‘She’s OK,’ he says. ‘A bit tired. Ocean still isn’t sleeping through the night.’ I don’t blame her. She’s probably traumatised by her ridiculous name.
‘That’s tough.’ I bet Simon has decamped to the spare room. He looks pretty well-rested to me.
Simon is fiddling with his keys, a sure sign that he’s nervous. ‘I’m sorry about your friend,’ he says at last. ‘Georgie showed me something about it online.’
Ella’s death is everywhere. In newspapers, on TV, online, floating through the ether. Apparently you can get your Facebook page ‘memorialised’ (Debra says we should suggest this to Ella’s parents) so the deceased can exist in cyberspace for ever.
‘It was a shock,’ I say.
‘Georgie says that she taught her, this Ellie.’
‘Ella. Yes, she taught her English in Year 10.’
‘It’s a shock for her too. She kept talking about it.’
‘It’s her first brush with death, I suppose.’ Simon looks hurt. ‘Apart from your dad,’ I say quickly. ‘I wasn’t forgetting that. But Georgie was only three when Derek died. Now she’s a hormonal teenager.’
‘Talking of hormones,’ says Simon. ‘She’s still in touch with that Ty.’
‘I know,’ I say.
There’s another of those serendipity moments, then Simon says, ‘I suppose we can’t stop her seeing him.’
‘I think that would do more harm than good,’ I say.
‘It’s been quite a long time, hasn’t it?’
‘Since the summer. That’s eons in teenage time.’
‘And you’ve met him, have you?’
I’ve told him this before but I say, as patiently as I can, ‘Yes. He was perfectly pleasant. Very polite and so on. It’s just that he’s twenty-one.’
‘Why can’t she go out with somebody at school? Somebody her age. That’s what’s meant to happen.’
‘I suppose Ty seems cool,’ I say. ‘He lives on his own, he’s got a car. Those things matter at fifteen.’ And he’s good-looking, in a muscle-bound, straining-out-of-his-shirt kind of way. But I don’t say this to Simon.
‘Well, try to keep them apart if you can.’
I resent Simon telling me this, as if it’s easy to keep apart two people who can communicate electronically every second of the day. But I think that I have the perfect retort.
‘I’m taking her to Cambridge on Friday,’ I say. ‘I’ve got a meeting about my book and I thought it would be a nice day out.’
Simon and I met at university. It wasn’t until a few months into our relationship that we shyly shared the fact that we were among the large group of students at Bristol known as ‘Oxbridge rejects’. I had been interviewed but didn’t get an offer, even though I did, in fact, achieve the required grades. Simon had an offer but didn’t get the grades. It’s hard to tell which is worse. I didn’t really mind, at first. I loved Bristol and parts of the university, especially the Wills Memorial Building, look quite Oxbridgey in the right light. It’s only recently, while I’ve been working on the book, that I’ve noticed how many people — writers, actors, academics — just happen to mention that they were at Oxford or Cambridge. R.M. Holland does it in the very first page of The Stranger. The rule is: if you went to Oxbridge, you have to say, otherwise it’s just ‘when I was at university’.
Simon was studying law so I ignored him for most of the first year. The lawyers went round in a pack, as did the medics. I was reading English and was caught up in the drama society, the debating club and an excitingly dysfunctional relationship with a philosophy student called Sebastian. I met Simon in the Christmas term of the second year. I was sharing a flat with Jen and Cathy. They were lovely people who became good friends but, in those days, they were what we would have called Sloanes, posh girls who wore their collars turned up and had pictures of their Labradors by their beds. My flatmates’ idea of fun was having dinner parties; Delia’s Spanish pork with olives, candles in Chianti bottles, spliffs circulating left to right. They were also very keen on having even numbers so I invited Sebastian even though our affair had cooled. Simon came with a girl from Modern Languages. He took one look at the elaborate place settings on our formica kitchen table and started to laugh. I caught his eye and that was it. During the port/spliff/truth-or-dare phase we sneaked out and ran through Bristol in the early hours of the morning, stopping to kiss by the Bordeaux Quay while the boats jangled in the harbour. We went back to Simon’s flat in Clifton and made love on his bed which had black sheets and a poster of Che Guevara over the headboard. We were inseparable for the rest of our time at university. We got married when we were twenty-three, after Simon had done his solicitor’s exams and I’d finished my teacher training. We were the first of our friends to get married and if you told me then that one day I would not be able to watch him drinking tea without becoming rigid with irritation, I would have laughed in your face.
The Cambridge thing intrigues him, as I had known it would.
‘Oh, are you still working on the book?’ is the best he can muster.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s going really well.’
‘That’s the one about the ghost story writer.’
‘R.M. Holland. Yes.’
‘The chap who murdered his wife?’ says Simon, clearly thinking that this is quite a wheeze.
‘No one knows if he murdered her,’ I say. ‘That might be one mystery I solve in the book. There’s the query about his daughter too.’
‘I didn’t know he had a daughter.’
‘No one knows for sure. There are mentions of an M in his diaries and I think she might be his illegitimate daughter. Yet she dies too, because there’s a poem, “For M. RIP”.’
Simon shivers in a theatrical way that I find irritating. ‘Bloody hell. He was a charmer, all right. I can’t believe all his stuff is still there in the school. In the attics. No wonder it’s such a weird place.’
When I first moved to Sussex and got the job at Talgarth High, Simon insisted that Georgie go to the private school nearby. Despite some ideological objections (which, by the way, Simon used to share), I agreed. I’d accepted the job at Talgarth but I knew that it was a school in crisis. Georgie had had a lot of upheaval that year, what with her parents divorcing and the move from London, so we’d thought that maybe St Faith’s, a small, select girls’ school, was the answer. Georgie hated it. She hated the girls — most of whom had been to the adjoining prep school — the uniform, the petty rules, everything. In just one term she became depressed and withdrawn and worryingly thin (competitive dieting was the one sport St Faith’s excelled in). I moved her to Talgarth in Year 8 and, by and large, she has thrived. She has lots of friends and does pretty well academically. Simon still secretly wishes that she wore a blazer and carried a flute case. Well, he’s welcome to go down that route with Tiger and Ocean (his tolerance of exotic names has also changed over the years, I imagine this is Fleur’s influence). But Simon can’t deny that Georgie is happy at school, so he confines himself to describing Talgarth as a ‘sink comprehensive’ and making remarks about its apparently unwholesome atmosphere.