The Reading Party

by Fenella Gentleman

  ‘I assumed you’d gone away,’ I lied, paying for my apples, waiting for him to finish his purchase so as not to be rude. He was holding some daffs wrapped in a furl of paper still dripping with water: white with a trumpet of apricot. What man buys flowers unless for a woman? Who was she?

  Tyler picked up his pannier, rearranging things so the daffodils slid down behind a wodge of foolscap paper, and gave a wave to the stallholder, whom he seemed to know.

  ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Been here all the time. You?’

  How frustrating, I thought, before catching up with the question.

  ‘Me? Mostly here. I’ll be off to Norfolk at the weekend, but that’ll be it. You can get a lot done with nobody around.’

  Tyler nodded, patting the pannier. He fiddled with the change he’d put in the pocket of his jacket. It was the same tweedy affair he’d had with him in Cornwall, surprisingly soft to the touch; he’d worn it at dinner on our final evening, sitting next to me.

  I’d probably interrupted him – perhaps he was with one of the women I’d seen in the quad and didn’t like to say – but concern for his work still got the better of me.

  ‘Are those notes safe from the daffs? It would be too bad if they got wet.’

  Tyler smiled as he bent down to adjust his belongings; he must have remembered the scene. When we were together in the library, Lyndsey had knocked over her posy of wild flowers, and because Hugh too used a fountain pen, it had made a mess of his jottings.

  We were getting in the way of the queue, so I stepped aside, ready to move on. Really, the whole thing was too embarrassing.

  ‘Are you busy?’ he asked, straightening up again.

  ‘Well, I’ve been tidying that paper I was working on. Footnotes, bibliography, you know the sort of thing.’

  ‘No, I meant … are you doing anything right now?’ He waved his arm at nothing I could see. ‘Hey, maybe we could have a coffee. If we’re allowed?’

  ‘Allowed?’ This was annoying. I’d battled so long and hard with the concept. His use of the word took away the relief of him making the first step, which could otherwise have been held against me.

  ‘Oh, you know, staff fraternising with students and all that,’ he said. His Yankee poise slipped and he seemed faintly uncomfortable. ‘Like when I came to say “hi” but didn’t leave a message, or sending you that note, which had to be so brief – you’re all so careful about what is and isn’t “done”.’

  This was even more annoying. I didn’t mind the brevity of the note, but why couldn’t he have visited again, or told me he had? And in all my considering I hadn’t considered it put like that – as if it was merely a matter of British restraint. But what came out, as if ‘allowed’ didn’t merit any thought, was, ‘Oh, I don’t see why not.’ Followed, as soon as we moved away from the stall, by, ‘Anyway, no one’s around to see us.’

  Big mistake: that wasn’t the thing to say. Tyler might have done the asking, but my response made me complicit. We made our way down the side street, neither walking together nor separate, his bicycle wheeling awkwardly between us, and we couldn’t fill the gap in conversation. A near miss with a lamppost got us underway again but then our chat was banal. It would have been better to say ‘no’. The whole thing was more than uncomfortable – it was fundamentally wrong.

  And yet I didn’t backtrack.

  The café he’d suggested was popular with tourists – more a ‘town’ than a ‘gown’ place – because it was quaint and you were expected to have home-made cake, which was beyond most student budgets. I’d been there before, with a group of colleagues from the Faculty. We’d sat tucked away at a pine table between a pair of pews, where you could squeeze extra people amongst the patchwork cushions if they chanced to turn up. But now it was busy and Tyler and I had to take a little table in the middle – the pub kind with a cast-iron base, a round marble top and a pair of matching chairs – which was clearly meant for two and made us very visible. As we walked through, it was hard not to check who else was there, and every time the bell above the door tinkled through the hubbub, you wondered who the new arrivals were. Tyler didn’t seem bothered, but for me the conversation was conducted at two levels. The first was an awkward exchange with somebody I was a little too pleased to see, and the second an internal debate about what to say if we were spotted.

