The Reading Party

by Fenella Gentleman

  I took off the lid and made approving sounds while trying to identify the herbs they’d used. There were a lot of grey flecks of uncertain origin, but then that might be me. Jenny, who was good at marinades, always joked that I was the world’s worst cook. Even she thought a woman should be able to provide.

  ‘Perhaps a bit of garlic salt?’ In my experience, this could transform a dish, turning failure into success.

  I laid the table as they clattered about behind me at the worktop, gossiping about the houses they’d lived in. It turned out that Martin’s mates in Jericho spent a lot of time sitting around talking and their music was always on loud, whereas Lyndsey had chosen to go back to living in, even though it was expensive, because she hadn’t liked the endless chat or the ‘multicoloured food’ her housemates favoured and preferred to eat quietly in Hall. Then I left them to it.

  When eventually they were ready to feed us, their stew proved tasty enough. The students allowed Lyndsey her share of the credit. Martin didn’t seem to mind; he was easy about everything.

  Loxton and I had ended up sitting in pole position as joint heads of the table, able to survey the scene like parents watching over a very large family, occasionally catching each other’s eye. He looked rather happy in the role, whereas I was reminded of our disagreement the night before and the way families gloss these things over. And there were only two days to go before we returned to the routine of College life! I wondered what happened to these Reading Party friendships and whether everyone settled back to their old patterns or found a way of fitting the new mates in. It would be a shame if they lost touch but perhaps that was the way of things – especially for someone like Tyler, who’d go back to the States if he didn’t stay for a DPhil.

  Priyam, sitting next to me, must have registered the pondering. ‘You’ve gone very quiet, Dr Addleshaw,’ she said – she was the only one who had stuck to formality. ‘My mother always says, when I go silent, that something must be the matter; she prefers it when we talk too much.’

  There was no obvious response to this. I was meant to be looking after them.

  ‘Is it going as you hoped, now it’s mixed?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure I had any expectations,’ I said, ‘and of course I’ve nothing to compare it with, so it’s hard to say.’

  ‘But you always look so at home! That’s one of the things we admire: the way you carry things off as if they were nothing.’ She paused a minute, which was just as well – I was still trying to take her comment in. ‘Dr Loxton seems to think it’s going okay. He says it’s more relaxed than it used to be.’

  ‘Ah, but does he think we’re working as hard?’ I asked.

  ‘He didn’t say we weren’t. I think we must be, don’t you? I mean, no one’s slacking. I’m ploughing through my Roman law. Even Chloe said she’d got on well today.’

  ‘And what about the play bit of “work hard, play hard”?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I think it’s cool. It’s been so serious this term, with everyone panicking about how much revision they’ve got to do. But here we’re having some really good times.’

  She gave me that look again, as if trying to decide how much to say. Then she blurted out, ‘We’re going to sit around the bonfire. Will you come too?’

  How had Priyam read my mood? How did anyone read the mood of more than a dozen people? Somehow you sensed that parlour games were not what was required that evening. The group hadn’t recovered its desire for performance; it was still in reflective mode – subdued, questioning, uncertain.

  Martin, excused from washing-up duties because he’d cooked, readied to go in search of sticks for the marshmallows as we’d planned. Muffled in long scarves, torches in hand, we made our way past the glasshouses to the garden shed, where we rummaged in near darkness for something suitable, much as Tyler, Priyam and I had done earlier in the light. It was extremely cold and, as we moved the sacking that blocked the way to the back, we discussed the possibility that a firelit evening wasn’t such a good idea, that we would all freeze or poke each other, that it was all a bit infantile. But we’d promised, so we stuck to it, returning with implements for everyone. I had smooth canes about four feet long, most of them already grey from exposure to the elements and split at the base where they’d been pushed into the earth, the few that were still in their pristine golden state easier to see in the gloom; Martin had some longer, bendy shoots of hazel, burgundy coloured, lightly freckled, slightly rough to the touch.

