Chapter 23: Before

BEFORE

“Ican’t do it.” Hannah stood in the center of the set living room, twisting her fingers together, nausea and dread mingling in the pit of her stomach. “I can’t. I can’t go down there and find out in front of everyone.”

“Fine. I’ll go.” April stood up and stretched luxuriantly. “I’ll text you. Castanets for a first, thumbs-up for a second, or skull and crossbones for a third.”

“Dickhead,” Hannah said, but she couldn’t help laughing. Somehow April’s attitude was exactly what she needed—a reminder not to take this too seriously. It wasn’t the end of the world, even if it felt like it. What made it worse was the unfairness of it all: April hadn’t even done collections—it turned out her professor didn’t believe in setting them in the first year. Will and Ryan had just done some kind of extended essay and got the marks back the same week. Hugh, on the other hand, had gone off white and trembling in his academic gown to sit a proper exam paper, and had been checking his pigeonhole every morning to see if the results had come through yet.

Hannah wasn’t sure how she had been expecting to get her results—a slip of paper in her pigeonhole, or an email from Dr. Myers. Instead, without warning, she’d had a group text from Rubye, one of the girls at Dr. Myers’s drinks party. Marks are up onDr. M’s office door. Rx And that was it. No photo. No hint of how anyone had done. And everyone doing English seemed to have received it—which meant there was a very good chance they were all down there now peering at her name, while she was up here too scared to go and look.

“No,” she said now, making up her mind. “No, I have to go. It’s better to know.”

“You know it’s bullshit, right?” April said. She put her hand on Hannah’s arm. “You do know that? It doesn’t count for anything.”

Hannah nodded. But it wasn’t true. Right in that second, that list was everything.

---

SOME TEN MINUTES LATER HANNAHwas walking down the corridor towards Dr. Myers’s office door, her palms sweating against her jeans. Even from this distance, she could see there were three pieces of paper tacked against the wood, and a girl Hannah recognized as third-year English was bending down, reading the rightmost one. As Hannah neared she stood and turned, a satisfied smile on her lips.

“Good luck,” she said to Hannah. “Hope you get what you wanted.”

“Thanks,” Hannah said, “you too. I mean—I hope it was. What you wanted, I mean.”

The girl smiled again, a little patronizingly this time with a slight calm down, dear air, and then moved past Hannah, leaving her alone to study the short lists of names.

The left-hand one was first-years, and she looked automatically halfway down, where J normally sat in the alphabet, before realizing that it wasn’t in alphabetical order but some other, confusingly randomized system. Her tutorial partner, Miles Walsh, was roughly where she would have expected her own name. Beside each name was a list of symbols—βα, β+ Hannah read beside Miles’s name. And γ++, β- beside another’s. A lump rose in her throat. What did it mean? Was this some kind of particularly cruel Oxford trick, dangling her marks in front of her in some kind of impenetrable code?

“Oh, hi,” said a voice behind her, and Hannah whirled around to see Jonty Westwell, the boy from Dr. Myers’s party, standing in the hallway. “Checking out your mark? Same here. Wish he wouldn’t put them up publicly. Most tutors only do that for prelims. What did I get?”

“I have no idea,” Hannah said, her voice stiff with a rage she could only half contain, “because they’re in some kind of fucking foreign script. What does that even mean? What’s a bloody y plus when it’s at home?”

“Oh!” Jonty began to laugh. “God, yeah, sorry. They used Greek grading at my school so you forget how weird it must be to people who’re used to percentages. That’s not a y, it’s a gamma—you know, like… alpha, alpha minus, beta, gamma plus, all that. Oh look, here I am.” He ran his finger down the second-year list to a position about halfway down. “Beta alpha, gamma plus plus. Could have been worse. I knew I fluffed the second essay. Where are you?” He looked over at the first-year list curiously, and then laughed. “Well, you don’t need me to translate that.”

