Red Joan

SIDCUP

JANUARY, 2005

SUNDAY, 11.17 A.M.

She knows the cause of death without needing to be told.

The hand-delivered note from the solicitor is brief and unemotional, enclosing details of the funeral arrangements on Friday along with a copy of an obituary from the Daily Telegraph. The obituary describes Sir William Mitchell’s early life in Sherborne, Dorset, where he contracted polio at the age of eight (she had not known that), made a miraculous recovery, and then proved himself particularly adept at Latin and ancient Greek at school. He went on to read Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge, was drafted into the Special Operations Executive during the war, and later rose to a high position in the Foreign Office, advising the British and Commonwealth governments on intelligence matters and gaining a number of honorary doctorates from various universities along the way. Apparently he was never happier than when walking in the Scottish hills with his wife, now deceased. She had not known that either.

What she had already known was this: that he would appear to die peacefully in his sleep.

She puts the article and letter on the table in front of her, her breath coming in short, sharp bursts. There is mud under her fingernails as well as on her apron, leaving smudged marks on the cream-coloured envelope. The three terracotta pots on the kitchen table are as she left them, each half-filled with patted-down soil around the geranium stem cuttings snipped from her neighbour’s front garden that morning, but they seem somehow changed by the interruption, no longer delicate and victorious at having survived the English winter into January, but straggly and ill-gotten.

She thinks of the silver necklace William gave her sixty years ago, identical to the ones both he and Rupert wore: the engraved St. Christopher’s charm depicting the ragged saint carrying Jesus on his shoulders across a stormy sea. She had not known what the charm concealed, having mistaken its significance for something else. There was no sign of the needle tip infused with curare, a substance chosen for its untraceable qualities, which relaxes the muscles so effectively that the lungs stop moving almost instantaneously. Death by asphyxiation. So motionless that it passes for peaceful. She would not have accepted this gift from William if she had known what it was, but by the time she read the instructions, it was too late to give it back. He had arranged it that way. He wanted her to have the option too. Just in case.

Is this what has happened? Did they finally come for him, after all these years? If they did, it can only mean that there is some new evidence, something irrefutable, to have made him believe it was not worth trying to defend himself and his reputation. Better to die than to risk the possibility of his knighthood being stripped from him, of having to endure the public recriminations and shame such revelations would bring, along with the inevitable criminal trial. And why should he endure such humiliation? His wife is dead; he has no children. Nothing to stop him.

No son to protect, as she has.

The obituary is accompanied by a picture of William as a young man, his features clear and unblemished, just as he was the last time she saw him. His eyes are directed straight at the camera, a slight smile playing on his lips as if he knows something he shouldn’t. She imagines that, to the rest of the world, the mistiness of the black-and-white image might appear glamorous and full of pathos, a picture of youth in a bygone age. But to Joan it is like looking at a ghost.

They come for her later that morning. Joan is watching from her bedroom window as a long black car turns into the quiet suburban street of pebble-dashed terraces where she has lived ever since moving back to England from Australia after her husband’s death fifteen years earlier. The car is out of place in this part of south-east London. She observes the man and woman as they step out and glance about them, absorbing their surroundings. The woman is wearing high heels and a smart camel-coloured mackintosh, and the man is carrying a briefcase. They stand next to each other, conferring, facing across the road towards her house.

Goosebumps rise on her arms and neck. For some reason, she had always thought they would come for her at night. She did not imagine a day like this, cold and bright and perfectly still. She watches as they cross the road and push open her front gate. Perhaps she is being paranoid. They could be anyone. Social workers or meals-on-wheels salespeople. She has sent such people away before.

The knock is loud and staccato; official-sounding. ‘Open up. Security Services.’

She steps back quickly, her heart stuttering as she lets the curtain fall in front of her. Too old to run. She wonders what they would do if she does not answer the door. Would they break it down? Or just trust that she is not in, and come back again tomorrow? She could stay here until they’ve gone, and then she could . . . She stops. Could what? Where could she go for any length of time without arousing suspicion? And what would she say to her son about where she was?

Another knock, louder this time.

Joan clasps her hands across her stomach as the thought occurs to her that they might try to find her at her son’s house if they do not find her here. Her neck feels hot at the prospect of one of Nick’s boys answering the door, muddy-haired and careless in his football kit, calling out that some people have come about Granny. If Nick saw these two, in their smart clothes and black car, he would think they had come to inform him of his mother’s death, and Joan feels a stab of guilt to imagine his shock at this news.

