Hmmmm, I thought: ‘instinct’ will favour the men.
He sucked on his pipe – it looked like a habit honed in tutorial with recalcitrant students – and then added that the arrival of women made no difference: the same considerations would apply.
The sun had moved further across the garden. Loxton asked if I was warm enough. Such a fussy man! I ignored him, gesturing towards the gaggle of women in their College colours, setting off for their ball game. ‘So how many women should we aim for,’ I asked, ‘given the experience of going mixed?’
His reply came laced with history. The College had taken more women than it was meant to; proof that the talent was there. By analogy, we should longlist for Cornwall on merit – arbitrary quotas set limits.
At last we agreed on something! I probably beamed.
Then he took me by surprise again. ‘Lest we pass anyone over unfairly,’ he said, standing up and brushing his jacket free of the odd petal, ‘we could encourage people to apply. A message to the Junior Common Room or a notice on the Gatehouse board, perhaps?’ He held the lip of his pipe a few inches away, to reveal again that tight little smile. ‘Would you like to make the overture to the JCR President and do the necessary with the Warden’s secretary?’
I’d known there’d be a catch somewhere.
I had much more fun talking to the Dean about practical arrangements now the Reading Party was to be mixed. Not a subject for a stuffy meeting, he said, with a knowing look; it demanded a certain amount of levity. He took me to the pub and bought me a double.
The main concern, from a pastoral perspective, was who should sleep where in Cornwall. There weren’t enough rooms for everybody to have one, but clearly we couldn’t have men and women sharing. How should this be resolved?
Unsurprisingly, given his politics, his argument was remarkably black and white. He suggested it was simple enough, if we wanted to avoid ‘a love fest’: put the women on the first floor and the men on the second.
‘But that’s not what you did in College,’ I countered, clinking his glass. ‘Dr Loxton said you made a point of not segregating; you spread the women around the staircases.’
‘And look where that got us: there’s bonking all over the place!’ The Dean licked the froth from his lips, gave me a little dig with his elbow. ‘Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. There is also the matter of the facilities – which is where things always come unstuck. The bathrooms are better downstairs – they’re in the old dressing rooms. Dennis will want them reserved for the women.’
‘But we’re capable of sharing a loo with a bloke! Did you see that piece in Isis?’
The Dean nodded as he took another swig of beer. ‘Though mostly I steer clear of the student rags. A student of Loxton’s wrote it: Chloe Firth; she’ll be on his list. He likes to surprise, you know. But it’s not the sharing of the facilities we have to worry about; it’s their quality. The top of that house was for servants: pokey attics, plumbing shoehorned in. Downstairs is more generous. Dennis will want the men to oblige.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake! Anyone would think …’ But I couldn’t be bothered, resorting instead to my trump card. ‘Besides, I’ve looked at that floor plan you gave me and on my count there aren’t enough beds in the attic, unless Dr Loxton sleeps in the annexe.’
The Dean said Loxton always took one particular room on the first floor and that you couldn’t give the suite over the kitchen to anyone else.
‘Why not?’
‘Because that would be asking for trouble. Anyway, much more interesting to leave it empty – demand is bound to outstrip the supply. Have you met Gloria Durrant?’
‘Not properly.’
‘You wouldn’t forget: she’s the one everybody fancied until you arrived, imagining a Renoir nude. She’s always angling to go and joking about the annexe. Top-up?’
When he returned, we moved on to the allocation of rooms. I was all for letting the students choose, but the Dean said that wasn’t the way it was done.
‘The students have always drawn from a hat. Dennis will want that tradition to continue. For that matter, so would the Warden.’
‘Sounds risky: danger of mixed rooms!’
‘Nonsense: have you never drawn different colours?’
‘Of course: stupid of me.’ I scratched the inside of my wrist where I used to get eczema. ‘And if they don’t like the person they are with?’
‘Same as the arrangements in College. They lump it or swap.’
I thought of Tyler Winston, whose name had already come up in the soundings. ‘And does the same principle apply to the desks – we draw lots?’
