The Start of Everything (18 page)

He took off his glasses. “That can’t be so, if you’re studying all night, can it? Are you struggling, Grace?”

He kept using my name. Every repetition jabbed me.

“You’re here because we have recognised a talent, and we want to help you. If you need extra instruction, we can—”

More
work
? I could barely manage the work I had.

“—and we believe in supporting those we’ve brought into the college through to graduation.”

Graduation was ages away. Five more terms. Two rounds of exams. 100—no,
146
—lectures, and 352 supervisions. I felt sick.

“Grace?”

Again,
jab
.

“My grandmother died this summer,” I began. Maybe I could make him understand. It was hard to put it into words, because what kind of person says that her own grandparent was a burden? “She was really good to me.” I had to make that clear. He had to understand that I wasn’t saying any of this because Gran had been bad to me. She just required a lot of work when she got very old.

“Perhaps you could talk about this with Dr. Hart-Fraser. He lost a brother during his first year at Cambridge. It must have been difficult for him to complete the work, but perhaps he found it helpful to have the work to focus on. His example could be an encouragement.…”

“No,” I said. “I’m not grieving, I’m—” It was too awful to say: I was celebrating, celebrating my freedom. Our lives had been on such a tight leash for so long. I wanted to run wild, now that I finally could.

“Your tutor can recommend a counsellor.”

“I don’t want—”

“Unless you feel you need to be with your family, in which case we can hold you a place to retake second year, when you feel ready. We take such concerns seriously, especially after what happened at King’s.”

“What happened at King’s?”

He hesitated. It must have been supposedly common knowledge, though, because he told me: “A first year Maths student attempted suicide earlier this week. Of course the University will hold her place until she feels ready to return.”

I gaped. It had to be. The girl I watched from the kitchen, who had always been working. I’d assumed she started sleeping in a boyfriend’s room and slagging off her books. “Is she all right?”

“As I said, she’s at home with her family.”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times. “Do you know why she did it?”

He couldn’t answer that. He probably didn’t know, and wouldn’t be allowed to tell me if he did. But anyone could guess that it was the pressure. That’s why students attempt suicide, isn’t it? I remember when our exam results had been posted last year. Pip had organised us to join the crowd in front of the Senate House. There had been a proper crush to read them. Everyone had wanted to see, except for me. At the end of the third year, it gets even more dramatic: The results are read
aloud and thrown down from the Senate House balcony. My hands shook. “I thought she was staying over with her boyfriend.” Tears ran all over my cheeks.

“You knew her?” he asked, opening drawers. He found a ragged box of tissues and passed them to me. “I’m sorry, I— We thought all the students involved had been personally informed.”

I shook my head and honked my nose into a tissue. I meant that I didn’t know her. He thought I was denying having been told when I should have been.

“Can I get someone for you? Dr. Fisher?”

What did Dr. Fisher have to do with any of this?
But she’s a woman. I think that’s all he could think to flail for.

“I don’t want that to happen to me,” I whispered. I’ve never, ever thought about killing myself. But neither could I picture myself on the other side of graduating. There was just nothing there in my mind. That frightened me.

“Articulating your goals can help. Why have you come to Cambridge? What do you want to do after you complete the course? Further study, research, teaching?” He leaned forward over his arms, which were crossed on the table. “What do you want to get out of this?”

The last two words were superfluous. I stuck on the ones just before:
I want to get out
.

“Maybe your daughter doesn’t want to interview for Cambridge because being good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it forever! Maybe she hates maths! Did you ever think of that? Did you?” I was on my feet. How did I get there? Those words were awfully loud. I covered my mouth.

Dr. Oliver reared back. Then he stood, knocking his chair over.

I didn’t apologise. I’d meant it. Why does encouragement always have to take the form of “You can do it!” I’d like some encouragement to tell me that I don’t have to do it. Plenty of people don’t study maths. Plenty of people don’t go to Cambridge. Not everyone goes to uni at all. Why can’t I be encouraged that it’s all right to give this up and not be ashamed?

He swept past me. The door fell shut behind him, anticlimactically with a soft
whoosh
and eventual tap against the jamb.

My hands itched. That familiar need.

I reached, getting my shoulder under the tabletop and my hand into the box. I scrabbled against the bottom and pulled out the first item my fingers hooked, squeezing it in my fist. I could feel what it was: a watch. Dial face, leather band. A frisson scampered up my back.

I ran. Rounding the corner felt like breaking the tape at a finish line. I’d stop taking things, I would. I have to. But not now.
Not now
. I needed the rush.

I slowed to a saunter and passed through the college gate.

The pin for adjusting the watchband pricked my palm. The gears pulsed a faint tick against my skin.

CHAPTER 17

CHLOE FROHMANN

S
ome mornings my eyelids stick together, and I think,
Did I go out the night before? Did I fall asleep with glitter and fake lashes on my eyes?
But it’s been years. I pat the bedside table until I knock my glasses onto the floor. I struggle them on, and I can see the time; I haven’t slept late. And my hair isn’t the crispy and crimped version from my teens. It’s not even long anymore. The heat of the shower catches me up to myself, and I emerge thirty-four years old, sticky-eyed from ordinary sleep. I pop my contacts in, rub a moisturiser over my face, and check out the bump in my middle.

