The Reading Party

by Fenella Gentleman

  With a quick look at Rupert, who was standing as if transfixed, Martin began running out to the water, pulling off his jumper as he went and stuffing it under his arm, calling to Barnaby in turn, and then pausing, head down into the wind, to fiddle with the top of his trousers. When Barnaby made to follow, Jim started rugby-tackling him to the ground in a heap of boisterous male show – and then they too scrambled to their feet and headed off.

  Before any of them got halfway to her, Gloria, a large dot in the distance, had stripped to a dark bra and knickers. She was too far away for us to see where she dropped her shirt – it looked as if she just held out her arm and let go where she stood – and I wondered if the bra would come off too in a gesture of women’s liberation, and what Loxton would do about that, but no. Perhaps the abandonment was more a personal than a political statement – whatever the Dean said, Gloria wasn’t one for the language of female oppression. Then she was running across the patch of wet sand in her underwear, ploughing through the froth, shrieking with the shock of cold, shrieking too at the men behind her, heaving her body through the water until she was in to her thighs, shrieking again as a wave hit her and she struggled to maintain her balance, and then momentarily silent before she lifted her arms, dipped and plunged. Within seconds she was jumping in the water, yelling in shock and exhilaration, facing the men as they ran in behind her, their arms held parallel with the sea. Then she turned again towards the ocean as they too ploughed into the water, and the four of them powered away from the beach with a few strokes of the crawl.

  It happened so fast that the rest of them, silenced with admiration for the folly and the glory of it, had barely resumed talking before the four bathers were on their feet again and stumbling through the water, Gloria briefly turning round to run on the spot as the others caught up, the little group then jogging back towards us in loose formation, tiny figures bobbing against the murky silver and beige-grey backdrop of sea and sand. As they crossed the dark meander of seaweed in the distance, they drew level and, barely slowing their pace, lined up with Gloria off-centre, arms locked across each other’s shoulders, just as Tyler’s group had done on the descent to the pub. We could just see them briefly looking down, slowing to match their pace, before they carried on towards us, trotting in unison. When they neared we could see the grinning, the shared congratulation, the euphoria.

  Where was Tyler? This should have been me, not Gloria.

  Then she broke away, waved and started running again, ahead of the other three, and I spotted him joshing with Rupert, man to man, oblivious.

  ‘The towels! Where are the towels?’ Mei rushed to and fro, darting between us, almost desperate.

  I glanced at the piles around us, trying to remember what we’d done with them and where Loxton was, my mind momentarily blank. Danger of hypothermia! And what would he think of all this nakedness?

  Lyndsey shouted something into the wind and began an awkward sprint up the bay, bending at the first and second bases to pick up the small heaps of colour and then at the third base handing them over to Mei, who’d made straight for the final marker. It would have been faster the other way round – Lyndsey really wasn’t a sportswoman and she was hampered by her skirt, whereas Mei’s neat clothes followed the hard curves of a gymnast’s body, all toned muscle – but that was how it happened. So the two of them only caught up with the swimmers after rejoining the group.

  By then Gloria had Martin’s heavy coat draped around her shoulders and was trying with her spare hand to grab her jumper, held at the other end by Rupert, who picked that moment to yank it just out of reach, taunting. Her hair had turned to the dark brown of the earth and was dripping at the ends as it swayed to and fro, leaving stray strands clinging to a cleavage that bulged from the wet nylon; her skin, which had been stunned into blotchy redness around the tops of her thighs, was beginning to acquire a purple hue. Perhaps the tug of war ceased to amuse her, or she was suddenly aware of near nakedness; whatever the case, she turned sharply away, shrouding herself in the towel that Mei held up to screen her, and, muffled by wrapping, called out to Chloe to get the rest of her clothes.

  Meanwhile the three men stood shivering a few paces away, nostrils flaring, arms clasped across their chests, talking so fast they could hardly be understood, waiting to cover up while Eddie joked around with Loxton’s tea towels. Barnaby, suddenly chatty as he tried to convey how cold the water had been, stood with his legs braced and picked at his pants, unleashing a pocket of water, which ran in rivulets down to his ankles, curving its way past muscle and hair. Jim, self-conscious again in white Y-fronts that had gone loose and heavy with wet, barely lifted his head as he took a towel, but then grinned sheepishly once he had it firmly tied it round his middle. Martin, louder in something red with a white elastic waistband, tossed his to Barnaby and then reached out again.

