It felt like the rising panic that he’d alluded to in talking about a short dissertation he’d written back home before he got the hang of things. That afternoon at Carreck Loose, staring at the loops and deletions that had made Tyler laugh so, thinking of Loxton and all the little tests I’d failed, the worry bug got me. Probably caught it from the others: there was always someone going white about Finals or fretting about their grant running out – a febrile mood under the surface, just as Loxton had said. Anyway, briefly I lost my own nerve, wondering if I could pull the thing off – not just the article, but the whole enterprise – and what else I was equipped for if not. Made my stomach juices churn as I speculated about what happened if you failed your probation, and where you went if you lacked the ‘rat-like cunning’ to be a journalist, like my uncle, or the itch to make money, like Jenny’s stockbroker dad. What were women meant to do if we didn’t want to be secretaries? Teach schoolkids? Marry?
Thankfully the wobble didn’t last long. In the end I got up to stoke the fire, poking a split in a log to get a hold, pulling it aside to make space in the glowing charcoal and selecting a new wedge from the basket. The wood was crusted with liverwort, which left olive streaks and a pungent aroma on my hands and jeans. Something about the action and the smells that lingered once I’d returned to my seat restored me to my senses. I put my article aside, picked the bottle-green memoir up again and found a comfortable place in my armchair, watching the tiny flames reflected in the old windowpanes and listening to the spitting as the logs caught and the mild thud as they settled in the grate. The panic went almost as swiftly as it had come, with the light going outside and the sparkle of the fire taking over. After all, a moment’s doubt was nothing in the wider scheme of things. It didn’t matter whether I’d solved the Ivy Williams problem that afternoon; I was much clearer on the timeline and I’d satisfy the Warden in due course. Meanwhile, nothing could beat being in this place with its mix of quiet companionship and rowdy fun, working out what you thought about your subject, your companions – life, even. What greater privilege could there be? The Reading Party was a preposterous institution, really – very hard to justify – but also wonderful. Why had I assumed this kind of thing wasn’t for me?
The historians had decided to cook together – not that I knew that or noticed when Barnaby left. But looking into the kitchen after a trip to the loo, there they were, standing by the worktop amidst the smell of baked potato, swapping stories about their sisters. I offered to help, but Jim said they were doing fine: two historians was enough for the moment – perhaps a hand later with laying the table? It was almost disappointing.
When I returned, they still didn’t need me. They’d progressed to their taste in music – Martin had brought a few albums, but his leanings were more mainstream than Jim’s and he didn’t share Barnaby’s fondness for Lou Reed’s deadpan – and they only wanted to know if we could move to the drawing room afterwards, where they could sit and listen. Banished, I went briefly back to my papers. The fire was fine, though the basket of logs wouldn’t last through supper. It was Eddie who kept feeding them in; he probably had central heating at home.
The others must have been hungry. By the time I remembered to go back to it, the kitchen was full and the only place left was at the end of the table, next to Barnaby.
‘I can’t sit at the head with you, like a Big Cheese,’ I whispered over the patter of water on metal as he drained the vegetables. ‘I haven’t done a thing!’ But Barnaby was adamant, muttering elusively about ‘figurative help’.
After he and Jim had doled out the spuds and the rest of us had chosen our fillings, Barnaby picked up the conversation. He was enjoying the week, he said. It was easy to concentrate and good to get to know people like Jim from the other years, but he still didn’t understand why he was there. Priyam, sitting on my other side, said her parents too had wanted to know what selection meant. I punctured a potato skin raised like a blister and did my best to reassure, wondering if Tyler – only a couple of chairs away – was going to join in, and then asked what they’d felt about the invitation.
Barnaby expanded on what he’d told me before: that most students knew about the Reading Party – it was something of a legend in College – but that he’d had mixed feelings, both chuffed and apprehensive.
‘We were surprised you agreed to host it,’ he said. ‘Dr Loxton’s a bit of a dry old stick.’
