The Reading Party

by Fenella Gentleman

  Gloria looked at me, her face expressionless, her voice flat, much as I supposed she might have looked at the matron at school. ‘It’s the whisky: it disagrees with her.’ She bent down to pick up a tangle of garnet lace and chucked it towards the laundry bag, talking into the floor as she went. ‘Maybe Rupert shouldn’t have got that second round, but she could have said no.’

  She straightened up, turning towards her friend, still brusque, unsympathetic. ‘It’s boring, Chloe. We were having fun.’

  Embarrassed, I asked if there was anything else they needed. Gloria’s ‘No thanks’ was almost automatic; Chloe barely turned her head. They were back on some habitual track of their own and I was the hapless neighbour, unwittingly intruding. Pulling the door to I heard the metal bedsprings crunch and then Gloria saying, ‘I don’t want to sit there. You wear me out.’

  Back in the kitchen, Tyler had disappeared. I should not have hoped otherwise.

  There was a brief discussion amongst the remaining students about whether anything needed to be done, but it seemed Chloe had a reputation for excess and the students were just as interested in whether a storm was brewing outside. No one mentioned the tots of whisky and Rupert wasn’t there to apologise; instead they spoke dispassionately of Chloe’s escapades, as if it wasn’t that cool to get drunk, and poked fun at Eddie for his theatrics on retreating to bed. There was none of that banding together to protect people’s privacy that I would have expected; more a need to be blasé, to take it in your stride. Had we been like that at York, when people got plastered? Impossible to remember.

  When they’d drifted off and the two of us were left alone, Loxton took me to task – first for my comment about ‘taking it to the max’, which I suppose was fair enough, and then for allowing the second round of whisky to be ordered, which I thought completely unjustified, given that he’d been there too. Then he switched tack to minor ailments triggering major ones, which I knew to be rare; Dad was always saying how robust the body is. We had a polite little scrap about the line between sensible precaution and hypochondria – I’m not sure he knew how to have a proper row, least of all with a woman; he was all taut expression and icy understatement – until he conceded that he might be overreacting, which I suppose was decent of him.

  In the circumstances he was remarkably forgiving of Chloe, despite the indelicacy of anyone being sick. Where I was annoyed that a woman should let the side down, he saw student experimentation applied to the smaller vessel. It was akin to the matter of the bike ride, he suggested, sounding parental again – there were always students who needed to defy. If you’d lived with them as long as he had – and so far he saw no reason to think the women were any different from the men – there was no point being disappointed or even surprised; it was what you came to expect. But it was unfortunate that it had happened in front of other people. He was minded to apologise to the publican on behalf of the College. Meanwhile, women’s bodies being what they were, we should be careful. If I had any concerns about Chloe, he was happy to call the doctor – the number was right there, on the pinboard.

  I thought an apology excessive, even from him. It was a pub after all – people got drunk all the time. As for getting medical help, his concern seemed to me misdirected. If you were going to worry about anything, surely it should be the emotional dynamics – the mixture of mutual dependence and tension between Chloe and Gloria; the way Rupert had egged the drinking on; Martin’s mix of passivity and aggression; Eddie’s uncertain contribution. Hadn’t the Dean mentioned something about Chloe, north London intellectuals and a broken home? But after Loxton had heard me out, he said he preferred not to speculate – it was none of our business – and again he closed the subject down.

  That was my cue to say goodnight. There was no ratting about the smoking, as I couldn’t see the point, and by the time I got back to my room, thoughts of Gloria’s exasperation had given way to my own. Besides, you couldn’t ignore the wind. The sound of it in the chimney was like the sound of a kettle as it starts to whistle, except that the screech didn’t mount and there was no relief. It was relentless; it drowned everything out.

  I stood by the side window, looking out to see how bad it was, reflecting. Opportunities to talk, unobserved, were so rare. Tyler was probably standing in the same way in his own room, watching the same palms do their demented bending and shaking in the moonlight, listening to the same wind thrash about outside with its low rumbles, its sudden bursts and its eerie moments of silence, as if it were trapped in a vast cosmic flue of its own. A shame such moments could not be shared.

