The Reading Party

by Fenella Gentleman

  Some of this furniture had been shoved aside and the mess cleared to the periphery, to create a clear space in the centre. Loxton sat facing inwards, his back to the light, a few sheets of foolscap neatly set out by his feet. Hugh was cross-legged on the floor opposite him, knees sticking out like open scissors towards the edge of the carpet, jacketless for once; Lyndsey was next to him, chatting more easily again – perhaps Barnaby had been wrong about the dynamic between them. Tyler, who looked different – remote, not like the last time at all – was discussing something with Rupert in one of the two short window seats, their mugs resting on the bottom of the window frame. Mei and Priyam were helping themselves to tea, which had been left on the table against the back wall where the literature was laid out each morning. Eddie was prancing around at their side doing part of a skit from a show he was taking to the Edinburgh Fringe, the biscuits on the plate in his hand sliding dangerously close to the edge, ready to cascade to the floor.

  ‘What have you got there?’ Hugh stood up, arms held out, to help me unload.

  ‘Aha! Wait and see.’

  I put the bags to one side on a pile of stacking chairs, the open ends facing the wall where nobody could see in, and sat down on the nearest sofa.

  Eddie paused mid-gesture to scrutinise, that arched eyebrow of his nearly as expressive as the Dean’s. No wonder he always talked about acting. Maybe he would direct later, when he’d calmed down?

  ‘That looks ominous, Sarah,’ he said. He shook the biscuits back to the centre of the plate, took a piece of shortbread and passed the rest on, freeing up his hands to pull his chair into position. ‘Like very fat exam papers. Are we being tough again? You don’t have to hand them out, you know.’

  They started reminiscing about their schooldays, arguing the toss: was it worse to have your teacher return marked essays to the class, naming and shaming the lazy or less able pupils, or to be forced to read them out loud to your tutor, even when they were shit? As the other students arrived, they picked up the thread, pitching in with ever-taller stories of embarrassment about academic performance. I was perplexed by the psychology of it; surely they would rather talk about something else with Finals looming – or did they avoid the subject the rest of the time?

  Eventually Hugh detached himself and joined me on my side of the rug. It was too serious to risk being jinxed, he said, and asked instead for advice on his application to do a DPhil. He’d got an interview at the University Offices about funding for his research, but was having doubts: he’d wanted to carry on – thought he couldn’t stop just at the stage where it all began to acquire meaning – but right now it felt as if the more you studied, the less you knew.

  I said everybody felt that from time to time. Didn’t his peers say the same?

  He agreed they did, but it didn’t seem to trouble them, and anyway there was also the business of spending so much time in the same place. Lyndsey was set on staying in Oxford, but hers had been a three-year course; Tyler was now having doubts, and he’d only done two. ‘Your views are always refreshing,’ he said. Should he take a twelve-month break, since he hadn’t had a gap year?

  That appeal for insight was troubling: I wasn’t sure how to live up to it. And the news about Tyler was distracting. I didn’t know what it meant.

  Jim was the last to come in, still in that same pair of jeans – or very like. By now we’d formed a loose circle, which shifted to let him in between Barnaby and Martin. When he sat down, unwittingly the centre of attention, Gloria made a remark about living the life of Riley while the rest of them sweated. What did he do all day? There was an outburst of laughter, teasing faces turning to Mei.

  Loxton started signalling to me – we were one short. Immediately I knew.

  ‘Has anybody seen Chloe?’ I asked. Blank faces.

  Gloria put down her tea. ‘She’s split – not coming.’

  I was shocked. ‘Any explanation?’

  But Gloria had nothing to add.

  Register completed, Loxton was brisk, launching straight into the accounts. He reiterated the terms of the endowment, reminded us of the £1 a day cap and reeled out a meticulous record of what the kitty had spent. Remarkably, despite the general profligacy – presumably he meant the pub or all those Easter eggs – we had ended the week in credit. He had taken an executive decision to devote that to a celebratory gateau, which we could consume now; the remaining small change would be donated to the scouts’ gratuities, given that they had so kindly supplied us with tea. He understood there was a small memento, which would be dispensed by ‘my friend here’ – that was me – before we all departed, but that was a private gift, not to be confused with expenditure from ‘the pot’.

  I hadn’t noticed the cardboard box from the café, tucked behind Loxton’s chair, which he was now showing round. It was a Sachertorte, so dark it was almost black; Tyler had hesitated over it when we had tea. I couldn’t help but look to see his reaction. He caught my eye and smiled, then bent his head to speak to Lyndsey. At least we’d acknowledged each other. Had anyone seen?

  Priyam cut the cake for Loxton – had she helped him procure it? – and dispensed neat slices that reeked of dark chocolate and the faintest whiff of apricot. Their mutual affection made more sense to me now: perhaps some instinct was at play there, a registering of absent family even if neither of them knew the details. No wonder she’d fussed about his celebratory meal and no wonder he’d patted her hand during the music – they were fond, like father and daughter. Now he was defending her use of napkins, saying that if we were going to look at photos we ought to keep our fingers clean, and she was beaming back at him, relieved. It was touching, almost painful to see.

