one next to the butcher’s, after the car park!’ Francesca was beaming. She pushed her hair coolly out of her eyes. ‘This place is going to look amazing, once I’ve finished—’ she halted. ‘We’ve finished…er, doing it up.’ She looked up at Tess, who was standing over her, her hands on her hips, and said breezily, ‘It’s marvellous. Great, isn’t it?’
‘Great, if you’re paying for it,’ said Tess, firmly. ‘Francesca, I’ve barely got any money for, oh, I don’t know. Silly things, like forks, and Pantene.’ She took her hands off her hips, knowing she looked a little confrontational, and tried to let her arms swing casually by her sides, as though this was normal, as though it wasn’t really, horribly tricky. Less than a month they’d lived together and she really didn’t want it to be a mistake. She didn’t want Meena to say, ‘I knew it’d never work out. Crazy idea!’
She hated flatmate confrontations and was still amazed at how perfectly normal people could behave so strangely when sharing accommodation with others. Money. It was always about money. Will’s hideously posh but otherwise polite flatmate, Lucinda, had suddenly announced that Tess should contribute to the rent when she was staying the night there, that they should keep a note of the days she stayed over and split the monthly rental three ways on those days. In their third year of university, Tess’s friend Emma had perfectly calmly announced one morning that she thought Tess should pay her two pounds fifty for letting her borrow her silvery top the previous night. Francesca was kind of the opposite; Tess could feel herself turning into Lucinda or Emma.
Yesterday Francesca had said, without irony, ‘Do you think we should just buy a proper dinner service? There’s a lovely one I saw online at Selfridges. It’s only a couple of hundred quid or so.’
Tess watched her new flatmate now. ‘But it’s—’ Francesca began.
‘Francesca!’ Tess said, exasperated. ‘I don’t want a plate. Or a side table. Or a dinner service for eighteen people when we’ve only got three chairs! Stop spending money to make yourself feel—’ She stopped, aware the words were too far out of her mouth. Francesca stared at her. There was silence in the little sitting room. The last of the day’s light shone bravely through the dusty windows.
‘…Sorry.’ Tess cleared her throat. ‘I’m sorry. That’s really rude of me.’
‘No,’ said Francesca, scratching her neck with her nails; it left red lines on her pale skin. ‘I’m sorry. I’m crazy. I need to calm down and…’ She blinked, suddenly. ‘I just need to take it easy. Right.’ She looked around her, as if ‘easy’ was just something she could physically pick up and start taking. ‘I’ll take this all back…’
Tess picked up the blue lamp, which was lying lopsided on the tatty old brown sofa. ‘This is lovely,’ she said placatingly. ‘Why don’t we keep this?’
‘Oh.’ Francesca smiled. ‘OK. I love it actually. And the plate?’
‘I don’t need a decorative plate.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Francesca said. ‘Was it not William Morris who said, “Have nothing in your homes that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”?’
‘I do not believe it to be useful or beautiful,’ said Tess, putting her hands back on her hips.
‘OK, OK,’ said Francesca, snatching the plate out of her hands. ‘I’ll put it in my room. I’ll—she narrowed her eyes. ‘Where’s your sense of fun, Tess? God, I bet you’re a bossy teacher.’
Tess thought fondly of that morning’s class on Virgil’s Georgics, in which she and her students had talked about the world of the hive as parallel with the Roman Empire. They had a) read the material, b) answered the essay questions, and c) listened in rapt silence as Tess talked about Virgil’s ideas of Rome and the countryside. Then, over coffee (Jan had made a walnut cake), all had discussed the relevance of the Georgics today to farming and the countryside. Andrea Marsh, who was not only the college’s secretary (every employee at the college was allowed to take one free course a year) but the cofounder of the campaign against the water meadows and kept bees, was particularly interesting.
‘The English bumblebee could be extinct in five years,’ she kept saying. ‘And no one knows why. If they’d listened to Virgil in the fourth Georgic, it’d all be OK. If we didn’t have these ridiculous ideas about twenty-four-hour shopping and eating huge strawberries grown in Chile in December and destroying our countryside to build brand new things—’ she cast an angry look at Leonora Mortmain—‘then we might be OK. He knew that!’
But Leonora had said nothing. She reacted to nothing. She just sat still, until Carolyn Tey—who was devoted to her, a sort of lapdog—offered her a slice of cake.
‘Do try some, it’s quite delicious,’ she’d said, her blue eyes bright with hope.
‘No, thank you,’ Leonora Mortmain replied. ‘I have had enough.’ She clamped her thin lips together. Tess wondered once again why she was there, as she didn’t seem to be enjoying the classes—but how could she tell? Leonora never reacted to anything.
She’d been teaching for a fortnight, and she was still surprised by how much she loved it. It was a treat to teach a class that didn’t lounge in its chairs, picking its nose, staring up at her with eyes full of near-psychopathic loathing. It was a treat for her to say, ‘Who wants to start reading this passage?’ and to see ten hands shoot up. It was a treat for her to watch the awkward Ron Thaxton, whom she had come to see was extremely shy, blossom in the class, talking fluently and articulately about Augustus, about battle strategies, his stuttering anger almost gone.
And then it was a treat for her to walk the ten minutes home, threading into town, her bag swinging from her arm, popping into shops here and there that sold things you actually needed, like a needle and thread, calling hello to people as she went. She was starting to recognize faces now, old and new. Some people remembered her from before, they asked how her mum and dad were, what Stephanie was up to. She thought of London now, of travelling back home, squashed on the tube, dodging the dog shit and the cracked pavements that had once tripped her up, the rain and the unfriendly faces. Tess hugged herself; it seemed so far away. She thought of Will, his huge face like a blank canvas, looming over her the night of Guy’s wedding, as he said, ‘But Tess, don’t you see? We’re not the same sort of people. We want different things.’
She had cried, she didn’t understand what he meant. ‘But I love you!’ she had cried, clutching at his shirt—why had she done that?
‘I don’t think you do,’ Will had said, removing her hand. ‘You don’t love my friends, you were bored the whole way through the reception. Lucinda’s a really interesting girl, you could have bloody made an effort. You’re so—rigid, Tess, it has to be on your terms or not at all.’
Tess shook her head, remembering it now. Dumped because she wasn’t nice to a girl called Lucinda who wanted to charge her rent and who made a living from making stuffed animals. What a diss. But…was he right?
‘Penny for them,’ Francesca said softly, standing behind her. ‘Hello?’ Tess started.
‘Sorry, I was miles away,’ she said, and blinked.
‘Are we all OK then?’ Francesca asked. Tess nodded. Francesca patted her housemate on the arm. ‘Fancy a glass of wine before I shoot off?’
‘Sure,’ said Tess, going through into the little kitchen, which looked out over the handkerchief-sized garden via a rickety old glass-paned door. She opened the drawer, looking for the corkscrew and glanced up at the sky. ‘Hey, it’s stopped raining!’
‘It has,’ said Francesca. She slapped her hands on the sides of her thighs. ‘Spring is here, and I’m ready for romancing.’ She looked up around her, her eyes sparkling. ‘Isn’t this weird? Us, here, in this house? Isn’t it strange, completely bonkers?’
‘Yes!’ Tess said, smiling. She was pleased to see her so happy.