Tim set a swift march to the station, not wanting to take the chance of ending up on the same train as Nick. In the carriage, he pulled out his phone, finger hovering over Bill’s name on his contacts list.
The landscape passed in a blur of blue outlines of trees, a white flash of low neat cottages, a dim grey field, his own troubled reflection in the glass.
Chapter 24
(Easter Term × Week 1 [≈ third week of April])
The St John’s crypts were echoing and dank, smelling of mould and decay, the vaulted ceiling of the New Court colonnade dispiriting and clammy. The golden stone of the building opposite was breached by gorgeous ogee arches filled with lead-light windows, but Nick turned his back on it all, breaking into a run down the steps and on to the path around the lawn. He ignored the aptly nicknamed ‘Wedding Cake’ frontage of New Court as he cut to the right and then around towards the wooded stretch by the back gates.
Whatever it was that had always made it so easy to focus on his studies, push his worries away and lose himself in the work, had disappeared. Suddenly his revision seemed to have multiplied a thousandfold and the time until the exams seemed both too long and too short. He couldn’t even hope to scratch the surface of his revision timetable in the weeks left, though he never seemed to do anything but pore over his notes, pen in hand.
The days had started to merge, endless and fleeting, filled with sick anxiety stretching forwards, stretching back. Even with Professor Gosswin’s book resting on his knees, the cover familiar and comforting under his hands, everything felt wrong: subtly, intangibly wrong.
When he woke in the mornings, he wanted to roll over and start the night all over again: just sleep until it was over and he wouldn’t have to watch the days slip past, knowing that he was moving closer and closer to disaster because, out of the blue, he just couldn’t do it any more.
Couldn’t figure out the problems.
Couldn’t see through the fog in his head, as if everything had become blunted and blurred.
Wild anemones glowed around the lush green of bluebell stems slowly creeping out of the ivy. Primroses tinted the banks. Under the trees along Queensway, following the little clay path along the Backs, crocuses dusted the ground like a purple carpet. He ran up the long drive to Trinity, stopping short of the bridge, then walked the avenue in reverse, trying to focus on the daffodils in the long grasses, the magenta and pink of cyclamen ringing the trees, the heart-aching tenderness of silver-green tulip stems spearing up from the ground.
He ended up outside King’s Chapel without consciously making the decision to head there, though he’d been meaning to go to Evensong since the start of the year. He stepped tentatively through the side door, expecting to be asked for ID, but no one questioned him as he followed a group of students up the aisle only for his steps to falter as he looked up and up and up; fluted white columns blossomed into an immense fan-vaulted ceiling so detailed it looked as if it were made of lace turned to stone. Stained-glass windows glowed like gemstones, rising from floor to ceiling, caught in the most delicate stone tracery he had ever seen. If the chapel was beautiful from the outside, it was like nothing on earth inside, making something deep in his chest hum half with pain and half with joy, his eyes stinging as if he might cry.
A jostling crowd caught him up and carried him through the arch in the centre of the intricate wooden rood screen into the top end of the chapel. Parting around a lectern, the students filed into the dark pews to either side of the aisle, facing inwards. Against the walls the panelling stretched up the height of two men, each seat divided from the next by a thin pillar of carved wood.
He was staring up at the ceiling when the choir arrived so that one moment he was only dimly aware of people moving around the chapel and the next the music had started. The boy sopranos soared above the organ, echoing into the highest reaches of the ceiling, and for a little while everything else faded away and the world became suddenly bigger and brighter, where for weeks it had been growing dimmer and smaller.
At first it had happened slowly, quietly, so that he was barely aware of it, but some time in the last fortnight it had all started spinning out of control, spiralling inwards into a tight curl of misery. At night he dreamed of standing amid the shattered glass of the fish tank, scooping the tiny desperate bodies into the water only for it to keep draining away, slipping through his fingers: an ending he should somehow have been able to change. It wasn’t the wisdom to know that the past couldn’t be changed that was the problem. It was finding the courage to change the present when there was nothing left to hold on to.
