Richard knew he shouldn’t go back to Zoe’s room, and he also knew that he was going to. He was starting to accept that his study days, which had seemed like enormous gifts, giant plains of time and space, didn’t always make him feel particularly good. When he was alone in the house, he felt himself alter, in tiny cellular adjustments, and after a few hours, the mood was there, definite and intrinsic.
He was constantly aware of the basement. As the day went on, its presence became more and more insistent, and then, when the dead hour was particularly oppressive, he found himself standing in Zoe’s bedroom again, staring at her tights.
It was still a mess. The duvet was contorted in a different position; her things had orbited round the room. There was a black bundle at the foot of the bed – light, slightly silky material. A cascade of pyjama bottoms; tights forming wrinkled cocoons. He went over to the wastepaper basket and looked inside: on top of crumpled tissues, an empty contact lens solution bottle and a cloud of red hair, sat a fat, slug-like condom.
Richard had only used a condom twice in his life, the first two times he’d had sex with Eleanor, before a detached, delicate conversation about former partners, in which they’d agreed that it was OK not to: Eleanor was on the pill, Richard was a virgin and Eleanor’s last boyfriend had been too. In the six months before they’d met, the condom in his wallet was simply currency: the potential for pleasure and sophistication compressed in a tiny foil package, but never exchanged. It felt like tempting fate and foolish to have it there at all, and as it turned out, he never needed it. When he and Eleanor became a couple, he threw it away without a note of regret: he had a girlfriend, a badge of maturity that had always seemed some way off, something he’d have to build towards or earn. It was only much later that he started to feel that the condom in the wallet had represented other things too – spontaneity, daring, inconstancy – and perhaps he had never fully cashed it in.
It took Richard a moment to realize that Zoe must have disregarded Eleanor’s rule about overnight guests. He felt briefly disgusted at the idea of a stranger coming into his house and then outraged at the thought of Zoe ignoring them, and then impotent as there was no way he could confront her about it.
He went into the living room. There was a small pile of nail clippings on the arm of one of the chairs, a scattering of little commas, white with patches of blue paint. Crumpled tissues with violent fleshy smears and streaks of black hovered on the seat of one of the armchairs, along with a mirror and two sticks of make-up. He itched to move them, with a surge of frustration – why didn’t she care about upholstery? – followed by a kind of envy: how freeing it would be not to care. He moved, this time more determinedly, to the writing desk. There were some thin sheets of lined paper, with sprawling, almost incoherent handwriting on them. He picked one up:
I’m only going to say this once and if you disagree, I’ll never say it again. I think you should split up with your girlfriend and go out with me. This is why:
1. I really like you
2. I think you really like me
3. I think we could have fun together
4. You don’t really seem to like your girlfriend very much
The rest of the page was blank; he turned it over but it stopped there. He picked up the paper lying next to it.
I know all the reasons we shouldn’t be together, but I can’t stop thinking about you. I didn’t want to say this at the time, but the sex with you was mindblowing, the best I’ve ever had. I feel like there’s definitely something between us – and that we could be something special together.
And another:
What makes you think you can just use me like this? I know what you want: you want to stay with Kathryn and carry on fucking me. Well, that’s not going to happen. I think it’s fucking disgusting that you would go to Edinburgh and see her after we’d been together on Saturday. How can you be so unfeeling – not just of me but of her! OK, obviously I don’t really care about her that much, but we didn’t even use a condom the first time. What if I had a disease that you gave her? I mean, I don’t, but I could have. That would be a really horrible thing to do.
Richard thought, Jesus, she shouldn’t say any of that. He set the last sheet down carefully, praying it was the right spot, making a mental note to be more careful next time. He went back upstairs. The dissatisfied, introverted feeling had intensified, and it was not something he could convert to productivity. He sat at his desk, shifting restlessly, thinking about the last time he’d felt that strongly about anyone. He knew that what Zoe was going through wouldn’t last and it didn’t even seem to be giving her that much pleasure. But it was powerful and it pulled at him. The feeling was both new and recognizable; the blood relation of something he thought had gone away.
*
Richard had met Lucinda in his final year at Cambridge. He knew of her, of course; she was famous, in an insular circle that felt like everything to Richard at the time. She played the lead in every student play; he always saw her face on posters in town. She was the kind of person you noticed, absorbing their presence and identity without thinking about it.
When he heard that Lucinda was doing the same paper as him for their finals – Shakespeare and Performance – and they were going to be in Dr Williams’s supervision group together, he was unsettled in a way he couldn’t put his finger on. He and Eleanor had been together for eighteen months; there was no cause for other girls to make him nervy. It was worse when he discovered there would only be three of them in the group: the third student was Fiona Turner, who Richard had heard of for different reasons. She was always one of the top four or five students in the year (‘she just works really hard’, Richard would say dismissively). Although he was jealous of Fiona and slightly suspicious of her, he assumed she would be his natural ally. As it turned out, he was wrong about everything.
At their first supervision, he sat on a low sofa, opposite Dr Williams, while Fiona sat in a high-backed chair, an awkward distance away. Her hair was pulled back in a scrunchie and she was wearing a purple fleece. They waited in silence, punctuated first by occasional small talk, instigated by Dr Williams, and then by her asking if either of them knew where Lucinda was, whether they were friends with her, would it be possible for one of them to ring her. He and Fiona shook their heads sullenly. Dr Williams had just said, ‘Well, I think we’re going to have to start,’ before there was a knock at the door, Lucinda arrived and the whole strained, suppressed atmosphere blew apart.
She chose to sit on the sofa, next to Richard. ‘Shall we start with the essay I put in your pigeon-holes?’ Dr Williams said and Lucinda put her hand on Richard’s arm and whispered, in the kind of whisper that made it clear she didn’t mind being overheard, ‘Can I share yours?’