  Normally Martin was good with his thank yous, but he too failed to acknowledge Mei. Instead he stood motionless, his outstretched arm still laden, watching as Gloria pulled his coat back onto her shoulders and bent to brush sand off her feet, steadying herself with her hand on Rupert’s arm. Seconds later Martin was turning back to Barnaby and Jim, muttering about laying down his robe but losing the prey, and then vigorously rubbing his chest.

  To break the awkwardness that followed – something about the abundant bare flesh, Loxton studiously busying with his thermos and handing round tea, or the fact that Chloe still hadn’t moved in response to this unscheduled ‘happening’ – I called out to Tyler and we set off down the beach to collect the clothes. Somebody had to do it; besides, even ignoring him could seem obvious. Most of it was easy – Jim and Barnaby had left their things in a single pile and Martin’s were spread over a small area, but Gloria’s belongings were strewn around and it took a minute to track down her footwear, beyond the biggest of the boulders. The two of us stood together in the blow, arms laden, scanning the sand and the line of seaweed as the light began to dim, discussing whether socks really mattered. Then I saw the last one lying waterlogged at the back of a stray crest of slate, a tiny pool forming around it, halfway down the slope to the sea.

  ‘There it is,’ I said, glancing over the rock at the rest of the group.

  Tyler balanced the pile of belongings on the sand and went off empty-handed to get it, waiting for the lick at the end of the wave to peter out and recede before he risked the short dash. He came back squeezing out water and flapping it flat. Smiling, he presented it to me, dangled between the thumb and forefinger.

  ‘One sock, not red and much inferior to Eddie’s!’ he said.

  I reached out – we were standing next to each other, both facing into the wind – and wobbled slightly. And there he was, raising his arm to steady me just as he had before, even though he hadn’t needed to.

  ‘I thought you’d be the one to go in,’ he said.

  ‘She beat me to it,’ I replied. ‘So annoying!’

  ‘You could have gone too,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not what I meant. It’s just that it’s so frustrating – all these things I’m not supposed to do.’

  ‘Who says?’

  I didn’t answer.

  He stopped to look me full in the face. ‘I’d have joined you. Should have stripped off myself. It was just bad timing – a split-second thing – missing the moment.’ Then he rested his arm lightly across my shoulders – a curving glow of warmth.

  Was Gloria watching? Had the others spotted us? I was torn between wanting his arm there and urgently wanting it not to be.

  ‘You know, I’ll remember this,’ he said, lifting the hand to gesture vaguely and then pulling me properly into the shape of him, so that my cheek brushed the ribbing of his jumper and my hair nestled like a carroty beard under the nook of his chin. It was another of those wonderful pinpricks of pleasure, but he didn’t say whether he meant the view, the group reassembling in the distance, the Reading Party as a whole, or even the pair of us standing together, and it was over in a second,
so it was hard to guess the significance.

  Briefly, an image sped by of Andy and me on the beach at Holkham in the days when we were still captivated by each other’s company. We’d stood together in much the same way, spray from the surf stinging our faces, and then he’d turned to kiss me – a long, sensual kiss that began with the taste of salt and lingered as our hair flicked around us. Only the yapping of the family dog at our feet had brought the clinch to an end.

  Too long since there’s been any romance, I thought; people like Jim and Mei had no idea how lucky they were. And then I remembered Gloria’s eyes and Loxton’s fussing, and before I knew it I’d said, ‘We should go – they’ll start looking,’ and pulled away.

  ‘Phooey,’ he replied – it was that word again. ‘They’ve got other things on their minds.’

  But he too stepped aside, the warmth went and we walked back across the sand, heads bent and with 15 feet between us, as if we’d had a tiff, which I suppose in a way we had.

