The Devil's Trill Sonata

Chapter 4-1

Chapter 4

“Essays on Friday,” Dr. Bell called as the room rustled. “And no excuses! I will email the marks back to each of you as I’m at a conference on Monday morning. Dismissed.”

“Hey,” Tim leaned over to whisper in Jayden’s ear. “Come with me.”

“Why? I have to do that essay.”

“So do I.” Tim shrugged. “C’mon. Post-lecture drink. Last class of the day, let’s move it!”

Jayden groaned, but shouldered his bag, and followed.

Routine came quickly here. Jayden had fallen into it almost from day one: intense classes, intense seminars, and every day off spent in the library. Typically, he only saw Leah and Tim if he was caught during classes; the rest of the time he spent socialising with Ella and Jonathon because it meant he didn’t have to leave his room too much, or spend too long away from work.

This meant, naturally, that Jonathon and Ella became his de facto friends, with Ella next door and Jonathon only a little way down the corridor. Jayden’s other neighbour seemed to be perpetually absent; rumour had it that he had a girlfriend in London, and he disappeared every weekend to see her and otherwise didn’t leave his room.

The workload was more than Jayden had expected. He had heard of other universities letting students ease into it more, or students taking a laid-back attitude to the studying, but he couldn’t imagine it being possible here. By the first weekend, he was already behind on assignments, and had snatched every precious minute to text Darren or talk to him on the phone in the evenings, letting that deep, dry voice soothe him.

Ella was helpful too, helping him find things in the labyrinthine college library, and inviting him into her study group even though they were all law students. Jayden found the intense atmosphere helped him focus, even if they chatted around him about the application of various Latin phrases and case histories that reached back into the eighteen hundreds. But for the most part, he stayed in his room, unless—like today—Tim was instructed to capture him.

Leah issued the instructions, and Tim followed them. Tim was just that kind of person, Jayden figured, happy to follow the rules of someone more domineering than him. So Jayden let himself be taken down to the basement bar, and then Leah was waiting with three pints of the cheapest lager money could buy, and all of which looked disturbingly frothy.

“I want a Flake to go with it,” Tim said, poking the foam with the tip of his index finger, and Leah snorted.

“Just get it down you,” she said. “How’s our social leper?”

“Oh, shut it,” Jayden said, going red.

Leah (and kind of Tim, but he was about as successful at applying peer pressure as a Star Trek convention, so kind of not Tim too) had taken to calling Jayden a social leper, or variations on the theme, from the minute he’d decided he was too busy with work to join hockey club (her favourite) or drama club (Tim’s). He wanted to—he sorely missed writing plays, especially when Mum had sent him the programme for the play they’d picked at the local theatre to do at Christmas—but he just didn’t have time. Unfortunately, Leah was kind of a chubby, girly version of Darren, because her unhelpful and ongoing demand was that he simply make time.

“University isn’t for working all the time,” she’d sniped, and maybe Jayden wasn’t as bright as Cambridge thought he was, because he had to work all the time. His parents couldn’t afford to fund him like Leah’s or Tim’s or Ella’s, so he had to get top marks to make it all worth it. He couldn’t rely on anyone else to support him, not even Darren, partly because Darren’s job didn’t pay well, and partly because the odds of him and Darren still being together by the time he graduated were next to nothing anyway.

“I went f*******:-stalking last night,” Leah said, and Tim grinned a wide, toothy grin that showed off a scar from what Jayden imagined to be a healed lip piercing. “Guess who I checked out.”

“Who?”

“Your not-particularly-cute boyfriend.”

Jayden flushed.

“Oh, I dunno,” Tim said, still grinning. “I’m not gay or anything, but you know, last two people on Earth, I would.”

I doubt Darren would, though, the snide little voice in the back of Jayden’s head piped up, and he squashed it.

“I take back everything I said,” Leah announced and smirked. “I like him. Such an arsehole. And the sarcasm, his timeline was dripping with it.”

Jayden flushed harder. “Yeah, well…he is fluent in English, despite his, um, keyboard skills.”

“Don’t apologise, it’s nice.” Leah waved a hand dismissively. “People are far too proper around here. It was a good laugh. I doubt anyone in your wing has a status that says—what was it?” She fumbled with her phone, leaving Jayden to momentarily consider drowning himself in the crappy lager, before finding the app she wanted and grinning anew. “‘Two-hour traffic jam because someone hit a cat. It shouldn’t take four cars to hit one cat!’“

“Poor cat,” Tim said mournfully.

“He did go to private school,” Jayden hastened to point out; Leah rolled her eyes.

“So?” she asked pointedly. “When’s he coming to visit you?”

“Um, I don’t know. Probably Christmas. Depends if he can get the time off and stuff,” Jayden fumbled.

“Invite him sooner,” she said imperiously. “I like him, he’s a right cunt.”

“Leah!”

“Weeey,” Tim crowed and high-fived her. “In the common way, right, not like the toff way.”

“Tim, you’re a toff. Your dad is a QC.”

“But I’m not a toff,” he insisted, pulling on one ginger dreadlock. “See?”

“Yeah, okay,” Leah said sceptically, putting her phone away. Jayden’s buzzed, as if on cue. “In a year, you’ll have shaved your head and be wearing Armani with the rest of the department.”

“The class war never dies!” Tim insisted.

Jayden privately had very little idea of what the class war was meant to be, but did know that he was easily the most working-class person at the table. But clever enough to get here, the voice in his head insisted in an unusual show of support, and he opened the text message without feeling quite so scrutinised.

Darren <3 Mobile: Whos leah rutherford? n y do ur nobby m8s keep frendin me!!

“Now you’ve woken the beast,” Jayden grumbled, and Leah snickered.

“Good.”

The girl who keeps trying to get me to join hockey club. She’s stalking your f*******:.

Y?

How should I know?

Ur m8!

I don’t even know why you do what you do half the time, never mind a girl I’ve known for a month, Jayden complained, then added a bunch of kisses. If Darren was online, it meant he was talking to Paul, which meant Paul would be in on the texting as well. Jayden privately thought that Paul took more of an interest in their relationship than he did in his own. Which might explain why his latest girlfriend had dumped him for ‘not being honest with himself.’

Gd point. And sure enough: Paul says hi. actualy he says have u shaged the colege dean yet but i think hes just jel that the lse dean is a raging dyke.

Jayden laughed and showed the text to a curious Leah. Paul had gone to LSE, the London School of Economics, and Ethan, perpetually joined to his hip, had strayed to the heady distance of University College London. They were even flat sharing somewhere in Soho.

“So your gay Muslim boyfriend,” Tim said carefully when Jayden had explained, “has two equally closeted gay friends? Mate, I’d watch out if I were you.”

Jayden rolled his eyes, relaxed back in his seat, and wished every evening could be just like this.