The day after her interview, she had met Nat for breakfast as usual. The wisteria-clad Great Hall at Gabriel College was famous for its beauty. Morning sun played over fluted stone. The smell of toast and butter rose to the rafters.
Nat had slurped at his fourth coffee. “So, you won your dream funding. And yet this is not a happy face?”
Emma groaned. “It’s that launch party. Those people will take one look at me and know I’m not meant to be there, with theirTatlerphotographer and their dressage clubs. I’m nothing like them. I’ve never shot a pheasant. Or shopped at Harrods. I’ve never ridden a horse, Nat.”
“I’m not sure that will be required, Emma,” Nat murmured, with exquisite delicacy, “at a cocktail party.”
Emma took the mature route and did not stick her tongue out at him.
“Em, it doesn’t matter, that elite nonsense. I spent years with these people, at anextremelyexclusive boarding school, no less. And it only gave them enough time to decide I wasn’t ‘quite their sort.’ They met you once, and they’ve already given you a cartload of money and a golden invitation. Maybe they like you.”
Emma pushed her food around her plate. “But you should have seen how they dressed at the interview, these girls. I have nothing to wear.”
“We’ll just get Helena to lend you something,” said Nat, briskly scooping Emma’s uneaten hash browns into his mouth. “She was all about society soirees and glossy ‘it’ girlfriends when she was here. And she has more clothes than she could ever wear.”
“I love your sister, but—” Emma said.
“Everyone loves my sister.” Nat heaved the long sigh of the martyr. “Alas, even me. Trust me, she’ll be excited about this. I’ll message her.”
And Helena Oluwole had come through. She had not sent just one dress, but a whole box of gowns and jackets and jumpsuits with labels Emma barely recognized, almost all the right length. Helena was tall, too.
Emma could tell that in her own clothes, she would have felt small and ashamed in front of the girls at this party. They looked as though they had never questioned money; always had so much that it had sunk into their skin. They all had the same coin-like shine, the crisp edges of a banknote. There was china-doll Venetia Kent,leaning against a steel sculpture in an attitude of complete boredom. Julia, a bright jewel in a crimson jumpsuit, shaking the University chancellor’s hand. Across the room, Imogen Baldock was vamping at one of the journalists. The other fellows flitted about, glowing in front of the cameras.
Batted around a gauntlet of photographers, Emma thought the night might never end. But as the last of the champagne dried up, so did the crowd. The journalists fled for the train back to London. Soon only Julia’s little clique remained.
Emma looked down at herself. Just one in a row of girls perched on the tables in the empty conference center, legs swinging, passing a champagne bottle. She wondered why she couldn’t remember ever feeling so happy.
“What next?” asked Elizabeth Lim, the fellow for history. Regal in a column of cloudburst silk, she was so beautiful that Emma could hardly look at her directly.
“The party at St. Dunstan’s, surely,” purred Antonia Viacelli, granddaughter of an Italian contessa, and the fellow for music. “Where else, darlings?”
An excited murmur shivered through the row of girls.
“Jasper Balfour’s first party of the year,” said Imogen, nudging Elizabeth in the ribs. “Let the scandal commence.”
“TheJasper Balfour?” piped up little Tabitha Mountbatten, the youngest fellow.
“Yes, and he’sjustas wicked as you’ve heard.” Antonia’s smile curled like steam from hot chocolate.
“I haven’t heard he’s wicked.” Tabitha was blessed with complete imperviousness to innuendo. “My brother Hamish said he’salready on the Olympic sailing team. Or the reserves, anyway. And Hamish was at Eton with Jasper, and he says one of the geography masters was always giving them stupid homework, so Jasper took his car apart in the parking lot, then put it back together on the roof, the whole car! And he was on Hamish’s ski trip in Courchevel, and Mummy said he was so charming, he was the kind of boy that just looking at him’d make you walk funny for a week, although I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, and—”
“Gods spare us the views of the entire Mountbatten clan,” Venetia muttered. “Someone muzzle the virgin.”
Imogen shoved her. Venetia shoved right back.
As the group swirled into motion, grabbing bags and shoes, Emma stood uncertain.
“Are you coming?”
Julia had turned back at the door.
“Me?” Emma found her hand had fluttered up to her chest. She pushed it down. “I mean, of course I’m coming. Let’s meet this Jasper you’re all so impressed with.”
She was worried for a moment that she’d overdone it. But the group laughed. And as they poured onto the sloping cobbles of River Lane, she felt Julia’s elegant hand clasp her shoulder.
The girls hurried along the river path. A hint of fog hung over the water now. Autumn, only a breath away. The river lay quiet in its bed, with barely a sign it had been capable of flooding a whole city just a week before. The crenellations of St. Dunstan’s College rose in the distance.
The group quieted as they shuffled through the college gatehouse. The silence they walked into had a weight to it. St. Dunstan’swas the oldest and richest of all the University’s colleges. Its students had the reputation of being the best-heeled in the University. Emma’s father had gone here. She had seen the few photos her mother had kept. There was one of them picnicking in the St. Dunstan’s gardens. Diana with her striking eyes and Greenpeace T-shirt, hair flowing past her waist. Hugh Pelham, blond and laughing, shoulders broad in a hand-tailored blazer. A strange match, even in a photograph. He had already been engaged then, of course, to his now wife. But Emma liked to look at the photographs and pretend. That there had been no other family for him. No one to leave her for. When she’d applied to the University, Emma had once had a vision of him showing her his old rooms at St. Dunstan’s and parading her in front of the porters.
