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I can’t keep putting it off.

The way I’ve written everything here, it makes it seem as though Marina dominated my first term at Northam. It is true that my memory of that time, like so many other things, is now clogged up with thoughts of her. I find it hard to picture any events where she wasn’t there – I can’t even clearly remember the moments where I was alone. But the truth is that there is another side to it. There were other things that happened. The other events, the events with the professor … I should address those.

In my initial glimpse of Marina with the professor, I’d recognized for the first time that there was something stagey about him. It wasn’t that he was lecherous exactly, but his authoritative persona, as someone who knew everything and whose self-confidence was unshakeable, struck me as unconvincing. I had seen him once without the mask on. Now, in the times I’d seen him since, it always seemed like he was trying to prove himself, like he was attempting to perform a part that he wasn’t at all suited to. Many people were like that at Northam – but the professor was the worst offender.

Or the second worst.

When I walked around campus, I’d sometimes see the professor with Henry. Their heads would be buried together in conversation in the café, locking eyes, nodding seriously. At other times they would exchange papers at the end of a lecture in an underhand fashion – Henry would slip the sheets sideways onto the lectern and give a perfunctory nod. It was like he thought he was on a mission for MI5 and not at ‘Renaissance Rhetoric’ in northern England. Once, when our first year seminar overran by ten minutes, Henry opened the door without knocking and ducked his head in. He looked panicked when he saw his mistake, muttering: ‘Wrong room.’ But I saw him go back in afterwards, when he thought no one could see him.

I heard from Marina that Henry was getting a head start on his dissertation. This was the cause of their clandestine meetings, she explained. She said that he was seeking advice from the professor about which areas of research might propel his chances of getting into Cambridge or Yale for a PhD. Early tuition was frowned upon, and since he was only a second year, it made sense for them to keep it hushed up.

‘To be honest though I don’t know why Henry bothers,’ Marina said to me. ‘It’s not that big a deal what kind of work you do anyway. References are what really matter. Professor Montgomery will pull strings to get him where he wants to go.’

This I found hard to believe. Then I remembered Marina’s scholarship.

The professor’s favouritism made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like the way Marina spoke about it either: she simultaneously criticized the ‘nepotistic structures’ of university, but was clearly complicit in it, in the fact she wanted to keep her scholarship. It hurt my head to think about this, so I tried not to.

Instead I deflected my dissatisfaction onto Henry and the professor. Conspiracy theories about them raced through my mind. One day I put one of them to Marina.

‘Do you think …?’

‘Do I think what?’

‘Henry and Montgomery …’ I said. I waggled my eyebrows, attempting to appear breezy and flippant.

‘Nah,’ Marina retorted, somewhat irritably. ‘For one thing, he’s definitely into girls.’

‘Who, Henry?’

‘God knows about him.’

‘Then Montgomery?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s got a wife but … to be honest, there are always other women. He was always accompanied by a “friend” to events, even when I was a kid. There would always be something dangling off his arm.’

This seemed to me so unlikely that I recoiled.

‘Ew,’ I said. ‘Who would … where did he even find them?’

‘Everywhere,’ she said.

‘But where?’

‘Everywhere, Eva. That’s how it works. He just … some people are like that. Women get desperate when they’re older.’

‘Does his wife know?’

‘No idea.’

I would try to push the conversation a little further then, try to dig a little bit more about the circumstances in which Marina and Montgomery knew each other, what he’d been like at those parties and out of office hours, but she would never dwell on the topic for long. It was fair, I guess, because I was so needy in my questioning.

‘You absorb too much popular culture,’ Marina said to me once. ‘That’s your problem. You see a story in everything. You’ve got so much wasted mental energy. Life isn’t a novel, Eva. We’re not in The Secret fucking History.’

This made me laugh so much that I started choking.