The It Girl(17)

The rain has stopped, and she leaves the shelter of the yew tree and walks across to the gate to the playground, pulled, as if magnetized, by the little group of kids and their parents. There’s a strict limit to how long a lone adult can watch children playing, she’s discovered. About five minutes before you start to get glances, maybe ten before someone comes over and asks if you’re looking for someone, though her growing belly gives her something of an alibi now. Women are more likely to smile sympathetically than glare suspiciously, and some will even start up a conversation. “Do you know what you’re expecting?” or “When’s the wee one due?”

Poor Will has no such leeway, though, and if they’re out together he pulls her past the park when she stops, lingering, trying to imagine her future here—Will’s future. Now she watches a father pushing a little girl dutifully on a swing, rain still beading his hood, and she has a sharp, almost painful flash-forward to a possible future—herself, standing at this gate, watching Will, her husband, pushing their child in the same swing.

She’s standing there, holding her breath, trying to imagine her perfect future in this perfect life, with this perfect man, when her phone rings again.

“Mum?” she says. “We got cut off.”

“Is that Hannah Jones?” says a male voice. “You don’t know me. I’m a reporter with—”

Hannah almost drops her mobile. Then she stabs the “end call” button with a shaking finger and stands looking down at the phone in her hand.

For the truth is this, and she will never escape it: her perfect life has come at a price. Mostly she thinks of herself as unbelievably lucky to be here, in this beautiful city, with the only man she has ever really loved. But now, with the reporter’s voice ringing in her ears, she has a different feeling: that she is living a stolen life. Not just one she never deserved, but one that was never supposed to be hers.

For what would have happened if April had not left the bar alone and gone up to their room to change? What would have happened if Hannah had followed her just five minutes earlier, discovered Neville in the room, interrupted the attack?

Would she have ended up dead too? Or would April have been alive, living with Will, carrying his child?

It starts to rain again as she shoves the phone into her pocket and begins to walk, past the playground, towards the road, with the children’s cries following her as she goes. And she wonders. Maybe it wasn’t only John Neville who stole April’s life. Maybe she has done the same.





BEFORE


“Hannah Jones, I presume.” The professor sitting in front of her swung round in his rotating chair and held out a hand. He was younger than Hannah had expected, with dark hair swept casually across his brow in a style that reminded her of someone, though she couldn’t quite place who—Byron, perhaps, or a young Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Definitely a minor romantic poet. The white silk scarf tucked into his tweed jacket only added to the look. “Dr. Horatio Myers. I will be taking you for Victorian Literature this term, and then we will be covering some of the early twentieth-century material in Hilary and Trinity terms. Did you receive the reading list I sent through?”

“I did,” Hannah said. It had been intimidating, to say the least—with a strong intimation that if she didn’t at least start on the reading over the summer break, she was unlikely to keep up during term time. “Thanks,” she added belatedly. “I’m sorry I’m late, I went to the wrong place.”

“Ah.” Dr. Myers shuffled some papers in front of him and smiled at her. “Stairwell seven, yes? Those are my rooms. And very nice rooms they are too, but rather small, so the college was kind enough to give me a separate office for tutorials. It’s a little bit tucked away, I know.”

“Just a bit,” Hannah said with a laugh. She was still finding her way in the labyrinthine passages and back offices of Pelham. “I actually had to ask a porter for directions.”

“I hope he was helpful,” Dr. Myers said dryly. “The porters can be a little bit jobsworth about that sort of thing.”

“Oh, no, he was very helpful,” Hannah said. “He brought me right here. To the door in fact. I’m not sure I would have found it otherwise.”

“Good, good,” Dr. Myers said, though Hannah had the impression that he had moved on to other things. “Well, as you know, we’ll be meeting weekly for these tutorial sessions alongside your lectures, and they will be a chance for us to really drill down into your understanding of the subject. You will normally have a tutorial partner, but I like to begin with a one-to-one, to really allow us to get to know each other. Who are you, Hannah Jones? What do you want from Oxford? Tell me about the real you.”

He leaned forward towards her, steepling his fingers, looking at her seriously over the tops of his horn-rimmed glasses.

Hannah was taken aback.

Who was she? What did that mean? She already felt increasingly that she was a different person here from the one she had been at home. Different from the girl who sang unselfconsciously along with ABBA on the car journey up here with her mother. Different from the geeky student she had been at school in Dodsworth. Different even from the person who had walked through that stone archway on the very first day.

Only deep inside herself was she the same—in the private, inner Hannah that she didn’t show to anyone—the Hannah who rolled her eyes at April’s excesses and secretly enjoyed films like Clueless and Legally Blonde. The Hannah who thought D. H. Lawrence was unreadable and pretentious. The Hannah who bit off her split ends and ate peanut butter out of the jar and did all of the myriad other strange and unadmirable things that people did in the privacy of their own company.