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them back late – it’s a dollar a day per item.’
    I thought how trusting she was. She didn’t even know me. And though I love them, I am notoriously bad with books – I lose them, I give them away, they fall apart willy-nilly under my fingers. I allow Hetty to eat them.
    â€˜My name’s Sophie O’Farrell,’ I told her, in case she should need to chase the books up. ‘And I live in a boarding house called Samarkand – you know that big old house down near the river?’
    She nodded.
    She had long, dark, perfectly flat hair tucked behind ears that were small and delicate and had almost no lobes. She dressed like a certain kind of boy, in plain jeans and T-shirt, and along with the CDs she carried a slim case that might have contained some tool or other.
    â€˜And my baby’s called Hetty.’
    â€˜Hetty,’ repeated the girl with a smile. Ever alert to her name, Hetty looked up and took her fingers out of her nose.
    â€˜And I’m Becky Sharp,’ said the girl, holding out her hand.
    â€˜Really!’ I exclaimed. We stopped, and I took the hand, which was long and slender, and very cool.
    â€˜What is it about my name? You’re not the first person who seems to think it’s remarkable.’
    â€˜Becky Sharp’s the heroine of a famous nineteenth-century novel,’ I said, ‘called Vanity Fair . And she was the author of her own life, a wonderful thing to be, don’t you think? She made sure it was an audacious and adventurous life, too. Full of surprises.’
    I could also have added that her namesake was beautifully manipulative and self-serving. She had to be, as she was an orphan, like me, and had no mama to arrange a marriage for her. She had to fend for herself.
    â€˜I like the sound of her,’ said Becky Sharp. ‘But I don’t read novels. I play the flute.’
    I wanted to point out that surely these two things weren’t mutually exclusive, but she had been kind to me. We’d been walking down the hill all this time, and when we got to the car park at the bottom she said, ‘D’you need a lift?’
    Becky Sharp’s car was low-slung and old and iridescent green; it looked like an enormous frog. It was an old Citroën, she said, a CX. She stowed the pram in the back and opened the passenger door for me. Then she went around and folded herself into the driver’s side. Becky Sharp’s arms and legs were so soft and pliable they seemed almost boneless. And every part of her matched. With limbs like that, it was fitting that she had those adorable little lobeless ears and a tiny rounded nose so flat she looked almost like a painting by Modigliani. And her eyes were slightly slanted, and her mouth a veritable rosebud, with a protruding lower lip. I wanted to reach out and touch her.
    She saw me watching her and smiled. Turning on the ignition, she pressed a lever, and the car lifted itself up like an animal about to pounce. ‘Pneumatic suspension,’ she explained.
    As the green car slid out of the university car park, I felt a great sense of triumph. I had penetrated the fortress of the university and had come away in style, with an armful of forbidden library books and a girl named Becky Sharp.
    The ride was very companionable. She put on a CD of Beth Orton (I gave her top marks for good taste in girl singers) and I retrieved the chocolate from my bag and gave her half. We laughed a lot, though I can’t remember quite what we said, and arrived at Samarkand far too soon.
    Gliding home in that car with its all-out, old-fashioned shabby elegance would stay with me for a long time. And the way Becky Sharp left her green frog car purring in front of Samarkand and ran slender-hipped up the stairs with Hetty’s pram and down again to drive off with a wave of her hand, that stayed with me too.

C HAPTER F IVE
    A FTER PERSISTING ALMOST to the end of the book, I found that I hated Madame