Adrian was a willowy youth whom Neve remembered from Oxford. Even when he wasn’t languidly lounging in a punt, he looked as if he should be. ‘Adrian’s gay.’
‘No, he’s not.’ Philip clicked his teeth. ‘You may have some experience with the opposite sex but your gay radar is a little shaky.’
‘It’s called a gaydar, Philip,’ Neve said gently. Philip was a terrible gay man. Since he’d plunged into further education, he tried to dress the part in corduroys and tweed jackets, but Neve always got the impression that he yearned to be back in his grey pinstripe suit. ‘Anyway, I think you have to say to Clive that you don’t want to be in anything other than a committed relationship,’ she added, anxious to steer the conversation back to Philip’s love-life rather than her own lack of one.
‘But even an open relationship is better than being without him,’ Philip said quietly, as if he was talking to himself rather than Neve. He gave her a brave but watery smile. ‘Be sure that a relationship is something you really want. Here be dragons …’
But there wouldn’t be dragons. There’d be only fun and frolics and her heart safely tucked away until William returned to claim it. Or maybe it was more important to work on reducing her girth rather than her relationship skills. Neve gave a non-committal, ‘Hmmm,’ and it was actually a relief when Philip decided they were done with the personal stuff and could get down to business. He pulled a ringbinder from his leather satchel and Neve spluttered into her coffee.
‘My God, that’s a lot of paper,’ she said accusingly. ‘Just how much have you written of your thesis since I last saw you?’
When he wasn’t beavering away at the Archive, Philip was writing his PhD dissertation on the poet Stephen Spender. Neve, for her sins, had agreed to ‘beta-read’ it for him.
‘I’m about thirty thousand words into the second draft,’ Philip said proudly. ‘But I’ve still got miles to go.’
‘OK, hand it over,’ Neve sighed, holding out her hand and mentally bracing herself for thirty thousand words on one of her least favourite poets.
Philip tutted and shook his head. ‘You know the deal, Neevy. I show you mine, if you show me yours.’
Neve kicked her satchel further under her chair. ‘But you’ve written another ten thousand words and I’ve written much, much less than that.’
‘Where are you up to?’ Philip asked, pushing his glasses up his nose so he could glare at her more effectively.
‘Lucy’s at Oxford and she’s met Charles Holden, although she thinks he’s an absolute pig at the moment,’ Neve revealed. ‘It’s odd, really, when you and I both know that meeting him set her on a path that would change her life for ever but she doesn’t even know that herself right now.’
‘Please, just hand it over,’ Philip said. ‘I want to know what happened with her father before she left for Oxford. Stop withholding.’
Neve reluctantly reached under her chair for her satchel. When the twelve cardboard boxes containing failed novelist and very, very minor poet Lucy Keener’s life and works had arrived at the Archive, Neve had left them gathering dust in her office for weeks. There were so many of them and Neve couldn’t find any details of Lucy Keener or her writings in any dead author databases, so she didn’t hold out much hope that she was going to discover one of the great unknown writers of the twentieth century. Then one afternoon when she’d run out of tapes to transcribe, she’d started flicking through Lucy’s autobiographical novel Dancing on the Edge of the World, about her Second World War years working at the Ministry of Information. And that was it – Neve had fallen in love, in the same way as she had when she’d opened up Pride and Prejudice at the local library one Saturday morning when she was twelve, or the time she’d seen her first Katharine Hepburn film, or when William had knocked on her door at Somerville College and introduced himself as her student adviser.
She’d spent the rest of that week devouring every single yellowing page in the Archive boxes. She’d read Lucy’s poems, letters and diaries and fallen in love with Lucy too; a working-class girl from Leeds who’d won a scholarship to Oxford, despite the opposition of her tyrannical father. At Oxford, she’d met the Right Honourable Charles Holden, whose family owned huge swathes of Gloucestershire and a Mayfair mansion. Lucy’s love affair with Charles would survive the war, his marriage to the second daughter of a viscount, even Charles defecting to Russia in the …
‘Neve! I’m waiting,’ Philip reminded her. Neve dug out a folder which contained ten single-spaced pages: Chapter Five of the biography she’d started writing about Lucy Keener. She didn’t even know why she was bothering because Mr Freemont had refused to see any literary merit in Lucy’s writings, when Neve had gone to him with her discovery.
