PERHAPS IT’S BECAUSE OF THE photos, but the next morning Hannah wakes early, in the predawn, from a dream of April. It was not the usual nightmare—Neville’s shadow looming out of the darkness; April’s body, golden in the lamplight, her cheeks still flushed.
Instead she was walking up one of the narrow medieval wynds that twist and turn their way up from the gardens all the way to the Lawnmarket in front of Edinburgh Castle. She was going slowly, her hand over the baby in her belly. And then, as she rounded a corner in the passage, she saw it—a flash of gold, a shimmer of silk. And somehow she knew—it was April.
Hannah sped up, going as fast as she could up the winding passageway, hurrying up the steps, and she could hear April’s footsteps in front of her, and see her flitting shape silhouetted against the walls of the alley by the lamps—but she could not catch her.
At the top, where the stairs spit you out suddenly into the bustle of the Lawnmarket, all tourists and bagpipers and souvenir stands, she stopped, catching her breath, casting around to see where April had gone.
And then she saw her—one last glimpse of a mocking face as she disappeared into the crowd, far down the street. And the strangest thing was that it was April—but not April as Hannah knew her, not the April of the Instagram photos, skin dewy fresh, a trace of puppy fat lingering at the curve of her jaw. It was April as she would have been now—a woman on the cusp of her thirties, her features sharpened to show the bones beneath the softness of adolescence.
In her dream, Hannah hurried towards her—pushing her way through the crowd, straining for one last glimpse…
And then she woke.
Now she lies there, catching her breath, trying to anchor herself back in the present day. Gray light filters through the cracks in the curtains, and beside her she can hear Will’s slow, gentle breathing. Her bladder is complaining—she always needs the loo these days—but she can’t quite force herself out of bed yet. She needs a moment to orient herself, remind herself of what’s real and what’s not.
It’s been a long time since she dreamed of April. Longer still since she caught sight of her across a crowded room. There was a time when she would find herself scanning crowds for April’s face, her heart skipping a beat at the sound of a certain laugh rising above the hubbub, at the sight of a close-cropped blond head weaving towards the bar. But over the last few years those occurrences have become more and more rare—until tonight, anyway.
Now it’s as if the news of John Neville’s death has stirred the mud of her memories, and images from the past float up from the depths—not the ones memorialized on April’s Instagram, but others, more intimate, more real. As she lies there, gazing at the minute cracks and crannies in the ceiling, the faces of the others rise up in front of her—not as they are now, but as they were back then. Hugh, streaking across New Quad on a dare one misty morning, wearing nothing but his glasses, the blackbirds rising all around him, flapping and shrieking their indignation. Emily, bent over her books in the Bodleian, that little frown line etched between her thick black brows. And Ryan. Ryan jumping from the Pelham bridge into the Cherwell, in full white-tie evening dress. Ryan running down Broad Street bare-chested, football shirt flying like a banner above his head, after a Sheffield Wednesday win. Ryan in the Eagle and Child, downing pints of bitter and holding forth about the evils of capitalism, then standing on the table and shouting, “Rise up, my fellow workers, and seize the means of production!” then leaping over the bar and gulping directly from the beer tap before the astonished barmaid could do anything to stop him.
He got thrown out for that, she remembers.
“Next time I’ll ban you for life, you fucking layabout student!” the landlord had roared as he slung Ryan out into the street, the others tumbling, giggling after him. “Fellow workers my arse, you lazy little shit!”
Now she wonders how he is, and feels more ashamed than ever of the way she cut him off after college.
Beside her, Will stirs, and she looks over at him, and feels her love for him clutch at her insides with a force that is almost painful. She has always loved him best when she is watching him unawares. Awake, he is self-possessed, polished, still very much the perfectly mannered private-school boy who offered her a seat in the dining hall at Pelham that first night—and some part of her feels she has never really gotten to know him better than she did that first evening.
But asleep, or in his unguarded moments, he is Will. Her Will. And she knows and loves the very bones of him.
He seems to be dreaming, emotions chasing across his face, his eyes moving uneasily behind closed lids. She wonders what he is thinking—as she does so often. Will she ever learn to read him, to see the real depths of feeling that he hides behind his mild, amused manner? But perhaps that is why she loves him so much—the unattainability of him, the rare flashes of vulnerability that he reserves for her alone.
Only once has she seen him cry—and that was after April’s death, as they held each other and wept and wept for what they had both lost, but also what they had found in each other.
BEFORE
When Hannah returned to Oxford after the Christmas break, it was with a sense of coming home.
“Why is it called Hilary term?” her mother asked in the car on the way to the station, and Hannah answered, without even thinking, “Because the feast of Saint Hilary of Poitiers falls in the middle,” and then wanted to laugh at herself, at who she had become. How did she know this stuff after just one term? It didn’t matter. She knew it, just like she knew how one acquired a blue, and what you wore for your collections.
Collections. Even the word gave her a squirmy feeling in her stomach. Three little syllables, not much to feel nervous about, but she did.
“They’re not prelims,” she had told her puzzled mother. “You take those at the end of the first year. Collections are done at the start of every term, and cover what you learned the term before.”
“So they’re just tests? They don’t mean anything?”
The thing is, her mother was right—but also so, so wrong. Collections didn’t count towards your degree class, or really anything as far as Hannah could make out—and yet everyone was in a flat spin about them, even the second-years, who had sat through the ordeal several times already.
What’s the point of an 8 week term, Will had texted her on Boxing Day, when they just make us do the rest of the work in the holidays? Is it just so the tutors get time to write their books? I can’t believe all my mates are out getting pissed and I’m stuck here revising.
Hannah had to admit he had a point.
It wasn’t just the collections giving her an uneasy feeling, though. Seeing the text from Will had triggered a sharp rush of pleasure, followed by an equally sharp stab of guilt. It was ridiculous—that just his name coming up on her phone should make her grin like an idiot. He was April’s boyfriend. Completely off-limits. But the problem was that while her head knew that, her heart didn’t seem to be able to remember it.
Before the holidays she had half hoped that her crush on Will was wearing off—and surely six weeks’ absence would give her plenty of time to forget his wry grin, the shape of his long, slim hands, and the way he looked at her across the crowded JCR with a smile that made her heart light up. But that one single text had shown that was not true. She still liked him. A lot. Which made her officially the worst best friend in the world.
Instead of replying to Will, she’d typed out a text to April, trying to assuage her guilt.
How are you? Merry Christmas! Hope you had a lovely day.
thanks, April texted back. it was fucking awful tho i did get a balenciaga tote so every cloud
Pause.
how was urs?
Pretty okay, Hannah typed back, though no balenciaga tote so every silver lining.