by Jenny Colgan
‘You’re young for such a short time, darling,’ she’d sigh, seeing Posy come up the path to their house in Hampstead in the holidays in her dungarees, hand in hand with Chris and carrying ingredients for supper. ‘You have such a long time to be middle-aged and settled and boring.’
‘I am standing right here, Mrs F,’ said Chris amiably.
‘Chris. You are a lovely man, OK? I just don’t want my daughter to miss out on all that life has to offer.’
‘Like boffing every guy at uni?’ said Posy disagreeably.
‘Really, I never talk to my mother about stuff like this,’ said Chris.
‘You should! You should always strive to communicate in life,’ said Jonquil.
‘Yeah, OK,’ said Chris.
‘No, don’t,’ said Posy. ‘Your way’s much better.’
In fact, Posy felt a little awkward at Chris’s house. His mother was a lovely, nervy, inexplicably short woman, who was constantly trying to feed them or make sure they were all right. Posy was uncomfortable with the way Chris would throw his washing at her - in Posy’s house, she and Fleur had been doing their own washing since their ninth birthdays - then go off to discuss some new development in engineering with his dad, who had worked in mining construction until they closed the pits. She would hang around their small beige formica kitchen, decorated with hay sheafs, making small talk about cooking while Chris’s rude little sister came and stared at her from the gap in the dining room door, listening intently to her unfamiliar southern accent.
‘Families should share everything!’ Jonquil would announce grandly, in Hampstead, while leaving the girls some money to order a take-away as she popped out to a psychiatric society fundraiser. Back in Warrington, Chris’s family all sat round their little brown table, with its omnipresent ketchup bottle, every night. It had seemed obvious to Posy at the time which way was right and which was wrong.
At the time.
To celebrate the beginning of Third Year, they decided to have a big party. Posy was quite excited about getting dressed up for once, sometimes she felt she’d spent her entire university career living in Chris’s holey sweaters. They invited everyone from their courses, Chris even adding a lecturer or two. He was that kind of person, Posy thought affectionately. Didn’t distinguish between people. Didn’t have narrow prejudices. Liked people on their own merits. She stirred a large, somewhat indiscriminate punch, and wondered how many people would come.
All of them, as it turned out. Their little house was overrun. Fortunately - and perhaps a first in the history of student housing - Chris had good relationships with their neighbours, having helped Mrs Chadha change her fuses, so they weren’t causing a nuisance as the ice in the bath tipped over and started dripping through the thin floorboards, and red wine started to collect in rivulets and puddles from spilled glasses placed on wobbly fireplaces.
One room was unofficially, clearly, the dope smokers’ room, and Posy’s heart sank as she watched Chris disappear into it. The gentlest and most charming of men, smoking dope turned him into an incredibly slow-moving bore, and could take a long time. It meant him crawling into bed at seven in the morning, telling her about some deep sea ocean facts he’d just discovered and asking if she’d make pancakes for him and his seventeen friends. She much preferred the sharp, energetic hit of alcohol, then dancing for hours. Dope made her sleepy and tired.
‘Chris!’ she said as she saw him head in.
He lifted his shoulders slowly - it would have been imperceptible to another observer - in a manner which, to Posy, looked suspiciously like huffiness.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Nothing!’ She was never ever going to become a nag, for sure. ‘I was just going to say . . . well, see you in the morning, I guess!’
He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing. I mean, you’re off to smoke dope, I’ll go have a party.’
‘This is a party.’
‘It is,’ she said. ‘I like the bit when you get into a really slow argument about the Middle East.’
Around them the house was steadily filling up with people - no one ever felt the need to knock. Plastic polythene bags filled with cheap cider clinked against each other, and Posy could already smell the toaster being pressed into action.
Chris’s brow furrowed.
‘Sorry, Posy, have you got a problem? Should I be at the door, having guests’ names called out by a butler?’
Now it was Posy’s turn to feel disgruntled. ‘No! But it might be nice to say hello to your friends.’
