She was now involved with the professor after a protracted and fraught seduction he had feebly protested. Overall, they didn’t have much to say to each other; they didn’t speak the same language on account of the significant age gap, but it didn’t matter. As they hid in hallways, lay secretly on the carpet in his office, Natasha felt like she was involved in a transaction that was professional and centuries old. It was a history lesson. While Professor Carr tried to educate her she adopted an expression of complete neutrality.

‘Of course, you’ve heard of Ionesco.’

‘You should have seen where I grew up. I was like the roadrunner in that awful cartoon, constantly evading a terrible fate.’

‘It can’t have been that bad, Natasha.’

‘You have no idea.’

When they ventured out together, into the city’s understanding night, to its high-priced bars and restaurants, she couldn’t help but think of the city’s own romantic past – all the liaisons it had hosted without its consent. Going out in the city was exciting for Natasha; she had to be stern with herself, and be extra careful not to have any fun.

‘Do you think other people are having liaisons in the city right now?’ she asked.

They were in a taxi, sitting far apart.

‘I suppose.’

‘Do you think two people having a liaison ever sat in this exact same taxi?’

‘Probably.’

‘The circle of life,’ Natasha said, dreamily.

He agreed but Natasha could see tears forming in the corners of his eyes. Since he met Natasha he was prone to excessive weeping. He wept whenever she mentioned anything contemporary. He wept when she told him she hadn’t accumulated any significant life regrets. He wept when she admitted to some laziness in her academic work. The real issue was Natasha made him feel like a young man and he hadn’t liked being a young man. She enraged him and brought him back to a time when all women were inscrutable. One night he confronted her with her blank academic diary. She watched him waving it in front of her, like evidence of an indiscretion.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘Why do you have so few time commitments?’

The next day, to appease him, and with a hope of finding out what she was studying, she visited the computer house. It was as bad as she remembered, full of irritating, flickering computers.

There were several emails from her father. He sent her articles about the importance of the college, what it had achieved, dead facts and figures. He also sent her clips from TV sketch shows they had watched together. After her mother left, they had watched comedies, takeaways resting on their laps. Splayed over couches in that sitting-room – their eyes glued on the television set, laughing over the same stupid scenes, sticky food dropping onto the stiff carpet – they had buried her mother, although, somewhere, she was still alive.

If she and her father wanted to express anything, they did it in the ugly, hideous, hilarious language of the shows. He attached a clip of a man screaming down a telephone about a hotel reservation, with the sentence: ‘Natasha, this is funny!’ Natasha wrote back: ‘They don’t like that stuff here,’ because she wanted to tell the truth and also she wanted to hurt him which was, occasionally, the same thing.