  And look at photos we did. How we kept the piles separate I don’t recall – Mei, Tyler and Rupert had them, as well as Loxton and I, and the prints were pretty similar, although Rupert’s and Tyler’s were colour and one set was oblong not square. The best were those taken by Mei, who had done more snapping than I’d noticed. They were mostly of the people, taken at the kitchen table or when we were mucking about, and, as a record, had an air of completeness that the others’ lacked. Tyler’s weren’t particularly illuminating – they were more about the place – though he did have a shot of Barnaby and me taken from behind on that final walk, against the backdrop of the cliff edge, which was evocative, and of course there was the one with Loxton and me, though that wasn’t very good. Each batch prompted further exclamation and storytelling, a reliving of important moments, many of which I’d missed. There was even a photo of Tyler and me, heads bent together, talking over lunch – his finger raised to make a point, my spoon hovering over my soup bowl – which I didn’t remember being taken. I tried not to linger over it and lost my place in mid-conversation instead. Was that one from Mei’s set?

  ‘So what about those paper bags, Sarah? The suspense is killing me!’ Eddie never let up.

  I collected the packages and plonked them by my side on the sofa, where they slipped against me, crinkling. I would have passed them round in batches, but Priyam urged me to do everyone in turn so they could all see what the others got.

  ‘Okay. Martin, here’s yours!’ This was a guide to making real ale. Guffaws from all sides, and an offer to help with the drinking from Barnaby.

  ‘Lyndsey, the Rossetti is for you.’ Effusive thanks.

  ‘And this is for Mei.’ I looked around, forgetting where she was sitting. It had been hard to choose for the lawyers, especially her.

  Eventually I got to Loxton. His was the only book I’d bought from the glass case, a volume of autobiography by Arthur Wainwright, with a picture on the jacket of a lone man standing at the top of a craggy peak. I was nervous that the image might offend, though it seemed apposite.

  We watched as he eased it out of the bag and smiled gently at the lettering: Fellwanderer: the Story Behind the Guidebooks.

  ‘Do you know, Sarah,’ he said, raising the book in his hand for all to see, ‘I began reading Wainwright when I wa
s a young don, here at the College, helping Godfrey on one of his Reading Parties in the Lake District. He’d given me responsibility for organising the walks and I knew nothing about where to go. It was the year the first of those guides came out. That would make it …’ – and he paused, returning the book to his lap and looking at the blurb on the inside cover, his index finger running down the text – ‘… that would make it 1955, when Rose and I had just got married. I have all seven of them, but I’ve never had a copy of this.’

  There was a stunned silence, presumably because Loxton had never revealed anything so private before. Then Priyam started clapping – whether at the unexpected serendipity, the glimpse of Loxton’s domestic life, or the two of us for hosting the trip, I didn’t know – and others picked it up until everyone had joined in. It was a fine way to end.

  Tyler came over afterwards to thank me for The House of Mirth. It was a little awkward. We had a brief chat about Edith Wharton, whom he confessed he’d never read, and Lily Bart, whom I described as the saddest of fictional heroines, tragically compromised. He promised he’d take it home with him to the States, which was confusing, – did he mean in the summer or was he indeed not staying on? – but also rather moving: after all, she was an American writer; he could easily get a fresh copy there. Perhaps he’d been touched in his turn by my inscription, which was perfectly proper but fond.

  ‘Hey, good cake,’ he said, readying to go. ‘And that was right on,’ indicating Loxton with that slight turn of his upper body that made the back of my neck tingle. ‘You must have been pleased.’

  And I was, I really was. I knew he’d appreciate it.

  I worried about Chloe. The few students I felt able to ask were non-committal about her state of mind; she was living out, so I couldn’t drop by to see her, and there was no reply to my note about her book. I didn’t know who her current tutors were or who, if anyone, held the role of her moral tutor – an innovation that hadn’t yet taken off. Loxton said not to fuss – students dealt with pressure in different ways and, mostly, they got through in the end – but he agreed we should alert the Dean in case something was seriously amiss. It was his role to follow up, not ours.

  When later I came across him, the Dean was in ‘on duty’ mode, which meant he was patronising and pompous, just as I’d feared they’d all be when I first arrived at the College. He knew Chloe Firth from when she lived in as a Fresher, he reminded me; she was one of the women on whom he’d kept an eye during that first year. Consider it done. And he launched into a little homily about his thinking on pastoral care as the successor to being in loco parentis – all as if we’d never discussed it before. There were references to Adam Smith’s invisible hand and to exercising the lightest of touches. Poor Chloe, I thought; poor women; and, most of all, stupid me.

  It was unsatisfactory, but her well-being was what he’d have called ‘his patch’. Besides – and I could see Loxton’s argument – with so many students to watch over, you could only do so much. So I tried to stop thinking about Chloe and made only a mild overture to Barnaby, whose continued withdrawal concerned me. The rest of ‘my’ students – a notion now encompassing those from the Reading Party – I left to get on with it. A few took advantage of my open-door policy – Jim, for instance, which possibly meant more to me than it did to him, as there wasn’t much I could say on the matter of his girlfriend, and Martin, who said he was surrounded by tension and needed to escape – but mostly they looked after themselves.