And then a greater, more terrible shock as he learns that no, this is not what they’ve come to tell him.

And which of those would be worse?

It is a tickling, stealthy creep of a thought, so bold and yet so soft as it insinuates itself in her mind, and she feels a cold spasm of fear run its sharp finger down her back. Yes, she can see why William might have thought it better to kill himself. She could do it right now, take the St. Christopher’s medal from her bedside drawer and push it open to reveal the needle tip, and then she could settle herself into bed one last time and she would never have to face them. It would be over, finished, and when they found her she would appear just as peaceful as William had, just as innocent. How easy it would be.

But easier for whom?

For one thing, the presence of curare in her bloodstream might now be traceable, even if it had not been sixty years ago, and would be revealed by an autopsy. Or it might not work, it might be too old, it might only half work. And, traceable or not, they might still push ahead regardless with whatever investigations they had begun. Nick would be left to face the accusations alone, and quite suddenly Joan knows with absolute certainty that, in such circumstances, he would not rest until he had cleared his mother’s name from whatever charge they brought against her. He is a barrister, and fiercely protective by nature. He would defend her with his last breath if he believed it was the right thing to do. It would all seem too far-fetched, too out of character to square with the mother he has known all his life.

In the reflection of the glass, she observes the man and woman walk back down the path and stand on the pavement to look up at the windows of the house before turning away. She draws back further. She can hardly believe it is happening. Not now. Not after all these years. There is the click of one car door opening and slamming shut, and then the other one. They are getting back into the car, either to wait for her there or to drive to Nick’s house. She does not know which.

This is not how it was supposed to end. A sudden memory of herself as a young woman comes to her with a jolt; a bright Technicolor image of a life which, from this distance, she cannot really believe was ever hers. It seems so removed from the quiet way she lives now, where the only things filling her week are watercolour classes on Tuesday afternoons and ballroom dancing on Thursdays, punctuated by regular visits from Nick and his family. A calm and contented existence, but not exactly the extraordinary life she had once imagined for herself. But still, this is her life. Her only life. And she has not kept silent for so many years just to have it swept away from her now when she is so close to the end.

She takes a deep breath and walks briskly across the room, no longer caring if she is visible from the street. She must sort this out now, alone. She cannot allow Nick to find out like this. The afternoon sun falls in a white blossom of light through the window above the narrow staircase as she hurriedly descends the stairs to the front door. She unhooks the silver chain and tugs the door across the part of the mat which has a tendency to catch on the underside of the wood, blinking as her eyes adjust to the glare of daylight, and then she steps out onto the doorstep, her heart pounding in her chest. She sees the woman turn around as the car begins to pull away, and for a brief second their eyes meet.

‘Wait,’ she calls out.

They take her to a large building in a narrow street not far from Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, a forty-minute drive from Joan’s house. They do not speak, except to check she is comfortable and to ask again if she would like to call a legal representative. She tells them that she is quite comfortable, and that no, she does not wish to have a lawyer present. She doesn’t need one. They haven’t arrested her, have they?

‘Not technically, but . . . ’

‘There, see? I don’t need one.’

‘This is a matter of state security. I would really advise . . . ’ The woman hesitates. ‘Your son is a barrister, I believe, Mrs. Stanley. Would you like us to contact him?’

‘No,’ Joan says, and her voice is sharp. ‘I don’t want him disturbed.’ A pause. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’

They sit in silence for the rest of the journey, Joan’s hands clasped tightly together as if in prayer. But she is not praying. She is thinking. She is making sure she remembers everything so that she cannot be taken by surprise.

When they arrive, her seatbelt is unbuckled for her. She follows the woman, Ms. Hart, out of the car, while the man, Mr. Adams, walks behind them up the steps to a small wooden door set into a carved stone frame. He does not say anything but reaches forward and holds his pass up against a small black box. The door clicks, and he pushes it open.

Ms. Hart leads the way along a narrow corridor. She propels Joan into a square room with a table and three chairs and takes the briefcase from Mr. Adams. He does not follow them in but waits outside, and then shuts the door behind them. There are microphones set up on the table and a camera attached to the ceiling in the far corner of the room. A glass window reflects Joan’s gaze back at her and she looks away quickly, although not before observing the faint shadow of Mr. Adams’ presence behind the screen. Ms. Hart sits down on one side of the table and gestures that Joan should do the same.

‘You’re quite certain you don’t want a lawyer?’

Joan nods.