He’d skimmed one page of Dancing on the Edge of the World with his hardboiled-egg eyes. ‘Well, it’s easy to see why she never found a publisher,’ he’d announced. ‘This is very pedestrian. Tiny ideas from a woman with a tiny view of the world; is it really necessary to spend an entire page pontificating about the hat she plans to buy? Send it back where it came from.’
But Neve hadn’t. She’d argued her case, which had surprised Mr Freemont because usually Neve did what she was told without any backchat, but he refused to budge. When Neve had distributed a photocopy of Dancing on the Edge of the World around the other members of staff who’d all loved it, he’d threatened her with a written warning for gross insubordination so Neve and Chloe had packed everything up, borrowed Chloe’s boyfriend’s car and ferried the boxes to Neve’s spare room. That was after they’d spent an entire week surreptitiously scanning every last piece of paper so there’d be back-up if Celia left a scented candle burning again and 27 Abelard Road went up in flames.
So Neve had started writing the biography because she was angry with Mr Freemont and silent rebellion was the only kind of rebellion she knew. She’d also wanted to exercise her writing muscles, which had got flabby since she’d finished her MA. Mostly though, she couldn’t consign Lucy’s sad and beautiful life to twelve cardboard boxes and simply leave it there unread and unknown.
Even with working full-time and a punishing gym schedule, Neve still had a frightening amount of downtime. She used this to sort and collate and write about Lucy’s life, farming out each new chapter to Philip, who’d then pass it on to Chloe; next on the list was Rose, before it came back to Neve with lots of margin notes in red ink.
She looked anxiously across the table at Philip who was already skimreading the first page of her new chapter. ‘Don’t read it now,’ she berated him. ‘Not when I’m sitting here.’
‘I’m sorry. That’s so rude,’ Philip mumbled, still reading even as he slid the sheet back into its plastic folder. With a sigh, he tucked it away in his briefcase and fixed Neve with what he considered to be a winning smile. ‘So, can you get that draft back to me in a week?’
Neve stared at him without blinking, without even the faintest flicker of her facial muscles.
Philip squirmed. ‘Two weeks?’
‘Call it three,’ Neve decided.
‘All right, three,’ Philip conceded unhappily. ‘And please don’t write on it. Your handwriting is completely illegible.’
Half an hour later, Neve was sitting behind the reception desk in the Archive’s Reading Room. She was supposed to be writing out index cards in her completely illegible handwriting, but was reading William’s letter instead. Then reading between the lines of William’s letter. Then looking for hidden meanings in the way that William dotted his i’s (there was one on the second line of the third paragraph that looked a little like a heart), crossed his t’s and looped his y’s. It was very time-consuming.
Neve forced herself to slow down and savour each word. William started off with a quick weather report and a request for a large box of Sainsbury’s Red Label teabags and a box of Carr’s Water Biscuits. She impatiently skimmed over that so she could get to the good stuff.
It was so lovely to talk to you last week. The sound of y
our voice always leaves me feeling nostalgic for those long Oxford afternoons where we sat by the river (as I recall, the sun always had that soft golden glow, but surely that can’t be the case? Because I also remember a lot of rain and you gifting me a set of Tupperware containers to catch the streams of water that poured through my leaking roof) and talked about the books we loved the most. Do you remember the ferocious argument we had about Jane Austen versus the Brontës? I think it was the only time I ever saw you get really cross. ‘Mess with Miss Austen and you mess with me,’ I seem to recall you growling.
It’s always sunny in California – that much is the same. But there are no rivers and no Neve to sit with and talk about literature, philosophy or anything else that takes my fancy.
