She places the phone down on the bed beside her, swallows hard. It’s after six – she should have checked the time first. She should have thought about how many tins of Stella he’d have drunk by now – it is Friday, after all. His voice keeps talking through the phone; even without the speaker turned on, she can make out the swear words, the rise of abuse before it falls into the self-pitying whine she knows so well.
Pushing the phone off the bed, she climbs under her duvet and pulls it up around her ears, but it’s many hours before she sleeps.
The week passes. Dull, grey, monotonous. She passes the professor a couple of times in the quad but he doesn’t look up, doesn’t acknowledge her. It’s like she’s dying inside, the withering of the dream she’s had for so long.
She could kick herself. It’s all her fault. The only thing stopping her from packing up her bags and fleeing the place immediately is the presentation she’s due to make at the end of the week. She spends every hour in the library – it’s going to be the best piece of work she’s ever done.
At last it’s the day of the seminar, a Friday morning this time. As usual, no one acknowledges her, though Lucy barely lifts her head to register their lack of interest. She’s too focused on her notes to care. She needs to be pitch-perfect. It’s her last chance – if she hasn’t blown it already.
Her turn at last. They’ve sat through a lacklustre monologue about young offender institutions from the mature student Jessica – no new insights, banal in the extreme. Lucy glanced over at the professor a couple of times to try and read his reaction. Nothing. A flat tone when he asks her to come up.
She looks down the table at the indifferent faces, a sneer on Jessica’s face, boredom on Alexandra’s, something close to aversion on Ben’s. The professor is looking at his notebook with concentration, his brows furrowed. It’s like someone’s switched off the light, the room dim. She takes a deep breath, and she begins.
When she’s about halfway through, the atmosphere changes, a crackle in the air. Ben is looking up at her, Jessica too. There’s even grudging respect on Alexandra’s face. Lucy is talking about the effect of prison sentences on women offenders’ families. An emotive subject, and she’s talking from the heart. When she relates the account of a pair of siblings who were separated and forced into care when their mum was sent down for dealing, Jessica winces in sympathy. By the end, they’re all leaning forward, nodding at the conclusions that she’s drawn.
As she finishes, there’s a smattering of applause. More than the usual, muted response – she’s pulled it off. She can feel it deep inside her. At last, she dares to glance in the professor’s direction. She must, surely, have made an impression.
He’s looking at his phone.
24
Lucy wants to get out of the seminar room as soon as the class is finished. No chance she’s hovering for the professor’s attention today. She’s kept her face mask-still for the remainder of the session, but there’s a limit to how long she can keep it going. She’s damned if she’s going to cry in front of him. Or anyone else, come to that.
As she gets to the door, Jessica catches hold of her arm. Lucy’s jaw clenches, the tightest of smiles. All the woman wants to do is rub her nose in it.
‘You coming to Formal Hall tonight?’ Jessica says. Alexandra is standing behind her, smiling.
Lucy tries not to look surprised. ‘No, I wasn’t planning to.’
‘You should – we’re all going.’ Jessica gestures round the room, taking in all the students. Some of them, Lucy would struggle to recognise outside class.
‘I might,’ she says. The professor is still looking at his phone as he sits at the end of the table. Time to pull herself together. ‘Fuck it, yes. It’s been ages since I had a proper night out. Count me in.’
Little black dress, black tights, black eyeliner. She’s pulling out the stops, blending eyeshadow into the crease above her eyes and smoothing foundation and blusher over her skin. She’s going to show them all what she’s got.You think the professor’s going to turn up tonight and you want to scrub up for him, a little voice jeers inside her head, and she tells it to fuck off, adding a slick of lipstick and a spritz of perfume as she does.
When she gets down to the college bar to meet up with the others it becomes immediately clear that the group has evolved from mere seminar allies to close friends. They’re doing shots of Jägermeister to screeches of laughter, even the staidest of them. Lucy blinks to see it, hesitates over the shot that she’s offered before tossing it down her neck so as not to be a spoilsport. They cheer in encouragement as she does so, making room for her in their circle, though Lucy is sure she can feel a little hesitation from Ben and Alexandra, who are sitting a little too close together.
‘Not working tonight then?’ Alexandra says. She is smiling, but there’s no warmth there.
‘Night off,’ Lucy says. ‘Wouldn’t want to miss this.’
‘Of course not,’ Alexandra says. ‘Though I’m sure you have more important things to be doing. Say, for the professor?’ Her tone is nudging, something nasty at the core of it, though her smile continues to play on her lips.
A stone drops in Lucy’s stomach. She fights a snarl into a smile. ‘I can’t imagine finding anything more important than this. So nice to get the chance to bond with everyone.’ She gestures around her in an expansive way at the others sitting at the table, hoping she might flush out an ally. Ben actively looks away from her.
No one else catches her eye, or even smiles at her. She messed that right up. Hang on, that guy over there – he was smiling. Charles, Charlie, something like that? She arranges her features in what she hopes is a winning way and sets out to charm.
By the time the meal is over, she’s made some inroads. Charlie takes the seat next to her in the old dining hall.
‘Your presentation was excellent,’ he says.
‘Thanks. I feel very strongly about it.’
‘I can see that,’ he says. He pours red wine into her glass, filling it almost to the brim before doing the same to his, too. They toast each other, clinking the tumblers together carefully so as not to spill any of it.
Alexandra is sitting opposite Lucy. She’s banging on as usual about how much the portraits and wooden panels make her think of Hogwarts. ‘I’m in Ravenclaw, you know,’ she says.
Lucy catches Charlie’s eye and bites her lip. She mustn’t laugh.
