by Amanda Coe
In the first month there had at least been exams—Mods—running alongside all of this, but now they were over and enjoyment was unconfined. Nigel slightly regretted the lack of an excuse to stay in the library even a little of the time, but the library, so crammed with territorial, hollow-eyed finalists for most of the year, was now deserted, the liberated finalists having preceded the first-years in abandonment to all this noisy pleasure. Despite spending his mornings asleep (in common with most members of the college), the days were sadistically long. Work had distracted him from his failure to extract any value from Oxford apart from the pale appreciation of his law tutors for his uninspired reliability in producing his weekly essays. This apart, he may as well have been studying law anywhere else in the country, redbricked or concreted, although when he was feeling particularly desperate he reminded himself that value would be added once he came to the stage of applying to law firms, so long as he did himself justice in exams. He also reminded himself of how very proud he assumed he had made his mother, Auntie B and Louise.
He was, though, feeling particularly desperate, which was why he had accepted Toby’s sister’s invitation to the picnic at St Hilda’s. Entering the porter’s lodge after a doctor’s appointment—he had been wondering if he had a virus and the brisk GP had told him that he was probably drinking too much and not eating properly—Nigel had almost missed the note in his pigeonhole, mixed in with photocopied fliers for garden plays and Undercroft bops, a scrawl on a torn half-sheet of pale green notepaper. The hurried writing, its comely, feminine flow, was enough to provoke fantasies of ending the evening in Toby’s sister’s narrow St Hilda’s bed. Her name was Zoë, and she was in her second year. They had met just once, when Toby had visited Oxford the previous term (Hilary), on a break from the London crammer where his parents had sent him after he had tanked his A-levels at St Christopher’s. Toby had brought her along with him when he had arranged to meet Nigel for a drink at the Eagle and Child.
Zoë was almost as tall as her brother, with the same hectic complexion but apparently none of his good nature. In common with all the girls he had met at Oxford, her wrists and knuckles were occluded by her overstretched jumper sleeves, the excess of which she kept gathered into each palm, as if she was either perpetually cold or—less likely—shy. She had barely stayed to finish her half (which Nigel had paid for), annoyed about some unfathomable but clearly boyfriend-related arrangement that she accused Toby of fouling up by arriving late, and had left abruptly after making a call from the pub’s payphone, borrowing the change to do so from Nigel, along with a further two pounds for the cigarette machine. So it was surprising to be invited to bring a bottle, ‘pref sparkling’, to her picnic. There was a hand-drawn map at the bottom of the sheet, guiding him to a riverside spot behind the St Hilda’s grounds.
‘Any difficulties with girls?’ the GP had asked him, while grudgingly filling out the forms for a blood test. Nigel had said no. The briskness of her tone, her middle age and utilitarian haircut, didn’t invite any kind of confidence, although there was an even more alarming glimmer of sympathy behind her manner.
Nigel took an antihistamine, bought an unchilled bottle of Asti Spumante and, as the sky’s colour leached into night, headed up towards Iffley Road. Hilda’s was all-girls, so his chances were good, even if Zoë herself had a boyfriend. He reminded himself not to get too drunk. He really felt like getting drunk.
By the riverbank, there were far more guests than he had been expecting. Although a few token picnic blankets scattered around the field bore trampled quiches, open packets of crisps and plundered punnets of strawberries, Nigel was undeceived. He recognised the same, rolling party he had been fruitlessly attending for the last three weeks. A boombox parked by the strawberries played Off the Wall, and he immediately spotted four members of his own college: two historians, a physicist and a prat wearing a trilby and earring whose subject he assumed to be English, trying to chat up the Hilda’s girls. Still, the ratio remained promising. Reassuring himself that the bulge of his inhaler was intact in his front right trouser pocket, he went to look for Zoë.
She was pissed and, therefore, cheerful. Oddly, her upbeat mood actually decreased her resemblance to her brother. This may have been because she was wearing eye make-up and looked disarmingly pretty when she smiled. Nigel realised that she was probably a full two years older than him, since he was one of the few people he had met who hadn’t taken what he had learned to call a gap year.