  By the time we rejoined them, there were several people by the bonfire – three or four seated on the stumps, the rest moving around, one of them writing in the air with a cigarette as sparkler. The fire had got to that stage where, its initial bulk having been consumed, most of the remainder had sunk into a dense mass of embers, sizzling quietly and only occasionally spitting. Barnaby was trying to lift a portion back into the centre with a pitchfork; having shifted it, he looked around for what to do with the fork, then speared the ground with the two prongs and left its handle rearing up behind the seated group like a thin figure listening in. Priyam, on her piece of log, began pushing marshmallows onto the canes – one open bag in her lap, the other leaning up against the bark by her feet. Ever neat, she was carefully alternating pink and white so she ended up with equal quantities of each. Behind us we could hear Rupert and Gloria cavorting about as they manhandled the wooden bench from the tennis court across the moist clumps of grass; by the time we turned to look, they were on the seat, laughing.

  Eventually we were all gathered. Even Loxton came and squatted awkwardly next to Priyam, chatting, though he didn’t stay long, which made me wonder briefly if I too was meant to leave them to it.

  We toasted the marshmallows, savouring their vanilla-rich sickliness. Barnaby and I lost a couple in the too-hot heat and then burnt our tongues on the melting sugar when they first hung glutinously from the tips of our sticks. After that Jim and I chatted happily about nothing much – me leaning on a rake, he on the pitchfork, each of us occasionally stretching out to reach the fallen charcoal and kick it into the fire. Later still, Tyler and I exchanged thoughts on the quality of the wood we’d gathered earlier, stringing out a mundane subject until neither of us could find anything more to say about it. Instead we stood contentedly in the near darkness away from the flames, watching, trying not to bump into each other – not quite succeeding. That was dangerous, of course; already it felt illicit, a slide towards something that shouldn’t be there. It was not the same as the original – accidental – collision.

  We were interrupted by a spat between Hugh and Lyndsey. Unlike Gloria, it seemed Lyndsey didn’t like being chased; when Hugh slipped on a twig, she retreated and sat on a tree stump, arms around her knees, skirt – as ever – trailing, unmoved. There was a glimpse of Chloe, alone on the bench, similarly huddled forward, smoking her roll-ups. Somewhere Eddie was puffing at his Gauloises Bleu: even at a distance you could smell their dark aroma, a whiff of the intellectual in a workman’s café. Tyler joked about his own experiments with smoking, the exaggeration making me laugh enough to lose my balance again, although I probably didn’t have to. Our hands grazed each other in the blackness and suddenly, out of nowhere, came the briefest hidden exploration, a teetering on the contours of the fingers so slight that no one else could have noticed it, but enough to be unmistakable. Still I didn’t go in.

  Who knows who rolled the joint? Presumably Chloe. Eventually I got a waft of skunky weed and saw it being passed around – and to my surprise it was Lyndsey who was taking a drag; fey little Lyndsey, who normally had her head in the poets and her childhood reading, who had wanted the window open in the van and whom I’d never seen with a fag in her hand.

  Why did that have to happen? It was too obvious to ignore.

  I shifted a fraction, and maybe Tyler did too. Either way, there was a cooling in the air between us, another of those tiny gaps. I carried on talking, fists back in my pockets, wondering what to do. The ban on smoking upst
airs was understandable – it probably kept dope out of the house. But dope elsewhere? Loxton couldn’t mean to extend the rule where it was bound to be broken. Had I been one of the students, I‘d have had a few drags. Such mellow moments almost called for it.

  When the joint threatened to get too close, however, I lost my nerve, made a stupid remark about becoming publicly complicit, which made Tyler say, ‘Phooey – you worry too much!’, and pulled away properly – just as Priyam emerged from the gloom where I thought it had been empty. I could feel Tyler looking after me as I set off for the house. Genuinely annoyed or merely amused? It was too dark to tell.

