The Reading Party

by Fenella Gentleman

  ‘Did I say something?’ I asked without thinking. ‘What did I do just then?’

  I glanced at Tyler, but he was in the gloom, his expression unreadable. Lyndsey, next to him, sat up from her slumped position.

  ‘You came out of your bubble and clapped,’ she whispered.

  ‘What do you mean, clapped?’

  Hugh pressed his page down to stop it flapping. ‘Like this,’ he said, and he clapped his hands as a child would: two excited little pats with his palms that made the leather buttons on his sleeves wiggle on their threads.

  A memory flashed of me wearing a hand-knit over a dress I got on my fourth birthday, clapping Granny’s efforts as a huge frond of rose landed on the grass and then stamping on it in my stumpy wellingtons.

  ‘Did I really?’ I said. ‘Goodness!’

  Now Tyler was watching. I could feel it, though I couldn’t see it. ‘Perhaps you solved a problem,’ he said. ‘Was it important?’

  ‘Do you know, I think I did.’ I gestured to the marks about the competing threads – Ivy aspiring to help the poor, taking her degrees, becoming the first woman ‘called to the Bar’, being the first to teach law at an English university – and lifted my hands wide with pleasure. ‘And yes, it is important. I’m writing about someone wonderfully daring – a pioneering don at one of the women’s colleges, whom I’ve been discussing with Dennis – and I’ve just sussed how to tell her story.’

  ‘Eureka!’ said Lyndsey, looking a little manic, as if the excitement – the relief, even – were hers.

  ‘You’ve something in common, then,’ said Tyler, as if he was testing the idea, thinking it through.

  Was he flattering me again? But it was still an interesting notion: historians need to get on the inside; it’s no good being just an observer.

  ‘Actually,’ I said hurriedly, ‘she was way ahead – born nearly a hundred years ago. I noticed that this week, when I was looking again at the dates. A September anniversary. That’ll make it easier to get people interested.’

  ‘There you are!’ said Lyndsey, squeaking again.

  There was a noise from the study, where the historians had been trying a new arrangement, working with their books in their laps – Barnaby sitting in the armchair in the recesses and Jim using the desk as a prop for a single elbow rather than a surface for both. Now they were standing in the doorway, one behind the other.

  ‘Why the fuss?’ asked Jim. But the roughness would only be awkwardness. Barnaby must have known that too; he put an arm over Jim’s shoulder, leaning forward, listening in.

  ‘Sarah’s made another breakthrough in the paper she’s writing – and a missing bit of the jigsaw makes it a dead cert for publication,’ said Hugh. ‘She gave herself a clap’ – and he paused – ‘without registering.’

  The historians grinned, knowingly.

  To make amends for all the disruption, I set off early to sort the coffee, hoping to recover my poise alone in the kitchen, but Tyler said there would be too many things to carry. We stood at the sink together, surrounded by stainless steel and the smell of Fairy Liquid – me filling the kettle while he balanced mugs on the ridges of the draining board – and chatted about those wonderful moments when things suddenly come right. He joked about people who made a habit of exclaiming out loud and we laughed at the memory of me chuckling about Loxton’s handwriting in the Lodge. He said he’d had only one eureka moment during his time at Oxford, to do with an issue in epistemology with which he had struggled and which, without warning, he had suddenly understood. He had written that essay in a blaze of clarity and then wondered if he was going mad – ‘crazy’, he called it. The relief when Loxton grunted approval, after utter silence as Tyler read aloud, had been extraordinary.

  I watched the coffee granules melt, hoping he might continue, but instead he gave me one of his quick looks and, almost as quickly, went off in search of a tray, creating a sudden draught of cold air.

  We’d been very close by the taps, again nearly touching; there was a vacuum after he moved, as if he’d taken the warmth with him.

  That put paid to my morning. Two sorts of embarrassment – maybe even two sorts of eureka – and I couldn’t work out which was worse: that moment of professional unguardedness or realising quite how much I fancied him.

  Just as well it was my turn to chaperone the shoppers.

