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Sarah noted Sally's new haircut and a wool skirt that swung out with gypsy romance over leather boots too expensive for a student. Sally perched there on the edge of the banquette, her eyes filled with a bemused, self-referential fog. She didn't seem able to get anyone into focus.

‘I know. It's crazy. He's so old,' she kept saying. ‘But then, he's so, you know.'

Sarah and Laura nodded as if completely knowledgeable about the kind of life that a creature like Sally might live, flying high and bright in her new metamorphosis – and dangerously close to burn-out it seemed, never still for a moment, sipping or tapping, and then standing ready to go for ages, the hem of her skirt trembling, her eyes darting about as if she thought she might be observed.

‘You must promise not to say anything. Ever,' she said. ‘He could lose his job.' She sounded desperately worried, and a tiny bit pleased.

After she left they picked up their pints. Bog standard scruffy students with greasy hair and bad jumpers. Tattered sleeves pulled
down over hands. Not a man between them. In the gloomy afternoon light of the JCR bar, without the glamour of darkness and strobe lights, the acres of cigarette burns and black chewing-gum blobs were plainly visible across the dirty red carpet.

‘God. Wouldn't like to get myself into a mess like that,' Laura said, setting her pint down judiciously.

Sarah nodded, made a glad-I-escaped-
that
grimace. But even so, Sally had left a resonance behind in the smoky air, live and disturbing. Sarah tipped up the last of her pint. ‘Best get going. Seminar on Chaucer.'

‘Later?' said Laura. ‘Come round and we'll make toast.'

Sarah headed towards the brick and glass block that overlooked a windy concrete piazza, a deserted area designed to act as a villagey meeting place but which always felt like a stake-out. She hurried across to make her five o'clock in the Parkinson. Arrived late, but she was still only the second one there. No lecturer, just the skinny boy with a Marks and Spencer jumper evidently bought by his mum. They exchanged a brief smile and Sarah dumped her bag down on the table near him. They had formed a bit of an alliance over the past few weeks. They sat and waited.

Loud voices were approaching down the corridor, the door was flung open and a boy came scudding in, holding his hands up for self-protection as another boy thumped in and shot a rugby ball at him.

‘Got you, Nicky, you old tart,' he yelled, raising both his arms in the air. ‘I am good.'

‘Oh shut up, Andrew,' said one of the girls coming into the room behind them, her voice beautiful and bored. Cami, or was it Ros? She settled wearily onto a chair, brushing her mane of blonde hair up higher in a languid move. Trying not to look, Sarah noted a delicate grey Fair Isle sweater and a peasant skirt with an inch of perfect white rustic lace round the hem. Sarah quashed any longing with the cruel
knowledge of what that must cost in French Connection. She folded the stretched mohair jumper over her hands, a find from Oxfam.

‘Don't you boys have time to shower?' the girl with blonde hair drawled.

‘Disgusting,' said the girl next to her.

‘What's the matter, Cami, don't you like my manliness?' said Andrew, moving nearer and pulling open the collar of his rugby shirt to show an oily chest with sparse hairs. The girls squealed, not unhappily.

Nicky lobbed the ball back at him, hard into his chest and Andrew doubled up. Andrew tackled back, thumping him with a driving right shoulder into the partition wall. The ball shot across the room, scudding Sarah's folder off the table. It crashed onto the floor, the hinges cracked open, and a term's notes spilled across the carpet.

There was something humiliating about having to get up and scrabble around for her papers. Nicky appeared at her side for a moment, a pink face, a musky smell of sweat. He started gathering up sheets in the wrong order. ‘Sorry,' he mumbled. Then the ball hit his shoulder and he was off.

The lecturer came in and order resumed. The boys sat down, flicking open files. The lecturer started attacking the board with a clicking chalk, everyone racing to keep up as she compensated for lost time.

‘You've all read the Yeats?' she said, dusting off her hands. They all had, except for the boy in the jumper. He raised his hand apologetically. The lecturer passed over him with a grunt.

That was one thing Sarah had noticed about these exotic people. They turned up with assignments completed. They turned up with pens. They didn't intend to mess up. At the sixth-form comprehensive essay assignments had appeared over the horizon like perverse trials – that you might or might not complete, depending on the will of the fates.

She'd heard Cami and Ros discussing recipes for zabaglione for a dinner party they were giving. A dinner party? What was zabaglione? The boys talked about what they'd do next, a law conversion course, the banking milk-round applications; no sense that things might not work out. Sarah hadn't thought about what would happen at the end of the degree.

‘OK Nicky, you read.'

Nicky cleared his throat. He was seated opposite in the horseshoe of melamine-topped tables. He stood the book at arm's length, sprawled across the table and began reading, throwing himself into it, serious and concentrated. His face was beginning to lose its raised pinkness, the freckles rising again to the surface of his skin. He had dark amber hair, the sort of colour you'd suspect came from a bottle if he were a girl. As he read there was a catch to his voice, as if the words affected him. Sarah thought of a clarinet. That was it. His voice had a sort of musical tone.

At the end he raised his eyes above the book and smiled at Sarah. She flicked her fringe out of her eyes and looked away. She didn't want to give him the satisfaction of approving his flirting practice.

At the end of the seminar the lecturer had a notice to give out. ‘Don't forget, there are still places for the poetry symposium in Bradford. One of our lecturers is speaking, Dr Jackson. Does anyone think they might like a place?'

Only Sarah raised her hand, blushed.

‘Dreadfully sorry about what happened in there.' He caught up with her as she left the room. ‘I hope your folder's OK. Your notes and everything.'

She shrugged.

‘I liked what you said about Yeats by the way. Good point. Do you like Yeats?'

‘Yes, actually.'