  Priyam may have seen us or caught the end of the conversation, but if so she didn’t comment; just walked back with me on the pretext that she needed the loo, chatting away as if nothing had happened. Standing by the fridge, milk bottle in one hand, door handle in the other, I asked her to keep an eye out for Mei, who might not be used to such adventures. She looked straight back at me. ‘It’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. We’re just hanging out.’

  Loxton must already have gone up. On the one occasion when, possibly, I was meant to check in with him, there was nobody about and the house was silent. I lingered a few minutes, collecting this and that – vaguely hoping that Tyler might follow, so I got the chance to explain – until the empty spaces began to unnerve me. It was okay going past the wasted privacy of the annexe, which somehow never spooked me; the heebie-jeebies came when I was walking up the second flight of stairs in the stillness, imagining myself stuck in the middle between latches that wouldn’t lift, slowly desiccating in the dark of an abandoned building, and had to stop myself from pounding noisily to the top. Back in my lonely attic, lying in my freezing bed – socks on, knees pulled up under my nightie – I got quietly crosser and crosser, asking myself why I’d made such a fuss, wanting someone to blame.

  It was that line that I hadn’t wanted to recognise, the line that separated the students from the dons. Had I left the bonfire earlier, like Loxton, there would have been nothing to see and the question of what to do about it wouldn’t have arisen. Instead it was horribly clear that you couldn’t be on both sides of the barricades at the same time; there was no escaping the need to choose.

  Still, by the time I switched off the light I’d found my solution. I wasn’t going to be one of those creepy lecturers who let it all hang out with their students, pretending they weren’t an authority figure when of course they were – the Dean strayed dangerously close, with his spiky hairdo and his clingy jeans. No, the students and I were in different camps, and it was best not to pretend otherwise. But I didn’t have to be craven. Dope was no big deal; Tyler was right. And the proper response to silly diktats had always been reform. In fact, a College happily in the vanguard in one area should avoid petty battles in others. So if Loxton complained about the spliffs, I would say it was beneath us; the students should smoke what they liked outside.

  As for the more important things that might be off limits, which Priyam might or might not have registered, I barely dared to go there; that wonderful slide into the depths was too frightening to think about. It could not – would not – happen.

  Thursday

  After all that agonising, it was odd to find the following day starting as normal. The only unusual bit was the plan about the beach.

  The landing was fast becoming the hub of our floor – a place of conversations and glimpsed views of private space. We joked when we passed or stopped to talk. We left doors open, stood on thresholds watching, wandered in on each other. And if the students hesitated where I was concerned, it was pretty minimal.

  That morning, for instance. My door was ajar; soon there was a gentle knock.

  ‘Are you decent, Dr Addleshaw?’ Priyam spoke just loud enough for me to hear.

  ‘Just about. It’s fine – only my shoes to go. Come in.’

  She pushed the door wide, let it swing back and then sat on the little chair that looked so pert with its high back screening the wallpaper and its embroidered cushion catching the sunshine.

  I glanced away from the buckle on my platforms, wondering if she was about to embarrass me. ‘All well?’

  She nodded. ‘Groovy. Just wanted you to know.’

  ‘Well, that’s good of you. Was it a late one?’

  She nodded again but didn’t expand – nothing about Tyler or anyone else – so that can’t have been why she was visiting. But there was no time to ask how she was getting on, as Martin was sticking his head round the open door.

  ‘Big room, Sarah,’ he said, bounding cheerily across the floorboards and into the recess of the gable window. ‘How come yours is so big?’ There was a tease about preferential treatment and the lucky dip.

  ‘Has she told you the plan?’ He gestured at Priyam.

  ‘No way! It’s your plan, not mine. Anyhow, Dr Addleshaw may not approve.’

  Martin ignored the last bit. ‘Well, I’m game. Can’t leave Barny to brave it alone.’