‘Right.’ Ms. Hart extracts two files from the briefcase. She places them on the table and pushes the slimmer one across to Joan. ‘Let’s start with this.’

Joan sits back. She will not touch the file. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘Mrs. Stanley,’ Ms. Hart continues, ‘I would advise you to cooperate. We have enough evidence to convict. It will only be possible for the Home Secretary to show clemency towards you if there is some sort of confession or an admission of guilt. Information.’ She pauses. ‘Otherwise you will make it impossible for us to be lenient.’

Joan says nothing. Her arms are folded.

Ms. Hart looks down at the shiny floor of the interviewing room, adjusting the position of her briefcase with the immaculate point of her shoe. ‘You’re being accused of twenty-seven breaches of the Official Secrets Act, which is effectively treason. I’m sure you’re aware that this is not a light charge. If you force us to take it to trial, it will carry a maximum sentence of fourteen years.’

Silence. Joan counts the years in her head, each one causing a painful tightening across her chest. She does not move.

Ms. Hart glances at the shadow of Mr. Adams behind the screen. ‘It will be of benefit to you if anything you wish to say in your defence has been recorded before your name is released to the House of Commons on Friday.’ She pauses. ‘I should tell you now that you’ll be expected to make a statement in response.’

Friday. The day of William’s funeral. She would not have gone anyway. She steels herself so that when she speaks her voice is quiet and firm. ‘I still don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Ms. Hart slips a photograph out of the side pocket of her briefcase and places it on the table between them. Joan glances at it and then looks away again. She recognises it, of course. It is the photograph from the obituary.

Ms. Hart places her palms flat on the table and leans forward. ‘You knew Sir William Mitchell at Cambridge, I believe. You were undergraduates there at around the same time.’

Joan looks blankly at Ms. Hart, neither confirming nor denying.

‘We’re just trying to build up a picture at this initial stage,’ Ms. Hart continues. ‘Place everything in context.’

‘A picture of what?’

‘As I’m sure you’re aware, Sir William died rather suddenly last week. There was an investigation and several questions remain unanswered as a result.’

Joan frowns, wondering how exactly she might be linked to William. ‘I don’t know how you think I can help you. I didn’t know him all that well.’

Ms. Hart raises an eyebrow. ‘The case against Sir William is incidental to the case against you, Mrs. Stanley. It’s your choice. Either we sit in silence until you cooperate, or we can just get on with it.’ She waits. ‘Let’s start with university.’

Joan does not move. Her eyes flick to the screen and then to the locked door behind Ms. Hart. It will not end here—she will not let it—but she can see that a degree of cooperation might be worthwhile, and could even buy her a little time to decide how much they know. They must have some evidence for William to have done what he did.

‘I did go,’ she says at last. ‘In 1937.’

Ms. Hart nods. ‘And what did you read for your degree?’

Joan’s vision is suddenly concentrated on Ms. Hart’s hands, and it takes her a few seconds to realise what is unusual about them. They are suntanned. Suntanned in January, and the thought prompts an unexpected thud of homesickness for Australia. For the first time since her return to England, Joan wishes she had not come back. She should have known it was not safe. She shouldn’t have allowed Nick to persuade her.

‘Certificate,’ she says at last.

‘Sorry?’

‘Women got certificates, not degrees. Back then.’ Another pause. ‘I read Natural Sciences.’

‘But you specialised in Physics, I believe.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes.’

Joan glances at Ms. Hart and then looks away again.

‘Right.’ A pause. ‘And why did you want to go? It can’t have been a very normal thing to do back then.’

Joan exhales slowly, aware that everything she says must be absolutely consistent. No, it wasn’t normal, but the only other options seemed to be getting married, teaching or learning to type and she didn’t want to do any of those. She closes her eyes and forces her mind back to the year she first left home, wanting to be absolutely certain of the memory before she speaks, and as she does, she finds that she can still remember the feeling of that year with absolute clarity; the breathless sensation brought on by the knowledge that if she didn’t go somewhere and do something then her lungs might actually burst out of her chest. It feels odd to remember it now: such a long-forgotten feeling. She had never felt a sensation quite like it before and she has never felt it since, but, now that she thinks about it, she remembers observing that same static energy fizzing out of her own son when he turned eighteen. Not old but no longer young either. An impressionable age, her mother called it.

