• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Dear Evie,

Can't stop thinking about you in your Miss Whiplash underwear. Isn't it time it had another outing?

Love and heavy breathing Ludo. xx

30

I dropped the card as if it were white hot. Oh hell. Oh, blinking blithering hell, they'd made it. Despite Ludo's best efforts, the message hadn't got through and the roses had persisted. They'd scrambled over the wire, dodged the florist's searchlights and made it to 22 Walton Terrace with a little help from a lethargic delivery boy who hadn't picked up a message on his mobile. Ant must have taken delivery of them, bemused – ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yeah, Mrs Evie Hamilton. Sign here’ – then walked them down the hall to the kitchen, read the card – no envelope – and been taken aback. No. Downright shocked.

I went hot. Pulse racing, I scrambled in my bag with fluttering fingers for my mobile. His phone was switched off. I left a breathless, thoughtless message about needing to speak to him urgently, to, um, explain, erm, the underwear thingy, which was just a silly joke, a message that even to my ears resonated with guilt, and then rang his office. Mary, the secretary he shared with various other dons in the English Department, said she hadn't seen him, but that didn't mean he wasn't about somewhere. Try his mobile? Thanks, Mary.

I stared out at the back garden, dry-mouthed, mobile clutched to my heart. I imagined him in the quad, walking through the cloisters, hands in his pockets, head bent, saddened, appalled: I pictured him being hailed by students, colleagues who wondered why he didn't acknowledge them, why he walked on by. I had to find him. I seized a piece of paper from the kitchen pad and wrote in large capitals: ‘THIS IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK! I CAN EXPLAIN!’ – and left it on the flowers.

Then I hurried down the hallway, out of the front door, and down the steps to the car. I vacillated on the bottom step. Hang on. Where was I going? To Balliol? Where Mary said he may or may not be? And what would I do when I got there – race through the hallowed portals, charge around like a lunatic, my frantic footsteps echoing in the hushed cloisters, poke my head into crowded lecture theatres, barge in on a tutorial where he was one to one with a shy young student? No. Of course not. Ant wasn't unhinged, wasn't about to hurl himself into the Thames, and I'd look ridiculous. And guilty. I must wait. Explain later. And meanwhile, exhaust all other possibilities. Because if, say, he wasn't in college, where might he be? Was there anyone he'd confide in? I racked my brains. Not Anna, obviously. Mum? Quite possibly, actually. I sat down abruptly on the bottom step and rang her. In an effort to make my voice light and carefree, I sounded shrill and hysterical.

‘No, darling, I haven't seen him. Has something happened?’

‘No, no, nothing, everything's fine.’ I massaged my temples with my fingertips. ‘It's just – if he does ring or call by, would you tell him I'm at the farm? Caro asked me to step in for her at a wedding.’

‘I will, but I'm going there myself soon. Are you OK?’

‘I'm fine.’ I hesitated. How would it sound aired in the open, I wondered. ‘It's just… Ludo sent me some flowers as a joke, and I'm worried Ant might get the wrong idea.’

‘Ludo? Oh, I doubt it, Evie. He's much too young for you. Ant will know that.’ She laughed.

Loyal, my mum. But on another level, encouraging. I tried the shop. Ant might look for me there. Clarence answered.

‘Malcolm's at Alice's wedding. Ludo invited him and sweetly asked me to the reception too. I'm just shutting up here for him before going across. D'you want me to give him a message?’

‘No, don't worry, I'm going there myself in a minute. I'm looking for Ant, actually. He hasn't popped in, has he?’ I said casually.

‘Not that I know of. But if you're going, why don't we go together?’

Good plan. Safety in numbers. I leaped back up the steps and into the house to change, and ten minutes later, was driving through Jericho to collect Clarence. Bafflingly, all the clothes