Back in the flat we opened a bottle of Valpolicella, emptied nuts into a dish bought on holiday together, put her favourite album on the stereo and settled back on the floor. When I’d had enough of Breezin’ and her fondness for smoochy jazz, we crammed into the miniscule kitchen and stirred pots over each other’s arms, teasing about who was getting in the way, fooling about companionably, and then took our supper – beef stroganoff on fluffy rice, with Birds’ Eye petit pois by special request – and ate next door with legs outstretched, plates on our laps. And all the time we talked and all the talk, no matter where it began and what it was supposedly about, brought us back to the same preoccupation: men. Who had banished Andy from my head and why was Jenny dabbling without serious intent? I hadn’t had such a conversation all term.
When finally we said goodnight, we were resolved. Jenny was going to stop footling with the guy she’d been seeing, who made her feel cheap; and I was going to make use of my freedom, not retreat into work. She stood by the door holding a glass of water and saying ‘Promise?’ – and I, unzipping the sleeping bag, promised back.
In the morning we took her acrid fag ends down to the bin, opened a couple of windows to create a through draught, and sat at the little table surrounded by breakfast things, enjoying the waft of proper coffee mixed with hot milk and sipped from a bowl, as we’d had it when we backpacked in France.
‘You still haven’t told me what it’s really like,’ she said, probing with the same subtext as before. ‘What about being the only woman?’
So I told her about that too. To leaven the serious chat, I talked about the Dean, whom possibly I fancied, though he could be a bit of a prick, and about the student who had a certain nautical appeal – Barnaby Quick – though of course he was off limits.
It was stacked in men’s favour, she said, judging from her own experience as an undergraduate. She remembered a don from one of the older colleges who used to feel all the girls up and was reputed to have bedded a few – was notorious for it in fact, not that that stopped him or made any difference to his career. He was married, needless to say. There hadn’t been that kind of hanky-panky where she was – no talk of female dons, married or otherwise, having student toyboys. Little scope, because men so rarely had tutorials there; besides, it wasn’t the same.
‘But why not?’ I asked, surprised at the force of the question. ‘What held them back?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Abuse of power and all that. The feeling that women, having fought so hard, ought to be above it. Besides, it’s just so sleazy, isn’t it? Older men and nubile chicks is bad enough, but imagine the roles reversed. Most of the women were such old crows. Anyway, would you bother with a pipsqueak of a student? They’re so young and inept – there’s nothing appealing about that in a man, is there?’
I thought of Tyler Winston and his air of sophistication. There was nothing of the pipsqueak about him; he was a cool cat. But she was right. You couldn’t criticise men who took advantage of their position if you behaved the same way – and the Warden had warned about the duty of care, so I couldn’t claim ignorance. Besides, a scandal involving a female don wouldn’t be so easily dismissed, even if not a disciplinary matter. Some things were taboo – the gossip would dog you for years. And women had that ridiculous need for the moral high ground; we gave ourselves so much more grief. Those were the issues. Women might be just as capable of lusting, or being led by the heart not the head, but the damage was greater and we weren’t good at brazening it out.
For some reason I didn’t say any of that, and chose not to discuss what felt like a dangerous topic. Instead I described a seventeenth-century portrait of the College’s first laundress, allegedly recruited because, being ugly, no one would want to molest her when she delivered the washing. It hung in Hall, at the student end, as a reminder to everyone. Jenny thought that was hilarious.
Eventually I got to the Reading Party and the discussion with Loxton about the students we should take in the spring. I tried to explain the mix of curiosity and exasperation it induced; my sense of being presented with a problem that should have been solved two years before, when the women arrived.
‘He sounds a nightmare,’ she said. ‘Don’t let him get to you.’
Back at Oxford, spared from marking the History Prelims and from the round of admissions interviews, spared even from thinking about Loxton, I revelled briefly in making my ‘set’ mine, pottering happily around the tiny College flat.
