He pulled gently on the little red ribbon. Had the notebook been a gift from this new friend Claire had made, this Caro (never Caroline), with whom she kept going out for sushi and pad thai at the pan-Asian restaurant on South Street? Caro was a queer theorist – perhaps the first queer theorist ever to work at the university. She came from Whitechapel. She had wide, staring eyes, and when David first met her she had stared at him as no woman had stared at him before, completely without sexual interest but rather with horrified curiosity, the same way you might study a monstrously large spider before you took the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner to it. He could picture Caro as a notebook-keeper, furiously recording every passing judgement about her new place of work and the people in it. Had Claire met Caro in London, they would not have become friends. He had seen Claire in London: she was the proverbial country mouse, trembling in the cavern of King’s Cross. This place suited her better. She could walk the full span, from the bus station to the ruins, in less than ten minutes, and feel she knew it all. But Caro, he could see, was already pining for the city. She was already wondering what on Earth she had done. For years now David had watched the influx and retreat of members of staff across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, the bright young things who came north with their four-star-potential research portfolios to put in a respectable couple of years before they fled back to the golden triangle of Oxbridge and UCL. Caro was one of them. The nature reserves along the coast, the rubbery seals basking on sandbars, the dark sky protection that rendered the weaker constellations visible, meant nothing to her. She was horrified by the stale Guinness in the Lachlan Hotel bar, the family-friendly musicals at the Roscoe Theatre. She wore her fake fur coat at all times, as if she was afraid that taking it off would signal belonging.