‘No, there you’ll be pleased to know that Dennis allows you to choose.’
You couldn’t help but smile. We chatted a bit about the students whose names had already been suggested – the Dean became tantalisingly unrevealing, I suspect on purpose – and then turned to our own work. He asked how my research was going.
‘Ace,’ I told him. ‘I’ve found my way round the Bodleian; mastered that underground labyrinth – just how I imagine a submarine: all echoing metal – and got the hang of those little green slips for the book stacks. Research is a cinch compared to dealing with Loxton.’
As term moved on I began to go native, the sense of strangeness undermined, like a majestic cliff face back home in Norfolk, by the ebb and flow of the day-to-day.
Oddly, the Reading Party helped.
Canvassing opinion from the Fellows was revealing. Loxton’s retreat had a reputation for vigorous walks and, depending on your point of view, equally vigorous or vacuous talk. How it would adapt, as a mixed party, was the subject of some speculation: a few doubted the students would get through their books; the majority assumed it would just be more relaxed. No one suggested it should be dropped: it was, apparently, a given. I began to think the same.
As for the students, most were happy to chat about their studies; many were equally animated about their passions – bands, sport, politics, religion, getting laid or getting high; and any number looked capable of ‘larking’. A rare few – like Tyler Winston, who was disarmingly urbane whenever I came across him: hard to think of him as a student – offered the possibility of all three. Invidious to choose between them, but I knew whom I liked.
There was remarkably little take-up from my notice on the board outside the Lodge, which fluttered against the green baize until someone pinned something over it. As for the ministrations of the JCR President – male of course, but no way a toff – he seemed reluctant to help. He was more fussed about changing College terminology – students should be ‘workers’ and members of a ‘union’ – than about establishing the right to join a rarefied retreat. Our encounter made me feel old, as if I’d moved beyond the demos and sit-ins of my youth and become a symbol of bourgeois oppression, but the Dean said I was acclimatising; it was just the difference between being twenty-one and being twenty-six. That made me feel better; he was a real support.
When family and friends phoned to ask how things were going, I talked gamely about my colleagues, my students, my rooms; the butterscotch colour of the stone and the way it soaked up the autumn sun. When they probed for more, I found myself saying that Oxford was ‘odd, but rather wonderful’, citing the Reading Party as a typically absorbing anachronism.
Jenny, remembering our rebellious schooldays, teased that I appeared to be enjoying the place after all, which made me laugh: surely everyone was entitled to change – hadn’t she once been dead against being a lawyer? She didn’t answer, just said we’d see what happened in the Easter vac – the trip to Cornwall would be telling; I’d have to watch my step.
Andy, an ex-boyfriend who’d lingered on in my life, was predictably tart about what he called my ‘about turn’. In another difficult phone call, the Reading Party became the conduit of the tension still between us – he ridiculing it as a symbol of all that he disliked about Oxbridge, while I stuck up for its oddities. Trying to be friends didn’t work, I said,
and asked him to stop ringing: over meant over.
That was the right decision, brutal though it felt; things were complicated enough, teetering between intellectual flirtation and flirtation proper with my various admirers, most of them married or otherwise untouchable, without allowing old lovers to prowl about. I went back to exploring the emptying gardens and meadows, the busy teashops and pubs, as a free woman determined to belong, while simultaneously going decorously into battle with Loxton.
For Loxton and I did have very different views about who should go to Cornwall, as became clear when we made our selection in Sixth Week.
We met in an uninviting room that lacked ‘a woman’s touch’. My mum, who is the archetypal homemaker, would have added a bowl of fruit – even Jenny’s college, a mile up the road, had had its pot plants. Not that I commented; I was cross with myself for noticing. Why was one sex so domesticated and the other not? Society – no, patriarchal society – had a lot to answer for.
Loxton didn’t waste time. He placed a typed list on the table – his names and mine – and watched while I read. Between us we had nearly thirty, including Tyler Winston, I noted, and a gratifying number of women. But how to choose?
