bright and perceptive, Connie. You could be a lot more than your parents’ book-keeper if you wanted to. You could go far – really far. Further than Little Holling, Silsford.’ He stopped walking and made me stop too. It struck me as wonderfully romantic that he’d bring us to a standstill in the rain in order to tell me I was brilliant and full of potential.
‘My teachers at school almost got down on their knees and begged me to think about university, but . . . I was suspicious of it, I suppose. Still am. Why spend three years being ordered to read certain books by people who think they know more than you do, when you can choose for yourself what you want to read and educate yourself without anyone’s help – and without paying for it?’
Kit brushed a droplet of rain off my face. ‘That’s exactly the sort of philistine thinking I’d expect from someone whose education was prematurely curtailed at the age of eighteen.’
‘Sixteen,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t do A-levels either.’
‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘Next you’ll tell me you were raised by wolves.’
‘Do you know how many books I read last year? A hundred and two. I write them all down in a little notebook—’
‘You should go to university,’ Kit talked over me. ‘Now, as a mature student. Connie, you’d love it, I know you would. Cambridge was the best thing that ever happened to me – without a shadow of a doubt, the best three years of my life. I . . .’ He stopped.
‘What? Kit?’
I noticed that he wasn’t looking at me any more. He was looking past me, or through me, seeing another time and another place. He turned away from me, as if he didn’t want my presence to interfere with whatever he was remembering. Then he must have realised what he’d done, because he made a concerted effort to bring himself back. I saw that look in his eyes, the same one I saw ten years later, in January, when I asked him why 11 Bentley Grove was programmed into his SatNav as his home address: guilt, fear, shame. He’d been caught out. He tried to make a joke of it. ‘The second best thing that ever happened to me,’ he said quickly, reddening. ‘You’re the best thing, Con.’
‘Who was she?’ I asked.
‘No one. That wasn’t . . . No one.’
‘You had no girlfriends at uni?’
‘I had lots, but no one significant.’
The week before, I had asked him how many times he’d been in love before me, and he’d dodged the question, saying things like, ‘What do you mean by in love?’ and ‘What kind of love are you talking about?’, while his eyes darted around the room and refused to meet mine.
‘Kit, I saw your face when you said Cambridge was the best three years of your life. You were remembering being in love.’
‘No, I wasn’t.’
I knew he was lying, or I thought I did. Something inside me darkened and curdled; I decided to become the bitch I can be so effortlessly when I’m feeling miserable. ‘So you were thinking about lectures and tutorials, were you, with that wistful expression on your face? Dreaming of essay notes?’
‘Connie, you’re being ridiculous.’
‘Was she your lecturer? Your lecturer’s wife? Wife of the master of the college?’
Kit denied it and denied it. I kept up my inquisition all the way back to his flat – was it a man? Was it someone underage: the college master’s not-quite-sixteen-year-old daughter? I refused to share a bed with Kit that night, threw a completely undignified tantrum, threatened to end our relationship unless he told me the truth. Then, seeing that he wasn’t going to, I scaled down my threat: he didn’t have to tell me the truth, but he had to admit that there was something he didn’t want to tell me, to reassure me that I wasn’t mad and hadn’t imagined the fervour I’d seen in his eyes, or the guilt. Eventually he admitted that he might have looked a bit sheepish, but it was only irritation with himself for having been so stupid as to give me the impression – mistaken, he assured me – that his university education was more important to him than I was.
I wanted to believe him. I decided to believe him.
The next time the subject of Cambridge came up between us was in 2003, three years later. I’d moved into Kit’s Rawndesley flat by then, and Mum had taken to