He slapped a shiny folded leaflet onto the wooden countertop.
“Thanks,” Hannah said. She picked up the plan, put it into her jeans pocket, and then remembered. “Oh, my mother might turn up soon. She had to park the car. Could you tell her where I’ve gone if she comes in here?”
“Hannah Jones’s mum,” the man said ruminatively. “That I can do. John,” he called over his shoulder to a man sorting post behind him, “if I’m on my lunch, if Hannah Jones’s mum comes, she’s in seven, five, New Quad.”
“Right you are,” the man standing behind him said. Then he turned and looked at Hannah. He was a big man, probably six foot, and younger than his colleague, with dark hair and a face that looked both pale and sweaty, even though he wasn’t doing anything remotely physical. His voice was oddly out of proportion with the rest of him—high and reedy—and the contrast made Hannah want to laugh nervously.
“Well, thanks,” she said, and turned to go. She was almost at the door when the second man called after her, his voice abrupt and slightly accusatory.
“Hold your horses, young lady!”
Hannah turned back, feeling her heart quicken as if she’d done something wrong.
The man came out from behind the counter, moving ponderously, and then stopped in front of her. There was something in his hand, and now he held it out to her, dangling whatever it was like a trophy.
It was a set of keys.
“Oh.” Hannah felt foolish. She gave a short laugh. “Thanks.”
She held out her hand, but for a moment, the man didn’t let go. He just stood there, the keys dangling above her palm. Then he opened his grip and let them fall, and she shoved them into her pocket and turned away.
* * *
VII, SAID THE WRITING PAINTED above the stairwell, and Hannah, looking down at the plan in her hand, and then up at the stone steps in front of her, had to assume this was the right place. She cast a glance over her shoulder—not so much because she doubted the map, but more for the pleasure of taking it all in: the pristine green square of manicured lawn, the honey-colored stone, the mullioned windows. With the sun shining and puffs of white autumnal clouds in the sky, the view had an almost unreal beauty, and Hannah had the strangest feeling that she had stepped inside the pages of one of the books in her suitcase—Brideshead Revisited, maybe. Gaudy Night. His Dark Materials. A storybook world.
She was smiling as she pulled her case beneath the archway into staircase 7, but bumping the case up the stairs wasn’t easy, and her smile had faded by the first landing. By the time she reached the second she was hot, breathless, and the fairy-tale feeling was wearing off fast.
4—H. CLAYTON read a neat little notice on the left-hand door, and opposite 3—P. BURNES-WALLACE. The middle door was ajar, and as Hannah stood there, catching her breath, it opened to reveal a very small kitchen containing two boys, one bent over an electric hob, the other holding a cup of tea and staring at her with an expression that was probably only curious but came across more than a little hostile.
“H-hi,” Hannah said, rather diffidently, but the boy only gave her a nod and edged past to the door marked P. BURNES-WALLACE. What had the porter said? Room 5? One more floor still to go, then.
Gritting her teeth, Hannah yanked her case up the last flight onto the top floor, where two doors stood opposite each other—one ajar. 6—DR. MYERS said the one to her right, which was shut. The open one was, by process of elimination, presumably her own, and Hannah stepped inside.
“Heeey…” The girl sprawled across the sofa barely looked up from her phone as Hannah entered. She was wearing a short broderie-anglaise dress that revealed long tanned legs hooked over the arm of the couch, one sandal hanging from pedicured toes. She appeared to be scrolling through some kind of photo app on her phone. “You must be Hannah.”
“I… am?” Hannah said uncertainly, her voice rising at the end of the sentence in a way that made her words sound like a question, even though they weren’t. She looked around the room. It seemed to be a sitting room, but with piles of the fanciest luggage Hannah had ever seen, stacked up by the doorway. There were hat boxes, hanging bags, a huge Selfridges tote filled with velvet cushions, and what looked like a real Louis Vuitton trunk with a giant brass lock. The pile dwarfed her own modest luggage—even when you took into account the suitcase her mother would be bringing up from the car. “Who are you?”
“April.” The girl put down her phone and stood up. She was middle height and slim, with cropped honey-blond hair that hugged the shape of her skull and finely arched eyebrows that gave her a look somewhere between amusement and disdain. There was something otherworldly about her—some indefinable quality Hannah could not put her finger on. She felt almost as if she had seen her somewhere before… or watched her in a film. She had the kind of beauty that hurt your eyes if you looked at her for too long, but made it hard to tear your gaze away. It was, Hannah realized, as if a different kind of light were shining on her than on the rest of the room.