Rupert grinned, running his fingers through his hair as if determined to enjoy the pleasure while it lasted; already it receded gently on either side of his forehead – he’d look like my father in no time. ‘Standards, man! You and Lyndsey may not have any, but Mei and I are fastidious.’
He called across the table to Mei and asked if hers was the dainty washbag in their bathroom, so orderly inside. A couple of people stopped talking; Mei looked taken aback.
‘Have you been peeking into other people’s belongings, Rupert?’ I asked, wondering if I’d have to take this up with him and still distracted by the closeness of the chairs. ‘That’s not fair. Besides, you’re meant to be using the loo across the corridor.’
‘Oh, but that’s such a drag! Anyway, why ever not? The bag’s sitting there; she hasn’t taken it away. Very revealing – very chaste. Lyndsey’s was equally disappointing – hardly a washbag at all: no unguents, none of those little pots of coloured stuff that Gloria has, whereas Tyler’s has things I’ve never seen before, which must come from the US. Perhaps someone sends them over.’
It was nonchalant showing off – like the speedboat we’d seen on our walk, flashing across the bay without regard for the wake – as well as a gross invasion of privacy. And he didn’t let up: ‘Is it your girl, Tyler, or does your mommy do parcels from home? Hey, have some of my sprouts: they’re crossed at the bottom – that’s how we do them here.’
Rupert, too, was insufferable. His parents were probably no grander than mine, but you’d never know it. At least Eddie was properly posh.
Tyler ignored both question and jibe, and carried on teasing about Rupert’s habits. Their room faced two ways: over the garden and over the courtyard. Who did I think had the bed with the best view? Rupert, of course, on the grounds that Tyler, having sacrificed a place at the front of the house for the sake of gallantry, clearly wasn’t fussed. He was a demanding roommate and you had to fight your corner: Tyler was becoming messier by the minute, in retaliation. He was quite funny about it.
By this time Gloria was passing plates again and Rupert interrupted afresh to explain what we were eating. I forget exactly what it was meant to be – he had a complicated French name for a layering of potato and cheese, vaguely reminiscent of a side dish served on High Table, which Martin called ‘veggie hot pot to you and me’. It seemed to have shrivelled in the cooking, which was oddly comforting.
Tyler too looked as if he was, again, trying not to smile. We tackled the crunch on the top – more of the Red Leicester, burnt bitter and almost black – and he and I began swapping notes on what we’d brought to work on. He was halfway through a book on systems of justice by a fellow American, which he said was a good bridge between political philosophy and what he’d do later – law in some guise. He was interesting about it; made it not sound dry. I talked about my article and Ivy Williams’s battles with what seemed, with hindsight, the ludicrously retrograde legal profession of the time, about which he asked some good questions. He would have been in Loxton’s category of ‘a pleasure to teach’ – anyone my age would have had to work hard to stay ahead of him – but it wasn’t easy to have a proper conversation. First there was too much crossfire; then noisy applause as Gloria made a show of serving her pudding. After that, it would have been too obvious to continue; our end of the table moved into discussion of the relative merits of pastry and crumble and the moment was gone.
There was outcry when someone asked who was playing whom at chess. Whoever it was – Hugh, probably – was quickly shouted down. Board games were too ‘tame’ – more exciting diversion was called for.
Ideas were batted around with an increasing undertow of double entendre. Martin, who had lots of layers on under his fisherman’s smock, suggested strip poker; Chloe, who wore fewer, launched volubly into the trap. There was a loud argument about the objectification of women, which quickly embraced both the provision of condoms in the College loos (in the men’s only) and the outrage of Miss World in the Royal Albert Hall (hosted, to compound the offence, by old crooners like Sacha Distel and Andy Williams). Martin continued with a maddening stance that was clearly not serious; Chloe, full of Spare Rib-style fury, tried to enlist me – and then, just as swiftly, refused to engage further. I was two-faced, she said, qualified support a betrayal. Even to discuss the matter with him was to accept his terms of reference, you shouldn’t give in to sexism, and so on.
