by Bruce Feiler
XIV
FLIRTING
A Yah Who’s Who
You round a corner, enter a room, pick up a telephone—and there are that voice, those mannerisms, those clothes, that style, THOSE PEOPLE. It all comes back. It never went away. It’s all going on now, still.
—Ann Barr and Peter York
The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, 1983
My invitation was the last to arrive. For weeks the trendiest members of the college had been chitchatting about the venue. For days the toniest CRABS and Lobsters had been wish-washing about what to wear. For all these days and weeks, however, I hadn’t been chitting or chatting at all, because I—a low breed—was so out of the loop I wasn’t even aware that I wasn’t in the know. Then one day I was eating in Buttery when Nigel—the top breed—was forced to sit down next to me. Halfway through our well-starched meal, a first-year upstart came rushing to his side and wondered aloud what time the party would start. Nigel glanced at me, turned his face toward the floor, and mumbled something inaudible that sent his friend scurrying toward the door. That afternoon an envelope appeared in my pigeonhole.
Nigel Parkhill, Pegram McIntosh, et tu, too,
will be celebrating Shrove Tuesday
with drinks,
in the Thirkill Room, Clare College,
from 7:30 P.M.
Dress: Fabulissimus PBABSpWW
I knew that PBABSpWW—the eight most important letters to any aspiring bon vivant—meant “Please bring a bottle of sparkling white wine,” but I didn’t know the meaning of “Fabulissimus,” so I asked.
“It means smart,” said Ian, the trendiest person I knew and also the most blunt. “Except it’s in Latin, which probably means wear only natural fibres.”
“Very funny,” I said. “But that doesn’t help. Are we supposed to wear DJs or togas?”
“We?” he said. “Am I going with you?”
“Yes,” I said. “You can be my escort.”
“In that case,” he said. “The only way to be sure is to have a look for yourself.”
“You mean stick my head in the door?”
“I mean take a peek through the window.”
“I can’t believe I came all the way to Cambridge to learn fashion espionage.”
“What did you expect?” he smirked. “The only things we’re famous for are cocktail parties and spies.”
Ian had a reputation in Clare for always wearing the right thing and often saying the wrong. On the outside he was a gentleman-scholar—a slightly cavalier Yah—forever strutting around college in his baggy tweed jacket, tight black trousers, and embroidered leather boots, while carrying in his back pocket a well-fingered copy of Nietzsche with the cover strategically facing out. But on the inside he was a childish terror—moody, feisty, and often uncontrollably blustery, not unlike the weather. Proudly unpredictable, he would alternate without warning between mild-mannered socialite and hotblooded lout. I watched him charm women with brooding renditions of Rainer Maria Rilke’s love poetry; I watched him offend others by asking them to describe the size and texture of their nipples. If Simon was a scientist hoping to uncover the perfect sexual chemistry, Ian was a philosopher hoping to devise the ultimate theory of existential love.
By his own standards, Ian was still down on his luck near the end of Lent Term. Miranda, his fallen, statuesque ideal, continued to haunt him from afar by sending long apologias from London. Louise, meanwhile, his quiet, redhead figurine dream, had been so alarmed by his gift of goodies at the end of Michaelmas Term that she remained cool to his advances throughout the new year, which only encouraged him to write her tear-jerking billets-doux asking for her forgiveness. The net result of these double-barreled blows on his not inconsiderable estimate of personal self-worth was a slow, spiraling decline into the arms of self-pity. By late January, when the war started, he began to sleep late almost every day and skip fencing practice. By February, as the fighting worsened, he began to shower and shave less frequently and lost a bout he shouldn’t have in the annual Oxford-Cambridge Varsity Games. And by early March, as the combat climaxed, he had lost all interest in Nietzsche, had stopped fencing all together, and had begun searching for clues to a solution of his romantic-identity crisis in cheap paperback editions of Barbara Taylor Bradford and imported copies of Calvin and Hobbes. “Maybe I should lift weights,” he said. “My upper body is too small.” “Maybe I should learn French.” The occasion of the All-Clare Mardi Gras Bacchanal presented an opportunity for me to drag him out of his self-flagellating den and push him back into the courting circle.
