When she left the seminar that day, I could sense that people were whispering about her. Some of them shook their heads. They widened their eyes at each other. I hate to think what they might have been saying. But at the time I blocked out my ears, so I can’t verify any of it now.
***
The professor’s eyes scanned the crowd and then they fell on me.
‘Perhaps you should …’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I packed up my things and went to the bathroom – the disabled just down the hall. I knew that she’d be in there.
On opening the door just a crack, I saw the damp grey of the walls, the image of her face reflected in the mirror. She looked awful. Disturbingly so. The expression on her face was entirely unfamiliar. I can’t describe it properly, even now. There was something haunted, something ghostly about it. There isn’t a suitable adjective, it just made her look … dead.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
‘Nothing.’
‘Then what was that all about?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well,’ I paused and wondered how best to put the question to her. ‘I wonder if you should maybe …’
‘I should what?’
‘You can’t—’
Her eyes shot towards me. ‘I can’t what?’
We glared at each other for several moments. The expression on her face had changed – now it was nameable: she looked defensive.
I wanted to say to her: you can’t expect to be the centre of attention all the time. You can’t throw a tantrum when you’re not given credit that you don’t deserve. But there was something in her look which advised me against it. There was an unspoken regulation in our relationship. I could only speak when she allowed it; when she approved of what I was saying. Although I felt justified, completely in the right — I still couldn’t bring myself to speak against her. In that moment, that regulation between us seemed more important than anything else.
And so I said nothing. I shrugged, looked at the floor and left the room. I walked back to my accommodation block. Alone.
ii.
When I was in my room I lay in bed and looked at my laptop. While I scrolled through social media feeds, I thought about our conversation. That led me to click on her profile again. I went straight to her photos, put them in a separate tab, and began to flick through. But this time rather than concentrating on how artsy and beautiful she looked, or how many likes each photo had accrued, I noticed her habits of virtual response.
One of the things I’d admired about Marina was that she didn’t care about her online status – I loved how she was above it. The way that she ignored her timeline activity but still had loads of tagged pictures, etc, had struck me as classy and aspirational, yes. But there was something else: it fundamentally justified her behaviour towards me. I took her abuse because I accepted that that was who she was. She was mean because she didn’t solicit or give approval. From me or to me. From anyone or to anyone. Online or offline.
But now I noticed, looking at her online activity more closely, that there was something she did do regularly. She might not have commented, tagged, or uploaded anything. She might not have liked posts. But she did like comments. She only liked the witty comments, made by people whose profiles – I hovered my mouse over the names – were as stylish and elusive as hers. Far from being detached, her profile was carefully monitored. It was not that she was above being vain – she was just vain about seeming vain.
I closed the lid of my laptop. I went to sleep.
iii.
The next day when Marina apologized, I accepted straight away, and we never spoke about the seminar incident again. We went to the same parties, drank in the same groups, and she even still came to my room from time to time. But it was different after that. My perception of her had changed. My behaviour towards her was less encouraging. And rather than look at her as an equal, I started to watch her from a distance, analytically, like I had watched my friends at school.
Things she said and did struck me as increasingly peculiar. Her relationship with the professor, for example.
Marina’s schtick with the professor struck me as odd in a different way to Henry’s. Theirs was a power game played without any clear rules or intentions. Why had he offered her a scholarship in the first place? Why had he been toying with her? And why had she been so insistent on studying his subject if she hated him so much anyway? Marina was always irritated when I tried to bring this up, brushing off the issue as tedious.
‘It’s not something that we have to talk about,’ she said once. ‘I just hate Montgomery, it’s not interesting.’
But the fact that she disliked him so much was exactly what was interesting to me. It didn’t make sense as to why she was following him around. She hated him – and yet she was making a huge fuss about transferring back to do his course. She’d insisted that we skipped everything except for his seminars. What point had she been trying to prove?
‘I wasn’t necessarily trying to prove a point,’ Marina would say. ‘It’s just unacceptable that students should be treated like that.’
This would stimulate another rant about the structure of university – how the institution was a nepotistic hotbed, etc – and I would tune out, silently reminding myself not to bring it up again. Marina’s complaints about university now came across as spoilt, boring and repetitive. It struck me as embarrassingly lacking in self-awareness to complain about nepotism when she was fighting so hard to maintain a scholarship that her dad had (probably) orchestrated for her. And she didn’t deserve the scholarship anyway – she was so careless with money, so careless about work, so careless about everything.
‘Look, it’s a long story, you wouldn’t understand.’
Then there was the issue of exclusivity. As time wore on, and her excuses became increasingly evasive, I began to suspect that there was another reason that Marina was avoiding this subject with me. It was like she didn’t want to talk about the professor to me because my knowledge would somehow encroach on her home life. This struck me as a class thing – like I couldn’t be trusted with any insider knowledge because I hadn’t grown up riding ponies and quaffing Veuve Cliquot in the Home Counties. Because I took things seriously, like work and money, and so did my family.
Sure, Marina’s father was a lecturer, but he had a pot of inheritance money which allowed him to make cushy investments. From Marina’s anecdotes it seemed like he hardly did anything at all, excepting a few token lectures. Marina, Henry and the professor had their own community – of leisurely jobs and moneyed ‘mind-improvement’ – and this was not a community to which I was invited. They enjoyed their private political machinations exactly because they were private.
I resented them for it.
iv.
One day, towards the end of November, I was sat in the library working on an essay. There was a deadline at the end of term. I was in the middle of trying to think of a convincing argument – actually, any argument – when I heard Marina speaking.
‘Eva.’
I ignored her.
‘Eva,’ she repeated, tapping on the desk. ‘I need your help with something.’
I looked up at her warily. There was that familiar expression: half mischievous; half angry.
‘What is it?’ I said. The words came out dull and flat, ruder than I’d intended.