Hannah looked at where he was pointing—to her name at the top of the list, with α, α written beside it.

“What do you mean?” she asked uncertainly, and Jonty grinned.

“Myers writes them out in order of class position. So from the fact that you’re first, you can probably guess you’re home and dry. But in case you hadn’t worked it out, that’s alpha, alpha.” And then, when she didn’t answer but only stared at him, waiting for the translation, he clarified. “There is no alpha plus. Alpha is the best mark. You got it for both papers. I’d say you did okay.”

---

“CHAM-FUCKING-PAGNE,” APRIL CROWED,when Hannah came back, blushing and unable to hide her huge grin.

“I can’t,” Hannah said. “I really can’t. It’s—” She looked at her phone. “It’s nearly six, I’ve got an essay I’ve got to get done for tomorrow, and besides, I’m broke.”

“Hannah.” April was severe. “It’s not every day you come out top of your class in your first exams. I am taking you out for a drink, whether you like it or not.”

“Okay,” Hannah said, a little reluctant, but laughing. “But just one, okay? Seriously just one. I have to get back for supper and I have to get this essay done. It’s due in first thing tomorrow.”

“Just one,” April said seriously. “Pinkie swear. And I know the perfect place to take you.”

---

SOME FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, HANNAHfound herself wearing her new Chantecaille lipstick and a pair of borrowed heels, balanced on a stool in a private members’ bar that she had never even noticed, with a Bellini in her hand that she didn’t remember ordering. As April chatted away about Valentine’s Day balls and the dress she was ordering from London, Hannah took a gulp of the cocktail and felt the alcohol filtering through her blood, giving everything a distant, unreal quality, as if she were looking down on herself from a great height. It wasn’t just the drink, though, she knew. Every day she spent with April she felt increasingly dissociated from her old self, the gulf between this gilded existence and humdrum Dodsworth gaping wider and wider until it seemed that no train could bridge it.

“Smile,” April instructed, and held up her iPhone high above the bar, angling her head towards Hannah’s with a provocative little pout that made her lips look like two plump red cherries. Hannah smiled—and the camera clicked, and then April was uploading the picture to an app on her phone, with the caption It’s a Shirley Temple, Daddy, promise *kiss emoji*

“That is definitely not a Shirley Temple,” Hannah said, pointing at the Bellini in April’s left hand. “It doesn’t even look like one.”

“No, but my father doesn’t look at my Instagram, so it all cancels out,” April said, rather sourly. Hannah looked at her curiously as she sat there, swinging one leg and scrolling down her feed, a frown between her finely plucked brows. She was never quite sure how much April’s poor-little-rich-girl act was just that—an act. On the one hand, she hadn’t witnessed any evidence of April’s parents at all—the closest thing she had seen to a parental figure was Harry, the minder/bodyguard who had accompanied April to Pelham that very first day. On the other, that was true of lots of people at college. Some parents had done a swift drop and run. Others had hung around for a few hours, making indulgent conversation, before being shooed away. And many students, particularly the international ones, had arrived without any parental escort at all. April wasn’t alone in that.

“What about your mother?” Hannah asked now, with the sensation of treading on rather thin ice, unsure how deep the water was beneath her feet. She knew that April had a mother, because she had referred to her in passing once or twice—but there was something about the tone April used in discussing the topic that warned Hannah that there were complicated emotions beneath the surface, quite different from Hannah’s own mix of affectionate exasperation with Jill.

“Oh, she’s a professional fuckup,” April said. She took a swizzle stick off the bar and stirred her Bellini thoughtfully. “You know, Prozac before lunch, Stoli after. Little Vicodin chaser before bed.”

“Stoli?” Hannah echoed, puzzled, and April rolled her eyes.

“Vodka, darling. You’re such a little provincial.”

Hannah said nothing. April probably meant it as a dig, albeit an affectionate one, but it was true, she was provincial, and she wasn’t ashamed of that. That wasn’t the reason for her silence. It was more that she didn’t know what to say, faced with this unexpected slew of information. Did April want sympathy? Or just a breezy agreement?

