‘Who is it?’ Rachel asked. ‘I see this picture every day but nobody’s told me who it is.’
‘One of our more colourful fellows,’ said Laura. ‘No longer with us, sadly. His name was Henry Winshaw. He was a Labour MP, once. Then he had a Damascene conversion, like so many people, and went over to the other side. My husband, Roger, started a petition once to get his portrait taken down. He had a particular problem with that word — “Choice”. He used to claim that it put him off his food.’
‘I know the feeling,’ Rachel said. ‘But for me it’s his eyes. They give me the creeps.’
‘Mm … The way they follow you around the room. That’s the sign of a good portrait, apparently.’
‘And the petition didn’t get very far, I’m guessing.’
‘Hardly. Our distinguished Master up there —’ she nodded in the direction of Lord Lucrum — ‘was something of a disciple of his, I think. I seem to remember reading they spent time on some influential committee together.’
Rachel did not seem to be listening any more. She put her fork down and pushed her plate of food aside, half finished.
‘You feeling OK?’
She grimaced. ‘I’ve got the mother of all hangovers.’
‘Ah. Yes, I saw you in the pub with your friends. Late night, was it?’
‘Very. Plus, I ended up having to take someone to A & E. A girl called Rebecca. She lives on my staircase. She tripped on the pavement when we were coming back. I think she’d had one too many. About ten too many, in fact.’
‘Oh dear. Is she all right?’
‘Yes, it was just a cut. We didn’t have to wait long, and the doctors were great.’ Rachel seemed embarrassed by all this, perhaps worried that it was not putting her in a good light. ‘Sorry. Typical student behaviour, I know. And it won’t help me get the Milton essay written on time …’
‘Don’t worry about that. My suggestion would be that you go and get some sleep. Paradise Lost will still be there when you wake up.’
Rachel smiled. ‘OK. Thanks.’
*
That night, sitting at home alone in the blue glow of her laptop, with Harry already deep into his second hour of untroubled sleep, Laura downloaded the online edition of Isis and read Rachel’s story. It wasn’t bad at alclass="underline" a vividly imagined dialogue between a young, idealistic barrister and her client, a jaded prison officer on trial for whistleblowing. It had the ring of truth and felt experience behind it. Afterwards, Laura went on to Facebook and did a search for Rachel’s name. She found her home page quickly enough, but it didn’t tell her anything: the privacy settings blocked access to everything except her cover and profile pictures. Laura tried to click on the profile picture, at least, but nothing happened, and it remained the size of a postage stamp. But there was another, perhaps more promising avenue to explore: the other student she had recognized at the pub table last night, ‘the spotty one’, as she had rather unkindly designated him. She typed his name into the search box and after a couple of false starts found herself swiftly directed to his home page, on which — as she had guessed — no privacy settings had been put in place at all. She looked at the latest messages and found — also as she had been expecting — that Rachel had been tagged in a number of recent photos. Following the link took her straight into an album called ‘Larking About, Monday Night’.
There were about twenty or thirty pictures. Each one showed a number of students in various stages of drunken revelry, but none of them made Laura feel particularly cheerful. Rictus grins, pallid, luminescent skin and red-eye photography gave all of these young people the appearance of alien creatures, visitors from another planet who had somehow managed to colonize the bodies of human beings and learn the outward manifestation of their emotions while under the skin, at heart, lay something hollow and coldly mechanical. As for Rachel, Laura could not help thinking — as she had thought at the time — that there was something half-hearted, semi-detached, about her relationship to the rest of the group: in each image, her eyes seemed to be directed elsewhere, with a gaze that was at once far-seeing and inward-looking. The pictures were arranged in a sequence which began at the pub. In some of the earliest ones, Danny’s shoulder could be glimpsed in the background — and even Laura’s own left arm, once or twice. But the drinking and the photography had continued long after Laura and Danny had left, and the last few pictures had been taken out in the street, after the pubs had closed. They included one particularly disturbing — not to say pornographic — image which showed one girl (tagged as Rebecca) bent double over the pavement, apparently in the act of throwing up. Laura felt a sudden dismay that this moment, so private and so shameful, should have been not just captured in digital form but also uploaded for all of the spotty boy’s friends (and friends of friends, and, for that matter, anybody else who felt like it) to see. Had the girl’s permission been sought? She doubted it. Was she even aware that the picture was on public display? Laura doubted that too.
She shut the laptop down, sat back, closed her eyes and rubbed the lids softly. There was a slight ache behind her eyes now, something she always felt even after a few minutes’ computer use. One of the inescapable conditions of life in 2012.
She did not see Rachel again until the end of the week, when they had their regular tutorial meeting. It was late on Friday afternoon, and already dark outside. Once, this had been Laura’s favourite time of day: the hour after dusk, when lights went on around college and the yellowish glow of standard lamps from innumerable windows threw a patchwork of violet shadows over the whole of the main quad. Recently, however — in fact, why be vague about this, it was since the death of her husband — she had begun to feel differently, and now came to dread this hour, especially on a Friday, with the prospect of a long weekend in the countryside ahead of her, with only her five-year-old son for company. This depressing thought could not be put entirely to one side, even as she did her best to concentrate on the subject of Rachel’s Milton essay: or rather, its continued non-appearance.
‘I’m pretty sure I can get it finished by Monday,’ Rachel was saying, tugging at a strand of blonde hair as her eyes roved distractedly over the contents of Laura’s bookshelves.
‘Really?’ said Laura. ‘Well, that would be great. But don’t rush it. Honestly. It’s not a great precedent to set, but I am used to students handing work in weeks after the deadline.’
‘It won’t be a problem,’ said Rachel. ‘There aren’t many distractions at the weekend. All my friends seem to go home, for one thing.’
This, Laura had noticed, was another new phenomenon of university life: students who, in years gone by, would have regarded term as a welcome opportunity to live an independent life for eight weeks now went back to see their parents most weekends, to have their meals cooked for them and get their laundry done. But not Rachel, it seemed.
‘That must be a bit dreary for you,’ Laura said.
‘Yeah, but … well, Mum doesn’t want me under her feet. She works a seven-day week these days.’
‘What does she do?’
‘She’s a barrister.’
‘Ah! Is that what gave you the idea for your story?’
‘You read it?’ Rachel’s eyes flared with delight.
‘I did. And I really liked it. It’s nice to read something like that which feels as though … well, as though the writer knows what she’s talking about.’
‘My mum represents a lot of whistleblowers. In fact, that’s more or less all she does nowadays. It’s quite a growth industry.’
‘“You will be dispensed with/when you’ve become inconvenient,”’ said Laura, remembering the song lyric in which Rachel had shown such an interest. ‘She must see a lot of that.’