Why hadn’t I said something like that? ‘You mean the washerwoman?’ I asked. ‘But she’s meant to be ugly …’
‘Sure thing,’ he said.
Maybe the Dean was right. Too suave.
The three of us moved on past the open doors, through the corridor and … Wow, what a noise!
In the kitchen everyone was greeting each another, crowding round the Rayburn, pulling chairs back from a long oblong table, making squeaking noises on the olive lino, banging cupboard doors in search of the makings of tea, opening and closing drawers to find the teaspoons, talking hard. Loxton was a little terse with me, I suppose because he was smarting, and it turned out there’d been a spare key all along, not that he’d bothered to tell anyone – but our exchange was drowned out. Tyler and Jim began dragging the little table from the conservatory to fit lengthways across the end of the main one, so we had enough places, and Hugh was calling, ‘Clear the way!’ as he deposited extra chairs from the dining room. Within seconds, all fourteen of us could have sat at that PVC tablecloth, with its cheerful pink and orange daisies, had we chosen to do so. The excitement was palpable: an air of being demob happy in a different place with different people, waiting to be let loose; a sense of camaraderie and adventure, of being in it together, though we didn’t yet know what that ‘it’ was; almost of being on holiday.
If Loxton was concerned about this moment – when he had to recap on the rules of engagement – he didn’t let it show, though he was peevish about Martin being late, as if that was somehow my doing.
He passed the buck to me. ‘Dr Addleshaw,’ he said, ‘will remind you where you are sleeping. I suggest you sort yourselves out upstairs and put on some extra layers. We’ll reconvene in ten minutes for a quick walk before the light goes, whether or not Martin has deigned to join us, so you can get your bearings. After that we’ll light one or two fires and decide who’s sitting where, ready for a prompt start in the morning.’
So I whizzed through while Loxton looked on. If there’d been time to think, I wouldn’t have done it; guys like Tyler would remember where they were going – no need to treat them like children. Besides, the Finalists clearly thought the allocation indicative only. Rupert, in the van, had engineered a switch with the courteous Hugh; there would be other such manoeuvres. And why not? Who cared?
Loxton and I stayed put in the kitchen, trying to maintain a conversation, as the students came and went. They were still essentially children, he opined, capable of endearing moments of abandon when collective enthusiasm took over – one saw it every year around Freshers’ Week. Really? But surely it felt different, arriving this time? He said it was too early to tell, but perhaps there was a frisson that had not been there before – and he waved in the direction of the rest of the house and the sound of joshing, bags being shunted across the floor and feet running up and down wooden stairs. We listened as the noises drifted in from the hall and then started again from above, footsteps pattering over our heads in the extension and then disappearing back where they’d come from; it was a kind of detective work, guessing what was going on.
It was then that Loxton said he had a piece of social history for me and, leading me into the corridor, opened the pair of doors opposite the boot room. I’d taken them to be cupboards, but one door revealed a small loo, still with its sixties wallpaper and its pale yellow porcelain, and the other a narrow set of stairs – the servants’ access. The sight made me think of holidays with my grandparents in the joined-together cottages they occupied as tenant farmers: routinely my brothers and I had been shooed outside to stop us clattering up one boxed-in run of stairs and down the other.
Now I took in the curl of the dry wooden treads, registering the mustiness of the air caught in the funnel – a complete contrast to the main staircase, so large and polished that it was like standing in a public building – and listening to the muffled sounds from above. Loxton followed me up and we had a quick reconnoitre of the annexe – the whole upper floor of the extension – which he said had been the housekeeper’s domain in the days of having staff. Its exclusion from the arrangements surprised me: it would be warm enough, above the Rayburn – rather nice, in fact, like a little bachelor flat; surely Loxton would have found it cosy? He must believe being part of the collective required him to sleep in the main body of the house with everyone else, and that you might as well not join the party if you were going to opt for the annexe. Strange, really, given how private he was.
By the time we re-emerged in the kitchen, the babble elsewhere had subsided and the students had begun drifting down again. I carried my case quickly up to my bit of the attic – at the front of the house, with gabled windows overlooking the turn of the drive in one direction and the shrubby area in the other, the sea clearly visible beyond – and took the opportunity to check out the floor.