  He turned back to me. ‘We thought we’d go to the beach – the long bay, not the short one – get everyone to scramble down that track. We could play ball games, smell the sea. Some of us might even go in.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ I said, liking the picture, wondering what the limits of decorum might be. I was a good swimmer, used to the North Sea; if I’d had my costume, I would have joined in. ‘Which bit were you seeking approval for?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. You never can tell – sometimes he fusses, sometimes he doesn’t.’

  ‘Quite. Well, better check that he’s okay with it. He’ll want the balls kept dry. And it’ll be icy: you’re not serious about going in?’

  But Martin said he was and claimed to have checked the bay out with Hugh. It was easily deep enough for a game, he said; a great U-shape where the clifftop dipped, with boulders at the rear and a curving expanse of sand, so any balls should be fine. He only stopped his gesturing as he opened the door to the staircase to let us go first.

  ‘What do you think?’ he called out behind me, above the clatter of our footwear on the wooden treads. ‘Rounders or Frisbee?’

  I should have chosen the American game, but I was concentrating on Priyam’s head as she spiralled in front of me: if you went down too fast, you risked banging against the dusty walls, which of course we did all the time; the servants would have done the same.

  ‘Either. Beat you at both!’ I said, and held open the door with its diagonal bracing. We used the back stairs for the rest of the way, so we could surprise the early risers by emerging from the ‘cupboard’.

  In fact, only four people were up – thankfully not Tyler – and none of them paid much attention. Still, being ahead made it easier to assess the mood of the day. So much was revealing.

  Take Rupert, for instance. He rose earlier than I’d expected and was much quieter at breakfast – almost emollient before his wisecracking revved into action. Unlikely he reserved his spikiness for later in the day; probably it just took him time to get underway. Besides, there was the distraction of the papers: he liked to read them over his cereal and was always grumbling at being a day out with the news. So long as he had that to occupy him, he would focus his barbs on politicians, union leaders – anyone he thought was an ass, which was pretty much everyone in public life – rather than us. It was when that was done that you had to watch out. He was a bit like the Dean, really.

  And there he was, true to type, although this time he was reading out scores from the Centenary Test, which was on a knife-edge down in Melbourne, or had been when they went to press. Of course that set him off again: a huge house but no TV or radio; it was ridiculous to have to sit in an icy van just to find out what was happening in the big wide world – but if he could have the keys, he might go and do just that, get the results.

  Jim too seemed to be a morning person, though that didn’t make him any more forthcoming: the silent type, as the Dean had said, but more interesting than that implied. He was always in the
kitchen before me and, having introduced porridge to the menu, had created a role that eased his prickly path into the group. There’d be discussion about how many he was cooking for, debate about the merits of salt versus sugar, teasing about the consistency of the gloop. It was never he who started the talking, but he was part of it, the focus even, in a roundabout way.

  That day he was at his post again, defending his oats from the charge of going bobbly, and it was Mei who stuck up for hot breakfasts and asked for another spoonful. I thought of the scene by the bonfire and tried to remember the details: Mei was normally too shy to intervene.

  Meanwhile, Loxton was sitting in the conservatory, scarf on, crossword, as ever, on his knee. He gave me a little wave. If anything had been amiss, surely he’d have risen to claim my attention? But when he did enquire how the evening had gone, once we were by ourselves, he exhibited none of his forensic curiosity. He didn’t even wait for a reply.

  ‘Usually a bottle of spirits, or some other drug, appears on such occasions. I won’t even ask if it did last night. Generally I find it is best not to know, which is why I absent myself. If I’m not there, there’s no need for any decisions. But it’s harder for the younger tutors. At your age you can’t win. “To fuss or not to fuss” is almost an existential question!’

  And, as if he didn’t want to embarrass me further, he refrained from asking how I would answer it. Instead, he set off towards the corridor as if it was just like any other day.

  This was positively avuncular, although it would have been more helpful earlier on. Loxton began to grow on me.

  After breakfast, I took my papers to the morning room to complete my circuit of the house.