I racked my memory constantly for what she had said, what exactly, that night when she had been afraid. When she’d mentioned some complication about her parents’ visit. Something she had to do, or not do. She wasn’t supposed to get attached. What had that meant? Why didn’t I ask more, try to help? What kind of friend ignores it when someone reaches out to them like that? What the hell was wrong with me? Obviously it was something serious if she was under so much pressure to say nothing, even to me. But I had no experience of being a friend. So I had failed her.
Now I was useless. What could I possibly do? I had no idea what she had been talking about, and I had promised Deb—the last promise I ever gave her—that I would never, ever mention anything about that conversation to another soul. I didn’t even know who Deb’s family were. We didn’t just Google stuff in those days. I had heard of some “internet search engines,” but they had names like “Lycos” and “AskJeeves” and they were rubbish. It would never have occurred to me to use them to try and find out anything about Deb or her family. Right after she’d gone, I realized with a nasty start that I didn’t even know if her surname was really Orton. That could just have been a pseudonym she used at the College for privacy. All we’d ever really talked about was the middle name she didn’t have.
Anyway, her family would be the kind of people who evaded the public eye. Even if I’d had Google, it probably wouldn’t have helped. It seems to confuse Americans these days, but there is this culture of old money. I met it in Cambridge, but I had already learned it from Conan Doyle and Christie. People who wore centuries-old heirloom jewellery that looked like nothing special, and carried incredibly battered leather bags. The only other people who could see these markers, these coded signals, were the others who belonged, who knew in an instant what they were looking at. People whose idea of researching their family history was pulling a dog-eared Debrett’s off the shelf of some uncle’s oak-panelled library, or wandering down a hallway of scruffily framed portraits that might include a Gainsborough or two but who’s counting. People who (quite literally, I am convinced of this) would rather die than be photographed in a gilt palace with a stuffed child on a stuffed lion.
I tried so hard, so terribly hard, to remember if there had been anything else. Any other hint, any tiny sign of anything unusual. Anything else strange Deb had ever said, or anything she had done.
But there was nothing. Not then.
—
It was six weeks before the first clue arrived. There was still no sign of Deb, and my bitter, painful terror had strung itself out into a state of permanent jumpiness. I kept walking past her room, and I always knocked, but there was never any answer.
I was dawdling in the stone passage between the Hall and the College Buttery, sort of hanging out with the absence of Deb. It was still early summer, but the Easter term had come and gone. Exams were over and I knew that I hadn’t performed as well as I should have. There was nothing you could do about that though, unless you’d actually failed something, and even then you could only apply for an aegrotat which, even if you got it, meant you’d be deemed to have received a bare pass. A bare pass was nothing I needed. I needed a First. If I didn’t get a First, what would be the point?
It never occurred to me to ask what the point would be of getting one.
Since Deb had been gone I hadn’t been eating properly. I glanced in through the open Hall doors at Henry, legs wide apart over the High Table, dangling himself at the diners below. Semper eadem over his head. Nice thing for you to say, you giant wanker, I thought. You had something to prove about how replaceable women are. Still, it made a good motto for canteen food. Right now, they were serving the usual varietals of solid English breakfast. I couldn’t bring myself to go in.
It wasn’t exactly cold anymore, but it was still Cambridge and a chilly breeze shoved its way along the passage each time the heavy oak doors opened to let a student in or out. For a second, I whimsically imagined the ghost of Deb slipping in behind someone. Deb in a pink sweater but transparent, the greying square stones of the wall still visible through her body. The ghost of Deb walked over to stand beside me, and turned towards the green felt noticeboards opposite the Hall doors. This was where little paper bulletins announced the winners of College prizes. Right then, I saw it. Something terrible, but at last, something real. Deb had won the fiction prize this year, and yet her name wasn’t there on the board. There was the white rectangle, the typewritten print announcing The Wharton Silversmith Prize in Prose Fiction, but underneath, instead of D. Orton, it read L. Smiley. Who the fuck was L. Smiley? And then a painful spasm grabbed at the centre of my stomach. What if that was Deb’s real name and I never knew it?
I turned on my heel and went up to my rooms to fetch a jacket, then headed out along the Backs. I needed to think. The idea that I might never have known Deb’s real name was painful, but at