The girls were on the landing. Gloria, who’d won a room to herself, was protesting at Chloe’s plan to migrate to it; Priyam, who was meant to be sharing with Chloe across the corridor, sounded as if she would be glad to lose her. Would I be expected to arbitrate?
I busied myself casing the rest of the joint. Put my head round the door to Eddie and Jim, but they’d abandoned their cramped quarters. Found Martin’s tiny cubbyhole at the end of the corridor: door open, he’d see all the comings and goings. Discovered the bathrooms were doubly ensuite, with no access from the landing – typical of the Dean not to explain things properly.
There was no time to check whether everyone was okay on the first floor, let alone to sneak a look at their rooms – the students were gathering noisily for Loxton’s quick constitutional, as he was rumoured to call his shorter walks. By the time I’d got downstairs and put my boots on, the last of them was going through the gate in the hedge and into the longer grass of the field beyond. Once again, he’d contrived to put me at a disadvantage: the front runners were nearing the end of the next field before I caught up the rear. Still, each group seemed oblivious to those behind – absorbed in conversation, navigating the slope of the pastureland and taking in the views. Maybe nobody noticed.
It was the most glorious setting. In one direction you could see beyond our spit to the coastline further east, with its succession of promontories merging in the distance into a dark and crumpled ribbon; in the other was our little beach and, further round, the long curve of the far bay. There the green pasture slid down into patches of gorse, bracken and bramble, whose deep greens and reddy browns merged imperceptibly into the olive of whatever clung to the top of the rocks. Between the two vistas stretched the long expanse of the sea, greener and more lustrous than the beige-grey of the sand, frothing and turning relentlessly as we watched, even at a distance reeking of seaweed.
I joined Rupert and Mei as they mounted a wooden style to cross one of those very dry-stone walls that Jim had talked about, its crevices sprouting ivy and brighter, fuller, glossy greens. Instead of following Mei down, Rupert clambered up to stand in the wind on a loose slither of slate.
He pointed at a distant patch of white and grey, almost indistinguishable from the heavy cloud hanging over the same promontory. ‘That must be Mevagissey. We should have brought a map,’ he shouted. ‘Do you know where there’s a map, Dr Addleshaw?’
Why would I? Loxton was the one who would know. I wondered whether they’d address me formally all week and if Tyler would do the same.
Rupert didn’t wait for an answer. ‘What we need is a map that shows the contours – and Martin to tell us how those rockscapes were formed.’ He picked his way down and the three of us trudged on together, sharing our ignorance of geology.
We didn’t go far. Loxton was concerned that we should get back while it was still light – at that time of year, he reminded us, it would be dark by six, and very cold. Too true: by the time we regained our long field, the square box of the house, the low bulk of the nearer buildings at the rear and the clump of pines beyond were all beginning to merge into the gloom and becoming indistinct; only the
white cottages and the little chapel still stood out clearly. In the dusk, the gleam of the conservatory lights was like a beacon – with a dark blob, presumably Martin waiting to be let in. Gloria was right: he was indeed a turkey.
As we looked, she sped off ahead, running towards the back entrance and reappearing in the glow a few minutes later as a second silhouette, just distinguishable as a separate entity before the blobs merged – she may have been standing between us and him, or giving him a hug: it was hard to tell. By the time we all filed through the front door and jostled our way through to the kitchen, she was standing next to Martin in the archway leading to the conservatory, laughing at something he’d said about all the hellos, watching the scene. It might have been their house, with us come to visit, they looked so at home.
Loxton had volunteered to cook that evening, on the grounds that he was familiar with the place, while the rest of us got ready for the first proper day. He co-opted Eddie as his helper.
Knowing the ropes, he explained, wasn’t about knowing the kitchen and its equipment but setting culinary expectations at the right level and ensuring that the opening evening was a success. I was relieved to be out of it: cooking the meal would have been a test too many. Besides, the Dean had told me that the inaugural meal followed a set pattern: Loxton cooked with one of the First Years and together they provided a nursery staple. So it wasn’t so much that Loxton was letting me off the hook; more that he wanted to deliver a party piece.
The rest of us, meanwhile, wandered the ground floor to choose where to work.
