Gifted and Talented (12 page)

‘I’d love to come for a coffee,’ she said, with what really was genuine regret. ‘But I’ve got a meeting.’

Would Sally believe her? Diana never had meetings, apart from occasionally putting her head round the door of the Assistant Bursar and asking for small advances on materials, like the bulbs.

Or would Sally be offended, recognising that she intended to keep herself apart?

To her surprise, rather than looking offended or suspicious, Sally’s eyes shone with understanding. ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ she exclaimed. ‘Isn’t he awful?’

Did she, Diana thought in shock, mean Simon? What did this woman know about her divorce, her ex-husband?

‘I can tell by your face,’ the other added as Diana dropped her head to hide her furious blushing. ‘He’s having that effect on everybody.’

Diana lifted her head fractionally. Sally’s use of the present tense didn’t quite add up.

‘The new Master.’ The housekeeper was rolling her eyes.

‘I haven’t met him yet,’ Diana told her. ‘What’s he like?’

‘Rude,’ Sally said, with feeling. ‘Short.’

Diana hoped not. Short and rude did not sound good. Diana imagined an irritable, undergrown, red-faced old academic limping over to criticise her planting. If she saw such a figure in the distance she would keep out of his way.

She returned to her work, and was absorbed in it again when another movement caught the tail of her eye: something red; she half-imagined it to be the robin that followed her everywhere these days, greedy for worms. Looking properly though, Diana saw now that it was the tall redhead. The one who looked so unhappy.

She had first noticed her some days ago: tall, pale, always carrying books. There was a heavy air about her, for all her slenderness. The sight of her, always alone, had brought Diana’s maternal instincts to the surface. The girl was obviously miserable; possibly lonely and far from home. Diana thought of Rosie, in the future, in just such a situation. She thought of how she would appreciate some friendly type, like herself, offering to help.

On the other hand, Diana told herself, I’m ancient. As old as her mother. She’s hardly going to want me to interfere. All the same, as the girl disappeared through a door, back into the college, she resolved that she would, next time – if the girl didn’t look happier.

‘How’s it going, love?’ Mum asked. ‘Making friends?’

Isabel closed her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘Oh, yes,’ she exclaimed in a voice full of forced gaiety. ‘Lots of them.’

‘Good,’ Mum said warmly. ‘But don’t have too much fun, will you? You’re there to work, remember.’

‘Oh, I’m working all right,’ Isabel said grimly. It was the first truth she had uttered in the whole conversation. ‘And what about you, Mum?’ she added, swiftly changing the subject. ‘How are things?’

‘Fine,’ her mother trilled, perhaps too airily, before going on to catalogue the local gossip. The doctor had a new dog, which was keeping the entire street awake at night. Bookings were down at the holiday cottages. The new headmistress of the primary school had stopped her outside the dentist’s to talk about Isabel: was one of the school’s former pupils, as she had heard, really at such a prestigious university? ‘I was so proud, telling her,’ Mum said, her voice so full of love that Isabel could hardly bear it.

‘I’d better go,’ she muttered. ‘Got an essay to write . . .’

‘Yes, of course. Don’t let them work you too hard!’ Mum sang, merrily contradicting her earlier message as she rang off.

As if there was anything else to do, Isabel thought gloomily, given the wholesale disaster of her social life.

Since the day of the freshers’ fair, she and Ellie had hardly spoken. Partly because Ellie was avoiding her and partly, Isabel suspected, because she had joined various clubs at the fair and was busy with new activities, new friends. Isabel would have loved, somehow, to join in with all this but Ellie looked right through her when, as was rare, they met. And each time they did, Isabel felt less confident, less inclined to stop her and beg for a minute to explain herself. As with Kate, who ignored her as well, she was unsure what exactly she would explain. Everything that had happened was so complicated. It all appeared partly her fault, albeit inadvertently. She had only herself to blame.

So Isabel had only Amber to call a friend. Although Amber clearly didn’t regard her as one. Any hopes that she might be grateful for the help Isabel had given with the reading list were dashed as soon as Amber emerged – triumphant – from Professor Green’s lair.

‘How did it go?’ Isabel had asked, emerging from her room at the unmistakeable sound of Amber in the corridor.

‘Fine,’ Amber returned coolly. ‘The prof was surprised by my grasp of things. Said she thought I’d made some good points.’

Isabel beamed. She had spent a lot of time rehearsing Amber, giving her three really strong things to say. She looked expectantly at Amber; some thanks was due, surely. But Amber simply let herself into her room and shut the door.