  I would have given a lot, at that moment, for quieter colouring. People say they envy hair like mine, but I often feel like a Belisha beacon.

  At least choosing from the menu gave us something to talk about. When we’d exhausted the relative merits of the various cakes on offer, we talked about a café in the market that displayed nothing in the window at all; then about the fruit and veg man, who’d been friendly when Tyler was finding his way around. After that, there threatened to be another lull. The ease of Cornwall had completely disappeared.

  I asked if he’d seen any of the other students. It was a poor choice of question – he said he assumed they’d all gone home or back to their digs. Anyway, this wasn’t the time to drop by – everyone was frantic, revising. Had I seen anyone? This was equally unfortunate: he was forgetting it wasn’t the same. No, I replied, it was surprising how little I bumped into the students in the vac; perhaps a tutor’s day ran to a different clock. Ouch.

  We started again after our order arrived. He asked about my work and I asked how he was getting on with his, and for twenty minutes or so, it can’t have been much more, we managed a conversation about things that genuinely interested us – me about Ivy Williams and the way her story linked to the rest of my research, the timeline as a whole; Tyler about moral philosophy, which was as close as he could get to doing jurisprudence. We swapped plates, so he got to taste a Victoria sandwich despite his claim that he didn’t like pips. As the cream and raspberry oozed, I made a joke about the change from our Carreck Loose teas and he laughed.

  For a few glorious moments, we had it back. I have no idea what I said – something else about Cornwall and the fun we had had – but the look he gave me was lovely.

  Then our waitress began to clear a neighbouring table and, panicking at the possibility of a further influx of customers, I asked for the bill. We paid – I made sure we went Dutch – and then got into a tangle, first about who should pull the table out of whose way and then about who should open the door, so by the time we were once again standing by his bike neither of us could say anything sensible. There must have been goodbyes – I really don’t remember, other than giving him a rough olive russet so he could try out my favourite apple. Then, although the logical thing would have been to accompany him halfway back to College, we set off in opposite directions.

  In fact, I did a huge circuit. Traipsed south through the noise and tat of Cornmarket and kept going down St Aldate’s until Christ Church and the vastness of Tom Quad, which always looked empty even when it wasn’t, and which you couldn’t cross quickly without running, which of course you never were. Went past the Picture Gallery, through the great stone arch and then down the narrow walk by Merton, which led to their playing fields and the water meadows beyond. Stopped to sit on one of those wooden benches, grainy and green-tinged, where you could watch the geese pecking about and looking self-important, or follow the lines of the gnarled roots of the trees pushing up through the grass, and wished that he was there to lean on. It was almost as bad as sitting by the lake on campus at York at the wrong time of year, with only the greylags for company, staring at that featureless fountain and smelling that fishing-net smell, save that in Oxford you might at least continue down a real river, where the colourful barges and the swish of the rowers suggested life carrying on as normal, leading elsewhere. But even that respite, and then the grace of Magdalen and the deer, failed to restore me.

  All the while I needled away at the obstacles, trying again to find a way out. To hell with it, I wanted to say to all the objections, what was the problem with having a cup of tea?

  Except of course that it wasn’t just a cup of t
ea. If it had been, it wouldn’t have been so hard to resist. It irritated me afresh that men had ignored such scruples for years – why shouldn’t women do the same? But Jenny had been right to caution. There was a line – or a succession of lines, marking increasing levels of incrimination – that women just couldn’t afford to cross. Whether men crossed them was immaterial. It was a matter of realpolitik – the penalty for male and female transgressions wasn’t the same. To put it bluntly, for a woman an affair with a student – even one you weren’t teaching – was taboo of a different order, more than unwise, a risk it wasn’t worth taking. And I’d been culpable from the beginning: minor flattery about my book and I’d succumbed. If I hadn’t laughed about Loxton’s script, inviting flirtation, we might never have had that early conversation; even the collision had had an element of coquetry – I’d known as I bent for my papers that my t-shirt would gape.