  Perhaps I was just experiencing what my younger brother had talked about as a junior medic. It was that old trope that doctors had to learn to take an interest in a case history rather than in the patient as an individual. It wasn’t just that they needed a little distance to do a good job; it was also self-protection – they couldn’t function if they worried too much. There might even be something more: their progress up the career ladder depended on getting this balance right. Too clipped, and they were deemed to lack a good bedside manner; too concerned, and they were judged vulnerable. They all grappled with this conundrum, he’d said.

  I could see why, as it was the same in academia. You were meant to take a professional interest in the students but not to let it get personal. Be close enough to develop trust, but not so close that you risked betraying it.

  All of which was fine until you rocked the boat with an event like the Reading Party, which created new bonds and then deepened them all round. Tyler had joked in Cornwall that that was the point of it: it ‘refreshed the parts that other beers didn’t reach’, as the Heineken ad said. Not an analogy for the likes of Loxton – or even, perhaps, for me.

  I braved the question of balance with Loxton one evening when we chanced to sit next to each other at High Table. It was Friday and I knew his dissection of the issue would be accompanied by fastidious deboning of the sole on his plate, the debris from my poor reasoning put neatly to the side just like the offending portions of the fish. So I watched, fascinated, as we spoke. He began by removing the fringe at the extremities, so he had a neater shape; then he got down to the main body, lifting one fillet, then the other, so he could get to the spine; a quick look to check all was well, while I finished what I was saying; and then – voilà! – he lifted off the skeleton to reveal the two matching fillets in all their delicate purity.

  Leaning aside as our waitress removed the plate with the filigree of bones, he asked if I might be confusing things. Firstly, as we had discussed before, the point of the Reading Party was indeed the reading. The social side, after as well as before the arrival of women, was at most an unexpected boon. Take that away, and the event would still have served its function, but take away immersion in relevant texts, and it would have failed. With a gesture to Martin’s endless rehashing of Monty Python sketches, he even essayed a joke – the Reading Party would have ‘ceased to be’; it would be ‘an ex-Party’ – and gave me a fleeting smile.

  I waited as he paused to balance just the right amount of white flesh and spinach on his fork, and watched again as he retrieved his napkin from his lap and gave his thin lips a wipe.

  Secondly, regarding those unexpected extras. If I didn’t mind him saying so, this was surely another instance when it was important not to confuse roles and responsibilities. For the undergraduates, yes, the week might make or deepen friendships that lasted for years. But for ‘you and me’, the contact was necessarily fleeting. ‘We’ were there in the capacity of stewards, watching over the students’ progress while they were with us, nurturing and guiding them as best we could, and then, just as we had welcomed them at the start, giving them a kindly send-off at the finish.

  Here again there was a pause – not pointed; I’m sure there was no hidden meaning – that extended as he watched the replenishing of our glasses. He took a sip and leant back in his chair, arm still outstretched, the goblet slightly tilted so he could examine the quality, just as he’d shown us.

  As we contemplated the wine, I found myself imagining Loxton towards the end of one of his lectures, at the moment just before he reached the fullness of his argument, when all the strands of thought he had unfurled would briefly, simultaneously, be on magnificent display, waiting to be drawn together and resolved into a single strong position. How was it that a man content to appear so austere and grey could conjure such colour out of mere ideas? It was like watching ribbons on a maypole rise into multicoloured brilliance before descending gracefully down again.

  And, naturally, Loxton was about to draw it all together. The Reading Party, he reminded me, was only seven days – merely ‘a pinprick in the timeline of their lives’ – and it was important not to get it out of proportion. As tutors we hoped it would be important – just as we hoped our students’ time at the College would later prove to be significant – but whether it was or not was largely outside our hands. We could only create the conditions in which the students might flourish; the rest was down to them and to luck.

  He hesitated, picking at the capers left abandoned on
his plate. On reflection, he said, he didn’t like the word ‘luck’. He preferred to call it serendipity, the unfathomable confluence of timing and ingredients that allowed something truly special to emerge. Hard to define, especially for a philosopher – there was a little smile here – but one sensed it viscerally when it was there. However, our feelings on the subject were not the point. What mattered was how the students reacted. And then he delivered his punchline: we might never know whether Cornwall, or indeed the years of tutoring, had had any real impact on a given individual – they might not know themselves, for a decade or more. That was life. It was another of the uncertainties one had to live with.

  For a minute we sat together comfortably, saying nothing, looking over the long lines of the students beneath us, the twinkling lights on the tables, the pattern of the staff working their way up and down to remove the plates. It reminded me of that companionable moment when Barnaby and I sat on the clifftop, watching the waves, listening to the birds. There’d been a moment like that with Tyler too, lounging on the grass outside Carreck Loose one afternoon, absorbing it all, happy just to be.

  As the gap in the conversation lengthened I realised Loxton was waiting.

  ‘In that case, perhaps there are pinpricks and pinpricks?’ I asked, unsure yet what I was referring to and whether the thought was merely a tease. ‘Most are so small they are barely noticed; a few are large enough to make a difference to the picture overall?’