Free Sunstroke and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

think of Neil?
    Hilary was cautious. —Is he from the north?
    —Birmingham, you idiot. Couldn’t you tell? Such a pure Brummie accent.
    —He wasn’t awfully friendly.
    Sheila smiled secretively. —He doesn’t do that sort of small talk. His dad works as a toolsetter at Lucas’s, the engineering company. No one in his family has been to university before. His parents don’t have money, compared to most of the students here. He gets pretty impatient with people, you know, who just take their privilege for granted.
    Hilary felt like a child beside her sister. What had happened yesterday marked Sheila as initiated into the adult world, apart from her, as clearly as if she was signed with blood on her forehead. She supposed it must be theunknown of sexual intercourse which could transform things in this way that children couldn’t see: Neil’s self-importance into power, for instance. At the same time as she was in awe of her sister’s difference, Hilary also felt a stubborn virgin pride. She didn’t want ever to be undone out of her scepticism, or seduced into grown-up credulous susceptibility.
    —But doesn’t he think that we’re poor, too? she asked fiercely.—Have you told him? Does he have any idea?
    —It’s different, said Sheila with finality.—It’s just different.
    When Hilary drove in the summer with her father in the Bedford van, to pick up Sheila and all her things at the end of her first year, she was waiting for them of course at Manor Hall, as if there had never been any other place, any squat whose kitchen was painted with giant mushrooms. Hilary understood that she was not ever to mention what had happened there, not even when she and Sheila were alone. Because they never wore the memory out by speaking of it, the place persisted vividly in her imagination.
    She had stayed on in that house for almost a week: she had arrived on Monday and her return ticket was for Saturday. Sheila rested for the first couple of days, sleeping a lot, and Hilary went out on her own, exploring, going round the shops. On Sheila’s instructions she took several carrier bags of bloody sheets and towels to the launderette, where she sat reading Virginia Woolf while the washing boiled. There seemed to be a lot of hours to pass, because she didn’t want to spend too much time in Sheila’s room; she shrank from the possibility of getting in the way between Sheila and Neil. A couple of times she went to the cinema in the afternoon by herself. They all went out to pubs every evening and she got used to drinking beer, although she didn’t get to like it. While the others joked and drank andsmoked she sat in a silence that must have looked gawky and immature, so that she was sure Sheila despaired of her, although Sheila must also surely have known that she found the conversation impossible to join because it was so tepid and disappointing, gossip mostly about people she’d never met. Sheila, who had been aloof and not popular at school, seemed to be working hard to make these people like her. She made herself brighter and funnier and smaller than her real self, Hilary thought. She surrounded Neil in particular with such efforts of admiration, prompting him and encouraging him and attributing ideas to him, while he smiled in lazy amusement, rolling up his eternal cigarettes. At least they weren’t all over each other, they didn’t cling together in public. Hilary even feared for Neil, thinking that he shouldn’t trust her sister, he should wonder what dark undertow might follow after such a glittering bright flood.
    By the end of the week Sheila was well enough to go to lectures again, and on the Saturday she came to the bus station to see Hilary off. She insisted on carrying Hilary’s suitcase, which swung in her hand as light as if there was nothing in it, now that their father’s old dictionaries of classical mythology had been unloaded.
    —I didn’t feel anything, you know, Sheila said as they walked, as if she