  When I got back to the Gatehouse, dusk was approaching. Usually this seemed an entrancing time – the grass in the front quad calmer, no longer its brilliant green; the sky a deep blue, almost indigo; the creamy glow from occupied rooms warming patches of stonework; artificial light pooling gold by the staircases. Now it seemed to snub me, as if saying, ‘Still here? Still debating?’

  I went home for the bank holiday, hoping for sunny diversion.

  But it turned out the boys might not be coming. That put a pall on the start of the weekend, as if a sea fret had descended. Then too many of my parents’ friends were invited over, making me feel like an exhibit. And when I did get Mum and Dad to myself, it was unsatisfactory. Mum asked if there was anyone ‘special’ – even wove in a reference to the Dean – which meant I remonstrated and she got upset. Then Dad said, ‘You could try to be less combative,’ which spoilt our long walk together.

  My elder brother did turn up in the end. He drove down for Easter Sunday, producing a sweetheart for the first time – one of the lab technicians – which meant we were on best behaviour. I was pleased for him, but still a little disappointed. She was nice enough, but very much a traditional wife in the making – when one of the few female scientists came up in conversation, she said she couldn’t do what ‘women like her’ did, ‘risking their happiness for their careers’. Of course Mum thought she was charming; even Dad was rather taken.

  My younger brother was on duty at Barts, so he missed the chance to voice an opinion. Not that he’d have shared my view: from what I’d gathered he was carrying on much as he’d done at medical school – getting drunk and sleeping around, treating the nurses badly. When I suggested he might reform, he complained that he ‘didn’t phone home to be lectured’. Out came the same old line about feminists taking things too seriously – it might have been that awful postmortem with the Dean on New Year’s Day – and again no way to respond without compounding the ‘error’.

  Upstairs in my room, pondering the criticisms, only the view was consoling – the dark of the reed beds familiar and beautiful in the moonlight. But standing there made me think about Tyler again. It was too much like watching by the window at Carreck Loose, with the palms swaying, wondering if he was doing the same on the floor below.

  I was back in Oxford by the middle of April. Checking my reading pile for height, there – still! – was the box with Godfrey’s journal. It annoyed me to have it glowering, vying for attention with tomes related to my research. I tried tucking it away in a less visible stack – a trick that occasionally worked – but it wouldn’t leave me alone. Besides, Loxton would expect it back before long.

  In my penultimate week of freedom, it got the better of me. I’d returned from a late lunch to find a message from the Dean chalked on the piece of slate by my door for all to see, saying he couldn’t make King Kong that evening, as if it had been me who’d suggested that ridiculous film. Anyway, that gave me the opportunity. When it got dark I drew the curtains, turned the bar heater on and settled down in a chair with a lager to read the journal properly.

  Once you got the hang of it, deciphering Godfrey’s script wasn’t much of an obstacle – it was much easier than Loxton’s – and reading his jottings didn’t take that long. Some bits I skimmed, like the horticultural detail and the topographical references. Much more interesting were the glimpses of social history, as Loxton had suggested. Even then a significant number of boys came from grammar schools in the north of England, as the ‘bible’ showed they still did. And it seemed the men went from one male environment to another without the ‘fairer sex’ – Godfrey really did use that language – intruding. Until, that is, the references to Loxton.

  According to one of the few personal remarks in the entire volume, in 1949, when Loxton must have become some kind of postgraduate, he was in danger of letting the side down. It wasn’t immediately obvious why: perhaps Godfrey didn’t like to document the offence, or the mere allusion was enough of a reminder. In any event, it wasn’t until the final page for that year that I found the explanation. Loxton was ‘moony’ and the person he was moony about was a woman called Rose.

  A woman! That complicated things. Godfrey was jealous!

  On I read, wondering if Rose was a friend of the family or a more recent acquaintance and, if so, how Loxton had met her. There was no reference to her the second time Loxton accompanied Godfrey, so it began to seem that she was an aberration. But then she was back again in 1951, mentioned because her letters pursued them to the Lakes. After that, both she and Loxton disappeared from the narrative until a reference to their being ‘betrothed’ in 1953.

