They’ve made their offer – an extremely generous offer – and now they’re waiting to hear from me.’
‘Ring them now,’ I ordered.
‘Now? It’s quarter past nine.’
‘What, they’ll be asleep? Of course they won’t be! If I were one of the UK’s leading granulated client-facing accountancy firms, I’d stay up till ten thirty to watch Newsnight.’
‘Con, slow down,’ Kit said, taken aback by my desperation. ‘Don’t you want to think about it first? Give it some time, mull it over?’
‘No. Why, do you?’ What if Kit didn’t want to move? He’d lived in several different places already: he was born in Birmingham, then moved to Swindon when he was ten, Bracknell at fifteen. Then Cambridge for university, then Rawndesley. He wasn’t trapped in the way that I was; he wouldn’t necessarily share my urgent need to escape.
‘The job’s an improvement, no question,’ he said. ‘And you’re right, Cambridge is a great city. And Rawndesley . . . isn’t. But . . . are you sure, Con? I almost didn’t bother mentioning it. Yesterday I was on the point of turning it down without even asking you. I didn’t think you’d be willing to leave your family, you’re all so . . .’
‘Unhealthily co-dependent?’ I suggested.
‘What about your job?’ Kit asked.
‘I’ll get another one. I’ll do anything – mow lawns, clean offices. Ask Deloitte if they need a cleaner.’
By the time we left the restaurant, Rawndesley already felt like somewhere we used to live. We were ghosts, haunting our old life, living the hope of a new one.
I told Mum, Dad, Fran and Anton the next day. I was afraid they’d find some way to stop me, even though Kit had done his best to reassure me that this wasn’t possible, that I was a free agent.
A long silence followed my announcement. I watched Mum’s and Dad’s faces rearrange themselves around the shock, feeling as if I’d just unloaded seven tons of invisible psychic rubble in the middle of the room and crushed the breath out of everyone present.
Fran was the first to respond. ‘Cambridge? You’ve never even been there. You might hate it.’
‘It’s the daftest plan I’ve ever heard,’ Dad said dismissively, wafting my words away with a shake of his newspaper. ‘Think how long it’ll take you to drive to work every morning. Two hours each way, it’ll be, at least.’
I explained that I would be leaving Monk & Sons, that Kit and I planned to get married, that Deloitte had made him an offer he’d be crazy to turn down. Mum looked stricken. ‘But Kit’s got a job here,’ she said, her voice unsteady. All of a sudden, because we were proposing to move to Cambridge, Rawndesley had become ‘here’, not ‘there’. ‘You’ve got a job here,’ Mum said. ‘If you move to Cambridge you’ll be unemployed.’
‘I’ll find something,’ I told her.
‘What? What will you find, exactly?’
‘I don’t know, Mum. I can’t see into the future. Maybe I’ll do a . . . course at the university.’ I didn’t dare to use the word ‘degree’.
‘A course is all very well, but it isn’t a job,’ said Mum. ‘It won’t pay the bills.’
Fran, Anton and Dad were all watching her, waiting to see how she was going to fend off the impending calamity. ‘Well,’ she said eventually, turning away. ‘I suppose it’s good news for Kit, anyway – a promotion. Our loss is his gain.’
In Mum’s personal dramatisation of the situation, Kit was the winner, she, Dad and Fran were the losers, and I was nowhere to be found.
‘Congratulations on getting engaged,’ said Anton.
‘I thought you thought marriage was old-fashioned and too much hassle,’ Fran snapped at him. She didn’t congratulate me. Neither did Mum or Dad.
First thing the next morning, I leaped out of bed and ran to the bathroom to be sick. Kit asked me if I could be pregnant, but I knew I wasn’t. ‘It’s purely psychological,’ I told him. ‘It’s my body’s reaction to my family’s reaction to us moving. Don’t worry, it’ll pass.’
It didn’t. Kit and I got into the routine of going to Cambridge every Saturday to look at houses. We both wanted to buy rather than rent – Kit because rent was money down the drain, and me to bind myself legally to a place that wasn’t Little Holling, to make it less likely that I’d ever go back. Each time we went house-hunting, Kit had to stop the car at least once so that I could throw up by the side of