The driver indicated and turned off. The world felt quieter as soon as he pulled on to the new road, flanked by sloping green hills. Pretty. She had been to visit before, of course. The previous year, while Max had been ‘studying’, which seemed to mean playing rugby and convincing some sweet, spineless friend to do his academic work for him, she had visited all the time, convincing her house mistress that she was going home and telling her parents that she was at school. But it was different now. She was going to be with him properly. Like adults. No more waiting up at night, hoping he would call her from some party, inevitably surrounded by beautiful girls, while she was locked up fifty miles away at school. And it wasn’t going to be all about Max, either. She was going to find her own friends. Her own place.

She had sworn to her parents, who had clearly been furious that she’d got into such a good university, where her boyfriend just happened to go, that she would make her own life. And while she lied fluently to them, in this instance she really meant it. Max’s friends were painfully dull, obsessed with which school people had gone to, who people’s families were, and talked endlessly about sport.

‘Will it be your first year?’ asked the driver, cutting through Zadie’s daydream of a group of like-minded friends who wanted to visit galleries with her or paint huge, messy canvases together.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘First term of the first year.’

‘You must be a smart cookie, getting in here.’

Zadie laughed. He wasn’t wrong. Her teachers had almost choked when she’d announced that she wanted to come here. But six months in the library, doggedly learning everything she’d ignored in previous years, and here she was. ‘I’m reading History of Art. It’s a bit of an easy option.’

‘Doesn’t sound easy to me.’ He caught her eye in the wing mirror and smiled.