The It Girl(2)

Robyn nods and disappears up the other end of the shop, into the glorified cupboard they call the “staff room,” and almost exactly as she goes out of sight, Hannah’s phone vibrates in the back pocket of her jeans.

She keeps it on silent at work. Cathy, the owner of Tall Tales, is nice, and checking phones isn’t forbidden, but it’s distracting to have it going off during story time or while she’s helping a customer.

Now, though, the shop is empty, and she pulls it out to see who’s calling.

It’s her mother.

Hannah frowns. This isn’t usual. Jill isn’t one for random calls—they speak about once a week, usually on Sunday mornings after her mother comes back from her swim at the lake. Jill rarely calls midweek, and never during the working day.

Hannah picks up.

“Hannah,” her mum says straightaway, without preamble. “Can you talk?”

“Well, I’m at work, so I’ll have to go if a customer comes in, but I can chat quickly. Has something happened?”

“Yes. No, I mean—”

Her mother stops. Hannah feels alarm begin to creep over her. Her efficient, prepossessed mother, never lost for words—what can have happened?

“Are you okay? It’s not—you’re not… ill?”

“No!” She hears the short, relieved bark of laughter that accompanies the word, but there is still that odd tension underneath. “No, nothing like that. It’s just that… well, I take it you haven’t seen the news?”

“What news? I’ve been at work all day.”

“News about… John Neville.”

Hannah’s stomach drops.

The sickness has been slowly getting better for the last few weeks. Now, with a lurch, the nausea is back. She clamps her mouth shut, breathing hard through her nose, holding on to the shop counter with her free hand as if it can anchor her.

“I’m sorry,” her mother says into the silence. “I didn’t want to ambush you at work, but it just came up on my Google Alerts, and I was worried someone from Pelham would call you, or you’d get doorstepped by the Mail. I thought…” Hannah hears her swallow. “I thought it would be better having it come from me.”

“What?” Hannah’s jaw is clenched as if that can stop the sickness, and she swallows back the water suddenly pooling behind her teeth. “Have what come from you?”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh.” It’s the strangest feeling. A rush of relief, and then a kind of hollowness. “How?”

“Heart attack in prison.” Jill’s voice is gentle, as if she is trying to soften the news.

“Oh,” Hannah says again. She gropes her way to the stool behind the counter, the one they use for quiet periods, stickering the books. She puts her hand over her stomach, as if protecting herself from a blow that’s already landed. The words do not come. The only thing she can do is repeat herself. “Oh.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Sure.” Hannah’s voice sounds flat in her own ears, and as if it’s coming from a long way off. “Yes, why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well…” She can tell her mother is choosing her words carefully. “It’s a big thing. A milestone.”

A milestone. Maybe it’s that word, coming out of her mother’s mouth, just after she was recalling her conversation with Will, but suddenly she cannot do this anymore. She fights the urge to sob, to run, to leave the shop in the middle of her shift.

“I’m sorry,” she mutters into the phone. “I’m really sorry, Mum, I’ve got to—”

She can’t think what to say.

“I’ve got a customer,” she manages at last.

She hangs up. The silence of the empty shop closes around her.





BEFORE


The parking spaces on Pelham Street were overflowing, so Hannah’s mother paused on a double yellow line on the High Street while Hannah scrambled out with the larger of her cases and her mother’s promise to come and find her when she’d parked the car.

As Hannah stood there, watching the beat-up Mini drive away, she had the strangest feeling—as though, in stepping out of the car, she had sloughed off her old identity like a second skin, leaving a sharper, fresher, less worn version of herself to face the world—a version prickling with newness. As she turned around to gaze up at the crest above the carved stone arch, she felt the cool October wind lift her hair and brush against the back of her neck, and she shivered with a heady mix of nerves and excitement.

This was it. The culmination of all her hopes, dreams, and meticulously plotted revision strategies. One of the oldest and most prestigious of colleges in one of the oldest and most prestigious centers of learning in all the world—Oxford University’s famous Pelham College. And now, her new home for the next three years.

The huge oak door in front of her was open, unlike on the day she had come for her interview, when she’d had to knock at the medieval grilled door-within-a-door, waiting for the porter to peer out at her like something out of Monty Python. Now she dragged her case through the arched passage, past the Porters’ Lodge, to a table under a gazebo where older students were handing out folders of information and directing freshers.