‘Well, my friends I see every day, and most of them are in here.’ He indicated the room. ‘And everyone coming in the door is probably some Third Year corporate-bound nob I don’t even know, so does it really matter, Pose?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Come here.’ He enfolded her in his familiar bear-like embrace. ‘You really are my lovely middle-class girlie, aren’t you? Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have formal seating for twelve?’
‘Shut up, ketchup boy.’
‘Having ketchup on your dinner table is actually a sign of staying close to your roots, doncha know.’
‘Yeah yeah yeah,’ said Posy, kissing him.
‘Ugh, you two are so in love it’s sickening,’ said Carla, in the same tutorial group as Posy, lurching past with her arm round an enormous rugby player. ‘Look at these two, Fugs.’
Posy wasn’t entirely sure what Carla was doing there. She had worn full make-up and highlights every single day of university and spent a lot of time bemoaning how provincial she thought the town was - she never went to the student bars and unions and spent a lot of time in London, afterwards recounting at length tedious stories about nightclubs. But it had seemed rude not to ask her along really. Posy was amazed she had come. She must be really desperate for a boyfriend.
‘FUUUG!’ said Fugs.
‘He’s not much of a talker,’ said Carla apologetically. ‘All the good ones are taken.’
‘She couldn’t possibly mean you,’ Posy told Chris.
‘Not a bone idle old doper like me, no. Absolutely not.’
‘FUUUG!’ said Fugs. ‘Where are the kegs?’
‘Kegs?’ said Posy to Carla.
‘He thinks he’s in an American frat house,’ said Carla. ‘They all do. It’s quite embarrassing.’
Sure enough, there was a roar from downstairs. Posy poked her head round the door to see the entire rugby team turning up, waving a keg over their heads.
‘Uni is definitely changing,’ said Posy. ‘Oy! Watch the bookshelves!’
Posy really noticed it that evening. Until then, they’d been drifting along, not really talking about the future, happy to spend their evenings deep in discussion, at cheap gigs or down the student union taking advantage of the cheap alcohol.
Now, however, she could sense something in the air. The feeling that life was about to get serious. Some, like the rugger buggers, were coping with it by pretending it would never happen, and immersing themselves in partying and fun. But others, she could see, had spent their summers doing intern-ships at banks and large companies. It sounded gruesome to her, and Chris had never mentioned the future at all. She’d always assumed she’d go back to her mother’s and look for something interesting to do, or that she and Chris would rent a little flat somewhere and do . . . well, something, she supposed. Now everyone was scurrying about with application forms and new, suspiciously smart haircuts.
Here came a group now. She went downstairs to say hello. More people she knew from her Marketing course. They looked smart and organised, and instead of two litre bottles of cider had bottles of wine and were making remarks about the glasses.
‘Hi,’ said Posy, suddenly feeling a little under-dressed in her ethnic smock with the little mirrors embroidered into the hem.
‘Hiya, Posy,’ one of the girls said cheerily, even though it was the first time she’d been in Posy’s house and she had an expression on her face that said she found
it wanting. Posy glanced at the group. They had with them a boy she’d never seen before and didn’t think was even at the university. He must be a friend from out of town. He was even wearing a suit! Maybe a townie. Surely not, the townies hated the students.
‘Hi,’ she said to him. ‘Welcome.’
The boy looked at her. He was taking in her hippie dress, she knew, and her bare feet. He didn’t look impressed. She found herself getting irritated. She didn’t care how casual this was, he was still a guest in her house.
‘What’s the matter?’ she found herself saying. ‘Not your scene?’
The boy shrugged in his suit. He was handsome, she supposed, if you liked that kind of thing.
‘Adam!’ screeched Carla, diving down the stairs behind Posy. ‘You came!’
‘Urgh,’ said Fugs from up the stairs, but it looked obvious that his time had passed.
Carla rushed up to the boy, who looked unimpressed by the commotion.