‘I’m doing it,’ Zoë announced, hooking her slender ankles and dropping to the grass cross-legged. ‘I said it was a picnic and as far as I’m concerned it means not having to stand up all fucking night.’
Nigel was relieved to sit down. For one thing, it made the disparity in their heights less marked. He refused the packet of Silk Cut Zoë waved at him, and busied himself in untwisting the wire on the cork of the Asti Spumante. Something he had learned since he’d been at Oxford—possibly the only useful thing so far that wasn’t Tort—was the gentle touch needed in releasing corks of this kind, the steadying thumb.
‘There are more glasses somewhere. Plastic.’ Zoë waved out at the grass. It was beginning to get properly dark; points of cigarettes and the odd spliff glow-wormed the view, flaring with each inhalation. Zoë added hers as she reached to get a light from the friend she had been talking to when Nigel approached, a shorter girl with lots of tumbling dark hair. Nigel decided not to bother finding a glass. He took a slug of the warmly fizzy wine and passed it to Zoë. She added some to the plastic cup nested in the dip of her curled legs and handed it along to her friend, who fielded her mass of hair back behind one shoulder before she took the bottle. This gesture placed her, for Nigel, as the editor of a student newspaper; he had loitered at the back of just one editorial meeting at the beginning of the first—Michaelmas—term, listening to her self-assured spiel, but lacked any answering confidence to pitch a story at the end of the same meeting. He thought her name might be Imogen. Or Cressida. Something obscurely Shakespearean, definitely. Beyond her was another girl, fine-featured, frosty. Smiling into the darkness, Nigel felt the familiar sinking totality of their lack of interest in him as he indicated that this girl, too, should have a swig of wine. It would be worse when he spoke. Although he had submerged his accent as much as possible in his years at St Christopher’s, there was always someone to ask if he was northern, who had a cousin at Ampleforth they expected him to know.
‘So, Cally,’ said Zoë, ‘Nigel’s stepdad is Patrick Conway. You know. Bloody Empire. Isn’t your aunt in it or something?’
At this Imogen/Cressida rearranged her hair in order to get a better look at him. Cally, with the fine face, stubbed the last of her cigarette on the grass and smiled, revealing snaggled white teeth.
‘Really? God, it’s extreme, isn’t it? I saw it when it was at the National and I didn’t have a clue what was going on. I can’t believe she goes on every night, like . . . months of it. And now they’re in the West End and everything, talking about taking it to America . . .’
She rubbed at her face, looking up at him impishly. He had been wrong about her; she was all friendliness. Her smile was lovely. And he’d seen her aunt’s tits.
‘I don’t really get it, to be honest.’
‘Me neither,’ he said, smiling back.
‘So what’s it like,’ asked Cressida/Imogen, with warm, competitive attention, as she curated her hair, ‘having Patrick Conway as your dad?’
All three of them were looking at him now, waiting for him to speak. He didn’t bother to correct them about the stepfather confusion.
‘Extreme.’
He decided it would be okay to get incredibly drunk.
FOR LOUISE, FIFTEEN was turning out to be worse than fourteen or even thirteen, a daily battle of wrongness. In her bedroom, she lived close to her reflection, tallying her many flaws and eruptions. She hoisted the Boots magnifying mirror at extreme angles, desperate to catch an unfamiliar, partial glimpse of hers
elf that might transmute into acceptability. Sometimes, with a slide of the eye, it worked. Mostly though, she despaired. She had nothing that gave you power as a fifteen-year-old girl: skin, hair, tits, legs, clothes, confidence, sarcasm, brains, malice, promiscuity, friends, money, parents with money, parents. She hated Auntie B, and hated herself more for hating her, but couldn’t stop it, or stop showing how much she hated her. School was a filler in the week, fending off the greater boredom of the weekend. The time she didn’t spend at school she mainly spent in her bedroom, communing with the mirror, masturbating to baroque fantasies with a royalist tinge (the aftermath of the Charles and Diana wedding was still intense in their household), or eating multiple, sickening bars of chocolate. When it got too cold in her room or she became too disgusted with herself, Louise went downstairs and watched telly with Auntie B. Unless the programme was unusually absorbing, she compensated for her parting from the mirror by brailling her fingers along her latest crop of spots, making them, as Auntie B never failed to tell her, worse.