‘I could hardly turn it down,’ I said.
Priyam, too, had been bemused to be invited. She hadn’t asked to come, she said, because there were lawyers who were cleverer than she and she hadn’t wanted to be turned down. Besides, she’d had enough of asking for things when she left school: too many years of checking what her City bursary covered and enduring snide references to ‘people from Paki corner shops’ when she did anything extra curricular. Her teachers – and of course her parents, who weren’t even from Pakistan – had drilled in that academic merit was the route to success. But she still felt she was at Oxford on false pretences; was always the Indian from the East End waiting to be found out. Events like the Reading Party were usually for other people.
Barnaby and I were shocked at this, though we’d both, in our own ways, felt second-class citizens at school: he sent over by the army; me bussed in from a rural chemist’s. For a while the three of us talked about racism – not the overt type seen at the Notting Hill riots or when the Sikh teenager from Southall had been killed the previous year, but the insidious sort that people endured day by day. Eventually this led us back to more general questions of privilege and the lack of it; being accepted or not; knowing your worth.
‘As to false pretences, Priyam, that’s nonsense,’ I said, thinking of the Dean disparaging her diligence. ‘You got plaudits from everyone. No one doubts your ability, any more than they do Barnaby’s. Maybe it’s more a question of how cleverness is used? There are so many different ways of being clever, aren’t there, not all of them interesting – especially the male kind. Besides, cleverness isn’t the only thing that counts.’ And I touched on Loxton’s criteria – would the individual benefit and would they enhance the experience for the group – relieved that Tyler was no longer listening in.
‘It’s so nice when people are reassuring!’ she said.
All the same, she looked unconvinced. We talked for a while about what she called the ‘looming wall’ of Finals. It wasn’t so much the danger of being unprepared, though she said she’d twice had a nightmare about starting the summer term knowing she hadn’t begun her revision, with no possibility of catching up. Instead Priyam was worried about insomnia, saying she was prone to bouts of it when she was working hard and her head was fizzing. What would she do if it hit her at the wrong moment?
We shared a few war stories – I talked about my eczema, which still occasionally flared; Barnaby muttered again, this time about the mix of fear and gloom which could lead to a tightening in his chest – and eventually she promised to revisit the College doctor, so she had a remedy to hand.
‘As for you, Barnaby, I didn’t know you got panic attacks,’ I said, reminded of a conversation with my dad about a man who hyperventilated. ‘So many people do.’
Priyam too was solicitous. ‘But you always look as if you could absorb anything, like a cushion,’ she said. She clearly hadn’t seen him scratching.
Barnaby seemed surprised and perhaps a little touched by this, though he brushed it off with a comment about having too many dinners in Hall, saying the worry lines were merely under cover.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ Priyam said, leaning across me to give his stomach a poke, ‘and you know it isn’t. I meant I’d never have thought of you being anxious, or having Fifth Week blues.’
She looked around the table, which was loud with the crossfire of so many conversations. ‘Some people are always having essay crises. You’re like Tyler – you always look calm.’
‘Well, that’s the irony, isn’t it?’ Barnaby replied. ‘Swans paddl
ing and all that – though I don’t suppose he paddles at all.’ He didn’t say anything further and that effectively shut the conversation down, which was a shame – I’d have loved to know how the other students viewed Tyler. It wasn’t until Barnaby had dished up the pudding that I was able to raise the subject again, but then it was to ask whether he’d had any attacks since I’d been teaching him.
He smiled at that and said no, he hadn’t. On the contrary, our tutorials had restored his confidence in having something interesting to contribute. And he picked up on an incident he’d touched on before that involved another tutor, not at the College, whose comprehensive lack of response to his contributions had, he said, made him dry up inside. This was a man who placed his watch on the floor next to a glass of water at the beginning of every tutorial and, on the one occasion when Barnaby had felt they were making progress, had shoed him out on the dot of the hour, even though it meant their discussion was left hanging. Instead of being angry, Barnaby had found it crushing. That was when he began having that ghastly sense of his rib cage seizing up, as if a metal belt were tightening, though thankfully it didn’t last.