Loxton suggested we start where it was easy to cull – with the undergraduates who were not Finalists.
This led to an uncomfortable discussion of the admissions policy and access for pupils from modest backgrounds like mine. Eventually we chose Jim Evans, the talented second-year historian from the Cardiff comprehensive, whom I hoped might emerge from his shell; Eddie Oakeshott, a bumptious Fresher from a London public school, reading English, about whom Loxton had extravagant reports; and Mei Chow, a first-year lawyer, one of the new Chinese scholars. That gave us three of our twelve.
What about the Finalists? We had twice as many names as we needed.
A few stood out academically and were swiftly decided. There were two Exhibitioners: Hugh Chauncey, in his fourth year of reading Greats – always useful to have somebody who knew the ropes, Loxton said, while I puzzled at the Norman edge to the name; and Lyndsey Milburn, reading English, recommended repeatedly as an extraordinary self-taught one-off. There was also the College’s sole student of Oriental Studies, Rupert Ingram-H all, and a diligent lawyer, Priyam Patel, one of the rare Asian students, whom I was pleased to see chosen.
Tyler Winston was not mentioned.
We moved on to our own fields. Loxton gave in on the historian from my first tute, Barnaby Quick, in spite of the shaky performance that had frustrated my colleagues. So I deferred to him on the journalist Chloe Firth, reading the trendy hybrid Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology, whose school had something to do with the suffragettes; if she was ‘something of a handful’, that would be his problem.
Still no reference to the American.
We were in danger of getting stuck, and there was no relief in that forlorn shell of a room, with its air of a neglected side chapel and its absence of refreshment, so I suggested phoning the Dean for his opinion. I’m not sure Loxton liked that, but he let me make the call. When the Dean offered to come round and ‘rescue’ me – not how I passed it on, of course – Loxton shook his head. Still, we dispatched a few candidates under the ‘worthy but dull’ rule, and Martin Trewin – ‘maverick geographer with a light touch’ – was through.
That left four people – Tyler Winston and three women – of whom we could take only two. If we dropped Tyler we’d have parity between the sexes; if we took him we would not. Did it matter?
Of course I had to argue for parity. Loxton, equally predictably, said an ‘arbitrary’ principle shouldn’t override merit. Take Tyler, he said: extraordinarily rewarding to teach and suited to a career in academia, though he might need to be wooed; the women were not in his league.
We went to and fro, Loxton’s low baritone contrasting uncomfortably with the high pitch I succumbed to when my argument was weak. Eventually Loxton suggested the Warden arbitrate; he was confident of the outcome. So I caved in. At least I had tried. We settled on Gloria Durrant, the linguist from my staircase, who was quick and had put herself forward. Ironic that he indulged me there, given that I hadn’t warmed to her: too much of a county type.
Decisions made, we had a treacly sherry spirited from the sideboard – the indigo-blue bottle like a splash of stained glass amid the gloom – and tried to talk of other things, such as my coming series of lectures and Loxton’s preference for seminars, but my appetite for jousting was exhausted. Within minutes the booze was back in its cupboard and the smell of caramelised apple had merged with the general mustiness. As soon as it was polite to do so, I escaped.
I may have worried about some of the choices, but the Warden declared himself happy with the outcome, bar a hint of irritation that both lawyers were women – what was it about the law, he asked rhetorically, that so appealed to the conscientious female mind? As for the process, he commended the principle of ‘our’ opening it up, though in practice we should keep an eye on our volunteer – Miss Durrant being somewhat ‘testing’.
Still, I’d got through that hurdle.
Just before the vac began, the letters of invitation went out to the students, signed by us both, with an explanation about costs. I kept a file copy, pleased that we’d been given equal billing, and waited for questions. To my surprise, there were almost none: it was as if being chosen was reason enough to accept. No one suggested that they had other plans or preferred to revise to their own timetable; no one queried whether the days in Cornwall would be worth the travelling time, or what it would be like being stuck in the middle of nowhere with Loxton and me. Best of all, no one who had not been invited made a fuss.
