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billowing cloud of Egyptian cotton.)
    Much love to you, and to Lucien.
    Eva xx
    In an insalubrious room in a hostel in Goa Lucien carelessly tossed the letter onto a crowded table, unconcerned by its landing in a pool of beer dripping from an overturned bottle, before returning to the task of carefully counting out a pile of blue pills into little plastic bags.
     ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘So Fauntleroy really was born with a silver spoon in his gob. He plays that down, doesn’t he? And he still hasn’t got the cojones to kiss Eva after making puppy-eyes at her for three years.’
    Sylvie, who was sprawled across a seamy mattress on the floor on the other side of the room, looked up from the paperback she was reading.
    ‘Give the poor guy a break. They can’t all be Lucien-style lotharios.’
    ‘I know, but he’s so wet it’s comedy. I mean, I like the guy, but…’
    Sylvie looked thoughtful. ‘Interesting, though. I thought it had all died down but if it’s still going on after all this time…I wonder if those two might actually end up together one of these days. You know they were all flirty with each other when they first met?’
    ‘Not really. Vaguely, I guess. Just tailed off, didn’t it?’
    ‘Sort of. He had a girlfriend back home that he’d carefully omitted to mention. Eva was spitting blood when he finally owned up. He broke up with her in the summer after the first year, but we were all good mates by then, so Eva kept things that way. You know what it’s like, you can’t have two people in a group like ours getting it on, it would have totally wrecked things.’
    Lucien didn’t answer immediately and fidgeted self-consciously, but Sylvie had resumed reading and didn’t notice.
    ‘Well, he’s blown it now, hasn’t he?’ he said finally. ‘She’s off to her job in London and he’ll be stuck in Bristol. It’s not like they’re going to be seeing much of each other.’
     Sylvie frowned. ‘It’s only temporary, all of this though, isn’t it? Everyone scattering to the four winds? You and I will go and live in London when we get back, and Eva will already be there and Benedict will wash up there sooner or later and then the whole gang will be back together again. And then in, like, fifteen years time when we’re all grown up and our idea of a good time is drinking cocoa and doing jigsaws, Eva and Benedict can get married and have a couple of kids—’
    ‘—called Tarquin and Octavia—,’
    ‘—and a golden Labrador. And I’ll be a famous artist with my own gallery and you’ll be, oh, I don’t know, a mid-level advertising executive or something…’
    ‘Oh, do fuck off. I’ll have some really cool business empire and I’ll sit in my corner office every day wearing sunglasses with women feeding me peeled grapes and fanning me with palm fronds…’
    Sylvie folded over the corner of the page she was on put down her novel. ‘Doesn’t it drive you insane sometimes not knowing how it’s all going to turn out? Like, literally anything could happen.’
    ‘Not really.’ Lucien shrugged. ‘I just figure that whatever adulthood’s like, it’s got to be better than our childhood.’
    She hated the split in her loyalties that opened up when her brother said things like this. ‘It wasn’t all bad, though, was it? We’ve always had each other, and I know mum was pretty useless but she’s got a good heart, just a lot of her own problems too. There are some happy memories in there.’
    ‘Like what?’
    She gave it some thought. ‘Summers in the Languedoc with Mami and Papi? I mean, obviously they were a bit boring but at least it was sunny and we could swim in the river and go on bike rides.’
    ‘Yeah, well. That was the upside of having grandparents in France. On the other hand, the downside of having grandparents in France is that they were nowhere to be seen when mum was barely functioning enough to do the shopping so that I could pack you a proper lunch for school, or