She knows she will not finish first or last, but somewhere in between. From her mullioned window she can see hungover students stumbling to the shop for soft drinks and cigarettes. To her right, just visible, the ghoul masks of the Sheldonian Theater. The Bodleian beyond. She will never set foot in the library again. She has packing to do. She wonders what it all was for.

There is nowhere to go home to. Her mother is dead and her father is in Spain. Her sister is in Canada. So she goes to stay with Hannah, who is living in a small flat on the edge of Kentish Town, walking distance up a long hill from where Lissa lives with her mother. Cate sleeps on the sofa in the living room of Hannah’s flat. Hannah has a new boyfriend, a man called Nathan. She met him through Lissa (of course). He is tall and handsome and gentle, and walks with a slight slouch, as though apologizing for his height. In all other respects though, he seems like a winner in life. Nathan spends nights there, in the small Camden flat. Sometimes, waking in the darkness, Cate hears them through the walls.

They talk, just once, she and Hannah, about Hannah’s new job—entry level in a management training firm.

“Why would you want to do that?” Cate asks her.

“It’s not forever,” says Hannah. “But I need money. I want it. I’m sick of not having it. I’ll do it for a while and then I’ll do something worthwhile.”

“But what about Patti Smith?” Cate wants to say. “And Emma Bovary? And the Pixies?” But she says nothing, only nods.

“So, what are you going to do?” asks Hannah of Cate. And Cate has no answer to that at all.

She doesn’t like London. The transit system alone makes her head hurt. Hannah leaves copies of Loot on the kitchen table, drops hints about people who might have a spare room available, but Cate follows no leads. She is ill at ease with Hannah and Lissa, a friendship that has grown and eclipsed her own. Ill at ease when they go out to dinner together with Nathan and Declan, Lissa’s boyfriend, a laughably good-looking Irish actor, to a restaurant Lissa knows—an Ethiopian place where food is served without cutlery on sour flatbread, which they all tear into with their fingers and dip in sauces with equal alacrity, and drink coffee which is brought to the table and roasted on the spot. They talk emphatically at these meals, using their hands as they speak, they seem certain about all sorts of things, like which films to see, which books to read, who they are, and what they are going to be.