Instead, my two historians used their last tutorials to check what the Reading Party involved before saying yes – Barnaby dubious about what he had to contribute, Jim warily interested but anxious that the £1 a day cap on costs should stick.
The two lawyers – Mei Chow and Priyam Patel – wrote prompt and correct notes to us both: Loxton was amused, suggesting such punctilious courtesy was without precedent. My volunteer, Gloria Durrant, had the nerve to say she hoped she’d have a proper desk, but the Dean said she’d contrived a waiver from the linguists’ year out on account of spending her life ‘holed up in Francophone this or Spanish that’, and was known for making demands. The best response from the women was from the English Exhibitioner, Lyndsey Milburn, who found Loxton under the huge copper beech, gave him an astonishing address in sonnet form and then sent us a crinkled, longhand copy.
The other English student – the flamboyant Eddie Oakeshott, who had petitioned for an invite – collared me again to say he was glad to see ‘democracy’ at work. The orientalist likewise addressed his more formal response to me, even though we’d never met; the Dean said that was true to form – Rupert always had an eye on the main chance, and what did I expect from a boy with a name like Ingram-H all? Hugh Chauncey, the classicist who’d been to Cornwall as a Fresher, gave his acceptance orally to Loxton, who was still teaching him, and the geographer, Martin Trewin, replied via his subject tutor, joking that he wasn’t looking for another reading list.
As for Tyler Winston, he rattled a box of College stationery at me in the Lodge, teasing that he could now do justice to the occasion, and pointedly addressed his note to us jointly, which endeared him to me despite what the Dean said. Why not be well behaved? And I liked his handwriting: a confident flow – each word curling towards the next, the ideas entwined.
The last person to respond was the PPP-ist, Chloe Firth, but Loxton said we were lucky to have heard from a natural rebel. For that matter, we were lucky all twelve had accepted; occasionally someone did not.
How extraordinary, I thought, realising that the possibility had always seemed hypothetical: why would anyone ever say no?
Christmas
I marked the end of term by going to London for the weekend. A quick exchange of postcards showed that Jenny was up for a visit.
When she opened
the door to her tiny flat, I nearly disintegrated into tears with the relief of seeing a real friend. We settled down on the thick pile of the rug that dominated the main room, propped against a Habitat beanbag and sofa, of which she was inordinately proud, armed with our cups of instant coffee, and talked about what she’d been up to since I saw her last.
‘But this is all about me …’ she exclaimed, after we’d been at it for the best part of an hour. ‘I want to hear about you!’
So I told her about the College, getting to know everyone, trying to find a balance between teaching and research, the right and the wrong type of flirting. I made her laugh with my picture of Governing Body meetings – the men in their black gowns resembling what the farmers back home called ‘a murder of crows’. She smiled when I thanked her for role-playing tutorials, which had allowed me to pass myself off as an old hand, and for answering my questions about the grading of essays, so I didn’t embarrass myself. She tutted as I talked about being on my guard with some of my colleagues, nervous about getting things wrong, and about the oddity of having students defer to me, even when the age gap was small. I should have more confidence, she said: it had always been my Achilles heel.
‘Oh, but I love all the attention,’ I said. ‘It’s just that sometimes it’s a bit much.’ And I mentioned eating custard tarts in the Woolworths tearoom because it was a treat to eavesdrop on normal lives, and bicycling out to Port Meadow on my own, because I missed the countryside.
‘And what about missing Andy?’ she asked. ‘Where’ve you got to with him?’
Thankfully we agreed that was a whole other conversation; we needed a drink, should get cooking, before we started on that. So we grabbed our coats – she generously wore mine and I tried on a glamorous number of hers from Biba – and pottered off to the local shops. There we goaded each other into our favourite indulgences – slippery tinned peaches with vanilla ice cream for me and a dense slab of Black Forest gateau for her – laughing with the pleasure of spending more than we were used to. Even allowing for inflation, such treats were more affordable on a salary.
The Reading Party Page 3