“Let’s go check out the clothes,” I said, pulling him from hypnotic repose in front of the dartboard. “We’re already past fashionably late.”
We stepped out into the cool air of Old Court and slipped surreptitiously to the one spot in college with an unimpeded view of the Thirkill Room: the top of Clare Bridge.
“Can anybody see us?” Ian whispered. “I’m so embarrassed.”
“Stop talking,” I said. “You’d make a terrible spy. Just climb up on top of one of these balls and tell me what you see.”
Ian put his right foot into my hands and maneuvered himself to the top of a ball, stretching his arms out for balance. Once he was steadied, he turned toward Old Court and craned his neck to see inside the room. A minute went by without any word, and then he suddenly announced: “Bloody hell. You’re not going to believe this. Everyone’s dressed in drag!”
The room was purring when we arrived—a jolly, cheerful, murmuring purr that hung over the outstretched glasses and upturned noses like a cloud of perfume smog. The light, like the noise, seemed to dance in the air, leaping from the pupils of the candelabra, twinkling from the lobes of every earring, and cascading from the chandelier—coccyx of the Milky Way—like endless ribbons of peach chiffon from the shoulders of the Queen Mum. Time had stopped (was this Clare or Versailles?); the party was cast (an all-star bill); and decadence flowed from every corner in a gushing fountain of braying laughter, tinkling wrists, sparkling white wine, and eau de toilette. At the center, on the edge, and flowing through it all was the chief socialite-impresario of Clare, Nigel Parkhill.
“Good evening, good evening, Ian and Bruce. I’m so glad you could come.” Nigel, dressed in vivid green, came gliding across the pale floral rug and planted two kisses on both of our cheeks. “And don’t you both look divine.”
He tipped his champagne glass, dipped his head, and escorted us into the room. Inside, several yellow marshmallow sofas surrounded the second-story room, punctuated by uptight antique wooden chairs, and lorded over by giant mirrors in gilded frames and miniature sketches of croquet games along the banks of the Cam. Untrue to Ian’s surveillance, none of the people upon closer inspection was dressed entirely in drag. True, most of the men had long hair and most of the women had short; most of the men wore slinky silk blouses and more women than men wore trousers and brogues. But every person seemed to boast in his androgynous vogue one distinguishing gender clue: the longer the earrings, for example, the more likely that ear belonged to a man; the more exposed the breast, the more likely that breast belonged to a woman. Among this rarefied chic clientele, Ian seemed perfectly male chauvinist in his baggy tweed jacket and slice of hairy chest and I, in my navy trousers, dark blue shirt, and bright crimson tie, seemed as much out of place as a Damon Runyon racketeer at an Evelyn Waugh garden party. Mind of a libertine; wardrobe of a hood.
“Come in, come in,” Nigel said. “Let me get you a drink. But first let me introduce you to some of my friends.”
He ushered us up to the central huddle and into the upright lap of one of his dearest pals, whose tight outfit and short hemline made her gender very clear.
“This is Chantalle,” said Nigel. “Meet Ian and Bruce.”
We smiled. She looked at both of us from head to toe, and settled her eyes on Ian. He stared, transfixed, at her.
“That’s some dress,” he said.
“It’s the fashion,
” she said. “I borrowed it from a friend who’s a psychiatrist.”
“Is that spelled with a capital F?” I asked.
“Psychiatrist?” she said.
“No, fashion.”
“Well, the dress was made in Paris—”
“And that’s certainly with a capital P.”
She simpered and pivoted back toward Ian. I wished him well and turned away. No sooner had I taken one step to my right than I found myself face-to-face with a certifiably fashionable man with blond hair to his waist, a chartreuse morning coat to his knees, and one caramel espadrille poised slightly in front of the other. He was just resting his cigaretted wrist on his well-cocked waist and spinning his glass toward the ceiling when I arrived in earshot.
“So what do you think?” he said to several of his friends. “Is this classical or contrapposto?”