Neve had to pause there to sigh rapturously. There were moments of self-doubt, of course there were, when she worried that she was getting ahead of herself and that she was building herself up for a spectacular fall when William got back. But he couldn’t write things like that if he didn’t feel it too: that tugging sensation in her chest, as if her heart was constantly straining in William’s direction, Atlantic Ocean be damned.
I’m reminded of all those long afternoons by the river because my current crop of undergraduates would be hard-pressed to name even one novel by either Miss Austen or the Miss Brontës, let alone deconstruct them. One of the girls in my sophomore tutor group actually played Lydia Bennet in a big Hollywood adaptation of Pride and Prejudice set in New York. (I can actually hear your sudden and swift intake of breath!) She’s personable enough, pretty even, if you like that kind of thing. But she’s also as dumb as a box of rocks and apparently her infrequent appearances on campus are more to do with her agent marketing her as an intellectual while the university is happy with the publicity they receive. I also have two models in my freshman class; the Dean has asked me to turn a blind eye when they need deadline extensions on their coursework because they’re modelling bikinis or jetting off to New York for castings.
Yes, Oxford seems like another lifetime.
Neve thrust the letter away from her in horror. Hollywood actresses? Models? She’d been worried enough about golden-skinned, blonde-haired Californian girls, but an actress? Models? They’d eat William up with a spoon. He had perfect, patrician features, as if he’d just strolled off a cricket pitch, and a posh, abstracted air just like Hugh Grant. And William wasn’t a monk. OK, he wasn’t an utter Casanova like Max, but he’d had plenty of girlfriends at Oxford. Wispy, weedy little things who’d cultivated a bohemian chic by way of Topshop and read a lot of Rilke. There were probably girls like that at UCLA too but they’d be called Tiffany and Brittany and Courtney instead of Sophie, Camilla and Tamara.
William had been in California three years and even if he only dated casually, he’d have had sex with at least fifteen women. Five women a year actually seemed like a very conservative estimate. Whereas, in three years, the only man who’d really touched Neve was Gustav when he was helping her stretch out her muscles after working out. Plus one bout of almost-sex with Max. It wasn’t good enough. She wasn’t going to be good enough. William had a sexual past while there were sixteen-year-old girls who had more experience than Neve.
She glanced across the Reading Room to see the Archive’s most regular visitor, Our Lady of the Blessed Hankie, sniff and pull out the massive wad of tissues she always kept up her cardigan sleeve. It was like looking at her future.
Neve folded up William’s letter and stuffed it back into its envelope so its contents wouldn’t torment her any longer. There was no time to prevaricate and procrastinate and keep faffing about with a vague plan to work her way up from light flirtation. She had to do something now. And the something she had to do was find a man, any man …
Chapter Nine
By the following Monday, Neve still hadn’t found a man but she had five dates lined up for that week and had developed a stomach-churning terror that had completely killed her appetite, which was an unexpected bonus.
She’d decided to keep Celia in the dark about her decision to date because her sister would be encouraging her to hook up with male models and forcing her into clothes that she didn’t want to wear. Instead, she’d thrown herself on the mercy of Chloe.
On the surface, they didn’t have much in common. Chloe was cool and Neve wasn’t. Chloe wasn’t edgy fashion cool, like Celia, but the kind of insouciant cool that you could only be when you’d spent your formative years travelling round Europe in a VW Campervan with your hippy parents. She spoke five languages, had got a Double First from Cambridge even though she’d only started attending a regular school the year before her GCSEs, made beautiful purses from vintage silk headscarves and sold them on Etsy, but she also played bass in a band called The Fuck Puppets and could down a pint of lager in eleven seconds. Neve had timed her.
Maybe it was because of her crazy, transient childhood, but there was a side of Chloe that was deeply conventional. Neve often thought that that was the side of Chloe she connected with. At exactly four thirty every afternoon, they discussed what they were going to have for dinner that evening; they shared a love of Georgette Heyer novels and a common hatred for Mr Freemont.
