily kiss and nod off on the sofa.
Nobody here understands how personable he is in private moments like that. Nobody knows how his family are all vintners going back generations and that he’s gone against the grain – the family’s rebel academic. Only I really know him and his life.
Anyway, it’s all academic now. We’ll be showing each other off all over the place soon and I’ll get to meet his intimidatingly posh parents. Once he tells them I exist, they’ll be dying to see me, won’t they?
All those future romantic dates, public declarations and fancy occasions are a big consolation for my studies coming to an end and life settling back into its old routines of caring, cleaning, cooking and nipping out to put a bet on one of Gran’s dead certs. Things are about to get much simpler at home now that I won’t be pulled in umpteen directions at once with the logistical problems of fitting in my reading, essay writing, and attending lectures. Yep, it’s going to be good.
The clapping’s stopped and I sit down again, accidentally bumping the girl beside me. I smile my apologies. She was in one of my classes – Restoration Theatre and the Comedy of Manners 101 – but she doesn’t seem to recognise me. Olivia, I think her name was. I don’t think we ever spoke much beyond hellos.
I didn’t really make any proper friends on the course. I suppose I had a reputation as a bit of a swot, never able to go out for a drink after class, always getting firsts in our assignments and making sure I had all the reading prep done – and with pages of handwritten notes too.
While I devoted myself to giving this degree my best shot, most of the younger students had other priorities; messy relationships and parties, uni societies and shop jobs, summer breaks overseas and gap-year planning.
I was more focused. I had to compartmentalise my life. There was time for studying and there was time for looking after Gran, and not much left for anything else outside of that, other than nipping next door for a brew in Daniel’s kitchen while he filled me in on the latest gossip at the Borders General Hospital where he works.
It’s a shame Daniel’s not here in the auditorium. He’d be grinning at me across the room and communicating daft, unintended innuendo he’d found in the Chancellor’s speech just with the look on his face and we’d be trying not to laugh out loud and spoil things like the two twins sharing one brain cell that we are.
I scan my eyes along the row at my classmates, all of whom are listening wide-eyed to the Chancellor describing the exciting lives awaiting them. I wonder if I’d have had a better chance of making friends if they had an inkling about me and Mack?
Perhaps then I’d have a reputation for being secretly wild and risk-taking, a daredevil romantic in an undercover love affair with a glamorous genius – like something straight out ofMadame Bovary. They probably saw me as a bit boring, if they saw me at all. Well, they’ll soon know just how exciting Jude Crawley really is, once Mack makes it known we’re together and word gets around. I can’t wait.
After being so happy and hopeful this morning, it burns a hole in my heart all the more to catch Mack pressing the girl against the wall round the back of the auditorium and watch him whispering in her ear between hungry kisses trailed up her neck. His glasses are steamed up and squint on his face and she’sstillgiggling and tugging at his tie and ruffling his perfect hair.
Is it weird that in this moment I’m thinking about how I don’t remember him kissing me anywhere outside of his flat or his locked office with the blinds pulled closed? ‘Not worth the risk,’ he’d tell me in a whisper, pulling away whenever I tried to sneak my hand into his as he pretended not to know me in the corridor or in the queue for coffee or in the big multi-storey car park on campus where I’d wait for him after his classes.
I suppose this girl must be worth the risk.
I watch them lost in their clinch for a moment, my feet frozen to the spot. Neither of them even notice me and I’m not surprised, given the way she’s rummaging inside his tweeds.
Instead of storming over there and demanding to know how long this has been going on, I find I’m crouching behind the big, stinking wheelie bins, which are buzzing with wasps, with my hands clamped over my mouth to keep the sobs inside. But they do notice when Daniel comes racing round the corner.
Through welling tears I watch my friend’s expression change from alarm to anger as he discovers the pair of them. I hear the girl yelp in surprise and Mack mutter something about things not being as they appear; that he’s only helping a student with a knotty philosophical quandary.
Daniel ignores him and reaches for me, scooping me up and guiding me away. For a millisecond I catch the look on Mack’s face, his nose screwed up in surprise and, I think, disgust that I was hiding behind the bins all along. ‘It’s not what you think,’ Mack says once more, and I get a glimpse of his expression dissolving into panic. Maybe he thinks I’ll make a scene and endanger his precious promotion.
‘Dignity,’ Daniel whispers quickly, keeping his eyes set dead ahead where Mum, Dad and Gran are waiting for us, their faces all concern and confusion. ‘We’re going to Anne Elliot this,’ he adds in a hiss, and that’s all he has to say.
I immediately sniff away my tears, straighten my back and we walk, heads held proudly, through the crowds of my oblivious classmates and away from Mack and his latest secret girlfriend.
