Claire thought a lot about this. It was silly, obviously. It was just a student newspaper. She knew that. At the same time, they were encouraged to take things seriously here. And Claire was good; she’d be a good editor. She believed totally in the paper’s ethos, which was a kind of piratical liberalism – anti-capital, anti-Israel, pro-legalisation, pro-choice – though conservative tastes were tolerated on the arts pages. There had never been a female editor before.

‘One guy,’ she told her mother on the phone, ‘one guy wrote this story about how two of the colleges employed a contractor who donates to the BNP to build their new halls. The colleges tried to pretend they hadn’t known about it, but this guy showed that they must have known. He’s on staff at the Independent now.’

‘Oh, the Independent,’ said her mother. ‘They’d like that kind of thing.’

The nominations were announced with Canada goose feathers: Claire found one stapled to her name on the newsroom wall after Easter. She took the feather down as if it were an eagle’s pinion, not something dropped from the dirty backside of one of the geese now so populous on the riverside that they were not in any sense exotic, as they must have been when the tradition began. Ben, the editor, put his hands on her shoulders and shook her very firmly. Others clapped who had hoped to be tipped themselves. Duncan was one.

‘Sorry,’ she said, in the Queen’s Head afterwards.

‘Why’re you sorry?’ he said. ‘They’re the ones who should be sorry. Stuck-up bastard cunts. I think I might finally’ve had enough of this place.’

Duncan was from Stoke-on-Trent, and Claire loved him a little bit, although she couldn’t tell whether this was because of who he was, intrinsically, or because they had spent so much time together, working on proofs or essays until 2am in Duncan’s room, him at the desk and Claire curled on his single bed, eventually falling asleep there rather than set out on the long walk back to the centre.

Duncan was reading History. Claire was reading English. Neither was happy to say they were ‘reading’ any subject at all, but while Claire gritted her teeth and saw it through, Duncan’s bitter discomfort made him generate countless alternatives, all equally absurd.

‘I’m knowing History,’ he’d say, in his cattiest voice. ‘What are you knowing?’

Claire, catching on, would say, ‘I’m knowing English.’

‘Oh, how marvellous,’ he would reply.