“This is nice.”

“So nice.”

Gianni’s was a small Italian place near Seb’s local tube station. It was reasonably affordable, served generous portions of pasta, and never gave anyone food poisoning unless they ordered the clams, which were reliably undercooked. Fat, squat candles dripping trails of hot wax sat on each table, and the walls were covered with twinkly lights, fake vine leaves, and sepia photos of rustic-looking Italian men engaging in ambiguous rural activities that often involved donkeys.

They had arrived about half an hour after the restaurant opened, because it didn’t take bookings and Seb reckoned it was better to eat early and avoid the rush. Hannah had agreed, even though she was going to be in lectures most of the day and wouldn’t be able to eat lunch until the mid-afternoon. Seb always took his lunch breaks at midday with the other graduates, so he was usually starving by about five.

It had taken a while to get back into the habit of seeing each other regularly. They had just spent a three-month summer apart except for about four meetings, because both of them had been working—he for the large bank in London where he was on a two-year graduate scheme, she at the coastal holiday camp that had employed her for the last three summers. There had been a lot of video calling at the start, but by August they could go several days without contacting each other. At one stage, Hannah had suggested that they try sending long emails, detailing what had happened to them lately; Seb made one half-hearted effort before he mentioned in their next video call that work was pretty heavy-going, actually, and to be honest his brain was completely fried when he got home every night—the world of work was much more intense than university had ever been. Hannah did not point out that she was working, too, or that this was Seb’s first actual job, not including the eight-week internship he had done at the same bank last summer which had landed him the graduate scheme. She had worked every summer since she was legally allowed to, time that he had spent travelling, attending festivals, or just doing what he called ‘dossing about.’

Since she had moved to London a month ago to begin her MA, they had been in more regular contact—mostly witty observations about people in Hannah’s classes or Seb’s office, or something they had seen in the news, or on Twitter. They met up once or twice a week when they remembered that it was something they were supposed to do; it reminded Hannah of the earliest days of their relationship, when each date was another opportunity to check if they were still compatible.

Dinner tonight?

to what do I owe the unexpected pleasure?

Bit bored you know

Obviously I want to see you!

well you do know how to charm a woman

luckily for you, my exceptionally busy social calendar is free tonight

where you thinking?

I’ll look around

Hannah took her phone off silent, turned it over, and went back to the academic article she was skimming with a pink highlighter. Her phone pinged seven minutes later.

Everywhere is booked eek

on a friday? never

Hmmm

theres a place near you thats walk in only I think?

Ohhh Gianni’s yes, good one

I’ll call anyway see if I can reserve

I think their whole thing is that you cant book

Let’s see

Hannah continued reading.

They said if we turn up shortly before six there won’t be a big queue

so we walk in lol

Yes but it’s a sort of booking

haha sure

meet just before 6 then?

I was thinking 5:30

ok xxx

Their waiter was a small man with dark hair around his temples and a large pair of hands, which he used to gesticulate wildly whenever he spoke. They ordered pasta—carbonara for Hannah, something with prawns in it for Seb—and a pesto garlic bread to share.

“So, how have you been?”

Hannah thought that this question belonged in an exchange between friends, kept apart by life and circumstance, who were finally reuniting for a long-awaited catch up over Italian food, not two people who were in a relationship and lived in the same city seven days a week.

“Not bad, postgraduate life is a lot, though.”

She wished that she could make some more interesting observation, something that would impress him. She liked to impress him, and he always seemed quite hard to impress.

Seb had been hoping that she would respond with something that would supply conversation for at least a few minutes. He wondered what she was thinking about, and wished he could come up with a clever and interesting way to ask her about it.

Suddenly, as if struck with divine inspiration, Hannah picked up her glass of house white and said: “The first-years had the weirdest lecture today.”

“Oh really? Wait, first-years?”

“Yeah, but—” she paused and pulled an uncertain expression, the corner of her mouth twitching as she tried to remember whether she had explained this to him before, “basically, master’s students are invited to sit in on some classes, audit them, you know, so we can see how it’s done, for if we stay on to do a PhD and have to teach.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember you saying that.”

“Apparently it’s this famous lecture, it’s like, the one everyone knows about each year. Older year groups tell the younger ones to look out for it, make sure that they actually attend it. It’s for their Shakespeare module, the Romeo and Juliet lecture, and these two academics dress up as,” she shrugged and sort of laughed at her own anecdote, a habit that Seb had always found mildly annoying, “well, Romeo and Juliet—they’re both men—”

“Both men?”

