“Dad!” Penny says. “Now can we talk?”
The other Professor Bunce fumbles towards the kettle and turns it on. Penny’s mum turns it off and takes it to the sink to add water, and he kisses her forehead. “Cheers, love.”
“Dad,” Penny says.
“Yeah…” He’s rummaging in the fridge. He’s a smallish man, shorter than Penny’s mum. With sandy blond-grey hair and a big squishy nose. He’s got unfashionable, round, wire-rimmed glasses tucked up on his head. Everyone in Penny’s family wears unfashionable glasses.
The gossip about Penny’s dad is that he’s not even half as powerful as her mum; my mum says he only got into Watford because his father used to teach there. Penny’s mum is such a power snob, it’s hard to imagine her married to a dud.
“Dad, remember? I needed to talk to you.”
He’s stacking food in his arms: Two yoghurts. An orange. A packet of prawn crackers. He grabs a gingerbread girl and notices me. “Oh, hello, Agatha.”
“Hello, Professor Bunce.”
“Martin,” he says, already leaving. “Call me Martin.”
“Dad.”
“Yeah, come on up, Penny—bring my tea, would you?”
She waits for his tea, then snatches a couple more gingerbread people—they’re eating them faster than I can decorate them—and follows him upstairs.
“Why did they break up?” I ask Professor Bunce after Penny and her dad have cleared out.
She’s staring at her laptop, holding her tea, forgotten, halfway up to her mouth. “Hmmm?”
“Lucy and Davy,” I say.
“Oh. I don’t know,” she says. “We’d lost touch by then. I imagine she finally realized he was a git and had to cross the ocean to get away from him. Can you imagine having the Mage for an ex? He’s everywhere.”
“How did you find out that she left?”
Professor Bunce looks sad. “Her mother told me.”
“I wonder why the Mage has never dated anyone else.…”
“Who knows,” she says, shaking it off and looking back at her computer. “Maybe he has secret Normal girlfriends.”
“Or maybe he really loved Lucy,” I say, “and never got over her.”
“Maybe,” Professor Bunce says. She’s not paying attention. She types for a few seconds, then looks up at me. “You just reminded me of something I haven’t thought of in years. Wait here.” She walks out of the kitchen, and I figure she probably won’t be back. The Bunces do that sometimes.
But she does come back, holding out a photograph. “Martin took this.”
It’s three Watford students, two girls and a boy, sitting in the grass—by the football pitch, I think. The girls are wearing trousers. (Mum says nobody wore school skirts in the ’90s.) One of them is pretty obviously Penelope’s mum. With her hair down and wild, she looks a lot like Penny. Same wide forehead. Same smirk. (I wish Penny were down here, so I could tease her about that.) And the boy is obviously the Mage—different with his hair longer and loose, and with no silly moustache. (The Mage has the worst moustache.) But the girl in the middle is a stranger.
She’s lovely.
Shoulder-length yellow-blond hair, curly and thick. With rosy cheeks, and eyes so big and blue, you can see the colour in the photo. She’s smiling warmly, holding Penelope’s mum’s hand, and leaning into the boy, who has his arm around her.
The Mage really was dead handsome. Better looking than either of the girls. And he looks softer here than I’ve ever seen him, smiling out one side of his mouth, with an almost sheepish look in his eyes.
“Lucy and I never really fought,” Professor Bunce says. “I’d fight, and Lucy would just try to change the subject. It was never a fight at the end, either. I think she stopped talking to me because she got tired of defending Davy to me. He was so intense by the time we left school—radicalized, ready to charge the palace and set up a guillotine.”