It was a relief she didn’t move onto the absence of female historians, on which she’d already taken me to task. She’d accused me of being a ‘faint-hearted feminist’, like the journalist who’d coined the phrase. No need to tell her I read Jill Tweedie religiously – Chloe already had it in for me. And now, likewise, best to let the matter rest.
Loxton may have thought things were getting out of hand, but he didn’t say so. Somehow he contrived matters so that instead of drifting off to play blind man’s buff and grope at our companions, as Martin had suggested, we stayed in the warmth of the kitchen and turned to paper games. Possibly the unexpected appearance of a couple of bottles of claret did the trick. I think Tyler had a hand in that – he certainly helped open the crate. Whatever the case, the rebellion fizzled out. And maybe staying put was the right thing to do; if we’d decamped so early in the proceedings, the spell might break just when it was beginning to take effect.
It was Barnaby, not Loxton, who suggested the dictionary game. He said he used to play it with his cousins in the holidays, which was revealing – I’d assumed he went home to his parents, who were posted abroad. Anyway, Jim said there was a big Cassell’s in the study but someone should clarify the rules, and Hugh, ever decent, ‘reminded everyone’ about identifying the one correct definition amidst the fake ones. We were all set.
I, too, had played as a child, but playing with strangers is much more revealing. You don’t know who will be good at lying or dissimulation – or, for that matter, who can ape the language of a lexicographer. I expected Hugh to be good at it, classicists being better versed than most in declensions and the like – and he was, but his definitions were predictable. Martin was better, because his were both plausible and slightly risqué. Lyndsey was better still, conjuring obscure meanings that were both convincing and haphazardly preposterous, but she was no good at reading them out, having nothing of the performer about her. Gloria, by contrast, was a brilliant mimic. You might have to wait a minute or two, as she wouldn’t say anything until she’d memorised the words, but then she’d deliver as if at an audition, adopting all manner of regional accents – Cockney, Yorkshire, Somerset: she knew them all – for comic effect. And she did all of this deadpan, however much the rest of us cracked up, until she relaxed out of the part. She was so good, it was almost worrying – if she took it into her head to deceive us, we would all be ‘had’.
After that it was hard to know how to carry on. The group by the conservatory switched to consequences. Barnaby started fiddling with one of the candles, letting loose a pool of hot wax that drifted dangerously across the table. Loxton took the opportunity to collar someone to help with the washing-up. Meanwhile our end of the table split into separate conversations, and Tyler and I could talk more comfortably, chairs turned inwards, arms draped over their backs.
He said he found these word games very English, though what he considered ‘foreign’ – our use of language or our sense of humour – I wasn’t sure. He clearly loved the accents and it was that – me exaggerating my Norfolk burr – that led us to the more personal. It turned out he was brought up in San Francisco, though his parents were often elsewhere on business, so they were utterly different from mine. He said he nearly didn’t take up the scholarship, not because it was irksome – and there was another smile there – but because it meant postponing his legal training until he was twenty-five. In fact, he was glad that he had. He could see more of Europe, which he’d largely missed in his gap year, and reassess the favoured track of Harvard, Oxford, back to Harvard for law school and then on to one of
the big East Coast firms. He still thought he might reject family tradition – do the doctorate he’d mentioned here or in the States and then look for a teaching post. He had a small window – diminishing by the day – in which to decide.
