Andrew soon grew fond of Mrs. Briggs, which was just as well, because he hated everybody on his course. He was savvy enough to work out that philosophy was going to attract a certain type, but it was as if they’d all been grown in a lab somewhere purely to annoy him. The boys all had wispy beards, smoked shitty little roll-ups and spent most of their time trying to impress girls by quoting the most obscure passages they knew from Descartes and Kierkegaard. The girls were denim-clad and seemed to spend all the lectures stony-faced, anger broiling away underneath the surface. Andrew only worked out later that this was largely due to the male tutors, who engaged in lively debate with the boys but spoke to the girls the way you might to a rather intelligent pony.
After a few weeks he made a couple of friends, a pudding-faced, largely benign Welshman called Gavin who drank neat gin and claimed to have once seen a flying saucer going over Llandovery rugby ground, and Gavin’s girlfriend, Diane, a third-year who wore bright orange-rimmed glasses and didn’t suffer fools gladly. Andrew quickly realized that Gavin was obviously the biggest fool of all, constantly testing Diane’s patience in increasingly creative ways. They had been together since before uni (“Childhood sweethearts, you see,” Gavin told him for the seventh time one evening, after his sixth gin), and Gavin had followed her to Bristol to do the same course. (Later, Diane would confide that this had been less Gavin’s not bearing for them to be apart and more that the simplest of tasks were too hard for him. “I came home once to find him trying to cook chicken nuggets in the toaster.”)
For reasons that were unclear to Andrew, Diane was the only person he’d ever met in his brief adult life whom he found it completely unproblematic to talk to. He didn’t stutter or stumble over his words when he was with her, and they shared a very specific sense of humor—dark, but never cruel. In the few instances where they were alone—waiting for Gavin to meet them at the pub, or in snatched moments when he was in the toilet or at the bar—Andrew began to open up to her about his mum and Sally. Diane had a natural gift for helping him to find the positives in what he was going through without trivializing anything, so when he spoke about his mum he found himself recalling the rare occasions when she seemed unburdened and happy, which usually occurred when she was gardening in the sunshine with Ella Fitzgerald playing in the background. When he spoke of Sally, he remembered a phase around the time they were watching Hammer horrors with Spike when she started to come back from the pub with presents she’d “acquired” (clearly from a dodgy regular who’d got them off the back of a lorry), including a Subbuteo set, a little wooden instrument apparently known as a “Jew’s harp,” and, most magnificently of all, an R176 Flying Scotsman with an apple-green engine and a teak carriage. He loved that engine, but it was Diane who made him realize that it was more than just an appreciation of the thing itself, that it was really emblematic of that brief period of time when Sally had been at her most affectionate.
Occasionally, through a haze of smoke in a rowdy pub, he would catch Diane looking at him. Unembarrassed at being caught in the act, she would hold his gaze for a second before rejoining the conversation. He lived for those moments. They started to be the only thing keeping him going. He was failing in his coursework to the point where he’d stopped bothering with it completely. He was resigned to dropping out at Christmas. He’d get a job somewhere and save some money. He told himself he’d go traveling, but in truth he’d found it hard enough moving to Bristol.
One night, he, Diane and Gavin were invited to an impromptu party in a fellow philosophy student’s halls of residence room, the caveat to the invite being they had to bring a crate of beer each. A large gang of them crammed into a bedroom and cracked open cans. Nobody wanted to talk about uni work, but Gavin found a copy of On Liberty and began drunkenly reading out passages as everyone tried to ignore him. As Gavin searched for a new book (perhaps Kierkegaard was what this party needed!), Andrew reached for what he was 50 percent sure was his Holsten Pils, but someone took his free hand from behind and pulled him outside. It was Diane. She led him through the corridor, down the three flights of stairs and out into the street, where snow was falling in thick clumps.
“Hello,” she said, putting her arms around his neck and kissing him before he could reply. By the time he opened his eyes again there was a carpet of snow.
“You know I’m going back to London later this week,” he said.
Diane raised her eyebrows.
“No! I didn’t mean that . . . I just . . . I just thought I should tell you.” Diane politely advised him to shut up and kissed him again.
They snuck back to Mrs. Briggs’s that night. Andrew woke the next morning and thought Diane had left without saying good-bye, but her glasses were still on the bedside table, pointing toward the bed as if watching him. He heard the toilet flushing in the shared bathroom and then the sounds of two different sets of footsteps meeting on the landing. A short standoff. Awkward introductions. Diane climbed back into bed and punished Andrew for not coming to her rescue by clamping her ice-cold feet to his legs.
“Don’t you ever warm up?” he said.
“Maybe,” she whispered, pulling the duvet over their heads. “You’ll just have to help me, won’t you?”
Afterward, they lay on their sides with their legs still entwined. Andrew traced his finger on the little white scar above Diane’s eyebrow.
“How did you get this?” he asked.
“A boy called James Bond threw a crabapple at me,” she said.
—
Five days later, they stood on the train platform as the sun warmed them through a gap in the fence. They’d been on their first official date the previous night, to see Pulp Fiction at the cinema, though neither of them would be able to remember a great deal about the plot.
“I wish I’d worked harder,” Andrew said. “I can’t believe I’ve messed this up so badly.”
Diane took his face in her hands. “Listen, you’re still grieving for goodness’ sake. The very fact you managed to get out of the house is something you should be proud of.”
They stood huddled together until the train came. Andrew bombarded Diane with questions. He wanted to know everything about her, to have as much as possible to cling on to after he’d gone.
“I promise to come and visit you whenever I can afford the ticket, okay?” Andrew said. “And I’ll call. And write.”
“What about a carrier pigeon?”
“Oi!”
“Sorry, it’s just you are talking a little bit like you’re being shipped off to a war somewhere, not Tooting.”
“And remind me again why I can’t just stay here?”
Diane sighed. “Because a) I think you should spend some time with your sister, especially at Christmas, and b) because I think you need to move home for a bit and decide what you want to do next independently of me. I have to concentrate on my degree, for one thing, and when that’s finished I’ll probably end up moving to London anyway.”
Andrew pulled a face.
“Probably.”
After a moment of silence he realized how unattractive his sulking must have been to Diane, but as she hugged him good-bye she gripped him so fiercely that he felt the warmth of her all the way back to London.
—
He moved into the spare room of a house currently occupied by two Dubliners who’d just discovered speed, and whom he managed to largely avoid apart from when they’d summon him to help settle entirely incomprehensible debates. (He tended to side with the one who looked most likely to set fire to something if he wasn’t declared the winner.) He survived entirely on Rice Krispies and the thought of the next time he’d get to speak to Diane. They had an arranged time every week when he’d go down to the pay phone at the end of the road and call her, Diane demanding they start every conversation with him telling her about the newest “busty” or “exotic” woman being advertised in the phone box. He kept an empty Nescafé jar on his bedroom windowsill where he saved up money for train fares to Bristol. He’d found work behind the till in a video rental store exclusively patronized by shifty-eyed drunk men buying porn, something he’d only told Diane after much carousing in the pub.