Men were extraordinary! My predecessor’s students must have sunk physically as well as emotionally as they read out their essays, so low were the chairs: I bought dusky velour cushions so they could lounge at the same level as me. As for the bedroom, I swapped the heavy masculine drapes for cotton, which billowed if you opened the window; it made me feel carefree.
I dug out a colourful vase – a kind of tie-dye in glass, swirling orange and black – to soften the austerity and, with the help of the ‘scout’ who looked after my room – a man, as it happens, though the College now had female ones too – hung photos of the Norfolk coast and put up some Athena posters.
Best of all, I unpacked the rest of my books and rearranged my modest library: reference books, biography, history and historiography, feminist texts. My own volume on the women behind the Pankhursts, whose publication must have helped with my appointment, stayed immediately behind my desk. Part multiple biography, part oral history, it cut across boundaries and was hard to place – unusual for a work based on a thesis. Besides, it was comforting to have it to hand: a reminder of those good reviews.
Only once was I interrupted, late on a wet and gloomy morning when steps bounded up the hollow wooden stairs and seemed to hover the other side of my door, neither moving away nor mutating into a knock. I stared at the doorknob, wondering whether to open it, but before I could make up my mind the footsteps went away again, descending rather jauntily in runs of two, and splattered off onto the stone flags down below. Stupidly I hesitated again; by the time I got to the window, there was no one in the front quad. No note on the door either; only my own message from the day before, saying I was out for the day. Fool!
Gloria Durrant was on the landing below, talking to a friend of hers. I could have asked her who it was – she must have seen – but thought better of it and was annoyed that she might have registered me looking. After some fruitless conjecture about who the visitor might be – my various colleagues seemed to favour the phone; the Dean normally scrawled chalk across my blackboard; Loxton I couldn’t imagine skipping anywhere; my students should all have returned home – I stopped speculating. In my teenage years my younger brother would wind me up with stories of friends who’d called without leaving a message: I’d learnt not to rise to the occasion.
In the afternoon, I put my pristine filing cabinet to better use, working out a logic for all that paperwork, labelling files and marshalling the contents. Teaching was in one mental box, lecturing in another, research in a third. Now, I created the physical equivalents by piling correspondence across the floor. There was a mass of papers about the tutoring of undergraduates; rather fewer for a graduate to be supervised; my lecture notes on the female reformers, mapped out over the summer; jottings for an article on a Dr Ivy Williams, an alumnus of Jenny’s college, who’d thought the poor should have access to free legal advice; endless scribbles towards my research on other women pioneers. All disappeared into the files.
That left me with a messy residue, mentally labelled ‘admin’. The Reading Party didn’t belong there, or anywhere else. It was like a known family member whose relationship to the rest of the lineage was stubbornly uncertain. In the end I gave it a folder of its own.
At that point, when my taxonomy became boring and I ached from spending so much time on the floor, I stopped, ran myself a bath and luxuriated amid the warm suds, pondering those footsteps.
It was during this marshalling of my professional life that Mum rang to probe about the personal. I took the call in my study, sur
rounded by the evidence of my new competence, but found myself succumbing to old habits and getting tetchily defensive. It wasn’t true that she’d been right about Andy ‘all along’: why did she need me now to concede it? And why fret so much about how I was meant to behave? Those were her insecurities about moving ‘up’ in the world, not mine.
That conversation took the edge off my sense of getting on top. What most annoyed me was her suggesting the Warden’s wife could help me decipher the protocols: I’d only mentioned the Bittermints as a joke. That needled away at me as I discovered the rotund pleasures of the Radcliffe Camera and other, less harmonious libraries and, sitting in its upper gallery, got back into the rhythm of my research. Even when profoundly absorbed, lost amidst the generous circles of that sublime space, irritation about Mum’s fussing would jab its way into my head and bring me back to the present. Nothing else undermined my concentration in quite the same way, although the notion of ‘toyboys’, and the absence of feedback on my performance as a don, were sometimes distracting. I felt doubly apprehensive about the trip to Cornwall.