‘I’ll remember never to take my watch off!’ I said, leaning into him as if he were a brother in need of moral support. It was completely different from Tyler’s leaning: uncomplicated and affectionate rather than conspiratorial.
‘But that’s just it,’ he said. ‘You never look at the time, though we’ve often run over.’
‘Have we?’ I asked, straightening up and trying to recall. The sessions with Barnaby were always enjoyable – right from that very first tute. He too was fascinated by oral accounts; the way they made history come alive. Possibly that’s what made me think of him for the Reading Party: the support was almost mutual. I didn’t say that, of course; just mentioned an essay of his that had been particularly stimulating.
‘But it’s often such a struggle,’ he said, as if it was obvious what he was referring to.
‘Is it?’ I asked. ‘Which bit, exactly?’
‘Oh, you know. The whole thing.’
A sign of the change in temperature came over coffee. Barnaby had gone to sort out the stereo; suddenly the students’ music was on. It was the new Fleetwood Mac album, Rumours, and it throbbed away at the other end of the hall, infecting the mood as we cleared up, turning it lush and provocative. There was a brief discussion of what we might do: no one was up for anything as demure as board or paper games – they wanted action. For some reason – I forget why – charades was voted down in favour of an unknown game that Hugh said was a Reading Party staple: two strangers, sitting on a train – in this case the sofa – had each to insert a word or phrase into the conversation without the other party identifying it as incongruous. Perhaps charades was too tame, or they wanted novelty. Anyway, railway carriages it was.
It was soon obvious that this could take a cerebral form, if you made the mistake of choosing an erudite expression (Tyler’s ‘habeas corpus’ for instance, but then he had the excuse of going first). Equally, it could become ribald. When Martin, with ‘call a spade a spade’, and I, with ‘cucumber’, ended up talking about digging allotments and whether he’d planted his seeds yet, our audience collapsed into laughter. We were ‘a hit’ and it was wonderful – and of course Tyler learnt the trick immediately.
Some of the students were a revelation. Priyam proved so resilient under questioning that I found myself speculating about grillings at home and what part that might play in making her a good lawyer, while Jim slipped into singsong patter – gliding up and down, rolling his ‘r’s and generally sending up his Welsh roots – in a way that was totally unexpected. Even Mei relaxed her controls, dissolving into such giggles that she slid off her cushion and onto the swirls of the carpet, flapping one arm to stop the teasing and holding her side with the other. When Gloria said to ‘leave the girl alone, you can see she’s about to wee her knickers’, Mei did disappear for a bit, presumably to the loo. I hoped she wasn’t upset – it wasn’t exactly a kind remark. But perhaps Tyler and I shouldn’t both have reproached: that was my job, not his.
Others might say that we were all just ‘letting our hair down’ and that there was no need to read much into it, but I’d got out of the habit of messing around in a group, not having any old friends to hand. I soaked up the affection like a dry sponge, enjoying the inconsequential warmth in the kitchen when we piled our dirty coffee cups in the sink, bumping into each other and laughing as we moved away. There was Jim, relieving Mei of a handful of mugs, giving a quick smile as if they might share a secret, though so far as I knew there wasn’t one; and Martin, curling his head round Gloria’s neck to check her expression as she stood next to him, in the manner of someone allowed to share her space – which apparently he had done the previous year, with Chloe and others, in a house in Jericho near the canal. Even Tyler – who’d occasionally been reserved at the start, as grads sometimes are amongst younger students – seemed remarkably comfortable, chatting to Lyndsey, drying-up cloth in hand. She did one of those quick whirls of hers that set her hair flying and I wondered if she was capable of flirting. Either way, he looked charmed.