  Wednesday

  A house like Carreck Loose was rarely completely silent, even after a storm. There was a constant backdrop of small noises, which carried a long way, though, perversely, you would have had to holler from the bottom of the stairs to be heard at the top.

  Take the mornings, when people began moving around. If there was an early riser on our floor, you’d hear the latch being opened on the door at the top of our stairs, then the clatter as it banged shut, then the echoey thud-thud, as whoever it was ran down the wooden steps in the enclosed space, and then you’d hear another clatter as they came out onto the landing on the first floor and the latch of that door banged in its turn. If you listened hard, you might even hear them on the main stairs as they carried on down to the ground floor – there was a spot where the tread creaked as you turned the corner in a way that for some reason carried right up to our floor. Or there’d be silence and you’d wonder whether they’d switched to the back stairs via the housekeeper’s lair – the quicker way to the kitchen – in which case it was as if they’d gone into a void, because almost nothing from the annexe reached our floor. And meantime, unless it was very early, there’d be all the other noises: a door being opened and banging shut, a loo chain being pulled, a bath being run, people talking, someone calling somebody else.

  What you couldn’t hear was what anyone was saying. You could tell when your neighbours began talking and you might hear murmuring from below, but you couldn’t distinguish the words. What you could tell was who was on the landing. It was a matter of recognising the timbre of the voice. Even Mei was identifiable when she popped up, ostensibly to speak to Priyam – though she did everything so quietly you couldn’t be sure if she’d gone in to see Jim or disappeared downstairs again. Tyler hadn’t been up to our floor yet – at least not when I was there.

  That morning someone decided to solve the problem of how to be heard from the kitchen. Martin and I were chatting on the landing when we heard the din. Even with the stair door closed we could hear it coming up from below.

  ‘Must have dropped something!’ he said, grinning and adjusting his dressing gown so it left less of a gap at the throat. Martin had abundant chest hair, but the early-morning chill made no concessions to vanity. ‘And again!’

  ‘It sounds like one of those metal trays, but not much like the tray being dropped.’

  ‘No, listen!’ Priyam came out of her bedroom to puzzle with us. She opened the door to the stairs, leaning in, trying to hear better.

  The din came again, and then was suddenly louder as the door at the bottom opened and light steps ran up.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Lyndsey asked, once she’d caught her breath. ‘We’re trying out the pans.’

  She looked at us fiercely, as if we should know what she was talking about and be focused already on her guessing game. ‘Could you tell the difference, the high sounds and the low? The lower sounds are the saucepans. The boys know why.’

  It turned out that Eddie, of all people, was experimenting with cooking pans as a substitute for a gong. The idea was to have two sounds – one in the morning, before the eggs went on and one for afternoon tea – so everyone turned up in time. This was a pretext to try out several pot sizes, even though Hugh said the physics made that unnecessary. A small frying pan turned out to be the highest; it might sound better with a wooden spoon.

  ‘Good thing we’re on this floor an
d not below,’ I said. ‘What an atrocious noise.’

  ‘But that’s the point. You’re not meant to like it; it’s meant to get you up,’ Lyndsey said, still fierce.

  Priyam was amused: ‘So why are you, of all people, devising that?’

  Martin didn’t wait for the answer: ‘Quite. And who said I want to get out of bed? I like my bed. I particularly like my bed when someone wants me to leave it …’ – he paused for effect, putting his arm round Lyndsey and trying to pull her in – ‘… or join me in it!’

  She paid no attention, as if immune, and resisted the hug, leaning away. Hard to imagine how anyone would get close to her. Reassuring, I thought, remembering her twirling by the sink; the women I’d seen with Tyler were completely different – glamorous and self-aware. She wouldn’t be his type.

  Downstairs the din began once more. If Eddie was trying to send Loxton up, he’d got him wrong – Dennis would have been more subtle.