  By now we’d almost given up on my idea of splitting shopping from cooking – conceived in ignorance of how Carreck Loose worked. I stood Eddie down and, instead, took Lyndsey and Martin, who’d petitioned for a break from swotting. The three of us bumped our way uncomfortably to Mevagissey in Martin’s little car – which looked fetching but had next to no padding under the cracked leather – armed with the local ordnance survey map and copious instructions from Loxton. I posted a letter to her parents for Priyam and did the boring shop at the Co-op; they disappeared down one of the narrow side streets, so Martin could distract Lyndsey by showing her the mechanics of Cornish fishing. He was still in his canvas smock, appropriately enough.

  They came back laughing, with the pasties but without receipts – that was going to complicate Loxton’s accounts! You didn’t get paperwork with ‘the real thing’, Martin said. The way he told it, half of them came from a cottage in one of the cobbled streets leading up from the harbour, with a sign propped inside the window saying ‘Pasties Sold Here’ and a grumpy woman serving, which sounded much like the place in my parents’ village where Cromer crabs were dressed in the back kitchen. The rest came from the shop Loxton recommended, which was more like mass production. We could all decide which were the best.

  I wasn’t sure I believed him, but it was a good story, so we agreed to hold a blind tasting. Back at the house we popped the pasties in the Rayburn, knocked up a quick salad and called everyone in to eat. When they were all assembled, tantalised by the smell from the oven, Lyndsey cut the puffy pasties in two – she made a bit of a hash of it – and Martin sent the plates down the table with instructions to have a half of both versions. Of course, we were soon in a complete muddle: the halves looked much the same; the plates underneath them were identical; no one could remember which was which. Loxton, who said he knew a thing or two about tastings from buying wine for the College, quibbled about the conditions – he too might have been pulling our legs – and we enjoyed ourselves eating with our hands and arguing about flavours and which taste was best. The consensus was that ‘the old bag pasty’ had marginally the edge – meatier, but a tad dry, while what Tyler dubbed ‘the Loxton special’ was shorter on filling but had a better crust. However, Barnaby was sure we’d been hoodwinked and suggested the pasties had all came from the same place – which one being immaterial. He was familiar with such pranks, he said; the only thing in Mart’s favour was that Lyndsey would have said if he’d been making it all up.

  Either way, Lyndsey had calmed down – and she’d eaten properly, for once – while the rest of us had had a lot of fun. If Loxton had been with them, I reflected afterwards, they’d never even have discovered the place on the harbour, if it really existed: they’d have been quick-marched off to his favoured shop and that would have been it. Loxton liked his trips to be purposeful, a matter of getting sensibly from A to B. It was the same with his walks: he didn’t do wandering off to see what might be there. In fact, come to think of it, he didn’t meander anywhere on foot, any more than he did in his head. But despite that you couldn’t call him a control freak. If he was with you, he fussed about the shopkeepers, but if he wasn’t, you could buy from anyone – and provided everything got crossed off his list, he didn’t mind what else appeared. Such a man of contradictions! I still wasn’t sure I’d got his measure.

  Even funnier was the language he used. He called it ‘the shopping detail’. Where would he have picked up such military slang, given that he hadn’t been on active service in the war? Couldn’t we just ‘go shopping’? But no, the whole concept was imbued with that ‘Boy’s Own’ feeling of adventure, as
if doing the trip was something out of the ordinary for which you had to plan, like a ground campaign, to minimise the unforeseen. Out came the route maps and the comments about ‘mustering’ here or there – and while there was nothing wrong with preparing the ground, this too was a little ridiculous when we were shopping every day. It reminded me of my uncle’s sometimes comical habits, which we’d been forbidden from making fun of. That was the sadness for bachelors of Loxton’s vintage: their irrational fixations – buy the pasties here, only play board games, stop at this little layby not that – got more and more entrenched. If Loxton had only had a family – a pair of rowdy boys and a tomboy of a daughter, say – such fads would have been teased out of him.