  I stared and then flicked the pages faster: they had bit parts as ‘Dr and Mrs Loxton’ in an entry for the following year, when Rose suggested she and Dennis host the reunion – an offer that Godfrey must have refused, because it took place in College as usual.

  Two years later a new name arrived as Godfrey’s sidekick on the trip, alongside a caustic remark about how fast the married Fellows shed their responsibilities. Another few pages – by now I was barely skimming – the journal stopped.

  Loxton married!

  Had I said it aloud? Suddenly there was bile at the back of my throat, a reflux strong enough to make me swallow hard and reach for my glass. This small but momentous piece of information upended everything. Married? Loxton?

  I stared down at the front of the volume, trying to take it in. So he wasn’t what he appeared to be: not even a bachelor.

  But Loxton courting? Loxton as part of a couple? Loxton in love? This was too big a stretch. It was a completely different picture of the man, just when I thought he’d come into focus.

  Besides if he’d been married then, as the journal said, why was he not married now? Godfrey wouldn’t have been wrong on a matter like marriage and, if he had been, Loxton would surely have pointed it out. If anything, Loxton must have assumed his marital status was common knowledge.

  Suddenly, things were explained that hadn’t made sense before. The tea service, for example. Of course – it would have been a wedding present! Rose probably chose it and they would have used it ‘for best’ when they had visitors. If she were no longer at home, it probably would get more use in College. No wonder Loxton had brought it in.

  But then, if Rose were alive, why wouldn’t she have things like the china and the inlaid tray? So what had happened? Were they separated, divorced, or – not to put too fine a point on it – was she dead? And what about children? Would Loxton turn out to be a father too?

  The facts, at least, could be established by asking a straight question of a colleague – the Mediaevalist, say. Or the Dean, though on reflection he’d been grossly selective in his briefings. You couldn’t trust someone who gave you all that stuff about the intelligence services and nothing about this; it was almost as if he’d set out to mislead me.

  But my error of judgement was much more problematic – how could I have been so obtuse?

  I rolled up my sleeve, feeling for the troublesome spot, checking for itches. On reflection, nobody had misinformed me about Loxton. In fact, no
one had actually said whether he was married or not – the subject had never come up, even when Tyler and I were in the chapel at Carreck Loose, sharing what we knew about Godfrey. No, it was me who had leapt to conclusions unaided – that single men of a certain age would be bachelors, probably homosexual like my uncle. The urge to be enlightened had spawned its own prejudice.

  I rubbed harder at my elbow where the skin was prone to crack and flicked the pages again, relief that I hadn’t made a fool of myself with Tyler vying with the urge to find a let-out. Such a simple piece of information – why had nobody taken the trouble to fill me in?

  All those examples of being wrong-footed by the College, usually over some procedural matter that no one had thought to explain. The Warden had said Loxton was hard to read, but he could so easily have given me a clue. As for the Dean, who’d affected to be my ally, posing as mentor but being nothing like – that was really unkind. He’d been a lousy lover too, every move a calculation. What had I seen in him?

  The problem was, I was just as culpable. Had I revealed more than the essentials about my private life? I had not. I’d kept even the Warden’s wife at a distance, and she’d been too polite to probe. It was a clear case of double standards: I was in no position to criticise.

  I went in search of an aspirin from the little cupboard above the loo, and swilled it down from the tumbler. It tasted unpleasant, but that might have been the residue of toothpaste. Either way it meant another grimace.

  Back in my chair, the full train of thought crept up on me. This was worse than any ordinary misjudgement; I’d tripped myself up as a historian.

  How often had we been lectured, as undergraduates, to leave prejudice behind, to look for what our sources told us rather than what we expected them to say, to try – like scientists – to disprove hypotheses before adopting them as working theory? But in relation to Loxton there had been no testing at all, just wild guesses and extrapolations, one error of interpretation piled upon another. These were elementary mistakes. Had a student of mine made them, I would have been merciless. Like Loxton, in fact – forensic in the dissection. I had no conceivable excuse.