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The next day when Marina apologized, I accepted straight away, and we never spoke about the seminar incident again. We went to the same parties, drank in the same groups, and she even still came to my room from time to time. But it was different after that. My perception of her had changed. My behaviour towards her was less encouraging. And rather than look at her as an equal, I started to watch her from a distance, analytically, like I had watched my friends at school.

Things she said and did struck me as increasingly peculiar. Her relationship with the professor, for example.

Marina’s schtick with the professor struck me as odd in a different way to Henry’s. Theirs was a power game played without any clear rules or intentions. Why had he offered her a scholarship in the first place? Why had he been toying with her? And why had she been so insistent on studying his subject if she hated him so much anyway? Marina was always irritated when I tried to bring this up, brushing off the issue as tedious.

‘It’s not something that we have to talk about,’ she said once. ‘I just hate Montgomery, it’s not interesting.’

But the fact that she disliked him so much was exactly what was interesting to me. It didn’t make sense as to why she was following him around. She hated him – and yet she was making a huge fuss about transferring back to do his course. She’d insisted that we skipped everything except for his seminars. What point had she been trying to prove?

‘I wasn’t necessarily trying to prove a point,’ Marina would say. ‘It’s just unacceptable that students should be treated like that.’

This would stimulate another rant about the structure of university – how the institution was a nepotistic hotbed, etc – and I would tune out, silently reminding myself not to bring it up again. Marina’s complaints about university now came across as spoilt, boring and repetitive. It struck me as embarrassingly lacking in self-awareness to complain about nepotism when she was fighting so hard to maintain a scholarship that her dad had (probably) orchestrated for her. And she didn’t deserve the scholarship anyway – she was so careless with money, so careless about work, so careless about everything.

‘Look, it’s a long story, you wouldn’t understand.’

Then there was the issue of exclusivity. As time wore on, and her excuses became increasingly evasive, I began to suspect that there was another reason that Marina was avoiding this subject with me. It was like she didn’t want to talk about the professor to me because my knowledge would somehow encroach on her home life. This struck me as a class thing – like I couldn’t be trusted with any insider knowledge because I hadn’t grown up riding ponies and quaffing Veuve Cliquot in the Home Counties. Because I took things seriously, like work and money, and so did my family.

Sure, Marina’s father was a lecturer, but he had a pot of inheritance money which allowed him to make cushy investments. From Marina’s anecdotes it seemed like he hardly did anything at all, excepting a few token lectures. Marina, Henry and the professor had their own community – of leisurely jobs and moneyed ‘mind-improvement’ – and this was not a community to which I was invited. They enjoyed their private political machinations exactly because they were private.

I resented them for it.