I think it’s age more than pregnancy. I’m not that far along. Yet I’d started dreaming, hard, of college parties and casual dates weeks ago, even before I’d wee’d on that stick.

Dan’s in the shower now, scrubbing with whatever bottle I’ve left in there. Today he’ll smell like mangoes and oranges.

Look in my wardrobe; no wonder my dreams are panicked. Black, brown, blue, beige. You wouldn’t think I shop, really shop, but I do.
The cream pullover is soft and fitted, with a gentle ruffle in the rounded neck; the black jacket is pinched in the right places. But it has to look like I didn’t fuss. It’s the same with makeup; Keene would swear I don’t wear any.
Ha
. I dab foundation on my chin and cheeks, and pink my mouth. I shake my head. My hair will dry on the way. I have a brush in my bag.

Keene
. What a mess.

I rap on the glass shower door, then wave. Dan opens it and sticks his wet head out. “Off to East Deeping?”

“I have to pick up Keene first.”

I’ve never minded driving before. It was a form of power, being the one steering the investigation and making it go. But now that he needs me to do it, not just is
letting
me do it, Keene is being a bastard about it.

My face must have tightened up. “Play the game, Coco,” Dan reminds me.

I back up, away from the growing puddle on the tile. Wet stretches across the bottoms of my black socks.

We blow kisses.

My leather boots are at the door. Bag, keys, wallet, mobile, energy bar.

I dart into the kitchen. I grab a bagel, two more bars, and a smoothie, and cram them into my bag. I’ve been getting light-headed if I don’t eat every two hours. Dan won’t hear the drawers and cabinet doors from the bathroom. I don’t want him to notice before I tell him.

Shit
. I told Keene last night. Right? Or had that been a dream, too?

No, I told him. I haven’t even told my mum.

I lean against the kitchen arch.
Aw, hell
. He won’t let on to Cole, will he?

Never mind that Superintendent Cole has asked me to report on Keene.

Mangoes and oranges. “You still here?” Dan teases, wearing a towel, heading for the kettle.

“I couldn’t find my keys,” I improvise.

He reaches into the still-open bread bin for a white loaf. “What were they doing in here?” he jokes, not waiting for an answer. “I’ll make you up a coffee.”

“No!” I bark.

“Still?”

I’ve been “under the weather” for too long. I freeze, feeling pinned by ultrasound eyes. But it’s not a coded question. He doesn’t have any idea. “This case …” I say. That’s always handy. A case can excuse anything.

He holds both my shoulders. “Somebody killed that woman. He smashed her face and dumped her in the flood. You fuck him up, Detective Inspector. You find that animal and you
fuck him up
.”

We’ll have to stop swearing when the baby comes.

“You’re sweet,” I say, both arms around his neck. I hold tight.

The drive gives me that transition time I need. I play music, loud, knowing that once I get Keene in the car it’s conversation or nothing. Driving while nodding and shouting along with the refrain is a solitary pleasure. The iteration of vast rectangular fields on either side of the road plays on a loop.

I’m almost to Cambourne when the call comes through, and by the time I perceive it through the thumping bass and wailing singer it’s gone to voicemail. I pull off the road to phone back, relieved that it’s not the Abingtons again about their runaway daughter. Keene tells me not to come. Richard left him the car; he’s already on his way.

On the day we’re heading for the same place?

No, I’m happy for him. He deserves his independence, and I can go back to using my passenger seat for rubbish and paperwork. We can split up later, and he can get his own self home. I’m about to forgive him his piss-poor timing when he jokes: “Traffic on the A14 is always a disaster. Coming via Cambourne did you a favour, right?”

My instinct is to swear. My time is not a joke. I’m not his chauffeur.

But the laugh that trails after the comment, the awkward “heh heh” that invites me to join in my own denigration, smacks of panic. The man is down; I refrain from kicking him.

I pull back onto the road and turn up the volume on the CD. My shitty speakers quiver with it, and the treble screams. The blast of sound calms me. I want to move faster, but I’m stuck behind a meandering minivan. It’s not that I’m in a hurry to end the drive; it’s that speed is, itself, a pleasure.

The minivan exits at the roundabout. I accelerate. Patchwork fields blur into a stripe on either side, the dull green intermittently jolted by the sharp, crazy yellow of rapeseed in bloom.

The house has enough land that you can’t see it from the road. The length of the driveway creates a kind of suspense that is fulfilled at the curve into what is now the car park. Deeping House is really only an aggrandised box, but the sight of it at last is thrilling for having been withheld and anticipated. Dan thrives on this sort of drama. In his designs he plots an experience to unfold as you walk through a house, rooms leading to rooms, not just existing on their own. He draws people through a space the way that artists drag eyes around a painting.