‘Posy, this is Adam,’ gushed Carla, grabbing his suit by the elbow.
‘Hi,’ said Posy again, unenthusiastically.
‘Hi,’ said Adam, equally unenthusiastically.
‘Have you got any clean wine glasses?’ asked Carla, fauxnaively.
‘Yes,’ said Posy. ‘Just go past the wine cellar and take a left at the art gallery. Or you can use a toothpaste mug like everyone else.’
Adam smiled for the first time.
‘Thanks for inviting me.’
‘I invited you,’ squawked Carla.
‘But it’s your house, right? That’s why you’re not wearing any shoes.’
‘Well, it was good of you to get off early from your court appearance to join us,’ said Posy, surprised she was so riled.
‘Oh, sorry about the suit . . . I had an interview.’
‘For prison?’
‘For the Bank of England, actually.’
Posy tried to raise her eyebrows to show she wasn’t impressed, but she was, a little.
‘Adam’s doing Economics,’ said Carla possessively. ‘He’s going to get a first.’
‘Are you at our university?’ said Posy.
Adam smiled derisively and Posy decided to dislike him again. ‘Uh, no. I’m at LSE.’
He said this as if she would automatically know where that was. Annoyingly, Posy did. It was the London School of Economics, open only to the very bright.
‘That’s the London School—’
‘Yeah, I know, thanks, Carla. So how long have you two been an item?’
‘Oh, no, Adam is a friend of my brother’s . . . he had to come up here for an interview.’
‘For a London bank?’
‘They have a recruiting centre up here.’
‘You are a dedicated career hound.’
‘Well, it won’t be sophisticated parties like this one for ever.’
He was definitely sparring with her.
‘So,’ he went on, ‘what are you going to do? Take a couple of gap years . . . bum around India . . . start doing something arty and low paid in London, staying at Daddy’s?’
Well, it would be Mummy’s, but Posy was annoyed to admit that in essence he was probably right.
‘I don’t know why everyone thinks it’s so uncool to want to make a living,’ he said. ‘As opposed to what, exactly?’
‘Enjoying your youth? Not becoming an office drone?’
‘I fully intend to enjoy my youth,’ said Adam. ‘But not at anyone else’s expense.’
Posy raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, enjoy the party.’
Carla grabbed Adam’s hand and they fought their way into the kitchen, and that was that. Later on, she saw them vanish home together without saying goodbye. Carla’s push-up bra was obviously working.
Posy didn’t expect to see Adam again, but somehow his annoying voice had gotten into her head. It said things like, Why don’t you fill in this application form? and made her want to attend milk-round presentations. Chris couldn’t understand it at all.
‘Why would you want to go and work for a bunch of pricks, surrounded by pricks, for some pointless prick thing?’
‘Because I do Marketing,’ Posy would say. ‘It’s what I do.’
Chris sighed, staring out of the terraced window into the cold wet street beyond.
‘What are you going to do anyway?’
Chris shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe travel for a bit, maybe do a postgrad.’
Posy shivered. Their last heating bill had been a shocker - too many friends coming round and switching up the radiators while they sat up all night - so they were on an economy drive.
‘That means we’d be poor for years and years,’ she found herself saying, conscious that she sounded a bit like Meg in Little Women.
Chris looked up from his book. ‘Is that very important to you, pickle? Money and so on?’
‘No!’ said Posy quickly. ‘I just . . . I guess I just want to do something with my life.’ If she’d thought it through a bit more, she might have said that she wanted to be normal, to live a normal life. She was excited about going into the world, half terrified too, but she did want to take her place among professional people, with ordered lives.
‘With . . .’ He leafed through one of her application forms disdainfully. ‘Equal opportunities policies?’
It turned out that he wasn’t joking, and that was perhaps the first serious disagreement they’d ever had. Everything that for their last two years had felt like fun, like playing at grown ups - going shopping, having dinner parties, sharing house keys and secrets and laundry - all of that suddenly seemed like exactly what it was: a rehearsal for the real, real life. And that life suddenly seemed to be approaching at appalling speed.
