The soft wind of Izzy’s conversation blew across the room, lulling them into a state of compliance. The excessive praise and discussion of her methods made Stevie start to sweat under her vinyl coat. She stripped it off, revealing the hoodie underneath, the traces of salad dressing still down the front.
“All right,” Sooz said. “If you think it would help. We all met as freshers at Cambridge. We came from different colleges. We met at auditions, and drinks after auditions, things like that.”
The three of them engaged in a little back and forth for a moment about who met who at which pub or party or school event and who introduced who to whom and where, and then, sensing that they had strayed from the discussion at hand, Sooz waved her hand in a graceful gesture that suggested the words “or something like that, it doesn’t matter.”
“We sort of just—well, came together right away. We were best friends. And we decided to make our own theatrical group, write and perform our own comedy sketches. That’s a common thing students do.”
“We all did a bit of everything,” Peter went on, “but we had some loose roles within the group. Yash and I wrote together, like we do now. That’s where we started. We were the main writers.”
“Angela wrote a lot as well,” Yash said. “And Rosie did some writing.”
“Theo directed,” Sooz said, and the others nodded. “She also did a lot of producing—getting us spaces to perform.”
“Sooz, Julian, Sebastian, and Noel were our primary performers,” Peter went on.
“Noel was our special character,” Sooz said. “He was good at playing authority figures. He had a hilarious way of being onstage. He just made you laugh without doing much of anything at all.”
Peter and Yash nodded at this.
“We weren’t bad. And we lived together. It was the end of university. It was time to pack up our house. It was like the world was ending and starting again. That’s how it felt, before . . . we had no idea. None.”
Sooz rubbed her mouth with the back of her fist to prepare herself.
“We went to Merryweather,” she said. “That’s the name of the house . . . you’ve probably heard that. It belonged to Sebastian’s family. It’s his now, along with the title of viscount. We’d go there every once in a while, on breaks, when the family was away. Incredible place. I grew up in a little house outside of Southampton. I’d never seen anything like it. It was magical. We drove down in two cars. It was hot that day—there was a heat wave that summer. We were blasting Parklife the whole way—that’s an album by Blur. Blur is a band. You’ve probably never heard of them, but they were the biggest thing. Remember?”
“It was a huge story that summer,” Peter said. “Blur and the other major band of the moment, Oasis, had had a public dispute and were challenging one another. Everyone took a side and had an opinion on which band was better . . .”
“Oasis,” Sooz said. “Most of the others thought otherwise. I was the only one standing up for the Gallagher brothers.”
“。 . . they released a single on the same day, and there was a huge furor about which band would come up on top,” Peter went on. “They called it the Battle of Britpop. So funny to think of that—it was such a bright summer and the big controversy was whose band was best.”
“We arrived well into the evening,” Sooz said. “Remember? We left late because most of us had hangovers and we’d been packing up the house. We got there right as it was getting dark and the rain started. We ran around and picked our rooms—that was always fun.”
Her brow furrowed. She’d hit a memory.
“Something was odd,” she said. “Rosie was in a strange mood the whole way there, I remember. Something to do with Julian. Rosie had been dating Julian, and things with Julian were always . . .”
She shook her head.
“Drama,” Peter said. “There was always some drama about Julian.”
“Not just Julian!” Sooz said. “We were all big, passionate, messy. But yes, that day was about Julian. I knew what that could be like. I dated him twice, and for most of our second year. Julian and Rosie were together for most of our last year, and they split up right near the end. At least Rosie was in the process of leaving him for Noel. That last week we were at Cambridge, I saw them going off together. We had this tatty tent—someone bought it for a festival and put it up in the back garden afterward, and we never took it down. We’d go in there sometimes. It was disgusting, muddy, moldy, but private. I saw Rosie and Noel slipping in there during finals week.”
“Did Rosie and Julian fight?” Stevie asked.
“No idea. Probably. Not a serious fight—not anything . . . not violent! Stupid things. Julian was, and still is, very, very attractive. Everyone flirted with him, and he flirted right back. When you were with Julian, things got messy. He wasn’t always faithful—and by that, I mean he was never faithful. Who is, at that age? I had my moments as well. But Julian was the worst of us when it came to that.”
“But he could have been angry with Rosie and Noel, right?” Stevie said.
Sooz wrapped her hands around her teacup and tucked her knees together as she considered her reply.
“No,” she said.
“No?”
“That’s not how it was with us.”
“And Julian had no right to complain about anyone,” Peter added.
“Oh God,” Yash said. “We’re always talking about Julian.”
“What I mean,” Sooz said, “is that we were . . . sort of a commune, almost? We always shared things with each other. Anything you brought into the house, you knew it belonged to everyone. By the end, I don’t think any of us knew which clothes were ours. If you found it on the drying rack, it was fair game. Clothes. Bicycles. Hairbrushes. Books. Food. There were no possessions in our house, and in a way, no possessiveness? I think we all dated each other at some point. There were so many showmances. Even though we all dated and broke up, we were friends. I mean, Yash, you and I got together in our first year, and Peter, you and I had a good year in there. Right?”
The two shrugged and indicated this was so.
“We might be heartbroken or furious, but the others would get you through it. We were constantly annoyed with each other—constantly, always—but we were always loyal as well. If Rosie stopped dating Julian and started dating Noel, that was within the bounds of how we did things. There was always a frisson of tension—it was quite exciting, actually.”
“More than a frisson,” Yash said. “The atmosphere could be thick.”
“But that was the fun of it,” Sooz said. “The undercurrent. Anything could happen.”
“And usually did,” Peter replied. “Loudly. At all hours. Frequently against the wall we shared with Julian’s bedroom.”
“That’s why I can sleep anywhere now.” Yash stretched and cracked his neck. “I once fell asleep during a performance of Stomp, during the part where they’re banging the dustbin lids. Lulled me right off.”
“Anyway.” Sooz waved her hand, moving the topic along. “Rosie was up in her room with Angela having a chat, and I dragged them downstairs for champagne. We had quite a lot of champagne that night, and some other things as well. It started to pour down with rain, and then we were going to play our game. It was team hide-and-seek. Sebastian was the seeker. The rest of us hid. There weren’t many rules, just you couldn’t go back inside once you went out, and the outbuildings were out of bounds.”