The Debt by Natalie Edwards

Author:Natalie Edwards [Edwards, Natalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-25T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Oxford

1975

The Old Moat looked innocuous from the outside - just another steep-pitched Tudor Revival pub tucked away down a side street, a half-hour walk from St Hilda’s and light years away from the usual student haunts. Nothing out of the ordinary.

If you didn’t know what it was - who it catered for - then you’d have walked right past it. Maybe even popped inside for a pint after work before you realised.

It wasn’t obvious.

Rose didn’t go in - not at first. Just stood outside, on the other side of the narrow road, watching from the doorway of a boarded-up tobacconist as a steady trickle of men and women - though mostly men - went in and out. And they weren’t obvious either, she thought - at least, most of them weren’t. Perhaps some of the men wore shirts a little more fitted than you’d see on the high street, blue jeans just that bit tighter around the buttocks than the average, and some of the women had short hair and ties around their necks - but so did some of the girls at college, even the ones with boyfriends. The clothes on the own didn’t mean anything, necessarily.

After 20 minutes in the doorway, when it was full dark and beginning to rain, she crossed the road and walked inside.

The pub was loud and heaving, every spare inch of space crammed with music and voices, limbs and bodies - bodies standing, talking, dancing, expressing waves of heat and a steady haze of cigarette smoke. By the door, two men were kissing, the back of one pressed up against the wall by the chest of the other - ordinary-looking men, middle-aged and paunchy, still wearing the suits they must have put on to go to the office that morning. She stared at them, then became aware of what she was doing and looked immediately away, blushing, in the opposite direction. Neither man seemed to notice - or if they noticed, to care.

She squeezed herself through the bodies, parting stiff denim and sweat-soaked nylon until she was close to the bar. The queue was three deep, the beer pumps barely visible through the sea of heads blocking her way. She stared down at the ground as she waited her turn to be served, at the sticky burgundy carpet under her boots - determinedly not looking up, not looking around.

Something - someone - tapped her on the shoulder.

She spun around.

A shaggy-haired blond boy stood behind her, smiling good-naturedly.

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” he said, loudly enough that she could hear him over the competing background noises. He sounded, to her, like every other boy at Oxford: polite, upper-crust, undeniably southern. Soft.

She studied his face, trying to place it but failing.

“Last month,” he said helpfully. “At Lance Keaton’s party. I was Bowie, you were Liza in Cabaret.”

The party, at least, she remembered: a fancy dress thing in a house off-campus, hosted by a braying third year boy done up - appropriately, she’d felt at the time - as a pantomime horse.

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