We were not by any means poor, we were simply no longer rich, and we stopped one another from acclimatizing to our new reality. We had food and we had rooms, but our ideas of what constituted essential had been changed. Every time our raw expectations began to heal over it only took a brief reminiscence to pick the scab. Alone, we would all have got used to our new conditions quite quickly; together, we reinforced for each other the idea that we had somehow been cheated, and that no one had the right to tell us to make do. To try to keep my income above the level of my student loan I took the job at Po Na Na, and spent several nights a week mixing cocktails for marines from the American airbase at Lakenheath. They were tall handsome men, mostly black and heavily muscled with short-cropped hair and tight white T-shirts, and the local girls loved them. The job was fun, the Americans joked with me and pushed me around like a bunch of older brothers, and they had imported their own culture of generous tipping. Still I found myself stung by service, used as I had become to being served. I even took a little pride in this sensation, as I felt it marked me out as someone like Francis or Jessica, someone designed to be on the other side of the bar. We stopped dining out and Jessica and I took pains to develop a mania for cooking, so that Francis would not mind eating the food we had prepared, and we could all pretend that it was a matter of choice and not necessity.

At the same time that the money began to run dry, the advent of warmer weather changed the shape of the day. Tables spread out from the cafés. On the bright days tourists would appear, and any journey through the city was punctuated by snatches of the tour guides’ monologues, giving out history like goody bags as the assembled group took photographs or filmed on camcorders. Red and blue flowers appeared in the wrought-iron hanging baskets outside the Bun Shop, which had swung empty in the winter wind of Michaelmas with the menace of miniature gibbets. The long nights were disappearing, and with them the freezing air and darkness that had given us cover for our climbing expeditions. The bodies of our fellow students began to emerge from the protective layers of clothing, like rolling fields from under thick drifts of snow, and the coughs and colds that plagued the overworked receded, making everyone seem fresh and new. It was as if they were gaining on us, their spirits accelerating as ours began to flag. Spring brought with it rain that made getting around the city a series of dashes from doorway to Gothic arch. The ancient pavements collected puddles. I felt not only had our former pleasures died, but the new crop that should have supplied us in this new season had been stunted. Several times, I heard the others bring up memories from the previous year, of the kind of things that they had done together then. They talked of ordering a hamper from Fortnum & Mason, of hiring one of the Tudor boats on the first day of real heat and punting all the way up to Grantchester, hanging on under the willow tree by St John’s and drinking in the shade, putting their bare wrists in the pale green water to keep cool. One weekend Francis had taken them all to Cambridge airport and whisked them away on a cheap flight to Budapest for a stay in an ancient spa. Later in the term it had been the Eurostar and a night at Maison Blanche, returning the next morning first class without having slept. Jessica had stolen the silver salt and pepper shakers as a souvenir. These recollections were tinged with a mellow sadness, as if one of the participants had died in the intervening year, but we all knew it was the money that was dead. The others raised them in a spirit of nostalgia, but they pierced me with regret for something I had never experienced, but should rightly have been mine. I felt like the son of a noble family whose father has squandered his inheritance, and watches as his estates are sold one by one to pay off another’s debts.