  ‘Is this really in the spirit of the Reading Party?’ I asked. ‘I’m not sure about being dragooned, even for breakfast.’

  ‘Seems pretty typical to me – there’s plenty of other dragooning round here.’ Chloe emerged, rubbing her eyes, grinding a loose spec of kohl into the lid. ‘What the fuck is that noise?’

  Martin turned round. ‘Ooooh. There speaks someone who had too many whiskies!’

  ‘Don’t give me aggro,’ Chloe began, but Martin was giving her a squeeze, so the rest of the sentence came out like expiration. ‘I’ve had enough already, not least from her.’

  That’s a bit rich, I thought.

  Martin did a show of rocking back, surprised. ‘From Sarah? Surely not! Let me guess: we haven’t been smoking upstairs, have we …?’

  Lyndsey chose that moment to start again on the sounds that might carry to our floor. She seemed to have no antennae at all.

  Chloe talked right over her. ‘Give us a break, you dolt. Sarah’s the fuzz, not you – or Martin. I’ve enough of a head already.’

  ‘Why not tell them we don’t like being woken by the contents of the kitchen sink,’ I said to Lyndsey.

  ‘Particularly those of us with hangovers,’ Martin added. ‘The hangovers and their mates vote for a more mellifluous sound.’

  I fetched some of Loxton’s Alka-Seltzer, but Chloe rebuffed all offers of help. No scope for pastoral care: she’d clearly been there many times before. It puzzled me. Usually students don’t go on getting drunk for nothing. I’d had my own patch of boorishness in my first year, angry at the smallness of my parents’ lives, trying to compensate with my peers. A miserable period, looking back – I was lucky that Jenny and others had got me back on track. If the Dean was right about Chloe’s family, she might actually miss those structures; Loxton could even be a kind of father figure, someone whose affection she needed to test.

  Eddie’s experiment with the cooking pans dominated conversation over breakfast. Perhaps it was less alarm call than decoy, like the crossword, but this time to provide cover for the whisky-drinking team. Whatever the case, talking about gongs – where we’d seen them, how they worked and why they were considered infra dig – allowed us to avoid discussion of the previous evening. Rupert breezed in, playing a tinny drum roll on the base of a frying pan with his knuckles as he walked by and then repeating the gesture on Gloria’s shoulders; Chloe stood by the Rayburn, examining the accumulation of black sediment inside another of the pans, and then turned instead to make herself a piece of toast; Eddie told a long yarn about a gong in his aunt’s house, which was a bit far-fetched; Martin juggled with the abandoned wooden spoons. In fact, those who’d been most involved in the drinking and its aftermath kept off the subject. A few of the others asked how Chloe felt – no one asked about Eddie – but she batted them away dismissively.

  Even Tyler was rebuked. When Loxton pointed out that it was ‘our American’ who’d sprinted nobly up the hill, Chloe said, ‘Quite right too. Penalty for hobnobbing with you lot,’ and gestured at the two of us.

  I spent a few minutes pondering the logic of that one. I didn’t dare to look at Tyler, least of all with Loxton by my side.

  There was no more talk of escaping the house; instead, the chat was about how people were getting on with their reading. It was as if they were all trying to prove that their minds were where they were meant to be, or that one act of subversion was enough. So, to his credit, Loxton chose not to issue another crisp reprimand. And he was perfectly pleasant with me. It was as if we’d never ‘had words’ at all.

  Soon enough the ritual of the crossword took over and the pockets of conversation meandered in other directions. Martin and Lyndsey had agreed to keep each other company in the kitchen and were discussing the evening meal: he could only do stews, he said, but that was a larger repertoire than Lyndsey’s; we weren’t to expect anything much. Barnaby was talking about the wind, which had brought more dead wood down from the pines and would have washed driftwood high up the beaches – could we have a bonfire on that patch of blackened ground beyond the cold frames? Priyam was asking if anyone had seen her glasses, which she’d mysteriously lost; there was chat about a book of Tyler’s that he’d mislaid; someone else had run out of fags. And on it went.