In the autumn of 1937, Joan leaves home to attend Newnham College, Cambridge. She is eighteen years old and impatient to leave. There is no particular reason for this impatience other than an underlying sense of life happening elsewhere, far removed from the ivy-covered lodge of the girls’ public school near St. Albans where she has lived all her life. The school is a hearty establishment with special emphasis placed on organised games, which (according to the school’s prospectus) will encourage the girls to develop a love of justice, alongside the ability to make prompt decisions and to recognise defeat with good cheer, and Joan is obliged to spend several hours every week charging around the school field dressed in a pinafore and wielding a wooden stick in pursuit of these lofty ideals.

As the headmaster’s daughters, Joan and her younger sister are not ordinary pupils—they do not have beds in the dormitory or parts in the school play or tuck boxes arriving through the post—and while her parents insist that this set-up is a privilege, to Joan it seems to be no more than a form of constant surveillance and, in her opinion, is bound to give them both asthma. She knows she should be more grateful, being reminded often enough of how lucky she is that her generation has not been sent off to the trenches, and that she is not obliged to run away from home in order to become a nurse in the Great War as her mother did when she was sixteen but, at the same time, she also feels there is something enticing about that youthful display of self-sufficiency, which only serves to make her feel more restless.

There is a whole world out there that is barely recognisable from the safe, padded vantage point of St. Albans. She knows this because she has seen it in her father’s limp, in the newsreels at the cinema showing the Welsh collieries and deserted shipyards of the North; in newspapers and books and films; in the pictures of small children in doorways with grubby knees and no shoes. She glimpsed it when the Great Hunger March passed through St. Albans a few years previously, a straggling procession of men and women so dirty that their skin seemed to have turned a deep, charcoal grey. Joan remembers how one of the marchers stopped outside the lodge as he left town in the morning, leaning against the garden fence and bent double in a fit of coughing.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ Joan had asked her father. ‘Shouldn’t we call the doctor?’

Her father shook his head. ‘That’s coal dust,’ he said. ‘Nothing you can do about silicosis. Cuts into the lungs and kills the tissue. And he’s walking to London with all the rest of them because he wants his job back.’

‘Why doesn’t he just get a different one?’

Her father had not answered this question immediately. He watched as the man drank the glass of water that Lally had taken out to him, and then struggled to catch up with the rest of the marchers. He turned away from her and limped out of the room, muttering, ‘Why indeed?’

He answered this question the following day, interrupting the chaplain just before the recitation of the school prayer in a way that only a headmaster can. He waved a newspaper aloft as he declared to the school that it was a criminal sort of government that refused to acknowledge the reality of life in what they called the ‘Special Areas’ of Britain. It was either a failure of imagination or wilful blindness, but either way it was a betrayal. He instructed each child and teacher in the school to close their eyes and picture life in the ship-building towns where no ships were being built, to think of the boarded-up shops, the Means Test man declaring that a family’s only rug must be sold before any relief could be granted. Imagine the destitution. And then imagine it in winter.

He quoted Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the coalition who was supposed to save the country from economic despair. ‘Has anyone,’ Ramsay MacDonald was reported to have asked in the House of Commons in response to the marchers’ request for an audience, ‘who comes to London, either on foot or in first-class carriages, the constitutional right to demand to see me, to take up my time, whether I like it or not?’

The question was rhetorical and its impact was lost on many of the younger schoolgirls, but Joan’s father let the words hang in the scuffling silence before folding the newspaper in disgust. ‘Our prime minister may not know it, but we have a duty,’ he said, frowning at a noise coming from a group of girls in the Upper Fifth, ‘to make this poor and hungry world a better place for everyone in it. To be responsible.’

Another pause, longer than the first, so that when her father spoke again his voice boomed into the beamed ceiling of the school hall.

‘From each’—she remembers his exact words—‘according to his ability.’

To Joan’s disappointment, her abilities seem to be limited to hockey and schoolwork. At first, she was unsure how either of these could be put to practical use in the way her father envisaged, but she suspected that one might be of more use than the other. Her science teacher, Miss Abbott, was the first to suggest she might try for university, and it was on her instigation that Joan applied to read Natural Sciences for the honours certificate at Cambridge; the flat, weather-beaten town where Miss Abbot had once spent her happiest years before the Great War marched in and snatched away the life she had planned.

Joan is excited about going, although it is less the qualification that interests her than the prospect of going somewhere, anywhere. And it is also the prospect of learning things that she would never have the chance of knowing if she didn’t go, of attending lectures in the mornings, reading books all afternoon, and spending evenings at the cinema watching Mary Brian and Norma Shearer being whisked away on horseback by Gary Cooper, then copying their hairdos later in case the same thing should ever happen to her.