Finals, revision, interviews . . . As usual, Chris worked his way through his work quietly and stoically, as if nothing were happening. He was going to do well, it was clear. Posy, on the other hand, couldn’t settle: moving carrels in the library, jumping from reading list to reading list and pestering tutors. It didn’t help that her mother was making polite enquiries as to her future plans - ‘I raised you to be an independent woman. Have you thought about social work?’ - and Fleur had enrolled on a homeopathy course which seemed to involve going to beautiful spring meadows to pick wildflowers, then pouring water into tiny bottles, then partying like rock stars for weeks at a time, with extra credit given if you managed to sell any of your concoctions at an international music festival.
Their futures were anything but resolved. By the time spring limped around, Posy found herself filled with dread. She and Chris seemed to be speaking less and less around the house, the long, late-night parties had stopped and they tip-toed round each other politely. Chris often studied well into the night, coming to bed too late for them to think about making love. The elephant in the room never went away. What now? What next? For each other, as individuals making their way in the world, but as a couple too. As a home.
‘I’m never going to pass this paper!’ Posy groaned a week later, sitting at the table by the window.
‘Well, you should have studied earlier in the year then,’ said Chris infuriatingly, who was reading a book in the armchair. ‘You can’t drink tea for three years then panic at the last minute.’
‘Well, why didn’t you mention that to me before?’
‘I dunno, I suppose I thought you had a secret plan that would render this unnecessary. But obviously not.’
‘I’m going to throw this book at your head.’
‘Then you really will be in trouble. They’re sixty quid each, those things.’
Then, silence. Posy looked at his shaggy hair and his bowed head, frowning in concentration over some difficult political text he was reading for fun. It was then, somehow, with the warm motes of summer light dancing through the small, dirty terraced windows, reflecting off the mismatched mugs and the fringed tablecloth, off the wall with all the photos of their friends stuck up with Blu-Tack; the fireplace, shrouded in beer mats and funny gold candlesticks;
the moth-eaten sofa with the throw over it, it was then that she knew. She looked around it, took it in, this life she had tried on. She had outgrown it just as surely as she’d outgrown keeping milk on the windowsill, Mark Owen and spray perfume deodorant.
She couldn’t think over the last three years and feel, like her mother did, that it was a waste. She couldn’t think like that. But she knew she had to move, she needed certainty and stability in her life and she needed to know if she was going to be alone or not when she did it.
She put the book down.
‘Chris,’ she said. He raised his head, and she looked directly and without rancour into his light brown eyes for the first time in a long time.
‘If I left . . . went away . . . would you come with me?’
He didn’t try and brush it off or joke around. He knew exactly what she meant.
‘To London? To live at your mum’s? Or in a cupboard somewhere?’
Posy shrugged. ‘Well, you haven’t come up with any other ideas.’
‘I have been thinking, actually.’
Posy’s heart sank. Chris was thinking all the time, of course he was. The difference was, he normally shared the things he was thinking with her. This was now.
‘Yes?’
‘Well, I thought I might go do some proper work for a bit. Stop fannying around with books. Go work on a farm, maybe. Some honest toil.’
‘Getting back to your roots?’
He smiled shyly. ‘Well, something like that. I do feel I’ve been a bit mollycoddled away . . .’
‘By me?’
‘I didn’t mean that. I mean, by this life in general.’ His voice tailed away. He did mean by her, she could tell.
‘Your mum and dad are over the moon you’re at university.’
‘Of course they are. I just want to . . . you know. Take my own year out, if you like. I want a proper job, Posy. A man’s job. Just to . . . just to know that I can.’
There was a long pause. Posy felt a great lump grow in the back of her throat. She could hardly speak or get the words out.
‘Could I . . . could I come?’
There was an even longer silence, as Posy watched the tiny dust particles float in the rays of the soft sun.