There was a pause while he fiddled with a knobble of the burnt cheese, spinning it round with his fingertips. Then he reverted to our conversation in the Christmas vac, probing about my opting for academia. So I told him how, at the beginning of my third year when the ‘milk round’ started and we were being wooed by potential employers, I’d been unable to imagine anything other than doing a doctorate. Although it might seem an odd thing for a tutor to confide, I talked about the men in my family being into science and the assumption that women were in support roles; that apart from my uncle, who as a journalist was the odd one out, no one had a feel for the humanities; how encouraging he’d always been about my successes – getting the bursary for school, doing so well in my degree, being offered another full grant, seeing my book in print. I even mentioned how kindly my uncle had listened when I phoned after the letters from Oxford arrived. I’d been astonished – and terrified – at the notion that you were allowed to climb the ranks until you were nearly seventy, and he’d reassured me about living up to it all. All that just spilled out, as if no-go areas didn’t exist.
Tyler said he admired my determination to do my own thing; he was in danger of having decisions taken for him. He even said something about radicalism, I suppose based on the bits of oral history in my monograph, or on what I’d said in those lectures. I thought that was overdoing it – people like Studs Terkel, a hero of mine whom he claimed to have read, had started long before me – but I was flattered. It was disconcerting to enjoy talking so much; he might be clever and handsome, but he was a student, after all, and I was not.
Still we carried on, discussing the difference between being temperamentally radical (which I liked to think I was – though people are always confusing feminism with radicalism) and finding that timing had landed you in the vanguard (which had definitely happened to me). He said he had his own internal debate. He felt he might be progressive as a thinker in academia; he wasn’t sure you could do the same as a practitioner in one of those big law firms, and he might not like a smaller one – that was why the decision was difficult. I said I didn’t know him – or them – well enough to comment, which was probably a good thing, considering how long we’d been talking. Gloria had her head lowered to her neighbour and was whispering again. She’d been watching. What had she heard?
*
Tyler’s reference to radicalism came back into my mind later on, climbing my way carefully up the servants’ stairs to the safety of my little attic, and merged with ideas about Loxton and his preference for the status quo.
He was a bit like those bourgeois politicians of the 1840s, making little accommodations with the masses in the attempt to stave off revolution. That night, with his wine and his willingness to play a different game, he’d bought the students off successfully, without them even registering. But in future he might not adjust fast enough and then they could rise up against him – as I’d tried to do with my teachers in ’68, organising a protest about a rule we found offensive from the safety of the school assembly hall.
If that were to happen at Carreck Loose, with Loxton and the students at loggerheads, would I be expected to mediate? And if not, on which side of the barricades should I be?
Monday
You couldn’t hear the sea from my bedroom – well, you couldn’t exactly hear it from any part of the house; it was just that bit too far away and of course we had the windows shut because of the cold – but the air was different.
Oxford had been dank when we left – musty, like an old floorcloth abandoned in a cellar. Sometimes, waking in College, I would walk the few clammy steps to my window seat and open the curtains, just to watch the early morning in the front quad. The mist often seemed to collect there as if poured from above, and the lights above the staircase entrances would look strangely spectral, like drops of brightness seeping into dirty water. The damp oozed everywhere and hung there; you were steeped in it.
Whereas Carreck Loose was absolutely icy. It made you think about the drudgery required of the servants when the harbourmaster had the house built: carting wood and coal about and laying fires in the early morning, carrying jugs of hot water up the stairs to fill the washbowls. But at least the cold was a clean, dry cold; brisk, bracing, almost stinging – you could do battle with it.
On went the rusty bar heater. I got back into bed and listened to the sporadic crackle as the filaments gradually turned the colour of smoked salmon and the room lost its edge. Would it have been better under a duvet, like that huge thing of the Dean’s? Possibly, but I liked the weight of the three blankets – tightly woven, coarse and almost sticky, as if the natural oils of the wool had yet to be washed out – and the quilt. Nothing had come adrift; whoever made the beds before we arrived knew how to do a ‘hospital corner’ and it was still intact.
