The Midlands is the setting of The Narrator’s brief, happy university period and the first place where she encountered Jade. Its campus becomes both a close-knit world of student routines and, in retrospect, the setting of an encounter whose significance The Narrator could not recognize at the time.

Campus and Setting

The university was new and small, established in the wake of legislation passed in the 1990s, and specialized in sports, business, and communication. Its professors’ offices occupied two single-storey pavilions that had served as a hospital during World War II. The Narrator imagines the cries of amputees from that earlier period lingering in the corridors, giving the campus a history that contrasts with the uncomplicated happiness she associates with her own time there.

Campus life gathered nearly every part of the students’ existence into one place. They lived in a residence, drank at the nightclub, and cleaned it the following day for four pounds and fifty pence an hour. The arrangement makes student life seem both carefree and practical: leisure and paid work belonged to the same small orbit. The Narrator remembers that period as a simple kind of happiness, an intense yet gentle way of living.

The Narrator and Léa Arrive

The Narrator arrived on September 8, and Léa came the next day. Their apartments, A and B, faced each other. They propped open the main doors with a fire extinguisher, making the two apartments seem like one large shared space; the doors to their bedrooms were often open as well. People were continually passing through the corridor, and solitude was hard to come by. The Narrator recalls laughter, tears, and undisguised promiscuity as part of the same communal atmosphere, without remembering that constant company as a deprivation.

That open-door arrangement gives the Midlands campus a particular intimacy in her memory: the students’ private and shared lives repeatedly crossed in the same hallway. The residence is not just a backdrop to the period but its social center, a place where chance encounters and everyday closeness were built into the way people lived.

Jade’s Brief Presence

Léa did not arrive alone. She brought a friend to help her settle in, along with enough luggage that she seemed to need a porter. The friend was Jade. At first, The Narrator paid little attention to the two French women. She was new to the campus, the city, and the country, and wanted to find friends who would stay for the whole academic year rather than spend time on someone passing through. Living abroad, especially in a language she did not command, made her conscious of managing her limited social energy.

Jade nevertheless stood out for her beauty and catlike eyes, though The Narrator did not find her especially approachable and could barely understand her English. She remembers Jade greeting people with a mispronounced version of “Hi!” Her surviving images of Jade are local and fragmentary: hiding behind Léa on the landing between apartments A and B, and appearing at an early party in apartment C with a vacant smile and a plastic cup, surrounded by about half a dozen young men from different backgrounds. These glimpses offer no obvious foreshadowing of what The Narrator later learns; at the time, Jade seemed like someone who had passed through without leaving much of a mark.

Retrospective Meaning

Years later, Léa recalled that arriving at the campus had overturned the roles the two friends had seemed to occupy. Jade had appeared worldly, while Léa had seemed like the sheltered one. But on the Midlands campus Jade was out of her element, frightened that people would speak to her because she spoke so little English. Léa believed that this exposure hurt Jade, or that Jade was hurt by Léa seeing it, and thought it might explain why Jade stopped speaking to her.

After Jade returned to France, Léa never saw her again. She called and sent numerous emails, then received notice that Jade’s email address was no longer active. Léa once feared that something terrible had happened; later, she concluded that Jade might have been trying to flee her lies, perhaps by beginning anew, and supposed that Jade changed her name and email address around that time. Against these later developments, The Narrator’s memories of the Midlands remain stubbornly ordinary: a corridor, a party, a mispronounced greeting, and a face half-hidden behind Léa. Their smallness is central to the location’s significance. The place where the past now seems to demand an explanation had not felt, when lived, like the beginning of a consequential story.