‘Me too. My friend at school, his people have this place in Yeats country. A sort of old castle.'

‘Great,' said Sarah.

‘You should come next time we go out there. You'd like it.'

Sarah looked up at him. It was the sort of thing people like him said. Not meant. No answer expected. Sarah didn't really understand these boarding school types, who passed along the uni corridors in groups, their little worlds encased in an invisible barrier made from antique panelling and expensive violins.

‘You've got some mud on your face.'

He touched his cheekbone. ‘Oh heck. We ran out of time to shower. You must think we're such pigs. Where is it?' He dabbed his hand over his face.

‘No, there.' She pointed towards his cheek.

The group in front had stopped.

‘Hurry up, Nicky,' the blonde girl called out crossly. ‘We're going to the Feathers.'

‘Sorry,' said Nicky, flashing a smile and breaking away. He ran to catch up, still rubbing at his cheek with his fingers.

Back at the Jacksons' where Sarah rented a room in their upstairs flat, she made herself a Nescafé. Hers was all gone so she had to borrow a little bit of Eloise's. She thought about Sally again. The poor man
who might lose his job. There were no more spoons in the drawer, so she fished one out from the jumble in the washing-up bowl and rinsed off the baby purée. Then she drained out the murky water and began to run in hot. Squeezed washing-up liquid over the dishes.

Winston would be back soon, and she could see how he would like to be able to come in and sit down and not have to start in on all the dirty dishes that his wife had left behind as usual. Eloise always made a grand entrance into the little flat with the baby buggy and her irritation and her busy activity around the small Jackson baby. She always left behind a war zone of discarded plastic bibs and cereal packets and mangled baby clothes.

When Sarah first met Eloise Jackson she'd immediately liked this woman in her stripy ethnic sweaters and hair tied up in a band of scarves. The whole house was linked up in a sort of commune system, with weekly meetings. They shared bills and a sitting room downstairs and sacks of pulses and had a rota for growing vegetables in the back garden.

‘The family is a unit of repression,' Eloise told Sarah as she explained the system, showing her a small wedge of a room in the attic. ‘Fine if you're a man,' she said, glaring at her husband. ‘So much oppression that's happened in the past, it's all come from people being forced into a mould, in the context of family.'

Her husband nodded. Sarah was surprised to find later that the Jacksons also had their own sitting room, a privilege no one else had. ‘After the baby you see . . .' said Eloise. ‘Well, I . . .'

‘To spare the other poor devils from the racket this little one makes,' said Mr Jackson, patting the denim sling that Eloise wore on her front, a hot little tuft of the baby's hair appearing above it.

Sarah saw herself getting good with small babies. She imagined the Jacksons' warm gratitude when they went out in the evening and she babysat for them. But she soon learned that Eloise Jackson
was hopelessly and totally consumed by one relationship, and she was not letting anyone near her baby – especially not the person she kept finding in her kitchen, undisguised annoyance on her face each time.

Sitting down at the kitchen table to leaf through the paper – yesterday's copy of the
Morning Star
– Sarah spotted a scrawled note held down by a sauce bottle. Written in failing biro the words were sometimes nothing more than almost invisible scratches on the paper: Sarah. Mother called. Call her back.

A tight feeling in Sarah's stomach. She folded the paper small and put it in the bin by the sink, pushing it down under a bread bag and some curling potato peelings. She meant to call. She would. What had it been, four weeks since she'd rung home?

Eloise was out. Probably at the feminist playgroup where she took baby Jackson twice a week, always returning indignant and fired up with copies of
Spare Rib
magazine, lecturing Sarah about letting men walk all over her. Sarah wondered if Eloise had noticed that she'd never brought a boy back to the flat. She thought of the shy boy with beautiful long black hair and pristine black motorbike leathers who came to her philosophy lecture. He'd asked her out on a date. In the end she'd said no.

Sarah took her coffee and wandered through to the sanctum of Eloise's sitting room. The sanded floorboards, long porridge-textured curtains falling in unhemmed folds on the floor. Huge palm plants, a round paper light shade, so low and oversized that Winston kept banging his head against it. She sat on Eloise's futon for a moment, flicked through one of her baby magazines – ‘How to keep your marriage fun after baby arrives'. You had to invest in new knickers and an expensive nightie apparently, cook a candlelit supper. Well, she'd seen a lot of that lately. Eloise's grey underwear drying in the bathroom, her monstrous feeding bras, old tights and knickers looming
through the misty room like chopped-up ghosts as you lay in the ancient bath. She shut the magazine.

Sarah couldn't help feeling a bit sorry for Winston at times; the way Eloise treated him. Anyone could see how he adored that baby, but Eloise was like a guard dog. The moment he held the child she was all over him, telling him how he was doing it all wrong; he was jiggling the baby's head all wrong. And he was a beautiful child. A smile like he was chewing half a Dutch cheese, wide and gleeful. Fine nutmeg skin and tight black curls on his tiny melon head. He was going to grow up to have Winston's tall build and neat face.

Sarah heard the front door bang, Winston's long strides coming up the stairs. She didn't move from Eloise's futon since he wouldn't mind. He looked in and smiled.

‘She's not back yet,' Sarah told him.

‘She's taken Thomas to demonstrate breastfeeding at the NCT,' he said.

‘OK.' Sarah didn't know what the NCT was, but could imagine.

‘So, I'm cooking. Do you want something?'

‘Sure.'

She followed him through to the kitchen, her hands in her back pockets, and watched with some anxiety for him, as she knew Eloise stocked mostly dried pulses, soya, mung, aduki, lentils, and they were always forgetting to soak them the night before. It took hours to cook dried beans if you didn't soak them. An empty fridge except for expressed milk in pots and apple purée.