The salad was passable. Leon had opted for a pasta dish that looked flabby and as if it had sat under hot lamps for too long, but it didn’t seem to put him off and he worked his way through the plateful as they plucked conversational starters out of the air. He lived in Leeds, as he’d said, with his parents and a younger brother who liked football and wanted to play for Leeds United. It was clear from the way he told the story that this wasn’t an ambition that Leon shared but he seemed proud of him, nonetheless.
Then there was some commotion by the servery that caught Maggie’s attention. It was that girl again, the one who had barged into her room demanding toilet paper. She was standing with her hands on her hips and shouting at the blue-rinsed woman who was serving at the counter.
‘No, “love”，’ she said with measured sarcasm. ‘Fish is not vegetarian. Fish is fish. Vegetarian means it’s made of veg-e-ta-bles. Oh, never mind. I’ll have the tomato soup. Or has that got some chicken hiding in it?’
Leon raised an eyebrow.
‘How to win friends and influence people,’ he said with a grin.
‘Did she knock on your door looking for loo roll?’ Maggie asked. ‘Earlier, I mean.’
Leon shook his head.
‘Her name is Angie. She’s very . . .’ Maggie searched for the word. ‘Very . . . direct.’
‘So I see!’ replied Leon. ‘I bet she takes no prisoners. What’s she studying? Did she say?’
Maggie couldn’t swear to it, but she suspected that the expression on his face was one of admiration. Maybe he wasn’t that interesting after all, not if he found something to admire in Angie.
‘I didn’t ask,’ she said tightly.
‘I bet it isn’t law or chemical engineering,’ he said wistfully. ‘More’s the pity. She’d really up the ante in the lecture theatre.’
‘I’m not sure I need that kind of interesting in my lectures,’ said Maggie.
But Leon wasn’t really listening to her. His entire focus was on Angie.
5
Term was a few weeks old and a routine of sorts had begun to establish itself. Maggie now felt confident of where she was as she made her way around the university campus and no longer faced the ignominy of having to consult the huge maps that were scattered along the walkways for clues. The Law Department was fairly central and therefore easy to find, and she knew where the students’ union and her college bar were, not that she had frequented either much thus far.
Maggie had decided before she had even arrived in York that the typical student lifestyle was not for her. She wasn’t averse to the odd night out, she had thought, but rolling in in the wee small hours on a regular basis wasn’t something that she had intended to do.
Now that she was here, it seemed that her prediction had come true. Her big nights out were commendably few and far apart; however, this was not for the reasons that she might have thought before she arrived. The truth was that Maggie was not fully engaging in student life because she had no one to engage in it with.
It wasn’t as if she was shy. She had no difficulty in introducing herself to strangers or suggesting an arrangement of some sort to them. The problem lay in finding the kind of people for whom she would happily use up a precious evening, an evening when she might otherwise have been studying.
Maggie had been unimpressed with the people on her course, who all seemed to be terminally dull or a bit cliquey. This left her with the people in her college or, more specifically, her corridor, but the pickings for new friends seemed a little sparse there, too. She liked Leon well enough and they had been out for a drink a few times, but he would insist on inviting the girl from the room next to hers, Angie.
With Angie came crowds of people. They seemed to flock around her as if she were a prophet. Maggie wasn’t sure whether they all wanted to be her friend or were merely curious about her. A few weeks into term and Angie still looked as if she had just stepped off the beach. Maggie was beginning to conclude that this was just her style and it certainly distinguished her from everyone else.
However, Angie had not grown on Maggie. She was just as brash and direct and, well, rude, as Maggie had found her to be on her very first day of term, and so far she had done nothing to alter Maggie’s opinion of her. Their second encounter had been equally unpromising. Each corridor had a small kitchen at one end with a fridge, a hob and a microwave where students could make snacks for themselves if they got peckish or had missed the meal service in the refectory. Maggie, struggling with the food on offer there, had stocked her clearly labelled shelf of the fridge with the wherewithal for various meals. She had written on each packet with a permanent marker as well, so that there could be no confusion over what belonged to whom.