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Of course. You should go down.’ Sasha scoured the floor for her underwear. ‘I have to get home anyway.’
‘You’re not staying over?’ Will looked genuinely crestfallen. Sasha sighed. He’s so lovely.
‘I can’t. It’s my dad’s birthday, remember? I promised him I’d be home for supper. Mum and I always watch him unwrap his presents.’
‘Hmmm. Well, I suppose that’s fair enough. After all, I’ve already unwrapped my present.’ Will pulled Sasha to her feet and kissed her on the lips. She felt ready to burst with happiness.
Will Temple loves me.
Will Temple has made love to me.
I am a woman at last!
Chittenden was in the village of Tidebrook, about a ten-minute drive from Sasha’s parents’ cottage in Frant. It was just past seven o’clock, and the last rays of summer sun were still sinking into the woody, Sussex horizon. I love it here, thought Sasha, driving through the familiar countryside. I’ll miss it when I go away to Exeter.
In a few weeks Sasha would have her A-level results. Not that there was ever much doubt what her grades would be. Sasha Miller had been a straight-A student since she started school at four years old. By that age she could already read fluently, and knew considerably more about the solar system than her primary school teacher, Miss Rush.
‘I hesitate to use the word “obsession”,’ Miss Rush told Sasha’s father at her first parent–teacher meeting. ‘But Sasha is inordinately interested in space. I’m wondering if you could try to introduce some other interests? Just to create a balance.’
‘Such as what?’ Don Miller, Sasha’s father, was a keen amateur astronomer himself. He shared his daughter’s delight in the unknown world of stars and planets, and wasn’t sure he liked the cut of Miss Rush’s jib.
‘A lot of the little girls are keen on princesses.’
‘Princesses?’
‘Yes. Princesses. Mermaids. Even the dreaded Barbie!’ Miss Rush let out a tinkling little laugh. Don Miller shot her a withering stare.
‘It might help her make friends, Mr Miller. Sasha…how shall I put this? She doesn’t quite fit in.’
Sasha never did learn how to fit in. Princesses, mermaids and Barbies passed her by in much the same way that in later years drugs, nightclubs and celebrity culture remained a deliberately closed book. Thankfully, as she grew older, her teachers became more encouraging of Sasha’s ‘obsession’ with astronomy, and her emerging genius at physics.
‘Your daughter is a uniquely gifted scientist, Mr and Mrs Miller.’ Mrs Banks, the headmistress of St Agnes’s, stated the obvious. ‘We have high hopes for her at university.’ Don and Susan Miller had strained every financial sinew to afford their daughter’s private school fees. They had high hopes too.
‘What about Oxbridge?’
‘Well.’ Mrs Banks shifted uncomfortably in her high-backed wooden chair. ‘That’s certainly a possibility. Of course, Oxford and Cambridge both require interviews.’
Nobody doubted Sasha’s intellectual ability. It was her social skills that had always been the problem. Speaking in public was her worst nightmare. But even speaking in private could be a challenge, if the subject didn’t interest her. These days, Cambridge colleges were looking for more than straight-A grades. They wanted ‘rounded’ students. Pretty, confident girls who could hold their own at interview. Sasha was fine once you got her onto particle physics or the latest debates raging in game theory. But she had no facility for small talk. As for the dreaded UCAS form, with its two pages devoted to ‘Hobbies and Other Interests’, Sasha could only stare at it in bafflement. Why would somebody need to have another interest, when their specialist subject was the entire universe?
Sasha applied to the five universities with the best reputations in her subject. None of them required interviews. All five offered her a place. She decided that, if Cambridge rejected her, she would go to Exeter, and she did her best to look forward to the prospect. But deep down she knew that the Cambridge physics faculty was the best in the world. She desperately longed to get in.
The staff at St Agnes’s suggested she go to an interview coach to address her weaknesses as a candidate. ‘Even something as simple as wearing the right clothes can be crucially important.’ But Don Miller was having none of it.
‘Ridiculous. It’s a travesty. Sash wants to be a scientist, not a television presenter. It’s blatant sexism.’
He was right. It was blatant sexism.
Unfortunately, the school was right too. Sasha’s interview at St Michael’s College, Cambridge, was an unmitigated disaster.
On the drive back to Sussex, Sasha glumly ran through a postmortem for her dad.
‘They asked me about politics. What I thought about the latest G7 summit and whether I had strong views on globalization.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve no idea, Dad.’
‘Well, what did you say, love?’
‘I said “no”.’
Fair enough. Bloody silly question anyway.
‘What else did they ask?’
‘The Tutor for Admissions asked me what I thought I would bring to St Michael’s.’
Don Miller brightened. ‘And what did you say to that?’
‘Books.’
‘Ah.’
Oh well. Exeter’s a fine university. I’m sure she’ll be happy there.
The Millers’ cottage was a tiny, higgledy-piggledy tile-hung gem overlooking Frant village green. All Sasha’s classmates from St Agnes’s lived in far grander houses – houses like Will’s – but Sasha would not have traded her childhood home for Buckingham Palace. She loved everything about it: the hanging flower baskets dripping jasmine on either side of the front door; the minuscule leaded windows that let in almost no light, but that gave the house the look of Hansel and Gretel’s cottage; the long, sloping back garden, a tangled mish-mash of weeds and wild flowers, with the shed at the bottom housing Sasha’s precious telescope, her most treasured possession.
By the time Sasha parked her dilapidated red Golf beside the green, it was twilight. The church’s ancient Saxon steeple jutted proudly over the village roof tops, a benevolent giant bathed in the blue light of evening. As Sasha got out of the car, a single note of the church bell marked the half hour. Summer smells of warm earth, freshly mown grass and honeysuckle hung heavy in the air. Sasha breathed them in, dizzy with happiness. Will loves me.
Before tonight, she’d been nervous about leaving him in October. Will had gone straight from school into his father’s estate agency business – I never fancied uni, Sash. I’m not the type. The idea of leaving him in Sussex, prey to all the St Agnes’s girls in the year below, filled Sasha with horror. Especially as Exeter was so terribly far away. But now that they were sleeping together – Goodbye, virginity! I won’t miss you – she felt blissfully secure in the relationship. She would read books on the subject and become a fabulous, inventive lover. Will, consumed with desire, would hurtle down the A303 every weekend, desperate to be with her. Afterwards they would lie awake at night, staring at the stars, talking about…Hmmm, the fantasy got a little vague at that point. But anyway, it would all be wonderful and perfect and…
‘Sasha! Where have you been? We’ve been trying your mobile all day. Dad was about to call the hospitals.’
Sue Miller, Sasha’s mother, was a plumper, shorter version of her daughter. Her once black hair was now heavily laced with grey, but her pale skin was still smooth. More worldly and sensible