I needed the daylight, and the cold, and that sparkling walk over Westminster Bridge, to bring me back to myself and the realm of the living.
We ate burgers and drank milkshakes on the South Bank, looking at the shimmering winter Thames, and there the talk was all of my interview at Oxford the very next day. It had really crept up on me, what with the play, the hospital stay and the resurrection – or not – of Henry de Warlencourt taking up all the RAM in my brain. The interview was with Professor Nashe, Abbot Ridley’s old Oxford tutor, a distinguished scholar who had last seen me hanging from a noose at the close of our performance of The Isle of Dogs.
‘You’ll be fine,’ said Shafeen.
‘Totally,’ agreed Nel.
‘All very well for you to say,’ I grumbled, peeling, as I always did, the sad and soggy lettuce leaf out of my burger. ‘Neither of you have had yours yet.’
It was true. Classics and medicine were in January, and personally I thought it was pretty barbaric that English with drama was before Christmas. Nel was comforting. ‘She as good as said you’d got in. Professor Nashe, I mean. She said to Nath— Abbot Ridley that she couldn’t wait until you went there.’ She still couldn’t say the Abbot’s name without turning pink.
I gave her a stern look. ‘Hmm. Getting the grades might be OK, unless I completely screw up, but I definitely have to nail the interview.’
‘It might help that you saw him though.’ Nel jerked her head in an across-the-river direction.
‘Who?’ For a moment I thought she meant Henry.
‘Benny-boy. It might help that you, you know, popped in to say hey.’
‘She’s right, you know,’ said Shafeen. ‘If nothing else, it’s certainly a good opening gambit, especially if Nashe is a world expert on Ben Jonson.’
‘Don’t you mean “O rare Ben Jonson”?’ I finished my milkshake with a slurp of the straw. ‘That really was a shit line.’
Then Ben Jonson and his standing-up grave and his rubbish epitaph were forgotten, because it was time to walk back over the bridge for the most surreal part of the day – our visit to the House of Lords.