The first concern might be hypothetical but, having failed to mention Tyler to Jenny, I wasn’t about to mention him to anyone else; as for the second, which was all too real, I didn’t know whom to talk to about how I was doing. I’d have asked the historian whose retirement created the vacancy – we’d chatted easily at the interview – but unlike the other Emeritus professors he rarely visited. The Mediaevalist kindly invited me to Sunday lunch, which should have created an opportunity, but his children were too noisy for a proper conversation. That left the Ancient Historian, but why show vulnerability to a blinkered old so and so who’d cheerfully conceded he hadn’t wanted women in College in the first place?
I wondered about asking the Dean, but something stopped me, and I was too proud to make an overture to the Warden, let alone to his wife, after what Mum had said. Instead I waited: eventually somebody would comment on how I was doing, my fitness to accompany Loxton on that dratted retreat. And then, as the College emptied for Christmas and the Faculty failed to call me in, I realised that they would not. I was being left to muddle through again, just like the students.
Only they made me feel I was on the right track. Barnaby invited me to join him and his mates for a pre-Christmas drink in the bar, and we spent a friendly hour chatting over our beers under the blare of Showaddywaddy’s ghastly hit before I left them to it. Another historian – a girl, the only one I’d seriously considered for the Reading Party – used a festive card to tell me how much she’d enjoyed our tutorials and what a difference it made to have a role model; a shame she’d been just that bit too bland.
Now it was Tyler Winston, walking with me one crisp but sunny day after we caught sight of each other on Magdalen Bridge, although it meant him pushing his bicycle for a good twenty minutes when he could have got back in five.
There was some brief chat about what we were doing at Christmas. I explained about the family gathering in Norfolk, which he thought sounded fun; he was flying back to the States, but it would just be him and his parents.
Then he asked about my career; how I’d come to be there. This was my cue for some wooing. I explained that the early part had seemed a natural progression: absorption as an undergraduate; doctorate efficiently done; further research and a bit of teaching. I conceded that there’d been a brief loss of faith when signing off the proofs of my monograph, seeing the areas of weakness and worrying about being discovered a fraud. And it had been extraordinary to find myself at Oxford, when I’d seen my application as a dummy run for other things and never imagined that, as a woman, there was a chance of being appointed; but it was proving wonderful.
I asked about him and he explained that, unlike me, he’d had a gap year – that American urge to travel. Then he too had read History, which he’d enjoyed, but he’d always assumed his path would be law, like his parents, though possibly he would teach rather than practice – he was considering a doctorate. The opportunity to come to Oxford was unexpected – and not something you would turn down – though, like me, he had never thought he would get through all the hoops. To be there when so much was changing, women having arrived at College the same year that he did, was a bonus, but – he said with a laugh – sometimes a little distracting.
That led to a lively conversation about which was worse – being a Rhodes Scholar, required to show ‘moral force of character and instincts to lead’, or being the first female don, about which there was such a welter of expectation. It was oddly intimate: we even teased that we might be taking our responsibilities far too seriously – life was far too short! In fact, the whole thing was full of banter and suggestion, and it gave me a fillip because there was no conceivable need: I could have carried on alone and, if he was being polite, there must have been a quicker way round.
He was the only person I knew with eyes that were different colours: one a blue-grey, the other brown.
Suddenly almost half the vac had gone. I packed my bags again – one for my clothes; another with presents for the family – and headed off to the station in a taxi, feeling as if another era had begun. When had I gone anywhere in a cab?
Arriving home, I was emotionally drained and physically spent. Dad carried my bags up to my old room, Mum brought out the cake she’d made, the dogs were briefly beside themselves with excitement – yapping loudly and bashing their tails against the upholstery – and I settled back into the reassuring shabbiness of the family home to be fussed over by both parents. It was just what was needed.
