“Sorry,” I mumbled. Richard got up. He had to push Alice ’s chair forward to get to me. He pushed his fiancée to get to me.

“Go home,” he said, putting a hand on each of my shoulders. “Get some sleep.”

That’s the thing with Richard. His good advice is always so uninteresting. There’s nothing arresting about it. No epiphany. It’s easy to ignore.

I tripped walking out the door, and caught the jamb to keep from pitching forward. The door bounced off my back. A group of students on the pavement stopped talking and waited for me to get out of their way. One of them had dark hair. I thought it was Liv for a minute, and stared, frozen. She looked at one of her friends and laughed, which snapped me out of it.

A bicycle bell jingled behind me. I wasn’t fast enough. The cyclist skidded sideways to avoid me and hit a parked car. Its alarm siren rose and fell, too close to my ears.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded.

I didn’t answer. He pedalled away, not leaving a phone number tucked under the windscreen wiper. I groped in my pockets for an old receipt on which to scribble my number-it was partly my fault-but I didn’t have one. I leaned over a rubbish bin, and almost reached in to retrieve a paper bag. It had a wet stain and a bulge at the bottom, and I finally recoiled.

I leaned against a concrete pillar. My mobile rang, again, and I assumed that it was Liv calling from a borrowed phone. I’d already ignored two of those, in the pub. But this call was from Peter. I answered.

Peter and I have known each other since we were teenagers. We boarded at different schools, but attended some of the same camps and summer courses. We were both at Cambridge now. We both had theses to finish.

“What?” I said.

“Careful, mate. You’re being followed.”

I’d drunk too much to have a sense of humour. I flattened against the wall and demanded to know what the bloody hell he meant.

Peter laughed. “That girl you know? Polly? Her mother’s in town, and she’s been asking for you.”

“What are you on about?”

“I told her you might be at Magdalene. That’s why I’m phoning. If you don’t want to see her, don’t be at Magdalene.”

“I’m not.” I got myself together, and started walking along back streets toward Earth Sciences.

“You sound wrecked.”

“I thought you were Liv.” I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t want to explain.

“Mmmm… Liv,” he said, tasting her name. “You’re not responsible for her. She’s not your fault. You didn’t ask to be worshipped.”

“Some things are,” I said.

“Some things are what?”

“My fault. Some-a lot of things are my fault.”

He laughed again. “You dog! I thought it was the other one you were after.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” I picked up my pace.

“So what happened with her?” he asked, referring, I think, to either of them. Whichever was a better story.

“Polly…” I said, then trailed off. I don’t know what happened with her. I know what happened between us, but I don’t know what happened inside her.

“Look, you did the right thing. Liv knows what she wants. You’re better off.”

“I did the wrong thing. I did several wrong things. I’m doing a wrong thing right now.”

I skulked along the edge of Emmanuel College and crossed St. Andrew’s Street quickly.

I stopped short of my office. It wasn’t a refuge. The stapler and pencil cup were probably still scattered on the floor, where they’d fallen when I pulled Polly onto the desk with me. The cleaners would have taken the rubbish bin, but the smell of sick would still be there, trapped in the poorly circulated air.

“Are you in your office?” I asked Peter.

He was. I crossed the road. The massive whale skeleton on Zoology’s patio rattled in the breeze. Female voices in the car park froze me until car door slams shut them away.

That’s the moment I thought of Lesley Harter. I hadn’t thought about her, except in passing, for years. She was seven years my senior, which was an impossible distance when I was fifteen, at least to me it had been. Now she would be… thirty-one. Which seemed equally impossible. She was probably married. She was probably a mother. She ran her family’s businesses, and had done since she was twenty. But I thought of her as just herself.

I had met her at a dressage event, where one of her horses was competing. She knew Dad through work. Alexandra had wanted to see the “horsies,” which is why we were there. I’d only been out of choir for a year, having cracked my voice at fourteen. I’d never seen a woman so beautiful. While Mum chased after Alexandra, Lesley showed me the horses.

She asked me to carry a box of tack into the trailer attached to her car. I put it down in the corner and she followed me in. The trailer walls muffled the loudspeaker and applause. “It’s all right,” she said. She just stood there, waiting for something, and letting me know it was all right. I stepped close and kissed her, terrified I was doing it wrong. When I pulled away, she smiled again. “You’re a lovely boy,” she said. She waited a few moments more before turning to hang up a bridle. She left it to me, all on me. If I wanted to touch her I could. I could see the outline of her bra under her polo shirt. I couldn’t move. It was overwhelming. She took pity on me. She kissed me again. I was mad with it in my response; I kissed her all over her face. She had earrings on, hard little gems that scratched my lips.

That’s all we did. Then we went to watch her horse compete. When he won, she raised her arms up in a cheer. Her breasts lifted with her arms. I could hardly breathe.

We became friends, and I never touched her again. I hardly saw her, just now and then. But when I did, she spoke to me like she valued my opinion. That wasn’t new, exactly, but usually adults wanted to hear what I had to say about academic things. She wanted my opinions on life. Should she forgive someone, should she insist on some condition in a contract? It was somehow much the same as what had passed between us in the trailer. She treated me as an equal.

I would never tell Peter about her.

He opened the front door of the building for me, and we went up to his office.

An empty coffee cup from Fitzbillies bakery was on his desk. The last time we were in there together, he’d flirted with the woman at the till. I noticed that this paper cup had a phone number written on the side. Next to it was a stack of books with papers inserted between pages throughout. None of the books were open. There was an empire-building computer game on his screen. “I thought you were working,” I said.

He grinned. “Procrastination is part of my process.”

His whiteboard had notes scrawled on it in three different colours, and an idle sketch of a rowboat, surprisingly detailed. More of his “process.” Polly rushed into my mind, her laughing that Penrose had illustrated his talk with colourful homemade transparencies. It’s something to watch American standards and expectations get tickled like that.

Polly even looks American, though I can’t quite explain what I mean by that. She looks like someone in an American chewing gum advert.

“So…?” Peter asked, leaning back in his chair, and I knew what he meant. I was in the stiff-backed guest chair, sitting straight up. I shook my head. “You and Liv?” he persisted.

He was my friend. I had to trust somebody.

“I went too far…” I began.

“Holding hands is acceptable in this century,” he teased.

The opportunity shuttered. I couldn’t make him understand without spelling it out. And once he did understand, he’d make a joke of that too, wouldn’t he. He’d think it was hilarious.

“Tell me again about your brother,” I countered. His face froze.

“The hell?”

That was mean of me. His brother was the only thing he was sensitive about.

“Seriously, do you have a problem?” he wanted to know.