It was in all ways a dreadful life. To escape it, Louise had become interested in the possibilities of her soul, which she assumed to be the invisible part of her dedicated to hectoring the shortcomings of her body and its behaviours. The notion of the soul was chalked up on the board in RE as unassailably as a Pythagorean equation by Mr Redstone, whose long weasel body, everyone knew, was up to no good with a sixth-former, despite him being married. It wasn’t anything purveyed by Mr Redstone that appealed to Louise. Her interest in what she had no idea could be called a spiritual life had been piqued by an interview she’d read in Auntie B’s Daily Express, where an American rock star had mentioned his devotion to Transcendental Meditation. He’d made it sound like magic. Better yet, he’d made it sound like magic that more or less allowed you to fly away from your body. Louise had followed this bewitching possibility to the library, which yielded only a slim, worthily brown cloth-covered book from the 1950s, part of a series that included vegetarianism and Buddhism as subjects. The book’s arid lack of glamour was disappointing, as was its failure to mention transcendence, but she put it on her ticket anyway.
The mirror, masturbation and chocolate eating were now interspersed with Louise’s attempts to empty her mind and feel herself at the bottom of the sea, as the book instructed, directing bubbles up to the surface, each of them containing a cluttering thought newly released from her mind. There seemed to be an endless proliferation of bubbles, some of them quite difficult to budge from the ocean floor, and more than once Louise had fallen asleep in the attempt. She knew she wouldn’t persevere. She hoped, though, that the effort might make her more interesting, that when Mum and Patrick paid their next visit, she could drop her new hobby into the conversation and Patrick would see her in a different, compatible light. She wouldn’t call it a hobby, of course: hobbies were the kind of thing Patrick despised. Little England, he’d probably call them, as he did most things enjoyed by other people. Holidays, parties and TV were all Little England. Also, caravans, pets, gardens, paying to see gardens, and many kinds of food, particularly food doled out in pots or saucers into individual portions. The word ‘portions’, in fact, was itself very Little England, according to Patrick. A portion in a ramekin, served by anyone prepared to use the word ‘ramekin’, would probably make his head blow off.
‘I’ve started meditating.’
The first time Louise broached it, she was in the back of the car. Mum was having trouble with the one-way system that led out of town and Patrick was barking at her because she was driving up a narrow street towards an oncoming Volkswagen.
‘For fuck’s sake!’
Patrick had never learned to drive, and was a nervous passenger. Mum was a bad driver, but calm. She started a multifaceted turn, grinding the gears. Louise sat back in her seat, feeling foolish. When she mentioned the subject again, at the restaurant, she pretended it was the first time she’d said it.
‘I’ve started meditating.’
They were having a drink before lunch, in the bar. Auntie B’s presence had been dispensed with a few years previously, when she had made a sour comment about not being needed as the life and soul, and Patrick had amazed her by agreeing that the three of them could do without her. Mum had managed to stop it turning into a proper row, but since then Auntie B had seen them off, saying she knew when she wasn’t wanted. Now, Patrick and Mum were both drinking sherry out of shapely little glasses the fake parchment menu called schooners, and Louise sipped warmish pineapple juice. There were ships’ steering wheels and polished brass bells and dark wood. They had never been to this particular restaurant before. It was, Patrick had remarked when they arrived, almost nice.
She tried it again; third time lucky. ‘I’ve started meditating.’
‘Well.’
Mum unloosed her bright scarf, eager yet uninterested. Patrick paused in settling his iffy disc into the spindle-backed chair.
‘Meditating?’
‘I got a book from the library. You have to . . . to empty your mind. It’s quite hard, actually, ’cos even when you’re not thinking, you kind of catch yourself thinking about not thinking, so that’s another thought, and you have to get rid of it, and if you’re thinking of that—’
‘Why on earth would you want to empty your mind?’
Patrick didn’t mean anybody, he meant her. He meant her mind was already empty enough. Louise touched the tender place on her jaw where a spot was ripening under the skin.