“Can I get you two ladies another cocktail?” The bartender broke the silence, pushing a little dish of olives towards them. He was dressed in a crisp white shirt and black waistcoat, and his accent was Spanish, or perhaps Portuguese, Hannah wasn’t sure. He was extremely handsome, and she was not surprised when April put away her phone and rested both elbows on the bar, giving the man a good view of her cleavage in a sheer white silk top.

“What are you offering?” she asked, a hint of a purr in her voice.

“What do you like?” the bartender countered, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “For you ladies, I could make something special.”

“What do you think, Hannah?” April asked, turning to her, and Hannah suppressed a guilty thought of her essay waiting unwritten at home, and the effect of not just one but two cocktails on an empty stomach.

“Well… I did say just one, but… I guess I could stay for one more. But then I have to get back.”

“Just one, then,” April said with a slightly theatrical sigh. “So we’d better make it count. Make us…” She skewered an olive on a cocktail stick and put it to her lips, twirling it gently against her teeth with mesmerizing slowness as she thought. “Make us… Oh, I know, make us a Vesper. You know, like in Casino Royale.”

“Excellent choice,” the bartender said, and he turned, pulling three bottles off the rack behind the bar with a theatrical flourish, spinning one in the air before pouring a long stream of clear alcohol into the shaker.

When the drinks were finally mixed, the bartender strained the cold liquid into two tall brimming martini glasses, and picked up a sliver of lemon zest. Very, very carefully he pinched it over the left-hand glass, spritzing the oil from the zest across the surface of the drink in a little iridescent cloud. Then he dropped in the rind and repeated the action with the right. Finally, he slid the glasses slowly across the bar, the cloudy white liquid trembling at the meniscus.

“Aquí tenéis,” he said, and gave April a little bow. “A drink named after a beautiful woman, for two beautiful women.”

“You flirt,” April said. She picked up her glass and took a long, luxurious swallow that drained it almost halfway. “Oh my God, that’s delicious. What do you think, Hannah?”

Hannah picked up her own glass, put it to her lips, and took a gulp to match April’s. She nearly choked. It was pretty much pure alcohol, from what she could tell. In fact, it tasted like almost neat gin.

“Jesus,” she spluttered, setting down the glass. Her eyes were stinging. The Chantecaille lipstick had left a deep rose imprint on the glass. “What’s in this?”

“Six parts of gin, two parts of vodka, one part of Lillet Blanc,” the barman said laconically. April laughed and raised her glass to him across the bar.

“I’ll drink to that.”

“And how many units of alcohol is that?” Hannah said. She knew she sounded prim and censorious, but she couldn’t seem to help it.

“Does it matter?” April said. Her voice was a little stiff, like she was trying to hide her irritation. “It’s not like you’re planning on driving home. Jesus, you sound like my dad.” She took another swallow of the cocktail.

“This is like—” Hannah eyed her own glass, trying to estimate the contents. It had to be close to a quarter of a pint of liquid. “I mean what, the equivalent of four, maybe five gin and tonics? Right?” She turned to the barman, who simply shrugged and smiled at April as if they shared a private joke. “And how much does one of these cost?”

“Who cares?” April said, and now the annoyance in her voice was plain, and she wasn’t trying to hide it. “Stop being so petty, Hannah. I’m putting all of this on Daddy’s account. He won’t notice.” She picked up the glass and tossed back the remaining inch of her Vesper with something like defiance. “The same again,” she said to the bartender, thrusting the empty glass towards him. “For both of us. And what’s your name?”

“Raoul,” said the bartender. He smiled at April, showing very white, very even teeth. “Two more Vespers coming up, it will be my pleasure.”

