She texts back OK but stops short of a suggestion to meet. The discovery of the letter broke something between them. In the first few days afterwards she looked for ways to approach Honor and tell her what she’d found and what she felt about it but she could never quite summon the courage. And so she said nothing but watched herself filling up like a boat overwhelmed in a storm, bailing so hard that she could no longer feel where she ended and the hurt began, wishing away the days until it was time to go back to Bristol and she could right herself and forget the discovery for a while. The scheme worked. Once she was back and fully engaged in her coursework, the letter lost some of its power and neither seemed so vital nor so urgent. The hurt crystallised and a little of it turned to anger, which made it more bearable somehow, but she hadn’t gone home at Christmas, afraid of blurting out something that might sink them both. As the months passed it became harder and harder to broach the topic. And so it floated through her inner world, like a great iceberg, a still, silent thing to be steered around and at all costs undisturbed.

Anxious now not to remain alone in the flat, she packs her laptop and a notebook in her daypack and makes her way to the bus stop outside the chippy and there waits for the bus to the campus. A woman lifts her tiny dog from the seat beside her and places it on her lap.

‘Are you a student?’ the woman says, smiling.

‘Yes,’ Nevis says.

‘At the old university?’

‘No, Avon.’

‘Wasn’t it one of yours who caused that ruckus on the bridge on Sunday? I heard they had to close the bridge to traffic for hours. You youngsters these days never think about anyone but yourselves.’

The little dog begins to growl. The woman does not speak to her again. A little further on, the bus stops to change drivers and the whole journey takes longer than it would have done to walk.

Chapter 20

Cullen