I was prescribed an afternoon nap and then sat in bed with newly fluffed pillows behind me, behaving like a patient while Dad cleared childhood knickknacks to make space for my mug and chatted inconsequentially about his work at the pharmacy. Later I sat in the kitchen on a chair with a dimpled cushion tied to the spindles, watching Mum prepare supper, listening to village news and her endless stories of family and friends. After we’d eaten I sank into my favourite spot on the sofa, tucked my feet under me, and joined them in a game of Scrabble.
The following day my brothers breezed in within minutes of each other in time to decorate the tree; then my uncle arrived and suddenly the house was its usual chaotic self again, full of habitual banter and noisy one-upmanship – exactly the kind of family life that Tyler had said he didn’t have. The rest of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and then Boxing Day came and went in a fug of family togetherness watching Morecambe and Wise and the like – the highpoint being Angela Rippon kicking her newscaster legs – interspersed with the obligatory drinks with neighbours. The whole house became properly festive, stuffed and glazed like a well-prepared bird: downstairs was heady with the scent of mulled wine – cloves, cinnamon and sliced orange, the peel stewed to pinkness in Dad’s choice of plonk; the upstairs reeked of the bars of Bronnley soap kept by Mum for when we had guests; archways everywhere were bedecked with red-berried holly, my brothers having vied to outdo each other’s ingenuity. Only the tiny conservatory escaped attention and smelt normal; I retreated there with my uncle for long conversations about what we were working on, the views across the salt marshes between us and the North Sea making up for the cold.
After three days of sustained raillery during which my brothers and I revealed almost nothing of substance about our private lives, the boys drove off again – the elder one back to Glaxo’s research labs, the younger to the hospital where he was a senior house officer – shortly followed by my uncle, who was wanted in the newsroom at the paper. Dad and I did a favourite walk with the dogs along the length of the sand dunes at Wells, talking about the years when he was the junior chemist angling for promotion and drawing tenuous parallels with my own sense of being on probation. Mum, under the pretext of clearing old clothes from my cupboard, took me to task for not caring about my appearance when ‘many a girl would have loved to have a complexion like yours’; all it needed, she said, was a little blusher and a bit of lipstick, but I knew that just wasn’t me. The three of
us chatted a bit about what Oxford was like, but I said nothing about my anxieties, still less about moral dilemmas. Rashly I mentioned the attentions of the Dean, but the Reading Party got barely a mention, attractive postgraduates none at all: such things were far too complicated to explain.
I stayed an extra day, knowing it would please them, and gave them the Faculty lecture list for the Hilary term as a parting gift. There was page after page of it, so I pointed out the entry for my contribution: ‘Reforming women 1792–1918: suffragists and suffragettes, from Wollstonecraft to Fawcett and the Pankhursts (Part 1); Dr S. Addleshaw; Th. 11; Examination Schools’. Mum asked if it was about my book and I had to explain that these lectures took the argument a stage further; Dad got that straight away and said he’d have it framed and put in the loo, along with the pictures of our graduation ceremonies.
Perhaps I’d had enough of cosseting and scrutiny. There was also the latest Pink Panther to see with Jenny, and I had to get back to Oxford promptly – the Medievalist and his wife had invited me to their annual jamboree; there’d be lots of hip people.
The movie was fab, and Jenny was impressed with my plans for New Year’s Eve. ‘You deserve a blowout,’ she said, ‘given the pressure you’ve been under. Find a guy you fancy, have a good time, start 1977 the right way: you’ve been ducking the issue for too long.’
I didn’t like the idea that I’d been ‘ducking’, letting the remnants of an old relationship stop me from having a new one. I thought we had different priorities: she put men first and I didn’t. Or perhaps it was just a matter of meeting the right person. Anyway, I determined to enjoy myself.
The Reading Party Page 4
