‘Come and keep me company instead.’
As they walked the few hundred yards along Broad Street, the snow was still light, a grey whirl in the air overhead, barely a dusting on the lawn at Trinity. Seb held the door open and she stepped down off the street into the semi-subterranean cave of the pub with its wood floor and enveloping scent of warm beer. Tinsel twinkled among the bottles on the bar-back, and though it was only the first week in December, the atmosphere was anticipatory, expansive. There were office Christmas lunches going on at two of the tables. Seb insisted on paying and carried their drinks to the large table in the window. Across the street, the great stone heads on the columns around the Sheldonian glared balefully down through the thickening snow.
Rowan had been out to dinner with the Glasses numerous times over the years but she’d never eaten alone with Seb before. Away from the house and his role there, he seemed different, younger. He was forty-nine – he and Jacqueline had both been twenty-eight when Marianne was born – but he could have passed for forty. His hair was still very dark, and his jeans and navy coat were classic, the kind he might have worn at twenty and could still wear at sixty. While they were eating their steak and ale pies, a couple of women in their mid-twenties walked in and, seeing him, came to say hello. ‘Alison and Katya, two of my Experimental Psychology grads. This is Rowan.’ They’d found a table at the other end of the room but she felt eyes trained on her several times and when they left, waving a flirty goodbye, she looked up in time to catch Katya, the prettier one, giving her an assessing stare through the window. Seb hadn’t given the girl a second glance.
‘I can’t believe you two are graduating next year,’ he said, recalling Rowan’s attention. ‘Do you know what you’re going to do?’
‘Actually, I’ve got an interview in London next week with Robin Poretta.’
‘Have you? The Time Capsule guy?’
She nodded. ‘My tutor put me in touch with him. One of his researchers is leaving in the summer and he asked Derek to recommend someone. He taught Poretta, too, years ago.’
‘Is that what you want to do, then? TV?’
‘Maybe. I thought about post-grad but I feel like I need to earn some money.’
‘I was the same.’
‘But you’ve got a PhD.’
‘Got it later. I went to work on a research project for a couple of years first, found myself in an intense relationship with a rhesus macaque called Peggy Sue.’ Seb smiled. ‘Occupational hazard.’
He launched into a fond anecdote and Rowan drank her wine, watched the snow coming down and listened. She’d never had Seb to herself for so long and it was different – he was different from the versions of him she knew from Fyfield Road: husband and father; distracted academic trying to work in a house filled with noise; host at one of the regular kitchen suppers he and Jacqueline had for friends and colleagues. He wasn’t the Seb she hated, either, the philanderer who couldn’t help himself; instead, cocooned in the pub, she had the sense that they’d fallen back through time to when he was her own age and all the other stuff – marriage, Adam and Marianne, the books, the money, the girls – had yet to come.
‘I should let you go,’ he’d said abruptly, finishing his beer. ‘I don’t want to be responsible for you not getting your first.’
‘A first?’ She’d waved it away, self-deprecatory, but she was flattered and there had been talk of her getting one, Derek had mentioned it last week, though he’d made plain how hard she would have to work.
‘My God,’ said Seb as they climbed the steps back to the pavement. He seemed not to have realised how much snow had fallen in the hour they’d been inside. Where it was undisturbed, it lay an inch thick, and the giant stone heads looked down from under white caps like the negatives of judges passing a death sentence. She’d shivered and he’d reached out to rub her upper arms. ‘Back to college. Go and warm up.’
‘I will. Thanks for the lunch.’
‘Thank you. It was fun – we’ll have to do it again in the New Year.’