Soon the sweet tones of the Eagles and Hotel California drew the students back to the drawing room. I asked Loxton about support for anyone feeling the pressure. He was surprisingly helpful, talking about the ubiquity of anxiety and the different ways in which it was expressed. He filled me in on the counselling service, which I didn’t know about, but it was clear he thought the most important thing we could do, as tutors, was to foster a sense in the students of the value of their contributions, whatever they were, provided they knuckled down and invested the necessary time. It was a more liberal approach than I expected, particularly when he acknowledged the rewards of music, drama and the endless societies, though he still saw these as ‘ancillary pursuits’, not the main focus. Nobody could study productively all the time, he said, so diversion was welcome – even necessary – but academic work remained at the core.
That’s why he had been firm, he continued, about Chloe and Eddie. If you signed up for the Reading Party there was an unspoken contract: in return for the privilege of participation, you played by the rules of the game. They weren’t many, but they were non-negotiable. We had to respond at the first transgression.
He was rattled when I asked if it had to be so black and white. He said it was the principle of the thing: the individual shouldn’t undermine the experience for the group. Time out cleared the head, but the reading hours must be respected. Whether someone was five or fifty minutes late was immaterial – any lateness broke the spell. You had to put down a marker.
This still seemed a little harsh – it had hints of the tutor who had quashed Barnaby. ‘But they were only minutes behind, Dennis,’ I said. And then, thinking of the conversation about housemasters and rebukes, added, ‘Anyway, they got the message.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure,’ he said. ‘In my experience – and remember I too have done my stint as Dean – there are some who always chafe at restriction. Their impatience may or may not infect others. Either way there’s a risk. They may need protecting from themselves and the others may need protecting from them.’
‘Well, Gloria seems to be tiring of Chloe without any help from us,’ I said.
‘Perhaps. Gloria is altogether more conventional, don’t you think?’ And Loxton gave me an enquiring look.
We sat silently for a minute or two. Gloria’s behaviour was straightforward enough, but she had a volatile streak that didn’t seem a natural fit. I tried to put this into words, but they didn’t come out as intended.
Loxton diagnosed the cause immediately, just as Tyler had predicted with his autopsy analogy. ‘Ah, the appeal of a strong woman. But there’s a difference between wanting your own way and being a rebel, is there not?’
He looked at me carefully. ‘If I may venture a personal remark, I suspect you have been known to exhibit a bit of both.’
Tuesday
My novel of the moment was a new feminist classic – a well-thumbed paperback from the States that was circulating like Samizdat literature because it hadn’t yet been published here. Rashly, the next morning I stretched for it immediately. Even that minor disturbance to the soft blur of my bedding was enough: the weightlessness – the luxurious feeling of being suspended, without edges – disappeared, just like that. Gone.
In fact, I didn’t read but allowed myself to doze. For what seemed ages I lay staring at the wallpaper, clocking the way the pattern repeated, although whoever had hung it hadn’t done well with the lining-up. I stared too at the wide boards of the floor with their uneven edges falling into dark cracks; they probably hadn’t been waxed for years but someone had rubbed them long ago. I heard, but didn’t really listen to, the sounds in the house – the lifting of a door latch, the padding of feet – and wondered if the early occupants of my attic had ever had the luxury of listening to others rising before them, aside from when they were ill.
As the dozing trickled into wakefulness, I began mapping out the day and what might realistically be achieved. There was also the question of the desk. Idly, I pondered my options. So much depended on whether the students started moving too. After days of resisting the gravitational pull towards Tyler, it was tempting to give in to it, but who knew where he would be …
That notion was the killer, banishing that delicious lull. Within seconds I felt self-conscious, as if the mere thought of him was taboo. Worse still was the fear that I’d been found out: even tracing back to the beginning, I wasn’t sure what Gloria could have picked up, but she’d found something to dislike. What was it?
The Reading Party Page 13
