Not to mention it had been a one-way fantasy. He hadn’t sought her out. They were too different, he instinctively knew that and would never act on it – she could see just from how he was sitting there that he was sensible like that. And besides, everyone knew she and Jules were on-off sleeping together. He wouldn’t dare—

But when she’d seen him on the river, in his element, it hadn’t looked like it was her boyfriend he was wary of.

‘I asked Mr Marling here to join us, Charlotte, because you made some points in your essay, “Does History Tell us the Truth”, which I thought might provoke an interesting discussion—’

She forced herself to look back at the professor. ‘Huh?’

‘—Yes, you said, for example, that History is just a fable agreed upon and that there’s nothing to be learnt from the stories of dead men; but I wonder if you’ve considered the long-term perspective it confers upon the entire human experience? That perhaps it puts the present into context, for example?’

She felt her cheeks burn. She didn’t want to debate history with him. ‘It would if the history conferred upon us was comprehensive, but the present is being contextualized by only that one narrow version of the past, the one written by the victors, and that is reductive,’ she replied sullenly, her voice sounding as perfectly bored as ever. ‘The dead can’t tell their truth. The full complexity of what really went down is reduced to a headline, an agenda, a policy. Historians can’t possibly know every aspect of the truth. No one ever gets to know the whole story. Lives are broken all the time by the things that go unsaid and remain unknown. The full truth lies down in the cracks where we cannot see.’

‘So you’re saying that History is inherently flawed because what is transferred is just one perspective in what is actually a prismatic experience?’

‘Exactly. Same as in life. We’re all here, in the same room, at the same college, in the same university – yet our experiences within that framework are completely different.’ Her eyes flickered towards Nathan again, she couldn’t help it. He was staring at her intently, but his thoughts were impossible to read. ‘Whose version is right or the most authoritative? When we leave here and move away, whose should be remembered and passed down as the official Cambridge experience?’

He didn’t blink, his eyes never leaving her now, her speech the warrant he needed to watch her.

‘So then, taken to its natural conclusion, your view is that History can tell the truth but not the whole truth and certainly not nothing but the truth?’

She blinked and looked back at him. ‘. . . Yeah.’

Doc Hall allowed a tiny smile to play on his lips. ‘Mr Marling, what are your thoughts on the matter?’

‘The exact opposite, sir. History is vital because it provides the framework by which the lives of every person on the planet are shaped. Learning from the mistakes of the past is the only way to avoid them in the future.’