Richard reacted as if her hand was scalding. She didn’t wait for an answer and shuffled along the sofa, so her thigh was pressed against his. She bent her head over the photocopy to read. Her face was far too close. Her red hair was pulled back and he could see tiny hairs forming a fuzz around her hairline. She wore bright red lipstick and her face was covered with a fine white powder; underneath it, the trace of freckles.
Throughout the supervision, Lucinda was garrulous and expressive, gesturing wildly with her hands. What she said was often irrelevant and tangential, but Richard found it impossible not to be fascinated by her. She ignored Fiona, but seemed to listen when he spoke; once she even said, ‘God, you’re brilliant,’ when he’d finished. When she said the word ‘cunt’, she leaned over and put her hands over his ears and laughed. It was stagey and inappropriate, and her fingers on his hair felt marvellous.
On the way out of the supervision, she questioned him intently about his reading and essays, as if there was a shared understanding that they were vastly superior to hers. Fiona walked pointedly ahead of them, emanating disgust. It had only been an hour and already they had formed a little unit against her.
Richard was flummoxed. In a just world, he should be in Fiona’s camp, isolating Lucinda. Any independent observer would have put him at the Purple Fleece end of the scale. But perhaps Lucinda knew this, and he had underestimated her need for an ally.
When Richard saw Lucinda in the student theatre bar at the weekend, she was actively uninterested in him, to the point of being rude. He approached her expectantly, primed for more flattery and physical contact, and she almost recoiled. He was cut by her callousness, but then, a small part of him was unsurprised – of course, why would she acknowledge him in public? He felt foolish but in a familiar, resigned way. In the next supervision, she was warm again, touching his hand, praising his ideas. She was rude about someone they both knew (‘I swear to God, she’s so boring, when she speaks to me, it’s like she’s shitting in my ear’), and Richard, shocked and amused despite himself, felt himself yield. Later that week, she came up behind him in the library and kissed him on the cheek; he yelped, she laughed, he was embarrassed. In the student bar, she ignored him.
It continued like this for weeks and it made Richard irritable – she was trying to draw him in, but lazily; she couldn’t even manage to do it consistently or well – but when she trained her beams on him, it was irresistible. He started to think about her all the time. At the end of every supervision, at the bottom of the stairwell, they would speak for a few minutes, before she had to go. He treasured that conversation, spending all week storing up things to say to her and forgetting them when he was there. Every morning, he thought about bumping into her in the street or the library or Sainsbury’s. He imagined the conversations they would have in fine detail. He fantasized about there being a very good reason she was rude to him in public, something they would laugh about together later. If he said something Eleanor found funny, he tucked it away to impress Lucinda with. His whole week revolved around Thursday afternoons.
For a long time, he managed to hold Lucinda and Eleanor in his head at the same time: truly loving Eleanor, truly obsessed with Lucinda. But his image of Lucinda enlarged and brightened, leaving no room for Eleanor. He started to wonder if he hadn’t made a mistake two years ago. That he’d been wrong to settle for someone who hadn’t immediately made his heart leap. He didn’t know if he believed in love at first sight, but all the love stories he’d ever heard began with a spark or eyes meeting across a crowded room or wild attraction. When he and Eleanor talked about how they first met, he told her he liked her from the first time he’d seen her in their tutor’s room. It felt ungallant to say that he didn’t remember her being there. She saw through it and teased him and they forgot about it. It felt ominous now.
The nights when he’d lost sleep over Eleanor felt like a lifetime ago. When those feelings had faded away, it seemed natural, inevitable, and he hadn’t minded. He’d just assumed that he wouldn’t feel that way about anyone again and it didn’t seem to matter that much: he’d gained other things. Now, it seemed impossible to live without – that kind of energized obsession that turned every Thursday into a festival and obliterated whole hours of the afternoon.
When they reached the summer term, it became clear that his time with Lucinda was finite. It seemed unlikely they would stay in touch; if he didn’t do something, he would never see her again. He didn’t think about what or where it would lead. It just seemed so important not to let her go. At each supervision, he told himself it had to be this week – he would ask her to have coffee with him or if they could see each other over the summer; make some gesture that felt honest and true; do something – and then he let the moment go by, resolving he would do it next week.
After their final supervision, they stood opposite each other in the courtyard; she was oblivious and it felt impossible to speak. His heart was beating fast and he put his hands in his pockets to stop them shaking. ‘Well, I guess this is it!’ she said cheerfully. She hugged and kissed him: an inappropriately defined kiss, lips wet on his cheek, as wonderful as it was unsettling. He still didn’t say anything. He told himself it didn’t matter, as she turned away and waved: it was stupid of him to think anything would have happened anyway. At least he’d avoided making a fool of himself. But he was surprised by the strength of self-disgust that rose in him as he watched her walk away.
After that moment in the courtyard, caught between desire and cowardice, everything shifted. Eleanor started to make him restless. He was outgrowing her; the whole thing was tired. He told himself Lucinda had just been a crush, that it was normal to have crushes, and anyway she wasn’t a very nice person, and yet he knew if he’d had the chance, if he’d been braver and luckier, he would have discarded Eleanor for Lucinda in a second. Even three years later, he’d bumped into Lucinda at a party, and he could feel himself getting pulled in again.
They were on the brink of entering the real world, where everything would be larger and different and harder – he couldn’t imagine him and Eleanor surviving it. They were probably going to split up and that frightened him, because it would be sad and gut-wrenching to actually separate. Then he realized they didn’t have to break up straight away, that he could let it run while it was still convenient for both of them. Once he’d decided that, he felt better. They would sit it out and then go their separate ways.