“One, please, Raoul,” Hannah said firmly. She swallowed the remains of her Vesper, then stood up, feeling the rush of alcohol to her head. “April, I’m sorry, it’s not just the money, I have to get back. I’ve got that essay to hand in tomorrow. I did say.”

“Fuck the essay! I never do them until the last minute anyway.”

“I have left it until the last minute. I told you, it’s due in tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow!” April scoffed. “Tomorrow is hours and hours away! I do my best work at three a.m.”

“Well—then—great,” Hannah said. Her arguments were slipping away along with her temper. “Good for you. But I don’t. In fact I’m pretty useless after midnight, and my tutorial with Dr. Myers is at nine a.m., so—”

“Oh, Dr. Myers,” April interrupted, mocking. She made a face to the barman that Hannah couldn’t read, but it was droll, as if she had secrets she could tell if she wanted.

“Yes, Dr. Myers,” Hannah said. She was getting cross. She could feel her cheeks becoming flushed. Why was April always like this? She was the perfect friend—until she wasn’t. Funny, generous, totally inspired on occasion. When she was in the mood, there was no one Hannah would rather spend time with. But then with the flip of a switch she would turn and become mean. “What of it?”

“I wouldn’t worry about him.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? I have to worry about him, April, he’s my tutor.”

“Well, good”—April reached out and tweaked Hannah’s nose—“for”—she pinched it again—“you.”

“Will you stop that!” Hannah said irritably, pushing April’s hand away, perhaps harder than she had meant, but there was something extraordinarily annoying about the action, the patronizing element to it, the physical invasion of her space. “For God’s sake, April, I’m going back, and that’s an end to it.”

“Fine,” April said. She crossed her legs, wrapping her arms around herself, looking for all the world like some kind of Siamese cat curling up to lick her fur. The candles on the bar winked off the huge rings on her fingers and she leaned confidentially across the bar. “Raoul and I will be fine, won’t we, Raoul?”

“I will take good care of your friend,” the barman said, and he smiled again at Hannah. “Don’t worry, I will make sure Miss Clarke-Cliveden gets home safely.”

“You”—April leaned still farther over the bar so that her top slipped lower and Hannah saw a flash of rose-colored brassiere—“can call me April. And I don’t say that to all the staff.”

“Okay,” Hannah said. It was that last word that did it, that little reminder of the world April inhabited and she didn’t. “Okay, that’s it. I’m out, thank you for a lovely evening, April, I’m going to go home and get some food and I suggest that you do the same.”

But April said nothing. Instead she pointedly turned her back to Hannah and began watching Raoul carve off a long coil of lemon zest.

Hannah hesitated for a moment, wondering if she was doing the right thing but unsure what her other options were, and then picked up her bag, turned, and made her way down to the street entrance.

A porter was standing at the door, and opened it as she came near.

“Can I get you a taxi, miss?”

“No, no thank you,” Hannah said. “I’ll be fine walking, but—” She paused in the doorway, uncertain of what to say, how to put it.

“Yes, miss?” The porter was kindly, in his seventies perhaps. He looked like a grandfather.

“My friend, she’s still upstairs—will you make sure she gets home okay? She’s had a bit to drink…”

“Say no more, miss.” The porter tapped the side of his nose and winked, but not in the way the barman had, with a hint of suggestion. This was purely avuncular. “I’ll see to it myself. Where’s home?”

“Pelham College. She’s a student.”

“You leave it with me. She’ll be grand.” He nodded at the rain, which was just starting outside, turning the stone flags of the pavement to dark mirrors and the lamps to splashes of gold. “Are you sure you don’t want that taxi now? I can put it on Mr. Clarke’s account.”

Hannah smiled, knowing that he had sized up her clothes, and April’s, and had a very good idea of how much cash she had in her account, and shook her head.

“No, that’s very kind, thank you. I’ll be fine. I’ve got my mac.”

“All right, then. Good night, miss. You take care.”

“Good night,” Hannah said.

And pulling her hood up, she headed out, into the rainy winter night.