Doubled over, coughing his way through his first revision supervision, Nick found he didn’t have the faintest idea where to start with the problem in front of him.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Dr Davis, trying to sound sympathetic, though the moue of distaste and the way he shifted away told a different story. ‘There. Take a deep breath now …’
Nick gritted his teeth to stop himself from snarling that he was having trouble enough taking any sort of breath. He pressed his fist against his breastbone, choking back another round of hacking coughs.
Susie made a sympathetic face, while Frank rolled his eyes to the ceiling.
‘OK, Nick. Let’s try again. What principles might help, do you think?’ Dr Davis asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Nick gritted out, rubbing at his forehead. ‘I just don’t know.’
Dr Davis sighed. ‘I know you’re full of cold, but try to stay calm, Nick, and tell me what’s confusing you.’
‘Everything.’
Frank snorted. ‘Lo, how the mighty have fallen,’ he teased, though with a shade too much satisfaction for it to be friendly. ‘Even I could do that question.’
‘Well, good for you. There had to be once this year you could do something I couldn’t, especially as I’ve got the flu.’
‘Now, gentlemen,’ said Dr Davis, flapping his hands between them. ‘Now, now, that isn’t the way to get along. Since this is a revision supervision, and Nick’s clearly sub-par, why don’t you get us started, Frank?’
Frank flashed Nick a look of triumph that turned into grimace. ‘Oh come on, Nick. Don’t cry about it, OK?’
‘I’m not! Don’t your eyes water when you choke?’ Nick gasped, hunching his shoulders over the pain in his chest, trying to swallow the urge to keep coughing. He lost the battle, curling over the tearing rattle of his breath. Although the sun was out, the air was cold, burning his lungs as if it were water. By the time he managed to draw breath, there was sweat on his forehead and his hands were shaking. He turned away to spit something foul into a tissue.
When he turned back, Frank was pulling a disgusted face. ‘Not to be unsympathetic, but didn’t your mother ever tell you to stay home when you’re making like Typhoid Mary?’
Nick shot to his feet, then tottered, closing his eyes as the room swooped around him. His ears rang.
A hand on his arm brought him back to the present. ‘Just shut up, OK?’ Susie was saying to Frank. ‘It’s not funny. No one’s laughing. I’m going to get Nick a taxi home. Back in a sec.’ She bent to gather his stuff into his bag and slung it over her shoulder before he had a chance to protest. ‘Come on,’ she said, tugging at his arm. ‘You need to be in bed. Actually, you need to get some antibiotics, ’cos if that’s not a chest infection then I don’t know what is, but let’s start with getting you home.’
His legs felt strange as they made their way downstairs. He blinked in the sunlight as his eyes watered again. His skin itched with heat as if he had a fever, but he knew he didn’t because his stomach was full of shivers and there seemed to be an icicle lodged between his ribs.
When Susie guided him to one of the window seats in the p’lodge, he slumped gratefully down, pressing his burning forehead against the cool of the wood and wrapping his arms about his body.
‘Nick?’
He looked up to find Susie leaning over him, one hand on his knee. ‘Do you think you’re O
K to walk to the end of KP by yourself? The taxi should be there by the time you are.’
Nick blinked at her, nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he rasped.
She gave him a tight little smile. ‘If I weren’t making such a muck of this year, I’d come with you, but I really need the extra supervision time.’ She sighed. ‘Feel better, OK?’ she said, hooking his bag over his shoulder. ‘And make sure your dad takes you to the doctor. Forget about revision for now. You’ll get a First in your sleep.’ She patted his arm then hurried back into College.
Sighing, then regretting it when he had to fight not to start coughing again, Nick stumbled out of the p’lodge and started wearily up Senate House Passage. He had to push his way through a crowd of tourists who seemed determined to stand across the whole street while they examined a piece of gutter with loud astonishment and a red-carpet-worthy barrage of photo-flashes. Hoping fervently that the tour guide was spinning them some dreadful fib, Nick shoved his way through and practically fell out the other side, turning into KP with relief until the wind forced him to stop and hunch over the catch in his throat as the urge to cough needled the inside of his chest.
