‘As often as I can persuade them to step over the threshold.’
Laughter, edged with something more than amusement. Appetite, perhaps. She rearranged herself on the rug – a length of gleaming black thigh – and began to apply butter. James poured tea from the brown teapot he had brought from home and that Eleanor had declared ‘very ethnic’. By mutual agreement they sat side by side, on the rug, facing the fire, hot butter on their lips and fingers. By mutual agreement they turned to look at each other and then leant forward and kissed. There was a little exploratory engagement of buttery tongues and the mingled taste of each other’s crumpets and Eleanor’s cigarettes.
‘Mmm,’ she said, as though to take the agreement one step further. Then she pulled back, took a puff from her cigarette, sipped her tea and might as well have been sitting in the café in the covered market. ‘We were going to talk about the summer vac,’ she said in a faint tone of admonishment.
‘The summer,’ he repeated, thinking more about this spring, the here and now, and wondering exactly what had just happened.
‘We’ve got to have some idea of what we’re doing and where we’re going, haven’t we?’
‘Are we going then?’
‘Of course we are. Aren’t we?’
‘If you want to. I want to.’ He had feared she might prefer to go to Paris or something, to dig cobblestones out of the Boul’ Mich’ and throw them at the battle lines of the CRS. But no, she’d already done that. Pavé was passé. Now she just wanted to explore Europe, Italy especially, and maybe even make Greece and see what conditions were like there where the Colonels reigned supreme. ‘Fascists,’ she said disdainfully.
Alarm bells went off in his head. ‘You’re not planning—’
She laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t get you into trouble. It’s just that I’ve never actually been to a Fascist dictatorship. Except Spain of course, but that doesn’t really count any longer, does it?’ And then she touched his wrist and said he looked terrified, but assured him that she would be as good as gold, which was not an element he was familiar with except to know that the only thing good about it, apart from its cost, was the fact that it was virtually inert. He doubted Eleanor would be inert.
They went on to talk about what they’d need to take with them, how much money, what clothes. Eleanor treated the whole thing as though it were a joke – ‘I can always sell my body if we run short of cash’ – and yet there was a bedrock of seriousness about the discussion, as though they really were going to do this. So James talked about sleeping bags, a couple of changes of T-shirt, a second pair of jeans. Washing things and changes of underwear, of course. What else? And he suggested his tent. ‘It’s okay for two at a squeeze,’ he added. He knew about these matters from weekends spent in the Peak District and the Lakes.
‘Your tent? At a squeeze?’ She had never slept in a tent.
‘Never?’
‘Well, not since my brother and I pitched one on the front lawn. That was ten years ago.’
‘Front lawn? You camped on your front lawn?’ To James front lawn implied back lawn and dragged along with it kitchen garden and orchard and probably, just probably, paddock. With a pony.
‘Yes, you know – one of those green things. Or don’t you have such things up North?’ She bit into another crumpet and told him the story. He was happy to listen, intrigued for the moment by lawns, front or back, as well as by the movement of her lips as she spoke and the butter that glistened on them. Apparently she and her brother had pitched the tent before having supper in the house and kissing their parents goodbye as though they were setting off for the South Pole. Darkness had descended on the garden and the tent. Inside, brother and sister had wriggled and fidgeted and tried to get comfortable on what had once seemed soft grass but now revealed itself as a bed of nails fit to try the patience of a fakir. Thus they had spent four sleepless hours before fleeing back indoors, her brother terrified because he had heard noises, Eleanor smugly triumphant because she had made them. ‘So, I am not,’ she concluded, ‘sleeping in a tent, and certainly not squeezing into one with you.’
‘That’s all right. I’ll sleep in the tent and you can sleep outside.’
That prompted a punch, not very effective, which landed on James’s upper arm. He responded by grabbing her wrist. Another punch, another wrist held. There was a brief struggle in which elbows and knees were involved before they were kissing once again and Eleanor was saying, through teeth and tongue and lips, that perhaps this was not a good idea, that she just wanted to be friends, that there was someone else in her life and that was the trouble.
There was an awkward rearrangement of limbs and clothing. She smoothed herself down. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, more than once.
‘There’s nothing to apologise for,’ James insisted, although there was, in fact, a great deal.
‘It’s just…’ she said.
‘Just what?’
‘I mean, it’s difficult.’
‘It seems rather easy to me.’
‘Maybe it is for you. You’re a man.’
‘Is it easier for men? Men have feelings as well, you know.’
‘Do they? I thought they just had erections.’
He made no reply to that, understanding when it was pointless to continue. ‘You know when we took that curtain call? When I carried you to the front of the stage and showed you to the audience?’
‘Of course I remember.’
He nodded, picking up the remains of her crumpet. ‘I think it was then that I realised how much I like you.’
Like you. A euphemism used in a time of hardship. There was a pause while he didn’t dare look at her.
‘That’s very sweet,’ she said. ‘But at the time I was a cripple wearing handcuffs.’
3
After the awkwardness of the afternoon tea and two more performances of the play, James and Eleanor settled into some kind of unspoken compromise. It involved a certain degree of physical contact – holding hands, kissing, perhaps a hesitant hand on a reluctant breast – but would go no further until…
‘Until what?’ James asked, emboldened.
Until she sorted herself out.
‘That sounds very bourgeois.’
Once again sitting in his rooms in college, talking in that rapid, articulate manner she could adopt, she denied it. Her emotional difficulties transcended all matters of class. They could belong to someone from an impoverished Irish family in Liverpool or Birmingham just as well as someone like her with her moneyed upbringing and her private schooling. Whichever way you looked at it, it was just nuns and priests.
‘Nuns and priests?’ Comprehension dawned slowly, for this was just another of those Oxford things – a peculiar ritual that might have meant something in the past but was now an irrelevance. So much of Oxford seemed irrelevant. ‘You mean you’re Catholic?’