‘Do you have a mobile phone?’ I asked. I couldn’t afford one, but lots of other students were getting them.
He smiled, as if this was an adorable question. He was thirty; he lived and worked in London – of course he had a mobile phone. ‘I do, but it’s dead, and I don’t know my number. Give me yours and I’ll call.’
I scribbled our landline on a piece of paper, even though I doubted I’d hear from him again. Then I pulled my duvet around myself, luxuriously, as if this was the sort of thing I did all the time. ‘Well, see you! It was fun.’
Jill came into my room a few moments after he’d left. Mascara was flaking under her eyes, her pyjamas were stained with red wine.
‘Er, morning,’ she said. ‘Everything OK?’
I nodded, smiling.
She turned to look out of the window. ‘I’m afraid he’s married,’ she said, watching him walk up the street.
I sat up. ‘What? No he’s not!’
‘Oh, yes he is,’ she said, sitting on my bed. ‘Sorry to have to break this to you, Em.’
After a moment, when I realised she wasn’t joking, I closed my eyes. ‘No.’
‘Affirmative, I’m afraid. He told me last night.’
‘When?’ I stared at her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You didn’t ask him . . . ?’
‘What, if he was married?’
‘Er – yes?’
I shook my head. ‘No. I just . . . Isn’t it reasonable to assume a man’s single, if he’s trying to kiss you?’
Jill started laughing. ‘Do you know anything about men, Emily?’
‘Oh God. No.’
She nodded, sympathetically. ‘I take it you had sex?’
We’d been at it all night. ‘I wish you’d told me,’ I said, but I just sounded petulant.
‘When, Em? When was I meant to tell you? You two disappeared from the pub without warning! What was I supposed to do?’
I groaned. She was right.
‘Just tell me you used a condom!’
‘Of course,’ I said, miserably. ‘Oh, God, I feel horrible.’
She climbed in next to me. ‘It’s what’s commonly known as a bummer, Em. I’m sorry.’ She slid down the bed and pulled the duvet up over us. ‘I suggest we sleep it off and then go and eat several burgers.’
So that’s what we did. But she was in a strange mood all day, and I felt I’d somehow let her down.
He didn’t call, and I was relieved. It had been exciting, for a few hours, to feel wanted – to be willingly selected by someone older, someone at the helm of his own existence. But he had stood at an altar and said ‘I do’ to someone else, in front of all of their friends.
And had Jill not told me, I would never have known: that’s what made me really angry. No remorse. No quiet doubts. He had put himself inside my body, this married man, and his only thought had been of orgasm. His, mine, his again, mine again.
I thought about her often, as the days passed: his wife in London. Had he done this to her before? Did she know? Had she ever confronted him? Did they have some sort of arrangement?
Eventually, I put him out of my mind and told myself I’d never be so stupid again. I got on with my course. There were essays, there was fieldwork, there was reading; endless reading, and of course there were parties. I was a second-year undergrad; I sat in the inside lane of normal, my strange childhood moving further away with every passing day.