The taxi driver glared as he opened the door and tossed his bag inside. ‘Derran?’ he demanded.
‘Yeah.’ Nick managed to croak out the address, then curled sideways into the seat, debating whether he could bother to tell the driver to turn down the radio before his head exploded.
Outside the house, he fumbled a note out of his wallet, told the driver to keep the change, and let himself in, dropping his bag in the hall and practically toppling on to the sofa. The house felt strange with Tim still away in America at his sister’s wedding. Michael had made it home most nights, but usually not until the last train: at best they spoke for ten minutes in the kitchen before going to bed, and another ten in the morning before Michael hurried back to the station.
‘But it’s not like I have to get used to there never being anyone home, like after each time Gerry stayed over while Dad was away,’ he mumbled to the sofa cushions, turning his back on the room, on the empty house. ‘Tim’ll be back this evening. Have to pull yourself together before then. Gotta stop being such a baby. You fell in the drink and got too cold. Picked up a dose of Cam Fever, ’cos if you can get it from the river, you can get it from the ditch. People get Cam Flu all the time. ’S not like you’re dying.’
But it didn’t feel like any cold he’d had before. He couldn’t have described exactly what was wrong, only that the world had become narrow and grey, and the desperation he’d felt building during his failed attempts to revise was now despair. He couldn’t seem to push himself like he always had before. There didn’t seem to be anything left. It was all just too much: one thing after another, always a fresh catastrophe around the corner. And it looked like the next one was going to be failing his exams.
Closing his eyes, he rubbed at the coldness in his chest and willed the world away.
The sound of the front door racketing into the wall woke him. Rolling over on to his back, he blinked blindly up at the ceiling. Light flooded the room, making him squeeze his eyes shut.
‘Nick! I assumed no one was home.’
‘Dad?’ Sitting up, rubbing sleep from his eyes, Nick heard the stereo come on – a CD of Chopin nocturnes – as he accidentally pressed the remote, lost somewhere under the sofa cushions. He winced as he watched Michael catch his foot on the strap of his discarded bag and stumble. ‘Sorry.’
‘Why the hell did you leave it in such a stupid place?’
‘What are you doing home? I thought you were off to the States later today?’
‘I am, only I had to make this brilliantly timed detour when I got a call from College saying you’d had some sort of meltdown in your supervision.’
Nick groaned, running his hands through his hair. ‘It wasn’t a meltdown. I was just sick, struggling to focus.’ He had to stop to curl over the burning in his chest, hissing air through his teeth as he tried to suppress the urge to cough.
‘Apparently your supervisor was concerned about your mental state. Said that you were unusually upset to be having difficulty with your revision work.’
‘The guy’s an idiot,’ Nick snapped. ‘They’re all just waiting for me to get frustrated so that they can throw up their hands and say I’m too immature. It’s nothing that Frank and Susie haven’t done half a dozen times each. I didn’t yell.’ A flutter of breath. ‘Didn’t cry.’ He grunted, pressing the heel of his hand to the centre of his chest.
‘Well you must have done something inappropriate. And apparently you hadn’t done your supervision work—’
‘Wasn’t there a week during college you had the flu and didn’t manage to get your work done?’
‘It’s not the same, Nick! You know that. You, of all people, can’t just refuse to do something because you’re under the weather. Especially with exams coming up.’
Nick stared wordlessly up at him.
Michael threw his hands in the air. ‘I don’t have time for this, Nick. I’m meant to be on the way to the airport!’
‘Well, go then!’
Michael huffed out an angry sigh. ‘I thought I’d come home and we’d have a reasonable conversation, but you are clearly in the middle of some tantrum. When you stop feeling sorry for yourself, we’ll talk on the phone and I’ll figure out something to say to your supervisor.’
‘Whatever,’ Nick mumbled, rubbing at the pain in his forehead.
