I half sat on our kitchen table, because I was a bit too restless to just use one of the chairs, but this conversation was getting complicated enough that I wanted at least a little bit of arse support. “How many are there?”
“Several. The first was in 1215, but there were multiple other versions of it throughout the thirteenth century.”
“See, this is why you should handle the homework stuff,” I told him.
There was a different flavour of silence. A slightly uncomfortable one. “Yes well. Unfortunately she takes my offers of assistance even more poorly than she does yours.”
She did. I was very aware she did. But neither of us really knew what to do about it because whileIlooked at Oliver’s slightly stuffy attempts to give Jaz pointers on maths or English or French—or, now I thought about it, on literally any school subject because he was infuriatingly competent like that—and saw a charming man making a sincere, if awkward, attempt to be helpful, she saw an arsehole trying to control her, make her feel bad, or control herbymaking her feel bad.
All of which made this feel like a good time to change the subject. And for reasons I can’t really explain to myself, I decided it was a good time to change the subject in an oldey-timey forties gangster accent. “So,” I said, “dids ya gets tha goods?”
There was a microscopic pause in which IthinkI heard Oliver deciding not to laugh in case it encouraged me. “Please never do that again.”
“I regretted it immediately. Did you get Jaz’s laptop?”
Oliver sighed.
“Is that a no?”
“It’s a yes, but I don’t feel good about it.”
I made a sympathetic sound. “Were they wankers?”
“They were…” He broke off with another sigh. “There’s a saying that you should never underestimate how hard it will be to get somebody to understand something if their job depends on them not understanding it. They were like that, only rather than ‘job’ it was, well, ‘access to quite an expensive laptop.’”
I felt a sordid mix of guilty and excited that we’d just got a free thing. “Is it very expensive then?”
“By the standards of a barrister and the son of a successful recording artist? No. By the standards of a British state school? Yes.”
I felt even more sordid. “Oh.”
“Quite. Essentially, they tried very hard to pretend that they didn’t know that anything they bought with Jasmine’s Pupil Premium Plus money was Jasmine’s property, and I had to remind them rather more tenaciously than I would have liked that they did know and, more importantly, so did I.”
“So theywerewankers?” I asked.
“I think this is one of those situations where wank is very much in the eye of the beholder.”
“That’s a bad place for wank to be.”
“Isn’t it just? But, no, they weren’t being wankers. They were trying to retain resources for their own students at the expense of a former student. And I can’t entirely blame them.”
“I can,” I said cheerfully. “They stole our kid’s laptop. To give to other kids who aren’t our kid. Fuck ’em.”
“Lucien, I’ve spent the last three hours arguing with some very tired, very underpaid educational professionals. This is sadly not afuck ’emsituation.”
Oh God. It didn’t feel fair that Oliver could feel so bad aboutdoing a fundamentally good thing. But that was who he was. While everybody else was celebrating a win, he’d always be there empathising with the people he’d beaten. If I didn’t love him so much, I’d have found it spectacularly annoying. As it was, I just wanted to make him feel better. “Still,” I tried. “It was a point of principle. You really like points of principle.”
“Itry to be principled. You’re making it sound like I have some kind of ethics fetish.”
“You basically do.”
“Youhave an ethics fetish. I just have ethics.”
I thought about that. “Okay. Fair. And I guess you’re right. It does feel a bit…grubby, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
I squirmed and levered myself out another slice of pizza. “I mean, we could give the laptop back?”