Chloe didn’t actually date because she’d been going out with the same boy (now a fully qualified Chartered Accountant) since she was fifteen, but she had lots of friends who dated and was always on the phone to them commiserating over bad dates and offering sound relationship advice, so Neve had waited until Mr Freemont went off to meet the Board of Trustees the previous Thursday and scurried out of her little back office. ‘Can you come in here and look at something?’ she’d begged.
Chloe had come, muttering because she thought Neve was going to make her look up obscure literary references in big, dusty dictionaries, but was confronted instead by Neve’s match.com dating profile.
‘I need you to read this and tell me if you’d date me,’ Neve had said nervously. ‘If you were a guy.’
She’d stood there waiting anxiously as Chloe sat down and started to read. Every now and again there’d been a stifled groan, or a, ‘Christ, Neve, for real?’
‘Is it that bad?’ she’d asked, when Chloe had declared herself done.
‘It’s worse than bad. You are never going to get a date with this profile,’ Chloe had said forcefully, because her angelic looks masked a steely inner core. She had blonde ringlets, Wedgwood-blue eyes and a deceptively demure face so even Mr Freemont never told her off, though she turned up for work most days wearing jeans and sneakers and insisted that taking only one hour for lunch was an affront to her civil liberties. ‘You need to cut out all words of more than two syllables.’
‘All of them? But “archivist” has three syllables.’
Chloe had looked at Neve as if she’d just admitted to being Britain’s most successful serial killer. ‘You can’t say you’re an archivist. You have to say you work in publishing and oh my God! “I like long walks and have always dreamed of visiting the New York Public Library but I don’t understand the whole fascination with backpacking. Trekking through the Hindu Kush would be my own personal ninth circle.” Seriously?’
‘What? What?’
Chloe had patted her arm gently. ‘They’re not really going to get the Dante reference.’
‘So I should change it to …?’
‘“I like travelling and long walks,”’ Chloe had said firmly, fingers already poised over the keyboard. ‘This list of favourite authors has to go too. Even I haven’t heard of half of them. Change “I don’t really listen to music” to “I like all different types of music”, and “a few extra pounds” to “curvaceous”.’
‘But isn’t this false advertising?’ Neve had fretted as Chloe began to delete huge chunks of text.
‘Oh, don’t worry. Everyone lies on these things,’ Chloe had assured her. ‘It’s just a little calling card; it’s not until you meet them that you’ll know if they have potential.’
‘How am I going to meet anyone if they’
re lying and I’m lying and I don’t know if we have anything in common?’ Neve had tried to nudge Chloe so she’d relinquish control of the keyboard but she’d refused to budge.
‘They send you a message, then you go and meet them,’ she’d said, fingers flying over the keys as she’d described Neve’s personality as ‘bubbly and outgoing’. ‘I know you, miss. You’ll spend weeks exchanging wordy messages about French cinema and never meet anyone.’
‘I wouldn’t do that!’ Neve had gasped without much indignation because that was precisely what she would do.
‘Honestly, sweetie, my flatmate finds all her boyfriends on the internet and it’s all about the numbers,’ Chloe had said. ‘Quantity, not quality. The only way to weed out the ninety-nine per cent who are total freaks of nature is to meet them in person.’
Neve hadn’t liked those odds. She’d liked it even less when Chloe had called in Rose, the Office Manager, for moral support and they’d both ganged up on her and deleted the arty black-and-white profile shot she’d uploaded. They’d taken her shopping during the lunch-hour and bullied her into buying a push-up bra and a low-cut top that she couldn’t really afford so they could take new pictures of her on Rose’s cameraphone.
‘Tits and teeth,’ Chloe had kept chanting as Neve bared her lips in what she hoped was a warm and friendly smile.
Despite her grave misgivings, the dumbed-down profile and cleavage-tastic photo led to thirty responses the next morning. Rose and Chloe had whittled down the non-contenders and stood over Neve while she sent saccharine messages to the shortlist. Now it was Monday afternoon and she was getting ready to meet Tom, a software engineer who liked martial arts, Asian cinema and graphic novels.
Neve also had a long list of dos and don’ts from Chloe’s flatmate.