Of course, she knows that in Cambridge she is unlikely to come across Gary Cooper. There will only be real men, men whose teeth do not glint in the moonlight and who ride bicycles instead of horses but still, endless, bountiful men. Boys, some of them, but even they will be a welcome break from the rippling sea of girls at school. Joan did not mention this to her father or Miss Abbott during the coaching sessions for the interview (‘And why do you wish to pursue your academic study at the University of Cambridge?’) but now it simmers under the surface of her enthusiasm. She knows that it is a privilege to be going and she is constantly reminded of this fact by both her father and the college scholarship fund but, frankly, she would have gone anywhere.

Joan’s father is delighted to see her go. He tells her that it will be a wonderful thing to be educated in the religion of reason. These are his words, not hers, although she knows what he means. They understand each other, Joan and her father, sharing a quiet sort of complicity that is not chatty enough for her mother or Lally. Other people tell Joan how much her younger sister resembles her, that they could be twins if not for the five-year age difference, and while Lally flushes with pleasure at this, Joan considers it to be eye-rollingly stupid, although she has to hide this sentiment from Lally. Her sister’s temperament is sweet and wide-eyed, and whereas Joan cannot remember there ever having been a time when she was happy to go shopping for dress material with her mother or make daisy chains in the garden, Lally seems happy to do it. It is only her father who does not see this resemblance and grunts his disagreement when anyone else alludes to it. He is complicit in Joan’s plans to escape, and Joan loves him for this more than for anything else.

In contrast, Joan’s mother is decidedly ungrateful about the whole enterprise. It is clear that she would like to march into that school and have a strong word with Miss Abbott for condemning Joan to eternal spinsterhood by educating her beyond all prospects of future happiness. It is made clear that she does not intend to let the same thing happen to Lally, oh-ho no. Her second daughter will be kept well away from Miss Abbott.

When Joan suggests that going to university is no worse than running away to become a nurse, her mother shakes her head and insists that the two things are quite different. ‘They were unprecedented times, Joanie. You can’t imagine it. You can’t imagine the sound they made, all those boys being delivered at the hospital door, crying out for their mothers as we unloaded them from carts and wagons and ambulances until they filled the corridors. Such a terrible, terrible time.’

Joan has heard this speech before and knows better than to say what she really thinks, which is that yes, it does sound terrible, but all times are unprecedented. Surely her times are unprecedented, too. But she also knows that her mother will not actually be able to stop her, and so while some of the other girls from her class will be enrolling in secretarial college in the autumn and others will be getting married and moving into their own homes, Joan is the only one who is going to university.

Before she goes, there is the University Trousseau to arrange; it is a compromise, a tactical diversion, to allow her mother this slant on events. A list of items Joan will need is drawn up between them, and Joan is dispatched to the local department store to obtain great swathes of material so that she can be suitably upholstered before leaving. There must be some sort of tweed ensemble, a navy suit, a knitted outfit for lectures, a pair of chic trousers (chic is her mother’s word, indefinable for both of them), three blouses, two belts, two bags (one pretty, one practical), a mackintosh, a simple woollen dress and one smart dance dress. Her mother insists that she should also have a fur coat and she will not be budged on this. It is a huge extravagance, there is no question of buying one: one must be found.

‘You’ve got to look the part, Joanie,’ her mother tells her, surrounded by pins and cottons and materials cut into unlikely shapes on the living-room rug, although neither of them knows what the part should look like. They know only that they do not know, which is not quite enough.

No mention is made of purchasing the set texts or the equipment required for science practicals or any of the other things that Joan feels might actually come in handy for the course. University, it seems, is mostly a question of textiles.

During those first few days of living alone in Cambridge, Joan finds that she is amazingly, gloriously happy just to be alive. She loves her new home with its red-bricked Queen Anne architecture, its beautifully manicured lawns and sports field and tennis courts. Physically, she equates this excitement to the feeling in her stomach when she cycles very fast over the hump bridge at the back of Clare College, that sudden rush of giddiness in her stomach, and then the exhilaration of speeding downhill.

