“Where is she?” Emily was tapping her foot irritably. “I’ve got to get back, I have an absolute mountain of revision to get done before tomorrow.”
Hannah looked at her phone. It was gone 10 p.m. The gates would have shut long ago. They were hanging around in the foyer, waiting for April to finish up and come out, but they’d been there for almost half an hour and she still hadn’t showed.
“Should we go backstage?” Hugh asked, looking rather nervously at Will.
Will shrugged. He had said very little since his altercation with April, and now he was just standing stone-faced in the foyer, the streaks of makeup still smeared across his T-shirt. Hannah found herself wondering what he was thinking.
“Well, I’m going,” Emily said, making up her mind. “Coming, Han?”
Hannah was torn. Part of her desperately needed to get back and revise for her last exam. The other part felt like a disloyal friend for leaving April on her opening night. But if Emily was leaving, then Ryan would probably join her, and maybe Hugh too.
“I don’t know.” She glanced at Hugh, then Ryan. “What do you think? Are you staying?”
“I’m leaving,” Ryan said. “I’m bloody starving. I came straight from rugby practice and all I’ve had is a couple of beers. I’m not hanging around here when I could be getting meself a large kebab outside.”
“I have to get back,” Hugh said. His voice was slightly reluctant and now he looked at Will. “I’ve got an exam tomorrow. You’ll be okay, Will?”
Will said nothing, but he gave a tight nod.
“Fine,” Emily said, as if that settled matters. “In that case, we’re offski. See you back at the ranch, Will.”
* * *
OUTSIDE THE THEATER, HANNAH FOUND herself looking up and down the street, half expecting to see Neville lurking in the shadows, but to her relief, he was gone.
“Are you okay?” Hugh said, rather curiously.
Hannah let out a nervous laugh.
“Yes, sorry. I just thought I saw…”
“Saw what?”
Hannah bit her lip. She hadn’t said much about Neville’s behavior to the others, not since that day when he’d talked about little girls in the Porters’ Lodge. Since then there had been nothing she could put her finger on, and she had begun to feel almost ashamed of her antipathy to him. Well, nothing, right up until the night he had come up to her room with the parcel—but that was weeks ago, and besides, it was so bound up with what had happened afterwards, her kiss with Will, that she had found it almost impossible to talk about. The whole night was so bound up with her feelings for Will and her shame over her own actions that she was afraid that if she unpicked one edge of the tangle, the whole mass would come unraveled—and risk betraying Will in the process.
“I thought I saw one of the college porters,” she said at last. Hugh looked puzzled, but Emily, a couple of paces ahead, swung round.
“Oh my God. Not that weird Neville guy? The little girls creep?”
“Yes,” Hannah said. She felt a deep unhappiness take hold of her, somewhere inside. “I thought—I thought I saw him near the front, in the second half. But I don’t know if it was him.”
“It was him,” Ryan said, somewhat unexpectedly. “I clocked him in the queue for the gents. Is he still bothering you?”
“N—I don’t know,” Hannah said. She felt like someone was pulling slowly at a bandage over a cut, exposing something very raw and tender underneath. “He’s just—he’s always there, always hanging around. He came up to our room one time—I don’t want to talk about it,” she finished hurriedly, seeing that Emily was about to open her mouth to interject something horrified and furious. “I told him to go away and he did, but I just—I find him really creepy and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“You have to go to the college authorities!” Emily burst out. “This isn’t okay!”
“And say what? He came to see my friend’s play? He made me feel a bit weird?”
“She’s got a point,” Ryan threw over his shoulder. “It in’t exactly a smoking gun, is it?”
Emily was opening her mouth to reply when Ryan stopped, pointing up a side street at a kebab van parked at the intersection, a line of people snaking across the pavement.
“Ey up, I spy supper. Hold up. I’ll be back in a tick.”
“Have you seen that queue?” Emily said explosively. “And did you not hear me about the revision?”
“So don’t wait,” Ryan called. He was already halfway down the side road towards the van. “Keep the bed warm!”
“You should be so lucky!” Emily yelled back, then let out an exasperated sigh. “Knob. Well I’m off, he’ll be half an hour in that queue if he’s lucky, and then he’ll want to eat it. Hannah?”
“I’ll come with you,” Hannah said. She looked at her watch, trying to figure out the likelihood that Neville would be back at Pelham by now. Did he live in college? It dawned on her she had no idea about the lives of the porters outside their jobs. “Hugh?”
“Well, I am pretty hungry. I might… I might join Ryan?” Hugh said, as if seeking their approval. He looked a little uncertain. Hannah had the impression that he and Ryan had never really been the best of friends—that they were linked by default, through Will, rather than via any real connection of their own. But maybe Hugh was trying to change that.
“Knock yourself out,” Emily said. “Laters, Coates!” she bellowed down the alleyway after Ryan, and then turned on her heel and left.
* * *
IT WAS ALMOST ELEVEN WHEN they got back to Pelham, and Hannah found her footsteps slowing as they approached the front gate, wondering if Neville would be there.
“Come on,” Emily said impatiently as they crossed Pelham Street.
“You go on,” Hannah said. “I just want to check if the Cloade gate is still open.”
“It won’t be,” Emily said. She stopped, looking harder at Hannah. “Is this about Neville? Do you want me to see if he’s in the lodge?”
“No, it’s fine,” Hannah said, rather wearily. “You’ll have to knock at this time of night, and then how will you explain going back for me? I’ll just brave it out. I mean, so what if he’s there. He can’t eat me.”
“Okay, well, first of all, let me reiterate once again how extremely fucked up it is that you’re rearranging your life to avoid this man without going to the college authorities, and second, you know you can climb the wall behind Cloade’s?”
“What?” Hannah wrapped her arms around herself, trying not to shiver in the draft coming down Pelham Street. It was June, but the night air was cool in spite of her cardigan. “No, I had no idea. Where? All the walls are eight foot and covered in spikes.”
“There’s a bit where you can get a foothold. Ryan showed me—he used it one time when he’d forgotten his Bod card and couldn’t be arsed to go round the front. Want me to show you?”
“Yes!” Hannah said, more eagerly than she had meant, and then felt ridiculous. “I mean, not that it’s that much of an issue. I don’t mind going past the lodge. It just might be—you know. Useful. One day.”
Emily shot her a look like she was in absolutely no doubt of how much Hannah did not want to face Neville, but said nothing, only turned up Pelham Street. They passed the Cloade gate without stopping, and then rounded the corner and ducked into a small lane that led between houses to the Meadow, a large field that backed onto Pelham and was used for cricket in the summer and lazing out on sunny days. Here, the high wall that bounded the college on four sides was covered in ivy and creepers, and Emily walked slowly through the scrubby trees, picking her way by the light of her mobile, before stopping at last at a place where the ivy grew particularly thick.
“There,” she said, pointing. “Can you see? The ivy makes a kind of mattress over the spikes, and you can get a foot onto that sticking-out stone halfway up, and pull yourself up.”