‘If you’re going to be like that, there’s no point my wasting any more time here. I’ll call when I land. Just … take some paracetamol and some Lemsip and go to bed.’
‘You can’t have paracetamol and Lemsip together: Lemsip’s paracetamol-based too. Or do you want me to overdose myself?’
The words were out before he’d realised what he was saying.
Chopin’s final nocturne grew frantic, pleading, in the background.
‘That was uncalled for. I’ll talk to you when you’re prepared to be reasonable, not vicious.’
The door slammed.
Stumbling to his feet, wishing the floor would stop feeling like it was rocking, Nick felt his way along the furniture to the kitchen and guzzled a glass of water only to spit half of it out over his jeans as he doubled over coughing, feeling like his lungs were shredding.
Snatches of words whirled through his mind. Who had called from College? What had they said? It was like the walls were whispering, hissing to him about all the things he didn’t want to think about: the way he couldn’t work, couldn’t understand any of it any more; the way the one thing he’d always been able to count on was suddenly slipping through his fingers. Because he wasn’t going to get a First at all. He was going to fail his exams: fail them absolutely, irredeemably. And if he didn’t have that, then what was there?
He was halfway down the street before he realised he’d left the house. It was only when he reached the station that he understood that he desperately wanted Professor Gosswin. He skirted past the guards and stepped straight on to the train at the platform, letting it whisk him away from Cambridge into a world of vast flat fields, broken by oceans of waving marsh grass and reeds. Water glinted yellow as little footbridges fled from his carriage window.
Leaning his forehead against the blissful, blissful coolness of the glass, he stared out at the passing world. The train was freezing and he drew his legs up, wrapping his arms around himself as his stomach cramped with cold.
The walk to the nursing home had never seemed so long, bent over the awful ache in his chest, trying to fight back the shivers that seemed to come from deep inside.
The staff waved absently at him as they buzzed him in, letting him find his own way to Professor Gosswin’s room.
Her face was turned to the door, as if she’d been waiting for him. There was something like a smile on her face, though perhaps it was just the way the stroke had distorted her features. But he needed it to be a smile: needed her to be glad to see him. He sank to the floor
at her feet, pressed his forehead against her bony shin, and raised his fist to his mouth to hold back a sound of pain as he fought not to cough. Something in his chest made a sharp crackling sound like the slick plastic foil cut flowers come in.
Professor Gosswin’s thin fingers fluttered, shaking, on to the crown on his head, wound themselves into his hair.
He closed his eyes, letting the tears spill down his cheeks.
‘Nick dear, what on earth are you still doing here?’
Startled, Nick looked up to find one of the nurses bending over him.
‘You look like you’ve been fast asleep,’ she said. ‘I’d offer you a lift back to town if I wasn’t just on shift ten minutes ago, but there’s a train coming in about,’ she checked her watch, ‘fifteen minutes. You go on down to the station now. You don’t want to miss that one too.’
The room slid to the left, like it was rising up a steep wave, as he struggled to his feet. The edges of his vision darkened.
The nurse laughed as he staggered into the wall. ‘Better rub some life back into those legs before the pins and needles attack.’
She turned away, shaking her head as she lined up a series of pill pots on Professor Gosswin’s side-table. The Professor reached out a shaking hand.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ said the nurse, moving the pills out of reach. ‘I’m on to you. No more tiddlywinks with your medication.’
Looking back from the door, Nick saw Professor Gosswin turn in his direction with that maybe-smile on her face. Nick smiled back, then started down the corridor.
Outside, the evening air felt wonderful. The nursing home was always hot and stuffy but today it had been stifling. It was growing dark now, a bleak sort of sunset, the sky turning from threatening orange-grey to dirty blue-brown. For some reason, the walk to the station seemed to take half an hour, but he arrived with ten minutes to spare. It must have been a mistake with the clock because the train seemed to pull up instantly, hissing to a stop then percolating unpleasantly as it idled at the platform. Somewhere metal shrieked along metal, making everyone in the carriage cower.
House of Windows Page 21
