‘That’s weird,’ she said.
‘Why weird?’
‘I had the same idea. But my friend decided to get married instead.’
‘A guy?’
‘To a guy. She’s a girl. We were going to retrace the Sentimental Journey. Do you know it?’
‘I remember my parents dancing to it in the sitting room. With Workers’ Playtime on the radio.’
Her laughter was so loud the hearties hushed their voices for a moment. ‘Not the song, you idiot. The book. By Sterne.’
Stern? He knew The Principles of Human Genetics by Curt Stern, but he doubted it was the same author. And of course there was the physicist Otto Stern, who must have published a great deal on quantum mechanics, but it wouldn’t be him. That was the trouble with science – it wasn’t the matter of ordinary discourse. You could get sconced in Hall for talking about bond energies, but you could never get sconced for talking about Shakespeare. Sconced. Another of those terms he hated, this one involving being challenged to drink too much beer out of one of those large silver tankards that graced the dining tables on special occasions in Hall. Punishment, of a kind. But Eleanor was going on. She’d clearly mistaken his ignorance for another of his jokes. ‘Oh, you should read it. It’s brilliantly funny, although not as important as Tristram Shandy. You have read Tristram Shandy, haven’t you? Anyway, we thought of taking it along with us as a guide – Sentimental Journey, I mean – although Sterne never gets beyond Lyon and the sequel, written by a friend after his death—’
‘The friend’s?’
‘Sterne’s, you fool. This friend tried to continue the book but his effort just isn’t up to the original. Anyway, that idea’s all finished now because Jenny’s gone and got engaged.’
‘Shame.’
‘So now I’m wondering what to do with myself.’ She took a sip of beer and looked at him thoughtfully. ‘What about going together?’
The oarsmen had started up again and were making such a song and dance about things that James couldn’t even be sure if he had heard right.
‘What did you say?’
She drew on her cigarette and blew blue smoke up towards the nicotine-stained ceiling. ‘I said, what about going together?’
The singing stopped. At least that is what it seemed to James, sitting there nursing his beer and his erection. ‘Sounds all right.’
‘I mean, just as friends, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘The idea was mainly to sleep rough. In railway stations, public parks, you know what I mean. Hostels and pensions at a pinch.’
‘Could be dodgy for two girls.’
‘That’s what my parents said. But it wouldn’t be as dodgy with a guy, would it?’
‘No,’ he agreed.
‘So what do you say?’
He tried to take a calm swig of beer, but somehow it got caught up in his tonsils. Spluttering, he apologised.
‘Of course, if you’ve got other ideas…’
‘No, really.’
‘It was just a thought…’
He looked at her, wondering. She wasn’t pretty, not in any ordinary meaning of the word, because she wasn’t ordinary-looking – she was striking. That wild, uncontrolled hair, those bold features, her cheeks dotted with faint freckles, her mouth designed with anger and amusement, her eyes alight with a green fire. And she had a reputation that was largely political, although it did extend, in some whispered conversations, to the sexual. She was a member of ORSS, the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students, and she had been manhandled – literally, although you could prove nothing; maybe his hand had just slipped – by the Oxford City police during a student occupation of the Clarendon Building. Subsequently she had spent a night in gaol and had been charged with disturbing the peace and fined two pounds. Worse than that, she had been threatened by her college with rustication. Rustication was another of those words that James loathed. What was wrong with ‘suspension’, for Christ’s sake? Anyway, that little incident had made her political reputation. Her sexual reputation, on the other hand, was more obscure. Gossip had it that there had been a man who was no longer around. She had been in love with him but was now off men – a natural but temporary state, James surmised, for someone who had been crossed in love.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Of course I am.’ She giggled.
‘What are you laughing at?’
‘Nothing. Just a thought, that’s all. No, don’t say it—’
But he already had, and realised his mistake as soon as the words were uttered: ‘Penny for them.’
She finished her beer. Maybe the suggestion she’d made was a terrible mistake.
‘Well?’ he insisted.
‘Let’s go, shall we?’
‘Are you serious?’ he asked again, convinced that he must be the butt of some kind of tease.
‘About going? Yes. I’ve got to meet someone who’s going to review the play. For the Oxford Mail, no less.’
‘I meant, about this summer.’
‘Oh, that.’
They climbed the steps up to the daylight of the Broad. Another of those terms. ‘The Broad.’ ‘The High.’ Why was the word ‘street’ left out of the equation? ‘Well, are you?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. Not if you talk in clichés. “Penny for them”, indeed. Look, I must rush. See you later.’
And she’d gone.
2
Then came the performance itself, with its intensity of experience, its focus on the two of them – James and Eleanor, Fando and Lis – as they meandered across a creaking stage before the gaze of a hundred invisible faces. The play, with Lis tied up and dumped in an old pram and swearing love and devotion for her captor. The play with fear and fright and catharsis – Eleanor’s word – both in the script and in the minds of the players. The play, with Fando’s sudden raging temper and equally sudden collapses into recrimination and apology. The play with its inconsequential dialogue – ‘sub-Beckett’, wrote the reviewer in the Oxford Mail, stealing James’s unuttered line – and hopeless outcome.
‘They loved your Mancunian accent, darling,’ the director told James at the party after the opening, draping his arm round his shoulder.
‘It’s Sheffield.’
‘Whatever. Northern, that’s what it is. Gritty, darling, gritty. You should seriously think about the Royal Court.’
At the curtain call, Fando had carried Lis to the foot of the stage as though she really was disabled, and there were those in the audience who were fooled, one of them coming up to them next day as they walked together in the Cornmarket, on their way to a photo shoot for the student newspaper, to say how brilliant it had been and how she’d assumed that Eleanor actually was handicapped, so convincing was her performance.
After that encounter with fame they went to his rooms in college, in the Old Quad, with the Tudor gatehouse visible through the windows and the two-bar electric fire turned on to provide a focus of warmth before which the figure of Eleanor could disport itself, as careless but more articulate than Lis. She was wearing a red skirt and black tights and a black top. The skirt was a novelty, presumably intended for the photographer. Normally, when not dressed as Lis (whose costume had been a tattered and grubby nightdress), she wore jeans and assumed a vaguely military look. But now a photogenic skirt. Thus clad she set to toasting crumpets on the fire by hanging them on the grille with hooks made from paper clips. The hooks were James’s suggestion. ‘Typical scientist,’ she said, but he detected a hint of affection behind the mockery. ‘Do you often have crumpets in your rooms?’ she asked. She was on all fours before the fire. A small shriek of pain as she dropped a crumpet onto the plate and sucked her fingers.