‘To, to free it of worldly concerns.’
He enjoyed this. Mum smiled back at him.
‘And what Gurdjieffian voodoo has captured your imagination, Louise?’
She had no idea what this meant, but the silkiness of Patrick’s tone was recognisably dangerous.
‘The Beatles did it,’ she proffered.
‘There you go.’ This was to Mum. ‘The Beatles did it.’
‘Actually,’ Mum said, bracing her forearms against her placemat. ‘We’ve got news of our own.’
She’d forgotten that she’d already told Auntie B in a letter about her and Patrick moving out of London and buying a house in Cornwall with the money from Patrick’s play going into the West End. Louise pretended it was all a surprise as Mum talked about the house, and how big it was, and how they’d be able, finally, to have her and Nidge to stay and have a proper family Christmas. Mum flushed pink talking about how beautiful it was, by the sea, and Louise began to feel quite excited herself, while Patrick and Mum, but mainly Patrick, finished their bottle of red (‘passable little plonk’). When she ran out of Cornwall, Mum continued to carry the burden of the conversation with a familiar set of consequenceless questions. Louise loved any evidence of curiosity about herself, however formulaic, so she didn’t mind the stop-start, and she was enjoying her food.
When the waitress brought the second bottle, Mum raised her glass, still filled from the first. Louise couldn’t remember ever seeing her smile so much.
‘To Nidge,’ she said, as was traditional, ‘and to a family Christmas.’ Which wasn’t. Particularly as there was months to go until then. Patrick didn’t join in the toast, which was his own tradition.
‘Meditation . . . the flight of the mind.’
He was chewing the last of his steak. Louise and Mum had moved on to talking about winter coats. Both of them tensed at his tone.
‘It’s exactly as I’ve always said, the sixties were a sort of collective cultural adolescence . . .’ Vehemently, he rattled his knife and fork on to the plate and pushed himself back from the table. ‘You have the excuse of actual adolescence, I suppose, but you may as well know you’re about twenty years too late in terms of the culture, dear.’
‘Oh Pat, leave her alone.’
‘Meditation. Mental masturbation. You’ll go blind. Spiritually speaking, of course. Stick to the other is my advice.’
Louise was horrified to see people looking round. No one talked like Patrick up here, either in accent, volume, or subject matter. P
inking, she concentrated on the ridges on a chip left on her plate. Of course it was impossible for anyone to suspect what she got up to with Viscount Linley. Patrick couldn’t read her mind.
‘It’s important though, Christ. If not our minds, what the fuck do we have? Why, of all things, at this point in human history, would we be seeking to abnegate our individuality? Tell me’—she could feel him glaring at her—‘what is there, Louise—no, I’m really interested—what is there but the world?’
‘Well, we were all young once. And you forget how the world can seem sometimes. You don’t want a pudding, do you?’ Mum turned to her.
Louise did want a pudding, very much. She’d been thinking about it all morning.
‘No thanks.’
They brought chocolate mints with the coffee, Elizabeth Shaws. Her mother didn’t eat any and Patrick only had one, so Louise nibbled through the toothpaste-flavoured gravelliness of three remaining in the saucer. She refrained from the last mint only in case Patrick commented, which he was clearly in the mood to do. He was sipping an Irish coffee in another ladylike glass, larger this time. The stripe of cream at the top of the drink whitened his full upper lip as he drank; he was beyond noticing.
‘Such a relief to be out of that pokey little flat,’ said Mum. ‘You won’t believe it when you see the rooms. Rooms and rooms, aren’t there, Pat? You’ll have to choose one for yourself, Lou.’
‘Bollocks.’ It had reached that stage. Although it often reached that stage on their outings, usually it was to do with Patrick’s work, or the government, not with anything directly related to or aimed at Louise. Today though, she had set him off, just by trying to make conversation. What was so wrong with meditation? She wasn’t hurting anyone.
‘Bollocks!’ Louder on the repeat, it was an invitation, or an incitement. Either way, Louise felt, staring at the dimpled foil of the single disc left on the saucer, that it was intolerable. Practically everyone in the restaurant was staring now.