  Barnaby got his way about the bonfire. We built it after lunch once we’d inspected the remnants of an old construction betrayed by an ugly splot of darkness beyond the greenhouses. Blackened soil and grey ash, an acrid mix where it was still damp, defaced the turf; at the extremities the grass crept inwards, curling over the offence and a few charcoal-edged logs suggested what might have been. A row of tree stumps, lined up against the cold frames, waited to be arranged in a curve at a sensible distance. People must have sat around that spot before, staring into the flames – it was a tradition calling out to be revived.

  Before we’d even begun gathering wood, Barnaby and Martin had reassembled the circle and were discussing how much heat was needed to bake a potato, forgetting we didn’t have any. Thoughts of eating by the fire would have stayed entirely hypothetical had it not been for the marshmallows I’d bought. The prospect of those little bags of rubberiness got me lots of brownie points. All we needed was a fire that would keep going into the evening; then, if the embers were still alight, we could toast them on sticks.

  The problem was the dearth of raw material. There was some dead wood on the ground by the pines, not so much branches as gnarled excrescences that might have fallen under the own misshapen weight even without the wind. But mostly that area provided pickings we could only use as kindling: curling spindles of still-pliable twig, topped with a green pipe cleaner; curved sheddings of bark, like rusting cheese graters; and endless tight little cones, too small to collect one by one but big enough to be caught together in the wooden rake.

  The real mass of the bonfire had to come from elsewhere. Tyler, Priyam and I explored the outhouses, the two of them deferring noisily to my supposed foraging instincts and swapping stories about where they’d gone as children to escape the city. In the stables we found rotten timber from what might have been an old shed, which Loxton agreed we could use; and there were neat piles of garden waste in the corridor between the greenhouses – trimmings from the shrubs and the area of hedge and so on. Still, we all had to work hard to assemble a good structure. Some of the students went down to the little beach in search of driftwood, returning with a few sizeable pieces washed naked and smooth by the sea. They’d looked for what would have been lying around for a while, they said, finding it mostly at the extremities, under the cliff edges. Anything recently thrown up was too waterlogged and heavy with sand to carry, let alone to burn.

  By the time everyone had returned and added their contribution, the pile was nearly too high to see over the top. Eddie didn’t believe we would get it to catch, given that some of the wood was damp, and there was a brief debate about using firelighters to give it a kick-start, but the purists won. Jim took Barnaby to collect newspaper and matches from the house and, on their return, the two men crumpled the sheets into loose balls and stuffed them into gaps at the base of the edifice. Then Mei lit the tapers, working with Barnaby from opposite sides, her face almost as studious as when she was at her books. It took several goes to get it to catch in enough places and then, all of a sudden, she was springing back from the crackle and smoke, colliding with Jim and, not so briefly, being held.

  Moments like that, which might suggest a burgeoning relationship, made you wonder what was going on behind the scenes; whether you were reading things correctly. After all, Tyler and I had collided and that wasn’t necessarily significant.

  The thought of Jim and Mei being drawn together made sense; you could imagine them slipping naturally into each other’s lives. Not so with the other apparent pairings, which were more of a puzzle.

  Rupert and Gloria’s behaviour was often an irritant – he’d play her until she seemed more interested in him than in anything else that was going on – but mostly it washed over. I now assumed they’d once had a fling and were reviving the relationship. Then there’d be a moment when Martin and Gloria sparked again with disarming familiarity and I’d think, I’ve got it the wrong way round! As to how Chloe fitted in – that was anyone’s guess.

  With Hugh and Lyndsey, who seemed mostly to enjoy each other’s company, it was hard to tell whether it went beyond being ‘just friends’. If you eavesdropped – and sometimes you couldn’t help it – you might think they aspired to a kind of rarefied spiritual relationship, with Hugh pursuing platonic love or some Catholic equivalent and Lyndsey exploring a romantic notion of her own, all very intense. The Dean hadn’t said anything about this – he was pretty dismissive of people he saw as Loxton‘s pets – and there was never a gesture to suggest it was physical, but then you might just have missed it.