From then on it seemed to Isabel that Amber had forgotten all her promises of friendship. She had said she would introduce her to everyone who was anyone and, indeed, a sequence of giggly, colt-like girls and tall, pink-cheeked young men filed in and out of Amber’s room at all times of the day and night. Music could be heard, honking laughter, the pop of champagne corks. But Isabel was never invited to join in.

Only once had the sound of Amber’s door opening been followed by the sound of knocking on her own. Wild with hope, Isabel had wrested it open to find herself looking into the rather wild eyes of a tousled-looking Amber.

‘Izzy, darling! Don’t have any milk going spare, do you? You do? Sweet of you; just leave it outside my door, could you?’

Meanwhile, whenever she went through the foyer, Isabel saw the invitations exploding from her neighbour’s ever-full pigeonhole. Amber was quite clearly the university’s most popular girl while she . . . Well, the less said about that, the better.

She was not, of course, alone in being abandoned by Amber. Coco the dog had suffered the same fate. Nor had Amber made the least effort to find her. Isabel had, herself, conducted a couple of desultory searches around the college and looked about in the streets of the town. But neither hide nor hair of the hound had she seen. She was now of the view that this was not altogether a bad thing; the way Amber had treated Coco, the dog was best out of it. Hopefully she had been taken – or found – by someone who would treat her better. It seemed unlikely they would treat her worse.

As a result of all this, Isabel was making increasing use of the Branston library. She did not particularly enjoy working in it, but it was better than sitting in her room by herself, unvisited by either Ellie or Kate, and hearing Amber’s lively social life going through its shrieking, door-crashing and giggling motions next door.

The library was vast and futuristic, the librarians’ area of operations looking like the control centre of the Tardis. The towering metal bookstacks moved by means of hand-turned wheels like something in a submarine. The noise of this was distracting but Isabel did her best to block it out.

Working was difficult in any case. Isabel was beginning to find that, no matter how early she ordered them, the volumes she had hoped to read had all already been checked out by someone else. It didn’t take long to find out who. One day she turned from the gap in the bookstacks where the books she required should have been to see Kate at the Tardis, taking delivery of those same books, evidently pre-ordered, from the librarian. She then disappeared with her haul.

It seemed ever more impossible that she and Kate could ever be friends again. And yet they saw each other all the time, at supervisions. There would be one this morning, with Dr Stringer – their first at his house. Isabel could already picture the awkward group standing around, the others giving them space and talking amongst themselves because they could sense the antagonism towards Isabel coming off Kate like black smoke. The only good thing was that Amber was hardly ever present. Hopefully before long she would be sent down, although things were so bad now Isabel doubted this would improve her situation. She must just ignore it all and carry on doing what she had come here to do, which was work. Get high marks. Distinguish herself and make Mum proud.

Isabel walked into town for the Stringer tutorial. As usual, she was alone. She was becoming used to feeling solitary, invisible even.

Passing the gates of St Alwine’s, Isabel thought about Olly, as she often did. It would have been nice – especially so now – to have had him as a friend, but that was another relationship not meant to be; the first that had gone wrong, in fact. How long ago that seemed now. She wondered how he was. Had he got a job on a newspaper yet? Had his novel been accepted? She smiled, recalling some of the things he had said, and this once-familiar movement of her lips felt strange .

She glanced into St Alwine’s quadrangle, screened from the street by the ancient gate, and could not help but feel a thrill at the picture presented. The college seemed to spring straight from a mediaeval manuscript. Pale spires, carved and elegant, reached up into an impossibly blue sky. There were gilded shields, mullions, stained glass and all the rest of the rich panoply of age. The trees were a blaze of copper and gold, the lawns a rich green.

A tall and beautiful blond boy was talking to a girl. His face was turned towards the street and his idle eyebeam crossed Isabel’s.

She started, violently. It had been a mere split second but it was as if a flashgun had fired at her. His image was branded on her retina: the long, narrow eye, the red lip, the curving cheek faintly flushed with pink, the level brow, the golden curls.

Ears thumping, heart racing, Isabel hurried on towards the tutorial. In her dizzy state she even took a couple of wrong turns but found it at last, one of several large Victorian semis on the road to the station.

Her excitement drained from her the second she saw the English set waiting outside the house.

Kate was looking her up and down as she approached. ‘I see Her Majesty Queen Amber’s not with you this morning,’ she observed snarkily.

As Paul and Bethany looked at her, possibly sympathetically, Isabel felt her cheeks fire up. ‘No,’ she said, quietly. ‘I don’t know where she is.’

Kate gave her a bright, sarcastic look. ‘And there’s me thinking you were her best friend.’

Isabel raised her chin. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ she repeated.

Kate grinned. Delving in her backpack she produced a newspaper and shoved it at Isabel, who recognised the newspaper gossip page – recognised, too, another photograph of Amber in a tiny party dress. It appeared, from this distance, to be transparent.