“I think it’s tagliatelle,” said one man.
“No, seriously,” he huffed. “One foot forward and the other back. What is that?”
“Let’s ask Nigel,” said one woman, looking around for our host, who was at that moment just returning with several drinks. “Nigel dear, is this pose classical or contrapposto?”
“Neither,” he said without batting an eye. “That’s Ralph Lauren.”
Nigel Parkhill, for all intents and poses, was a classic Cambridge Yah. His skin was as pale as custard, his hair was as fair as barley, his nose was as angular as the masthead on the flagship of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. He dressed only in suits or sweats (never jeans), wore matching ties and handkerchiefs (usually polka dots), and owned more pairs of wide-wale corduroys than I owned pairs of socks. He came to his own Mardi Gras gala, for instance, in a pink broadcloth shirt, white silk bow tie, and an oversized lime green three-button suit with a white kerchief dangling joey-like from its upper breast pocket. His accent, to boot, could best be diagnosed as severe nasal congestion.
Nigel, however, was not what he appeared. His clothes, his pose, even his accent were all careful affectations to disguise a less-than-noble birth. Of course, ambitious makeovers are quite common in Cambridge. The British class system, as I was discovering, was not as much a system, nor as closed a class, as most people inside it would like to believe. Yet even in that world of smoke and mirrors Nigel’s guise was a sleight of some distinction, for he was not born in Essex nor in Surrey but in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
In many ways it is easier to penetrate the English elite if one hails from rural Wyoming than from cockney Cheapside. Many of the most “Brideshead” characters I met in Cambridge, for example, actually came from abroad. There was the German lawyer in my course who wore a different-colored paisley ascot every day of the week. There was the French aristocrat I met from Peterhouse who was writing his M.Litt. thesis on homosexual overtones in Edwardian schoolboy literature. And of course there was Nigel, a graduate student in art history, who was writing his Ph.D. dissertation on a series of prose poems about Venice written by the Oxford high priest of letters, John Ruskin, in the late nineteenth century. All of these characters looked the part of a gentle Englishman, but their true genius lay somewhere else: they could act the part as well.
“Pegram,” called Nigel from the center of the room. “Would you pour Chantalle some more champagne?
“Sy,” he cried in the other direction. “You must meet my friend Bruce. He would love to hear about the George Eliot love letters you found in the basement of the U.L.
“Now, Bru,” he said, pivoting back toward me. “You just have to meet my pal Rana. He’s Indian—very rich—and wait till you hear what he had to do before he came up to Cambridge.”
Already spinning from the merry going round, I accepted my drink—a mocha-colored concoction artfully concanted from Kahlúa, vodka, allspice, and cream—exchanged banalities about George Eliot, looked in vain for any rich-looking Indians, and marched through the middle of several charming circles to find the food table overlooking the Cam. Heaping bowls of fruit were perched on either end, sprinkles of sugar cookies dotted the tablecloth, and a porterly, rotund silver samovar was poised at the heart of the spread just beneath a marble bust of Lord Byron. I was looking at Byron’s reflection in the face of the samovar when someone tapped me on the shoulder and reached to embrace me.
“Bruce,” came a squeal from inside my arms. “I’m so happy to see you.”
It was Susanna, dressed, unlike she was at the Crew Meal, in a dark two-piece pants suit. Since our first meeting in Michaelmas Term I had seen Susanna at many Clare events. With her bleached-blond hair and two dozen outfits, her whitened skin and broad toothy smile, she seemed to me a central figure in the social network of the college. In some ways I was right about her position; in others I was not.
“What are you doing here?” she said, squeezing her shoulders close to mine in conspiratorial fashion.
“I’m spying,” I said.
“For whom?” she whispered.
“The proletariat.”
My answer bounced flatly off her forehead and landed in her drink. She took a sip to mull it over, then changed the subject. “Hey, do you know that man who just walked in?” she said, pointing indiscreetly across the room. “The one with the funny jacket. He’s so handsome.”
“That must be Nigel’s friend Rana,” I said. “I think he’s an Indian prince or something.”