As the scout on my staircase told the story, when the first female students arrived in College, he and his colleagues – still mostly male – had said they should drop this part of their duties. Their logic? That the women knew how to make beds and would naturally make their own, and if the scouts weren’t going to do it for them. then why do it for the men? According to him there was quite a tussle: the Student Liaison Committee got involved and there were discussions about whether the charges on battels, for board at the College, should drop to reflect the change in service. He didn’t see anything offensive – on the contrary, I think he was proud of taking a stance. And in a way it was progressive: why should the students have such things done for them? Why should anyone? He was absolutely right on that score. It was the assumption that the girls would, even should, know how to make a bed that got me. Of course they should, but why did it take their arrival to say the same about boys?
None of my colleagues had mentioned the saga: they probably didn’t dare. But someone like Tyler would have seen and enjoyed the humour in the situation: he’d have recognised a tradition that had passed its day.
Mum must have shown me how to make a bed – no one else changed the sheets when we were small. Would she have told me the tricks from her nursing days or would I have picked them up from seeing it done so many times? Either way, to her credit – for she was no feminist and hated me banging on about these things – on that point too my brothers got no special treatment. But perhaps we weren’t typical. It was hard to imagine Gloria being taught at home – they’d have had a housekeeper in England, just like Carreck Loose until a few years back, and then staff in Peru and all those other places they passed through; at best, she’d have picked it up at boarding school.
The attics included some extraordinary sleeping contraptions, worthy of proper scrutiny. Mine had a traditional metal frame, but not brass. The black ironwork at the head and the feet was dull, rusty and flaking; it was a bit like lying between a pair of old gates. I thought of all the maids, endlessly airing the mattresses or tucking in the sheets, whose workaday hands had banged into the hard metal, scraping their knuckles and ripping their cuticles, year in and year out. Only a man could have designed a detail so unkind. All it needed was a curved edge.
Someone should write a social history of the bed.
Martin was on the landing, by the door to the stairs, when I surfaced.
‘Your things have gone,’ I said. ‘Have you been ousted?’ His washbag, with its whiff of Old Spice, had disappeared.
‘No one ousts me,’ he said. ‘I’ve defected to the men’s side, to keep the peace between Eddie and Jim. Anyway, Gloria takes an age – likes to bask. Blokes with beards are swift.’
As if on cue, Eddie crossed the floor in the bedroom beyond, miming horror at being caught with only a towel round his middle like an actor playing someone camp. He was a bit long in the body, the area of the abdominals almost concave. Not one to pass muster with Jenny, so
cks or no socks!
Martin turned back from the spectacle, unmoved. ‘I’m planning an egg. Dr Loxton doesn’t seem to do eggs, but I’m an egg man myself. Must be all those chickens at home.’
We clattered down our little cavity, our hands gathering dust from the walls and the stair treads – me again pitying the poor maids, who’d warranted no handrail – and stepped out onto the landing.
‘Ah, Tyler. I’m sure you’re an egg-eater. Sunny side up?’ Tyler nodded – he looked as if he’d only just dressed: the eyes childlike; the soft hair rumpled; his chin slightly raw from shaving – and gave again that almost hidden smile.
‘Whereas Rupert here,’ and Martin clapped him rather too forcefully on the back, ‘claims to prefer thin toast and that very fine marmalade. Isn’t that so, Rupe?’
Rupert said something about having had enough of fatty cooked breakfasts. The four of us carried on down the main stairs, discussing the pros and cons of ‘having the works’.
In the kitchen, Jim was cracking a couple of eggs into a cast-iron dish that was warming on the stove. ‘Want to add any?’
It was amusing to watch. Martin and Jim were clearly used to sorting themselves out, whereas Rupert hung about, leaning against one bit of furniture and then another, as if waiting for things to happen – probably for food to appear.
Tyler was handing out tumblers he’d part-filled from a carton of fruit juice. He was considerate, like Hugh; you couldn’t fault him on that. It was almost annoying. I wanted him to loosen up, to stop being so polite.
‘Orange, Sarah?’ he asked, and seeing Rupert look up, added, ‘Hey, we’re allowed to call you that, aren’t we?’ And he carried on pouring and handing round.
The Reading Party Page 11