Carreck Loose was a stolid building, well proportioned but with little by way of graceful decoration, and it had a masculine feel about it despite being an old family home. To the right as you came in the front door, facing south and east, where it looked towards the chapel, was what Loxton referred to as the ‘morning room’: small, with a couple of pieces of campaign furniture and a two-person sofa in vivid orange stripes – another of those sixties touches, now a little tired. That led discreetly to a study, an interconnecting space with no access from the hall; and beyond that, on the north-east corner, to a ‘library’, which had one of those tables with tooled leather, and buttoned chairs of the kind Rupert had described, except that these were in an advanced state of disrepair. To the left of the hall was a spacious drawing room facing south and west, with traditional chintz on the window seats and a massive suite in the same tatty state, awkwardly arranged to allow for a small grand piano, and beyond it the dining room, with window seats looking west and north, where a lot of empty space surrounded a once-glorious table that was clearly capable of seating still more people if the extra leaf were put in place.
Hugh said they mostly ignored the main entrance, using the back door and arriving via the corridor from the extension, where the turn of the stairs above cut off the light. That seemed to me symptomatic of what was so appealing – having the legacy of a rough kind of grandeur, without being constrained by it. For there was space for everyone, and more, but this great lump of a house wasn’t the least forbidding. Nothing was new – and equally, nothing was properly antique. There were almost no ornaments and those few were clearly nothing special. Even the piano looked unprepossessing: no lacquerlike sheen here, but a lid soiled by watermarks and piled with sheet music and colour supplements that hid none of the damage. It was a house that had been buffeted by years of use and went on standing no matter what storms were flung at it, inside as well as out.
Some people chose to park their reading matter in the library. Perhaps it was simply that they were used to working in such spaces and, by force of habit, selected the environment that most nearly replicated it; maybe Hugh had sat there happily on his previous trip. In any event, there he was with Lyndsey, confidently clearing space for their own piles on the central table. As I walked through, Tyler came in and asked to join them – only a modest amount of reading, I noted – and then Loxton arrived with a hardback, notebook and pencil. So that wasn’t for me; one option conveniently removed.
The morning room was less popular, having fewer suitable surfaces, but it had a large heater. Gloria and Chloe were there – Gloria draping the kind of cardigan coat that Jenny would have worn over the end of the old roll-top she’d angled for, Chloe bagging a campaign table and chair with her poncho, poking around in search of an ashtray. They seemed wedded to being together – who was protecting whom?
Most surprising of all was that somebody – Jim, I suspected – had earmarked the little study, presumably to work in solitude.
The occupants of the other side of the hall were equally spread out. Priyam, Rupert and Martin were preparing to sit at the big dining table, but the logic of that particular trio wasn’t obvious. I’d half expected Priyam to be with Mei; as for Rupert and Martin, who didn’t seem to like one another much, why park themselves together? Yet there the three of them were, grouped at the end nearest the hall, with a spectacular view across the garden and towards the sea.
In the drawing room Eddie had chosen the sofa and pulled up a footstool; Mei had placed her books neatly on an occasional table between the windows – odd, really, to have your back to the others and no view, but maybe she planned to avoid distraction; and Barnaby had pulled an armchair up to a games table – given the general air of tattiness, a surprisingly lovely piece of Georgian furniture with an inlaid chessboard. Others were gathering here to watch the lighting of the first fire, savouring the whiff of burning newsprint, waiting for the kindling to crackle.
As for me, I collected my briefcase and chose the dining room, opting impulsively to settle for a while amongst the fading waxed peonies of the window seat. Once my legs were braced – shoes off, feet against one of the cushions – I could sit comfortably under a rug with my knees drawn in and the Edwardian memoir on my thighs, the list of students as a marker. There I stayed, happily absorbed in my reading, barely noticing the cold and the condensation and the smell of damp cotton; ignoring the sounds of the students exploring talking and laughing; stopping to gaze vacantly into the blackness of the garden while pondering a thought; looking up and chatting briefly when anyone came to the door. It reminded me of childhood days sat perched in an alcove during that long-gone era when there was a real prospect of finishing a novel at a single sitting. How quickly you could slip back into that space where the world on the page took over from the world around you and everything stilled.
