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dimensions looked it too. People would have said they were out of the same mould. Rebecca couldn’t but acknowledge that.
    â€˜I wonder what happened to her.’
    â€˜There’s nothing on the database,’ the hipster said. ‘I’ve already looked. She hasn’t kept in contact or attended reunions or contributed to any of our fundraisers.’ He stroked the length of his beard with his right hand and tweaked the waxed moustache points between finger and thumb. ‘If you’re really interested, I suppose you could ask Professor Fleetwood.’
    Fleetwood was a name recently familiar to Rebecca. Before she made the mental connection, the hipster provided it.
    â€˜When he first became a Professor here, he’d just signed the lease on a flat at Absalom Court. I think he was the one who suggested we buy or rent the vacant properties there and convert them into student accommodation. In those days accommodation blocks had to be supervised at night and he would have got a modest stipend for the supervisory role. As far as I’m aware, he still lives there. He was an extremely clever chap, back in the day. Might still have all his marbles and, since they were neighbours for three years, he might very well remember her.’
    â€˜He doesn’t still live there,’ Rebecca said, still staring at monochrome features, smudged and faded and uncannily similar to her own. ‘He was moved into a home for the elderly when he became too frail to live independently.’ But she thought he might still remember Rachel Gaunt. He might even remember the name of Rachel’s indolent pet cat.
    â€˜That has to be her,’ she said to Tom, seated outside a riverside pub, eating an early dinner three hours after leaving the LSE alumni archive to its picturesque custodian. ‘Professor Fleetwood brokered some kind of deal between the college and the freeholders of the block over the summer of 1963. By the autumn, the conversion work had been completed and the rooms were ready for student occupation by the start of the term in October. Rachel was a fresher and the first tenant. Curiously she was also the last. 21a remained vacant after her departure.’
    â€˜Which was when?’
    â€˜I don’t yet know. She wasn’t awarded a degree, so I’m assuming she didn’t complete her course. The drop-out rate was proportionally higher in the Sixties and Seventies than it is today. But then the course work was much more demanding and the finals much harder than they are now.’
    â€˜Why’s that?’
    â€˜A university education was something you earned academically, not a right contrived by politicians honouring a manifesto pledge. You had to be clever to get in and even cleverer to stay. Few people got a university education back then and all of them earned it.’
    He was staring at the picture of Rachel taken by Rebecca using her phone. Some digital alchemy had made it clearer and sharper than the original photocopy. The greater clarity and increased contrast only enhanced the likeness. He hadn’t mentioned this. She was sure he had noticed it, though. It was eerily strong in the shadow she cast over their table, on the screen he studied in the spring sunshine outside the pub.
    She looked at Tom, looking at the picture. He looked beautiful in this light, with his iridescent grey-green eyes and his tousled hair and the glow of good health on his skin. He was wearing a pale blue suit and a soft-collared shirt. A cherry tree was in full pink bloom in the pub garden. The ground under their table was tiled and strewn with fallen blossom. A bit of verse came into her head and she spoke it aloud; ‘He was as fresh as is the month of May.’
    â€˜What did you say?’
    â€˜It’s a line from Chaucer, from the Canterbury tales. It describes the knight’s squire, sums him up precisely in a line. You reminded me of it just now. I love this time of the