“Oooh,” she said. “India. That sounds exotic…which reminds me, have you figured out what international relations is yet?”
“No,” I said. “But I’m working on it. I have an exam next week, so I have until then to decide.”
“The war must be providing you with all sorts of material.”
“It should,” I said. “But I wonder if it has. I don’t think it’s had much effect around Cambridge. The parties all seem to continue.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But I just came from the King’s Mingle, and it just wasn’t the same as last year.”
“What’s the King’s Mingle?”
“Don’t you know?” She took a quick sip of her drink, a cranberry cocktail with a fizz so powerful it looked like it came from Liquid-Plumr. “King’s voted several years ago not to have a May Ball because they thought it was too elitist—can you imagine?—so now they have a big party every year at the end of Lent. This year they had to have special security because they thought it might be bombed.”
“Did you have a good time?”
“It was a good laugh, I suppose. But Peter really wanted to come here.”
“Peter!” I said, recalling as I did the bloody scene at our Crew Meal. “Are you still seeing him?”
“Well.” She grabbed the back of her hair and diverted her eyes. “I know what everyone thinks. But I rather like him. He’s not so bad, really. You see, I always wondered if I could ever have a healthy relationship with a bloke because I could never say no.”
“Can you say no now?”
She straightened her back. “I did to Peter.”
“And what happened?”
“I changed my mind.”
As she spoke, Susanna recognized someone standing behind me.
“Hillary,” she called. “Hill. It’s me.”
A young woman brushed my shoulder on her way to double-kiss Susanna’s cheeks. Like her friend, Hillary was wearing a two-piece pin-striped suit that seemed to stretch in a single line from the tip of her black suede pumps to the top of her soft blond bun in a striking effect not unlike an upside-down exclamation point.
“Do you know Hillary?” asked Susanna. I took her hand as if to shake it; she demurred as if to say, “Why don’t you give it a kiss?” I let go.
“Hillary and I are starting a drinking society,” Susanna said.
“Like the Lobsters?”
“Oh no,” she said. “All they do is have a drinking party in the spring which anyone can attend if they buy a ticket. We’re forming a new society, for captains and cuppers—you know, those who play intramural sports.”
“And those who direct
plays for the college,” said Hillary. “That’s how I get in.”
“And what will you do?”
Susanna shook back her hair. “Every two weeks or so we’ll have dinner with good-looking male societies from other colleges.”
“Sharking, you mean.”
“Flirting,” corrected Hillary.
“What’s the difference?”
“In sharking you have something in mind—an aim.”
“Like getting someone into your arms?”
She stared at me coolly. “I mean into bed.”
Hillary Prime was a first-year linguist in Clare, a first-time director of Oscar Wilde for the Clare Actors Society, and a first-class wordsmith. Several moments into our initial encounter, Nigel’s friend, the George Eliot scholar, stepped up to the table where we were chatting.
“This is Simon,” I said, by way of introduction.
“Actually,” he interrupted, “it’s Symond.”
“Sorry,” I stammered. “I must have misunderstood.”
“Not to worry,” he said. “It’s an uncommon name. It comes from an obscure earl in a Shakespeare play.”
“Macbeth,” said Hillary. “Act Five.”
“Why, yes,” said Symond. “Nicely done.”
“But I thought his name was Siward,” she added.
His face fell to his shoes.
“Actually,” he said, “it was. I’m afraid my mother can’t spell.”
At many times throughout the year, and especially the times that I happened to hobnob with the yah and mighty, Cambridge often seemed to me a giant theatrical set. The weather was dank, the buildings were dark, the trees were heavy with age, but the student with a few pounds in his pocket and a surplus of free time could splurge on a life-style so grandiose it would make even marble Byrons blush. Liquor was the fuel that drove this class, sex was the fire that triggered its clash, but the one currency that sealed its exchange was the spoken word. For those peers in the realm of belles-lettres, words are like pearls one can dangle for display. Words are like swords one can wield for cachet. But above all, words become dialogue, dialogue becomes theater, and theater becomes the main display in an ongoing parade of wit.