“Isn’t that, like, the one thing everyone knows about Shakespeare?”

“That he was two men?”

“No, that only men and boys could be actors in the 1500s.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, well, now you do.”

“Okay.”

“So the younger one plays Juliet, the older one plays Romeo, and they read extracts throughout the lecture and the whole thing ends with their death scene played out across the desk in front of them.”

“Do they dress up?”

“Obviously. The one playing Juliet puts this thing round his middle to give himself child-bearing hips and they both wear ruffs.”

Seb laughed. “‘Child-bearing hips’?”

“His words, not mine.”

“And this helps the students to pass an exam?”

“Obviously not, lol.” Hannah hated how she had started saying lol like it was an actual word in the last few years. “But English Departments the world over have never been very concerned with that. They just let the students get on with it come May.”

“Doesn’t make much sense as a system.”

“Oh, no, English takes pride in making no sense whatsoever.”

He asked about her research: Hannah was writing her dissertation on something to do with violence and sex in the works of an obscure Victorian novelist. Seb hadn’t really read fiction since To Kill A Mockingbird at school, and a part of him had always struggled to take Hannah seriously when she spoke about her studies, and the books or poems she was reading—especially this year, now that she was receiving a much smaller loan from the government to get a second degree in literature which, as far as he could tell, wouldn’t raise her earning potential any more than just having a bachelor’s did. When they were undergraduates, she had never let on to him what she planned to do with the rest of her life, and now he wondered if the MA had been a default decision in the absence of anything more interesting.

Seb went to the bathroom, and when he came back Hannah was looking at her phone and rubbing the charm on her necklace between her finger and thumb. She looked pretty, he thought. He liked the way her hair fell around her face, and how she always wore tops that looked good on her, and that she owned nice things like silver bracelets and little stacks of rings, and perfume in colourful glass bottles. He had grown up with two brothers and attended an all-boys school, and even now he still found women, and all of the lovely things they owned, exciting and admirable.

“I don’t feel old enough to be an adult,” she said suddenly as she picked up another slice of the oily garlic bread, which was flat and cut into slices like a pizza.

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know, like, I don’t think I’m mature enough—I always thought that people with degrees had their lives together, knew what was going on, they were the people to look up to, you know. I just don’t think I’m that.”

“Do you not?”

“Do you?”

“About me, or you?”

“You, obviously.”

“I’d never really thought about it. I guess I’ve just taken each year as it comes, and whoop,” he flicked his fork, “now I’m here.”

Hannah wondered if Seb felt this way because he had a plan. The bank he was working at already looked likely to offer him a permanent role when the two-year placement was up: apparently they had a spreadsheet where each graduate employee was ranked from best to worst, and the positions were reviewed at the end of every week. Only the top twenty percent would be invited to stay on at the end. Seb said that he had a pretty good feeling about his own place on the ranking after his line manager, a large man called Cyril, had started introducing him to colleagues in other parts of the company and using phrases like “after you’ve been here a few more years” in conversation.

She was enjoying her MA, though, and the busy life it gave her. She could fill the hours between waking up and going to bed with everything that had to be done right now in order to sustain her own existence: attending seminars, writing essays, replying to emails, eating toast, buying overpriced coffee from independent shops, and doing admin for the postgraduate literary magazine, for which she was an unpaid assistant editor. Hannah’s login details gave her access to the mechanics of the magazine’s website, and sometimes she would spend several hours fiddling with fonts, header settings and tagged archives, or she would check the inbox and file away emails from before she was even appointed into colour-coded folders with names like Accepted for Publication, Queries, and Redirected. So far, she had reached the emails from three years ago, when the editor was someone called Clara who often apologised for responding to things so late, she was having a hectic week. One day Hannah would have archived the whole inbox, and maybe then she could start applying for jobs.

