it had occurred to me that if I decided to start learning Italian, I could revise at the library. Revise for the night classes I am definitely going to sign up for, soon. And then, if I ran into Ben, it’d be chance. Just fate, giving a tiny helpful shove.
As I approach, my posture gets better and my height increases by inches. I try to look neither left nor right at anyone as I walk in but can’t resist, my line of sight darting about like a petty con on a comedown. Central Library has the reverential atmosphere of a cathedral – it’s a place so serene and cerebral your IQ goes up by a few points simply by entering the building.
Inside, I unpack the Buongiorno Italia! books I happen to have on me, feeling intensely ridiculous. OK, so … wow, for a romantic language, this is harder work than I imagined. After ten minutes of intransitive verbs I’m feeling pretty intransitive myself. Let’s try social Italian: Booking a room … Making introductions … and my mind’s already wandering …
Ben knocked on my door bright and early on the first day of lectures, though not bright and early enough to pre-empt Caroline, who’s the one to call the lark a feathered layabout. I was anxiously turning my face a Scottish heather/English sunburn hue with a huge blusher brush, pouting into the tiny mirror nailed over my sink. Caroline stretched her flamingo legs out on my bed, cradling a vast quantity of tea in a Cup-a-Soup mug. It was a relief to discover that the girls in my halls of residence weren’t the demented, experienced, highly sexed party animals of my nightmares, but other nervous, homesick, excited teenagers, all dropped off with aid parcels of home comforts.
‘Who’s calling for you again?’ Caroline asked.
‘Someone on my course. He gave me my ID card.’
‘He? Is he nice?’
‘He seems very nice,’ I said, without thinking.
‘Nice nice?’
I debated whether to oblige her. We’d only been friends for a week and although she seemed sound, I didn’t want to abruptly discover otherwise when she started yodelling ‘My friend fancies yooooooo!’ across the union.
‘He’s quite nice, yeah,’ I said, with more take-it-or-leave-it insouciance.
‘How nice?’
‘Acceptable.’
‘I suppose I can’t expect you to do thorough reconnaissance,’ Caroline says, looking at the photo of me with Rhys on my desk.
It was taken in the pub, both squeezed into the frame while I held the camera above us. Our heads were leant against each other – his tangly black hair merging with my straight brown hair so it was hard to tell where he ended and I began. Rhys and Rachel. Rachel and Rhys. We alliterated, it was obviously meant to be. I’d daydreamed the two intertwined ‘Rs’ we’d have on our trendy wedding stationery invites, and would’ve put a firearm to my temple if he found out.
I glanced over at it too and felt a small tremor. Things were new and passionate, and unstable, like new and passionate things usually are, and we were forty miles apart. I’d been so elated when he’d said he wanted us to keep seeing each other.
We’d met a few months previously at my local. I used to go with my friends from sixth-form and we’d all sit with pints of snakebite and black and make moony eyes at the cool lads in a local band. They even had cars and jobs, their few extra years in age representing a chasm of worldly experience and maturity. This hero worship had gone on from afar for a long time. They were never short of female company and clearly content to keep a gaggle of schoolgirl groupies at arm’s length. Then one night I inadvertently found myself in a two-player game of call-and-reply on the jukebox. Every time I put a song on, Rhys’s selection straight after would pick up on the title. If I chose ‘Blue Monday’ he’d get up and play ‘True Blue’ and so on. (Rhys was in his ironic cheese phase. Shame it was long over by the time we really were planning our wedding.)
Eventually, after a lot of giggling, whispering and twenty-pence pieces, Rhys strode casually over to my table.
‘A woman of your taste deserves to be bought a drink.’
In a moment of sangfroid I’ve never since equalled, I found the words: ‘A man of your taste deserves to pay.’
My friends gasped, Rhys laughed, I had a Malibu and lemonade and a welcome for me and mine to join the corner of the pub they’d colonised. I couldn’t believe it, but Rhys seemed genuinely interested in me. The dynamic from then on was very much his man of the world to my wide-eyed ingénue. Later I’d ask him why he’d pursued me that night.
‘You were the prettiest girl in the place,’ he said. ‘And I had a lot of pocket shrapnel.’
There was a knock at my bedroom door and Caroline was up and over to answer it in a flash.
‘Sorry. Wrong room,’ I heard a male voice say.
‘No, right room,’ Caroline trilled, throwing the door open wider so Ben could see me, and vice versa.
‘Ah,’ Ben said, smiling. ‘I know there were a lot of freshers and cards yesterday but I was sure you weren’t blonde.’
Caroline simpered at him, trying to work out if this meant he preferred blondes or not. He looked at me, obviously wondering why I was the colour of a prawn and whether I was going to do introductions.
‘Caroline, Ben, Ben, Caroline,’ I said. ‘Shall we get going?’
Ben said ‘Hi’ and Caroline twittered ‘Hello!’ and I wondered if I wanted The First Person I’d Met In Halls to get it on with The First Person I’d Met On My Course. I had a suspicion I didn’t, on the basis it’d be tricky for me if it went badly and lonely for me if it went well.
‘Enjoy your day,’ Caroline said, with a hint of sexy languor that seemed at odds with it being breakfast time, trailing out of my door and back to her room.
I grabbed my bag and locked my door. We’d almost cleared the corridor without incident when Caroline called after me.
‘Oh, and Rachel, that thing we were discussing before? Acceptable wasn’t the right adjective. If you’re studying English, you should know that!’
‘Bye Caroline!’ I bellowed, feeling my stomach shoot down to my shoes.
‘What’s that about?’ Ben asked.
‘Nothing,’ I muttered, thinking I didn’t need the bloody blusher.
Surveying the Live-Aid-sized crowds milling around for the buses, Ben suggested we walk the mile to the university buildings. We kicked through yellow-brown leaf mulch as traffic rumbled past on Oxford Road, filling in the biographical gaps – where we were from, what A-levels we did, family, hobbies, miscellaneous.
Ben, a south Londoner, grew up with his mum and younger sister, his dad having done a bunk when he was ten years old. By the time we’d passed the building that looks like a giant concrete toast rack, I knew that he broke his leg falling off a wall, aged twelve. He spent so long laid up he’d had enough of daytime telly and read everything in the house, all the Folio Society classics and even his mum’s Catherine Cooksons, in desperation,
