‘Rugby gets super-serious this term, so he stops eating anything apart from steak and chicken breasts, and he goes off the drink, which makes him enormously grumpy.’

‘You’re having a welcome-back party without him?’

‘Just a little one.’ She knelt down, pulling things out of a suitcase. ‘I can’t find anything.’

‘Maybe if you unpacked?’

‘I know, I know, but Max’s parents don’t send anyone to clean unless he’s here, and I’m basically a human manifestation of chaos. How about these?’ She picked up a pair of wide-legged velvet trousers. ‘Nice?’

‘Great,’ Chloe said, bemused. ‘Does your cleaner put your clothes away?’

Zadie zipped up the trousers. ‘Yes, I know, I’m a hideous brat. I quite like these with just a bra.’

‘You’ll be freezing.’

‘You’re being very’ – she paused – ‘motherly this evening.’

‘Sorry. I’ve been at home too long. Come on, let’s have a drink.’

The party unfolded as Chloe had come to realize Zadie’s parties often did. They drank, someone cranked up the music in the living room, people lay around on sofas getting high, ran around the garden playing complicated drinking games, disappeared into bedrooms to fuck. Chloe moved from room to room, trying to decide what she was in the mood for. A nagging voice at the back of her head kept reminding her that she had exams coming up, set texts to read, notes to revise. Before she had come here, when she was doing her school exams, she had woken every day at seven, run for an hour, studied until her mother brought her a sandwich, and then studied until seven at night. Not to make herself suffer, not even because she had to, but because she wanted to. This was what was going to change her life. This was what was going to get her out.

But then, she was out now. This was the ‘out’ she had dreamed of, the world she had wanted to reach. She’d got through the door, behind the curtain – whatever metaphor you wanted to use. She’d dreamed of leaving her town, finding people who also wanted to live in a different time and to have adventures. That was what she was doing right now. So if she couldn’t wake up tomorrow to re-read Great Expectations, or her notes on Beowulf went untouched, did it really matter? Was she really missing anything?

She needed another drink to silence the nag, to let herself believe that she deserved to have some fun, to enjoy what it was she had worked so hard to achieve. The kitchen was filled with ten, twenty people, setting up a game of Beer Pong. Chloe took a bottle from the fridge and tipped it up into her glass, filling it to the lip.