It seemed bizarre to her, then, that amid everything else she ought to be doing, it was socially acceptable to put all of that off for a night by booking a table at an Italian restaurant. During the 90 or so minutes they would spend at Gianni’s, Hannah was only expected to focus on putting forkfuls of spaghetti carbonara into her mouth, sipping warm pinot grigio and deciding whether she had room for pudding. It would actually be inappropriate right now for her to get out her laptop and start working on her dissertation, or to stage a peaceful protest against modern slavery, or do anything that might make her life or the lives of others better. If that wasn’t the case, though, she supposed that everyone would go insane trying to enjoy small things like spaghetti carbonara whilst maintaining the sense of dignity and seriousness that was demanded by the existence of climate change, and of people murdering each other in various awful ways, and the fact that, right now, there were people living in abusive situations or extreme poverty or both, and so on. Then she wondered if she was using the fact that no one could be expected to dwell on these things all the time as an excuse not to dwell on them enough, or even at all—especially now, as she sat in a restaurant wearing clothes that probably weren’t ethically produced, eating food that probably wasn’t completely sustainable and/or organic, and generally profiting from a whole host of privileges, consciously or otherwise.

“What are you thinking about?”

Hannah looked at Seb. “Hm?”

“You were staring into the distance,” he laughed.

“Ha, sorry, yeah, I do that a lot.”

“You’re okay, though?”

“Oh God, yeah, fine.”

They finished their food and split the bill, and started walking back to Seb’s without either of them explicitly saying that that was where they were going. They passed a small supermarket and he paid for two ice creams, which they unwrapped and ate on the way. He lived in a shared apartment with three guys who also had jobs in things like banking or analysis. One of them also had a girlfriend, who stayed over a lot more regularly than Hannah did.

Seb unlocked the door and immediately went upstairs. She followed and found herself sitting cross-legged on his bed, waiting for him to initiate something. He did, but a few minutes in they both agreed it was too early in the evening, and decided to watch a film first. They settled on a long courtroom drama based on real events from the 1960s that Seb said he had wanted to watch for a while; it featured a lot of shouting and flashbacks and white male actors who looked the same because they all wore dark-rimmed glasses and had the same brown hair that had been cut with the same pudding-bowl. Hannah counted three women with speaking parts. She enjoyed it more than she had expected, but felt ignorant for not knowing more about the historical context of the storyline.

They had sex, and afterwards conversation came more naturally, with less irony. They spoke about how the last couple of weeks had been, and what the rest of this year looked like, and Seb told a funny story about an embarrassing incident at work that he claimed had happened to somebody else.

Later, when the lights were off and Seb snored quietly beside her, Hannah reached for her phone—she had to pull the charger out so she could hold it at the right angle—and opened Instagram. She scrolled through Seb’s profile, which had been inactive since the summer: the most recent post was a photo of him in his graduation cap and gown. When she got to the bottom of his feed, she tapped on every picture one by one and read each caption, wanting to find something that might provoke a reaction in her: joy, confusion, recognition, even disgust. It only needed to be mildly interesting, she thought as she reached his graduation photo, having found nothing that caught her attention.

The next day was a Saturday, and when Seb woke up Hannah was lying beside him, leafing through a book that she had brought with her.

She heard the duvet crumpling to her left. “Morning.”

“What time is it?”

“Er, nearly nine. Have you got somewhere to be?”

“Got a thing at eleven.”

“Oh, you’re fine,” she said, and turned on her side.

Seb picked up his phone. He always checked the news first thing in the morning, and Hannah asked: “Anything interesting going on in the world?”

“Have you not looked yet?”

It surprised Hannah that, after all the occasions on which they had shared a bed, Seb still didn’t understand that she was not in the habit of reading the news when she woke up. She wondered if his question was an attempt to assert superiority, designed to draw attention to the fact that he was an adult with a job who checked the headlines every morning, whereas she was a student of English literature who started her day by reading books about people who didn’t exist. 

“No, I’ve been reading.”

“Good book?”

“All right.”

“What’s it about?”

“This woman who just wants to read her book but her boyfriend won’t stop talking,” she said with a smirk, and put the book on the floor by the bed.

She looked over at him; he seemed expectant, or at least politely inquisitive. She couldn’t really be bothered—she had been hoping to get off early this morning—and once or twice before had pretended not to understand what he wanted, got up and got dressed. This morning, she indicated that it was all right for him to start. It was clammy and quick, and Hannah nearly cried, because she had decided that it was the last time they would do this.

Afterwards, he made breakfast for them both: she sipped milky coffee and said she wasn’t hungry, so he made her take a slice of buttered toast with her for the journey home. A quarter of an hour later, she realized she’d left the book by his bed, and that she probably wasn’t going to get it back.