  So, as we stood about the bonfire, I watched. Rupert and Gloria were larking again, playing tag behind the backs of those standing on the far side of the fire. Lyndsey and Hugh were in different groups – Lyndsey’s trio standing chatting way back from the heat, Hugh poking between pieces of wood to let the air in, flicking stray twigs back towards the flames, discussing the shape of the mound with someone else. Jim and Mei were standing near but not together, talking to other people. I might be imagining things.

  When Loxton next came over I alluded to possible twosomes. He conceded he’d noticed but didn’t contribute any thoughts of his own; instead he repeated his mantra about not probing into people’s private lives. What they got up to outside the reading hours was their own business – always had been and was still so now – and our role was to keep out of it. As if to make his point, he did a quick circuit and retired to the house. I stayed outside for a while, determined not to cave in, but in the end I too went back to the kitchen and the job of making afternoon tea.

  Loxton’s firmness felt like another ticking-off, a reminder that we were there to set an example of application, not to connive at the distractions.

  Tilting back in my chair, foot on the crossbar of the table for safety, sheaves of A4 in my hands, I began to ponder the politics of publication. Should I go for the kind of journal that was now mainstream, like the Journal of Social History, where my argument might gain acceptance as a nod towards fashionable trends? Or try somewhere more radical, a feminist publication, say, which might make up for what it lacked in academic kudos by placing me amongst friends?

  The issue wasn’t just about this particular article – it went far wider. Mine wasn’t the kind of history in which Oxford generally traded. Social history might have broad acceptance, but oral history and the poorly documented history of the illiterate was another matter. And Carreck Loose was a reminder that it was indeed the history of ordinary people that interested me, the people whose stories hadn’t been considered worth recording and who had lacked the means to record them themselves, whose descendants the oral historians were now busy taping in factories and fields, to the dismay of the academic traditionalists. I wanted to know about the very people who had made houses like this possible – skivvying away at scrubbing flagstones, polishing woodwork, carrying water up and down stairs – whose world was shaping us even as we conducted our Reading Party.

  Where were the studies of the masses, I wondered, whose labours had allowed the harbourmasters of the day to prosper and whom the likes of Ivy Williams had later aspired to help? Where was the history of the family, rich and poor? Why wasn’t there a journal of women’s history? Why no female professor in my field?

  I stared at the bookcas
es on either side of the end window, vaguely aware of the burgundy of one row of leather bindings and the blue-blackness of the rest. Tyler had been right to talk of trying to pioneer: I wanted my work – this article – to get noticed. But had it been right to give up York or the radical universities I might have moved to, to argue from inside the fold? Must I now choose the orthodox route again? And how did it help to be in remotest Cornwall, indulging in a quintessentially Oxbridge experience and seeking an accommodation with a symbol of the ancien régime?

  After Lyndsey had been gone for a while, I took a break to check how she and Martin were getting on with supper: they were such an unlikely pairing. There was loud chatter and an excitable whoop or two from the extension. The two of them were trying to stop parsnips and carrots from rolling off the work surface. Lyndsey, responsible for the whoops, seemed to be in charge of the chopping, while Martin ribbed about her ignorance of livestock.

  He threw a question at me: ‘Ah: Sarah! What cut would you use in a beef stew?’

  I said something about relying on the butcher to advise.

  This amused him. ‘And you a Norfolk girl! Try living amongst our cows for a few years!’ He explained about the cut he’d insisted on. But, he said, that was the sum of his knowledge. He never helped his mother – the kitchen was her territory. Anyway, theirs were dairy herds.

  Lyndsey picked up an onion. ‘We were trying to remember which of them to put in,’ she said, circling the knife in the direction of the other vegetables.

  ‘Watch out!’ Martin sprang out of the way of the blade. ‘Hopeless! As bad as Rupert – only good at chopping things – but at least he has proper respect for knives.’

  ‘You can talk!’ she said. ‘You were the one who wanted that thing with an “m”.’

  She indicated a large brown mixing bowl, covered with a large plate. ‘Would you smell that?’ she asked me. ‘See if we’ve missed anything. He says it needs at least an hour, so we’re behind.’