  That was part of the pleasure of the Reading Party, I realised, thinking back to the previous afternoon – the tight structure had benefits beyond the hours of quiet. Once you had got the hang of it, it absolved you of responsibility for most daily decisions. The reward wasn’t just the pleasing rhythm of work and play, it was also the holiday from the minor choices of daily life.

  So after breakfast there was no point in debate about whether or not to work that day: you went back to your books, ‘period’, as Tyler liked to say. Similarly, there was no need to discuss what or when to eat: meals were provided and the gong now announced when they were ready. Even the strictures on luggage had helped – no one fussed about what they wore because they had so little with them and were so keen to keep warm. We could focus on the important things – like what to do during ‘time out’.

  Also, it being midweek, we were getting into our stride. We’d done our bit of pushing at the edges of the structure to establish boundaries, discovering which were flexible. We’d got each other’s measure, which changed the balance of power. The gap between Loxton, who had always known the score, and the rest of us, who hadn’t, was narrowing. Even Tyler was easier to read.

  Playfully we argued the toss between the ideas for the afternoon. The consensus was that having a bonfire would be the most fun, now we were in the flow. What would the Dean have made of that? Were we still being too tame, or getting suitably frisky?

  *

  Having skirted round the subject of the morning after the night before, we settled contentedly back into our pattern. There on our tables were our books, just as we’d left them; there were our chairs and sofas, waiting for us; and there were our companions, their foibles increasingly familiar.

  In the library, the obvious quirk was Hugh tapping the table. Mostly he tucked his hands away, bringing them out only to turn a page or pick up his pen and then stuffing them deep in his pockets: it was as if he found it a distraction, the fingers trilling unasked but insistent.

  Lyndsey was soundless but had an extraordinary presence, her Pre-Raphaelite tresses regularly raised over those bony wrists and flicked away, only to sink back like a shroud.

  Tyler, by contrast, was a dark figure at the opposite end of the table, the face beneath the curls in shadow unless he tilted towards the window. There was something curiously sensual about the way he took his chin in his left hand: his thumb would rest beneath the jaw line; his forefinger would stroke his upper lip, which was fuller than you’d expect; his other fingers would curve round to fan out across the bottom half of his face and occasionally slide below his mouth, caressing the skin in the patch where the stubble was sparse, or settle into the little nook below. I could have spent hours watching him, if I hadn’t been absorbed in my work.

  Havi
ng stripped away some of the biographical detail in my paper, I’d simplified the chronology and clarified the strands of Ivy’s battles with the authorities in education and the law. Now I was tracing them through the sheaves in coloured-pencil marginalia, trying to assess their relative importance. I was nervous of excising hastily: there might be unintended consequences.

  It reminded me of my grandmother’s pruning of the roses on her garden wall, which dominated our childhood visits in the autumn half-term. First she’d trim the new shoots and snip off the dead wood, so she could see better; then she’d identify the stems that were too close; but before she did anything to them, she’d check for old branches that needed to go. She’d consider how removal might change the shape of the whole and then she’d lop decisively at the base. There was always a nerve-wracking moment when the offender was taken out, bringing all its subsidiaries with it. Then we’d stand back, surrounded by clippings, and assess the result.

  The boys never stuck around long enough to see the whole process, but its purpose had sunk in with me. Perhaps Granny even explained it, as she fiddled with her raffia and her ties, to shut up my chatter. Or Grandad, coming over with rosehip syrup and tea.

  In any event, looking afresh at my draft I found too much about arranging free legal advice for the poor, which is what Ivy Williams originally intended to do (and how I’d come across her), and not enough on what later she had actually done – namely, win for women the right to receive degrees and to practise as barristers, just like men.

  Once seen, the rest was obvious. I knew where to lop!

  Perhaps my excitement got the better of me: all of a sudden the three of them were watching. Lyndsey had tilted her head, causing the hair to shift; Hugh had stopped mid-page turn, his hand poised alongside the print; Tyler’s chair had returned to the floor with a thump.