‘What was your thesis?’

‘My thesis, God.’ She remembers the potential supervisor she’d approached, his stained teeth as he’d asked the same question. ‘Well – I was twenty-three. Everything was so dramatic. Everybody in that book, except Woodville – he’s the love interest, kind of – everybody is living a very traumatised life, and there was a lot of stuff about trauma going on at the time, so I thought, OK, I’ll do that.’

‘Right, but what was your thesis?’

‘I’m getting to that,’ she says, ‘if you’ll let me talk. Mathilda isn’t – it’s not what you’d call a masterpiece. It’s quite an indulgent book. It doesn’t have that central sort of spine that the monster and the experiments give to Frankenstein, so all the hand-wringing and the hysterics and the long speeches start to feel a bit baggy and ridiculous, but at the same time somehow purer. It fails, but it fails in this sort of pure way. I wanted to write about that – about how the book’s trying to impress the extremity of its trauma on the reader, and just ignoring everything else a novel’s meant to do.’ She feels herself reddening again. ‘Stylistics of Trauma, or something, I called it.’

‘I guess it’s a smart play,’ Jerome says. ‘Going for the minor works.’

This is what people tend to think – that Claire’s project was cynical, calculated – and usually she’s happy to let them think it, because it’s less shameful than admitting she loves the book, finds Mathilda’s predicament moving, and wishes Shelley’s life and work weren’t overshadowed quite so much by her earliest novel. Once or twice a year, students come into the library and claim they cannot find the copies of Frankenstein, and she takes them to the Shelley section and points out all the other novels. She tells them their lecturer will be hugely impressed if they reference these works as well. The students look at her as if she’s saying, hey, why not do double the work for absolutely no reason?

‘So? What happened?’

‘I got a place, I just didn’t get funding. I tried to save up for it. That was when I started working at the library, as a shelving assistant. I used to watch all the postgrads coming in and making these fortresses of books on their desks that I had to take to bits at the end of the night. I was saving, but it was really slow. I was living at home, I had to pay Mum board, and I had to get to the library, which was two buses each way.’

‘You didn’t have a car? I know you guys don’t all have cars, but that sounds terrible.’

‘Not really,’ she says. ‘If you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it.’ Jerome asks if her parents didn’t help, and she says that her mother couldn’t, she’d never really worked so she didn’t have much, and her father was living in the Cayman Islands.