October 1933

She’d seen him on her way into the building: a solemn-looking boy in a serge suit, standing by the railings on the corner of the square. He’d been finishing a cigarette that smelled like tarmacadam, hair made flat and moist around his temples from the pressure of a hat, which he was dangling by his knee. It was an odd thing to be doing, just lurking there with his head tilted at the sky. Was he expecting somebody to throw down a rope ladder from the roof? Had he sighted a rare bird? He’d seemed a touch ridiculous – but also handsome, self-assured in his plain disregard for passers-by, the students constellated on the paving stones of Abercromby Square. Later, when they met in studio, across an empty draughting table in Architectural Design, she could think of little else but that first glimpse of him outside; because she had an inkling it would be the last time that she ever viewed him as a stranger.

Throughout her first class of the term, while their instructor, Mr Lundy, drifted between tables and extolled the wonders of his syllabus, she gave his words the fixity of concentration she’d resolved to bring to every aspect of her studies. There would be no greater failure, she’d decided in the summer, than to earn her place at Liverpool among the men and let herself become distracted by the admiration of someone in their ranks. She hadn’t chosen to detach herself from everyone she knew to end up in the sort of ten-a-penny romance she could’ve found back home – knock on any door in Ockham and there’d be a fellow willing to go out to dinner. No, the reason she’d moved north was to achieve her architect’s diploma, and she wouldn’t leave until she had it. But there she was, in her first session of a five-year course, presented with a face she couldn’t keep from staring at. Already, she was failing. Arthur Mayhood was his name. He’d spoken only once so far, to answer during registration. ‘Present, sir,’ he’d said. What a settled way he had with his surroundings, a subdued energy.

At the end of studio, when Mr Lundy told the class to pack their double-elephants away, Arthur sat there with his drawing on the table while she put hers carefully into her case. Before she could do up the clasps, he said, ‘Excuse me, would you mind?’ He was worrying the edges of his paper. ‘I know we’re meant to have our own portfolios by now, but the Stationery Office had none left and they were meant to have one for me yesterday, but –’

‘By all means,’ she said. ‘And I won’t even charge you.’

The straight line of his mouth began to curl. ‘How kind.’

She opened out the case for him and watched him slide his paper into it with no regard for its condition. His drawing was, by contrast, conscientious and precise. Mr Lundy had instructed them to start work on a ‘parti’ – a basic concept in response to the dull brief he’d set them: to design a public building in the classical style. She’d struggled to imagine anything except a shameless replica of a church crypt she’d once visited in London. But Arthur Mayhood’s parti was more abstract, a strange union of overlapping triangles and squares and semicircles, out of which a form revealed itself almost in negative. She didn’t know if it conformed to the Beaux Arts values Mr Lundy had been trying to impart; still, when she looked at it, her breath stuck in her throat. Arthur didn’t ask for her opinion, and she didn’t give it, closing her portfolio and saying, ‘Aren’t you going to carry on with it?’