  Our troupe arrived at the house with less than five minutes to go before library conditions resumed. The climb up the cliff had been arduous and perhaps we’d dawdled a bit on the home stretch – certainly the fourteen of us were more spread out than usual, the swimmers in their damp clothes straggling at the rear with their groupies. Loxton was clearly rattled and there was a hint of that vengeful hypochondria in his repeated fussing about the danger of chills, an old-womanish edge even greater than before, perhaps because he was embarrassed by all that flesh or once again at odds with me. He was brusque in the kitchen about the resumption of celebratory chat, packing the swimmers off for hot baths and a change of clothes, overruling Priyam – with whom he was normally so gentle – as she put mugs on the table. The two of us would do another tea round, he decreed; everyone else should do whatever they needed to do and then settle back at their desks.

  On impulse, I suggested we might simply push everything back half an hour, which would give the bathers time to recover and the rest of us time to draw breath. Loxton seemed surprised, annoyed even, at the intervention. We had a tart exchange that might even have got heated had it not been for the presence of others. In fact, he only conceded the point when some of them voiced their support – notably Tyler, actually, who was to cook with Chloe and said they’d welcome a few minutes to plan. By then Loxton’s tetchiness was looking ungracious – and although we all tried, with the ceremony of tea and the cake Mei and Jim had chosen, we seemed to have forfeited the normal convivial slide into the late afternoon. There was no lounging around as a group; everything was fragmented and abrupt.

  Back in the morning room, the mood had changed from the peaceful start to the day. Eddie decamped for the appeal of a larger sofa, which left me stuck with Rupert, who looked tense. Gloria appeared, bringing with her a waft of pine bath suds, her hair freshly damp – brazen again. Then Rupert switched to Eddie’s place, which meant a third change. Plus there was a tautness in the air, what you might call ‘an atmosphere’, which made it even harder to concentrate.

  The descent into evening didn’t help. The windowpanes became shiny black mirrors, amplifying the slightest movement. Gloria and Rupert were unnaturally still until a flurry of something or other – secret messages I suppose. Distracted by the reflections, I got up and closed the curtains, flinching as each set of wooden rings scraped the length of the rods, ready to say sorry, except that neither of them raised their heads.

  The tiniest noises became infuriating. Being linguists, they each had a dictionary and, periodically, something to look up. I hadn’t noticed the pattern in the morning; that afternoon, it was as if they did nothing but search for words. Every time I was conscious of the pages turning and the slide of a finger down the leaf; could almost hear the gap while the definition was digested; was distracted equally by the sound of a jotting and the absence of note-taking; noticed again as the dictionary was pushed away or put down. I kept straining to work out what was going on. Was it more passing of messages? Who knows.

  When I wasn’t focused on the mood and the sounds, clips from the drama on the beach replayed themselves in my head: the enviable moment of Gloria’s abandonment, running in a curve like a footballer after a goal; the bleakness of Martin’s barbed reference to Sir Walter Raleigh; Jim’s look of embarrassment and pride as he shivered in his Y-fronts, his skin so pale it was almost grey; Mei rushing around with the towels.

  I kept seeing, too, Tyler’s body poised, elongated, arm stretched aloft in that extraordinary freeze before it snapped down in the act of bowling; the yelling of my side, during our innings, after he flung the bat into the sand in front of me and sprinted away, when I, watching the way he ran, forgot it was my turn; the moment we all realised that Gloria was going to go in, when everyone turned to watch and I caught his reaction – that impulse to join them which I had felt too. Most insistent of all was that arm on my shoulder, rocking me in oh-so-briefly. What had that meant, why say ‘Phooey’ again, and, above all, what was I doing, gliding towards waters into which you shouldn’t go?

  Round and round the spool went, wasting the reading hours.

  Within minutes of the gong, Gloria, Rupert and I were milling in the hall with everybody else, waiting for the temporary logjam in the corridor to subside. It reminded me of College before dinner. For a period there was always a crowd of students waiting to go into Hall, trying to be heard above each another, wanting to sit with their mates. You half expected to see Loxton, like one of the stewards, counting us through.

