Page 2 of Midnight in Paris

She hated opening presents in front of the giver, hated feeling their sharp, discerning eyes on her face, judging her reaction. She never got the expression right – the surprise of the gift inside, the shock of it, adjustment – it took time. ‘Are you disappointed?’ people would say, or ‘I’ve still got the receipt if you want to return it.’

This time, drawing out the tickets, she snorted. ‘Eurostar?’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘Why not?’

‘It must have cost a fortune!’

He laughed and lay back on his single bed, under a black poster with white lettering emblazoned with the words‘PARENTAL WARNING: EXPLICIT LYRICS’. ‘But do you like?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ she coloured. ‘Of course. It just seems…’

‘What?’

‘A bit extravagant?’

‘They’re just train tickets.’

‘Yes, but to Paris.’

‘Yes. You said you wanted to go one day.’

‘They’re first class!’

‘Only the best,’ he said, a lazy smile crossing his features. She couldn’t get used to his relaxed stance on money. His parentshad itapparently – she wasn’t yet sure whether that meant they lived in some elaborate country pad, or just that they were doing OK in middle-class suburbia. She suspected the former – it was something about his ease about money, the way he spent it, the way he talked about it as if it were no big deal.

She – attending Anglia Ruskin, the former polytechnic, rather than the ‘real Cambridge’ university in the same city – felt herself to be an ordinary student, living on beans and pasta and watching every penny. Poor. Budgeting. Counting out change to see if she could get chips on the way home from the uni bar. But it didn’t matter because she was the same as everyone else in her circle.

When she was with him though, things felt different. She was somehow reduced. He wouldn’t automatically order the cheapest thing on the menu, didn’t baulk when he went through the till at Sainsbury’s. Got two scoops on his ice cream in the park. It wasn’t that he was off buying expensive luxuries, but to her – in her third frugal year of an English degree – the carelessness with money felt foreign.

He got an allowance, whereas she topped up her student loan with two shifts a week at The Anchor. When he was short,he rang his dad for a bung. When she was short, she rang her parents for sympathy – the only thing they had plenty of.

It shouldn’t make her feel inferior – her almost certainly first-class English degree would set her up in a way his half-hearted philosophy third (albeit from ‘real Cambridge’) might not. But somehow, she always felt on the back foot.

‘I can’t… pay for mine,’ she said.

‘Soph. It’s a gift.’

She nodded. She knew that, really. But something inside her twisted. They’d been together for two months – it was early for this kind of gesture. But maybe in his world that’s what couples did. She felt him watching her. ‘Thank you,’ she said at last.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said casually.

She wondered whether it really did feel like nothing to him. Or whether he’d stressed over giving her the tickets. Whenever she bought something for a new boyfriend, she worried it might seem ‘too much’; that she might scare them off. She couldn’t imagine for a second that Tom had felt this way – would ever feel this way.

She showed them to Libby later as they sat in the fifteenth row of the lecture hall, watching an academic in an ill-fitting suit lecturing on seventeenth century poetry. Libby opened her mouth in an expression of surprise. ‘From Tom?’ she whispered.

Sophie nodded.

‘Lucky.’

She shrugged her response. She didn’t know how she felt about it yet.

‘He must really like you.’

She wasn’t sure about that either.

Sophie had barely remembered Tom when they’d bumped into each other in the small Internet cafe on Mill Road a week or so after the infamous party. She’d been sitting at a table readingMiddlemarchand he’d joined her without even asking if it wasOK, opening his own book and ordering a coffee before saying, ‘Oh, you don’t mind do you?’ in a way that gave her no real recourse to say that she did, that actually she was reading a set text and it was difficult to concentrate with his constant slurping and spoon-stirring.

‘Just trying to read,’ she’d said.

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