‘
The See-Through Ball
,’ Kate said, reading from the newspaper. She looked up and her small dark eyes locked on to Isabel’s. ‘Everyone wore something transparent, apparently. Well I guess that’s appropriate. Amber’s pretty easy to see through – if you’ve got the brains to, that is.’

‘See-Through Ball?’ Bethany was pondering. ‘I don’t get it. What’s it for?’

Kate gave her a supercilious smile. ‘What are any of these events for? Charity, on the face of it. Although, of course, there’s only one cause Amber’s interested in: herself.’

Paul cleared his throat. ‘Come on,’ he said in his best head-boy voice. ‘Let’s go in.’

Kate knocked at the scabby front door. A skinny, black-clad and heavily made-up teenage girl answered it and scowled. The group shuffled in. From the far upper regions of the house came an unearthly wailing, as if of someone in terrible pain.

‘What on earth is that?’ Paul asked, concerned. ‘Sounds like someone’s being disembowelled.’

The girl looked at him stonily. ‘Mum’s a violin teacher.’

Paul’s hands flew to his face. ‘Oh, no. Sorry.’

Lorien regarded her with friendly interest. ‘Oh, so you’re Dr Stringer’s daughter?’

Sardonic eyes, heavily rimmed with kohl, met hers. ‘Don’t remind me. Dad’s in there, anyway.’ She waved with black-painted fingernails to a door at the end of the passage.

Someone else was coming down the stairs. Isabel glanced up at the banister, curious to see the violinist. There were footsteps, a pair of trainers appeared, then some jeans and then a face Isabel recognised.

‘Olly!’ she exclaimed, and felt a burst of happiness, as if somehow she had been rescued from something. ‘Oh, Olly,’ she added, a second later, her voice a groan of apology. ‘I’m so sorry. I overslept, you know. I couldn’t believe it when I woke up. You must think I’m so awful . . .’

It was difficult to go on because he was smiling at her and it made her want to burst into tears of relief. Far from looking cross, which might have been expected, Olly actually looked glad to see her. She realised how lonely she had been, how sad, how hungry for a friendly face, and the resulting wave of self-pity was hard to hold back.

Olly was delighted. He had written off his chances of ever seeing Isabel again and there had seemed no point in chasing her. He felt rather dazzled at this unexpected materialisation, not least because, probably for peace-of-mind reasons, he had forgotten just how lovely she was. She looked as beautiful as ever, although perhaps a bit paler and thinner. Working too hard, he guessed, staring like one transfixed.

‘I didn’t realise you were a violinist,’ Isabel said, unable to suppress a deep Scottish chortle in her throat. ‘And why are you wearing rubber gloves?’

He had been cleaning the bathroom. Olly stared at his hands. ‘Violin?’ Then, amid the confusion, the penny dropped. ‘Oh, you mean the noise? That’s not me. It’s this poor child called Alfie Lintle.’

So thrilled had Isabel been to find a friend that she neither knew nor cared that the others were following this fascinating exchange. But now the door at the end of the passage opened and David Stringer’s haunted eyes peered out above his bearded chin. ‘Why don’t you come up and see me afterwards? Room at the top.’

‘I’d love to,’ Isabel beamed at him as she followed the others through Stringer’s door.

Olly used the intervening hour to prepare his room for Isabel’s visit, scooping up piles of clothes, wiping the condensation off windows, straightening the duvet and, for some reason, brushing crumbs off the sheets. Realising he was doing this, he stopped, blushing. Just what did he expect? He’d asked her for a cup of tea, not full sex, and anyway she didn’t fancy him. He could not allow his hopes to rise by believing what she’d said about falling asleep.

Sooner than he was expecting, footsteps were heard on the attic stairs. A rich flash of auburn poked through his doorway.

Olly imagined his room through her eyes, still looking rubbish despite his efforts. Crimson with discomfiture, he set about trying to fill the tiny plastic kettle at the equally tiny hand basin. It took an age to boil and made a fearful noise while doing so. He saw with a flash of horror that the mugs weren’t clean. Hands shaking, he rinsed them in the undersized sink. They clashed deafeningly against the taps.

What was the matter with him? His heart was beating and his ears were rushing. Perhaps it was the kettle.

‘How was Stringer?’ he asked her in a voice strangled slightly by his contorted windpipe. At least, thanks to his efforts, the don’s messy study was better than it had been.

‘Freezing,’ Isabel said. The expected armchairs and roaring fire were conspicuous by their absence. There had been a small and exceedingly smelly gas fire, but Stringer had been more or less sitting on top of that with the result that no one else could feel it. ‘The room was so untidy it was unbelievable,’ Isabel added.