on epic voyages to the South Seas had been built here, where that rusted hulk lay at anchor in the lower harbor. The Endeavour and the Resolution. Good names, she thought.
Royal Crescent, curved in an elegant semicircle facing the sea, offered a number of private hotels with vacancies, but the prices were too high. She might have to stay a week or two, and over ten pounds a night would be too much. It was a shame, because these hotels were probably a lot more comfortable than what she was likely to get. Still, a room with a bath and a color television was too much to ask for. And you always had to pay more if you wanted to see the sea. How often did people on holiday actually sit in their rooms and admire the view? Martha wondered. Hardly at all. But it was the reassurance that counted, the knowledge that it was there if you wanted to look. And that privilege cost money.
The promenade along West Cliff was lined with huge Victorian hotels of the kind that were built in most seaside towns when holidays at the coast came into vogue. Martha knew none of these were for her, either, so she turned down Crescent Avenue to find a cheap bed and breakfast place on a nondescript street.
As it happened, Abbey Terrace wasn’t entirely without charm. It sloped steeply down to the estuary, though it stopped at East Terrace before it actually reached the front, and boasted a row of tall guesthouses, all bearing recommendations from the RAC or AA. Many of them even had their rates posted in the window, and Martha chose one that cost nine pounds fifty per night.
Wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, she opened the wrought-iron gate and walked up the path.
2 Kirsten
Come on now, let’s be ’aving yer! Ain’t yer got no ’omes to go to?” The landlord of the Ring O’Bells voiced his nightly complaint as he came over to Kirsten’s table to collect the glasses. “It’s half past eleven. They’ll have my license, they will.”
“Pray cease and desist,” said Damon, holding up his hand like a stop sign. “Dost thou not ken ’tis the end of term? Know’st thou not ’tis the end of our final year in this fair city?”
“I don’t bloody care,” the landlord growled. “It’s time you all pissed off home to bed.” He snatched a half-empty glass from the table.
“Hey, that was my drink!” Sarah said. “I haven’t finished it.”
“Yes you have, love.” He stood his ground, not a big man, but quick and strong enough to outmaneuver a bunch of drunken students. “Out, the lot of you. Now! Come on!”
Hugo stood up. “Wait a minute. She paid for that drink and she’s got every bloody right to finish it.” With his curly blond hair and broad shoulders, he looked more like a rugby player than a student of English.
Kirsten sighed. There was going to be trouble, she could sense it. Damon was drunk and Hugo was proud and foolish enough, even sober, to start a fight. Just what she needed on her last night at university.
The landlord tapped his watch. “Not at this time, she hasn’t. Not according to the licensing laws.”
“Are you going to give her it back?”
“No.”
Behind him, the cellarman, Les, an ex-fighter with a misshapen nose and cauliflower ears, stood poised for trouble.
“Well, fuck you, then,” Hugo said. “You can have this one too.” And he threw the rest of his pint of Guinness in the landlord’s face.
Les moved forward but the landlord put out an arm to stop him. “We don’t want any trouble, lads and lasses,” he said in an icily calm voice. “You’ve had your fun. Now why don’t you go and have your party somewhere else?”
“Might as well, Hugo,” said Kirsten, tugging at his sleeve. “The man’s right. We’ll get nothing more to drink here and there’s no sense starting a fight, not tonight. Let’s go to Russell’s party.”
Hugo sat down sulkily and frowned at his pint glass as if he regretted wasting the stout. “All right,” he said, then glared at the landlord again. “But it’s not fair. You pay for your drinks and that bastard just snatches them off you. We ought to get our money back, at least. How long have we been coming here? Two years. And this is how we get treated.”
“Come on, Hugo.” Damon clapped him on the shoulder and they all got up to leave. “ ’Twould indeed be a great pleasure to drown yon varlet in a tun of malmsey, but…” He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and shrugged. “Tempus fugit, old mate.” With his short haircut and raddled, boyish complexion, he looked like an old- fashioned grammar-school kid. He whipped his scarf dramatically around his neck and the end tipped over a glass on the table. It rolled toward the edge, wobbled back and forth there, undecided, then stopped for a moment before dropping to the floor. The landlord stood by patiently, arms folded, and Les looked ready for a fight.
“Fascist bastards,” Sarah said, picking up her handbag.
They beat a hasty and noisy retreat out of the pub, singing “Johnny B. Goode,” the song that had been playing on the jukebox when the landlord unplugged it.
“Russell’s is it, then?” Hugo asked.
Everyone agreed. No one had any booze to take along, but good old Russell always put on a good spread. He had plenty of money, what with his father being such a whiz on the stock market. Probably a bit of insider trading, Kirsten suspected, but who was she to complain?
And so the four of them walked out into a balmy June evening-only Damon wearing a scarf because he affected eccentricity-and made their way through the deserted campus to the residence buildings. There were Hugo, Sarah, Kirsten and Damon, all of them final-year English students. The only person missing from the close-knit group was Galen, Kirsten’s boyfriend. Just after exams, his grandmother had died and he’d had to rush down to Kent to console his mother and help out with arrangements.
Kirsten was feeling a little tipsy as they hurried to Oastler Hall and up the worn stone steps to Russell’s rooms. She missed Galen and wished he could be here to celebrate, too-especially as she had got a First. Still, she’d had enough congratulations to make her thoroughly bored with the whole business already. Now it was time to get maudlin and say her farewells, for tomorrow she was heading home. If only she could keep Hugo’s wandering hands away…
The party seemed to have spilled over into the corridor and adjoining rooms. Even if they wanted to, which was unlikely, Russell’s neighbors would hardly have been able to get to sleep. The newcomers pushed their way through the crowd into the smoky flat, calling greetings as they went. Most of the lights were off in the living room, where the Velvet Underground were singing “Sweet Jane” and couples danced with drinks in their hands. Russell himself leaned by the window talking to Guy Naburn, a trendy tutor who hung around with students rather than with his colleagues, and welcomed them all when they tumbled in.
“Hope you’ve got some booze,” Hugo shouted over the music. “We just got chucked out of the Ring O’Bells.”
Russell laughed. “For that, you deserve the best. Try the kitchen.”
Sure enough, half-finished bottles of red wine and a couple of large casks of ale rested on the kitchen table. The fridge was full of Newcastle Brown and Carlsberg Special Brew, except for the space taken up by liter bottles of screw-top Riesling. The four latecomers busied themselves pouring drinks, then wandered off to mingle. It was hot, dim and smoky. Kirsten went to stand by an open window to get some air. She drank cold lager from the can and watched the shadows prance and flail on the dance floor. Smoke curled up and drifted past her out of the window into the night.
She thought about the three years they had spent together and felt sad now they were all going their separate ways in the big, bad world beyond university-the real world, as everyone called it. What an odd bunch they’d made at the start. That first term, they had circled one another warily and shyly, away from home for the first time, all lost and alone, and none of them willing to admit it: Damon, the witty eighteenth-century scholar; Sarah, feminist criticism and women’s fiction; Hugo, drama and poetry; herself, linguistics, specializing in phonology and dialects; and Galen, modernism with a touch of Marxism thrown in for good measure. Through tutorials, department social evenings and informal parties, they had made their tentative approaches and discovered kindred spirits. By the end of the first year, they had become inseparable.