  Did we get through the meal faster than usual? It certainly seemed so. For the first time there was proper political argument, a ferocious, rapid-fire discussion about unionism, unofficial strikes and the absence of The Times the previous week, which then moved on to the Grunwick dispute, sweatshops and the right to union recognition. Probably we were all a bit ‘tired and emotional’, still drunk on the events of the afternoon, or maybe it was Chloe’s chilli con carne, which suffered from an overdose of paprika – there was a surfeit of something. It wasn’t clear to me how the row started, but Rupert certainly goaded it once it got underway: there he was down the other end of the table raising this issue and that, as if he’d been charged with involving them all, and then lobbing in remarks that seemed calculated to provoke. He riled Priyam by referring to the ‘strikers in saris’, which she said was demeaning, unworthy even of hack journalists. But that was predictable enough. The surprise was when the reaction came from Barnaby – normally so steady, phlegmatic and unrufflable. Suddenly he leant forward.

  ‘Stop playing bloody games, Rupert. All this point-scoring, as if it’s just a matter of good or bad argument, all form and no content, loftily seen from above. It’s not. And you’re not some great arbitrator in the sky. You have to take a position, like everyone else. Yes to picketing or no?’ He was compelling; I was proud of him.

  Jim, who’d been fiddling with the cuff of his jumper, tensed visibly, waiting.

  Tyler, sitting between the two of them, pushed his chair back to give them space.

  ‘Perhaps I don’t have a position,’ said Rupert slowly, scoring the peel of an orange into neat quadrants and stripping them off, so the tang of the zest mixed with the honeyed smell of molten wax.

  Jim pushed his plate away. ‘That’s a luxury some people can’t afford – and I don’t mean only those who walked out, the women on twenty-five pounds a week. Inflation’s always hurt the poor most of all – Sarah could tell you that. Anyway it’s not true, is it, about not having a position? Barny’s right. Of course you have one. Everybody does.’

  There was no time to work out when I’d said anything about inflation and the poor: Rupert was again underway. ‘I don’t see why. One doesn’t have to have a position on everything. Ask Tyler – he’s great at avoiding them.’

  But Jim ignored him. ‘In the real world you do – people have to decide whose side they’re on. We’ve got whole towns out of work in Wales. Going on the dole isn’t what you do in the holidays, not if you�
�re a miner. This isn’t about smarty-pants disputation – which Tyler doesn’t do, by the way. It’s about making ends meet and it’s no joke.’

  Rupert pulled at the pith on the last quarter and flicked it towards the pile at the base of the candlestick. ‘I never said it was.’

  ‘But you behave as if you think it is. Look at you with your fucking orange, airily above the fray.’ Jim leant over the table and plucked the piece of fruit from Rupert’s hand, where he’d been holding it between his fingertips, knife at the ready to peel away the pith. ‘You should try it for real. There are people back home for whom it’s not a matter of neat dissection, making the perfect cut and tidying the skin. They need the bread, Rupert. You may not, but they do.’

  ‘Who said anything about money? I never mentioned the subject. If you’d stop being so chippy …’

  ‘Don’t you dare judge me.’ Jim was suddenly incandescent.

  Rupert froze, blade upwards. The room fell silent. Mei’s head had lowered, as if shrinking from the raised voices; Loxton’s was alert like a bird that has heard the wrong sound.

  My mind flipped to my conversations with Jim, in our tutorials and in the van. Something had suggested an austerity of experience, even downright poverty, though he’d never seemed ‘chippy’ to me. But he’d always had that boy-of-the-backstreets look about him; easy to imagine him in a Cardiff brawl. Could he lose it completely? Would he lose it now?

  Within seconds I was on my feet and leaning across the table: ‘Whoooah!’

  I took the knife from Rupert and the orange from Jim. ‘Stop it, both of you. You’re as bad as each other and you’re not to ruin our evening.’

  I pushed the naked fruit to Gloria. ‘Here. Pass it on, would you?’

  Jim was still white, his lips drained of colour. He swiped his arm across the bit of table in front of him, sending a spoon clanging into a jug. ‘I don’t want any of his bloody orange.’