She attends lectures in the mornings, leaving her bicycle propped against the railings of the science faculty on Pembroke Street, and then sliding into the back row of the lecture theatre with her satchel under her arm. The days of chaperones are over, but the lecturers still largely ignore the female presence, addressing the audience as ‘gentlemen.’ They tend to stand directly in front of whatever they have written, mumbling ‘square this’ and ‘subtract that,’ and then wiping the board down to move on to the next calculation before anyone has had time to work out what they are supposed to be doing but Joan remains undeterred. She regards each lecture as a small dot of knowledge which will one day join to another dot, and then another and another, until she will finally understand at least some of the figures chalked up in minute smudges on the blackboard, and she is hopeful that this will come about before the summer examinations.

Her room at Newnham is on the ground floor of Peile Hall, a relatively new block with modern bathrooms and kitchenettes and a view out over the immaculate gardens. It is as large as the drawing room at home, with a small truckle bed pushed up against one wall and a thick-cushioned sofa against the other, leaving a huge expanse of carpet in the middle where she can practise handstands without the remotest possibility of breaking anything. The kitchenette has a single gas ring upon which she has not yet attempted to cook, preferring to skip breakfast in favour of an apple on the way to lectures, followed by a packed lunch of crusty bread with cheese or boiled ham, and then dinner in Hall, a large, light room with beautiful, corniced ceilings and long, communal tables. Although there is no one she immediately takes to in those first few days, she is not lonely. Everyone is astonishingly friendly, and these dinners are enjoyable, rumbustious affairs. She is not used to this after the cliques and hierarchies of school, and she puts it down to the fact that here, in Cambridge, everyone is a bit of a swot, and so for once there is nothing unusual about her.

On her third night, Joan is awoken by a smart rap on the window, followed by a scrabbling noise on the window ledge outside, as if a very large cat is trying to get into her room. She leans out of bed and pinches the bottom corner of the curtain between her finger and thumb and pulls it back. Her hockey stick is propped up against the wall, and there is something comforting about its proximity. She clears her throat, ready to scream if necessary, and peers out.

Two scarlet high-heeled shoes are standing on her windowsill.

She pulls the curtain a little further back and looks upwards. A girl is half-standing, half-crouching in the shoes, resplendent in a black silk dress and a white scarf, and when she sees the curtain lift she smiles and puts a finger to her lips. She crouches down so that her face is almost level with Joan’s.

‘Hurry up and let me in,’ she mouths through the glass.

Joan hesitates for a moment, and then slides out of bed to undo the catch, and the girl steps through the window frame and into Joan’s room. ‘My room’s on the third floor,’ the girl announces, by way of explanation, removing her shoes one at a time before jumping down from the windowsill. ‘Darned curfew,’ she mutters, massaging her toes where her shoes have been chafing. ‘Sorry for getting you up. The laundry window was closed.’

Joan rubs her eyes. ‘Don’t mention it.’

The girl glances around the room, taking in the heavy green curtains and the sofa with its collection of ill-matched cushions. Her hair and eyes are dark, her cheeks smooth and dusted, and her lips bear a bright slash of red lipstick. Joan is suddenly conscious of how she must look, standing barefoot in her nightie with small strips of muslin tied into her hair. She steps back towards her bed, supposing that this might encourage the girl to go, but the girl does not seem to be in any rush.

‘Are you a first year too?’

Joan is surprised by the implication in the question that this girl is also a new arrival. She seems so self-assured, so certain of the rules, that it is hard to believe she hasn’t been here for years. ‘Yes.’

‘English Literature?’

Joan shakes her head. ‘Natural Sciences.’

‘Ah. I was fooled by your cushion covers.’ She pauses. ‘I’m reading Languages. More modern than medieval. I say, I don’t suppose you’ve got a dressing gown I could borrow? I don’t want to get caught walking around like this. Better to pretend we’ve been up all night drinking cocoa or something like the rest of them.’

Joan nods and turns away, not wanting to let on that this was, in fact, how she had spent the latter part of her evening before going to bed, that she was one of them. She goes to the wardrobe and takes out her dressing gown.

‘Is that a mink coat?’ the girl asks from behind Joan’s shoulder, her voice suddenly curious.

‘Hmm, yes, I think so.’ Joan gives a small shrug, self-conscious at having such a thing in her wardrobe, procured on indefinite loan from a second cousin who no longer had any use for it, but Joan cannot imagine that she will ever be bold enough to wear it. ‘It’s a bit hideous, isn’t it?’

‘Well, it’s rather fin de siècle,’ says the girl with a sideways smile, stepping towards the wardrobe. She reaches out her hand and strokes the coat, and then slips it off its hanger, tilts her head to inspect it, and flings it around her shoulders. ‘Although at least it’s not Arctic fox. They’re