Supper, when it came, was a genial affair, although it was hard not to feel slightly on the fringe; Loxton knew the form and the students knew each other, whereas I was on the outside.
We ate in the kitchen – it seemed the Reading Party had all its meals there, bar the final night. You could see why: it was warm, with the Rayburn in the corner; squeezing in made it cosy; plus you could bask in the smell of sausages and Bisto gravy. Yet there was no rowdiness – we were too uncertain for that and we were only drinking cider – only some nice moments of spontaneity.
One came when Eddie planted two great baking tins of toad-in-the-hole in front of Loxton’s place at the centre of the table, with a flourish and a joke about being only the ‘sous chef ’: there was applause and friendly banter about who liked the crunchy corners and who preferred the moist bit in the middle – Tyler asked for the latter, saying he liked it ‘succulent’. That prompted what I suspected would be one of many erudite, but not entirely serious, discussions of language, some of which must have been beyond him. Why was it ‘toad-in-the-hole’? Why a toad? Was the hole literal – the bubble of Yorkshire pud; or figurative – a toad in a spot? And if figurative, what kind of spot was he in and why? Martin proved the most inventive, holding the room with a riff about Rat, Badger and Mole grappling with Toad, who of course was Martin himself, and all the while Loxton looked on, like the head of a family enjoying the young ones’ amusement. I began to see the sense in having a first night like this, with a menu chosen for its potential to break the ice; could even see why Loxton should be dishing it all up from the middle of the gr
oup. Perhaps the Dean, who’d been so spiky, hadn’t liked sharing the limelight.
The other notable moment came towards the end of the meal, when the scent of cloves and vanilla took over – we had baked apple with Birds Eye custard – and the table was a mess of scraped pudding bowls pushed to the side, rings of yellow where the blue-and-cream jugs had dripped, and detritus from the main course such as a forgotten serving spoon caked with batter. Very comfortable. Gloria, who’d been leaning over to chat, suddenly pulled back to listen to Tyler and interrupted with, ‘Is that all?’ before topping his story with one of her own. That sort of thing was normal at home, and certainly in the house Andy and I had shared in York, but rare at High Table – and I’d missed it. It was a good way to end the meal, with the students cracking up and Loxton sharing the joke, smiling as he picked up his pipe and found the little sachet of tobacco that he always carried with him, acting the paterfamilias as if he’d had years of experience. I chuckled too – how could I not?
By the time the laughter subsided, several people were carrying the dirty plates away. There was no dishwasher – not that we were expecting any mod cons – and more than enough of us were trying to help, given the small area for circulation. But actually it was fun standing with crockery in one hand and cutlery in the other, waiting for space to clear around the kitchen sink, joking about the boys suddenly finding they had other things to do. It would have been too much to impose a washing-up rota, though I half expected Loxton to produce a schedule. Or perhaps that was another job he planned to spring on me: taking the men to task. The Dean had warned it would be like him to do so.
Instead, Loxton put his mark on the evening in another way, by assuming the party would continue the tradition of playing board games after supper – chess, Scrabble, backgammon and the like – while he listened to his organ music and smoked his pipe, just as the Dean had predicted. So that’s what we did: we played games amidst a reedy booming from an ancient stereo. We all moved to the drawing room, pulling the two folding card tables from their place beside the big cabinet from which the various boards emerged; clearing the long, low footstool between the armchairs; hijacking the little inlaid table, which Barnaby had earmarked for his own, so we could use it too. Looking up once we were underway, distracted by the sudden quiet and Loxton rising to turn the album and tend to the fire, it was easy to imagine the Reading Party of old – rather Spartan, rather uncommunicative – losing itself of an evening through serious concentration on a set of squares. With women in the mix the dynamic was surely different. There was chat between the groups, teasing and quipping – almost a flirtation – but any idea of doing this repeatedly, as some kind of week-long championship, was scotched by talk of all the other amusements that might make better use of a large house. Only a few seemed to be taking the competition seriously – Chloe triumphant when Martin was gammoned; Hugh delightfully taken aback, but chivalrous, when his studious game with Mei came abruptly to an end in his own checkmate. Cue jokes from Tyler about having a female Bobby Fisher in our midst, which amused me at least.
The Reading Party Page 8
