I saw Kendall a few days later in Chapel Quad. He was lying on a bench by the ivy-covered wall, his head resting on his rucksack. I thought he was asleep, but as I walked past he lifted his head and called to me.
‘Stieff!’ he said. ‘Off to Boycott?’
‘Yup,’ I said. It was my ten-minute slot with the tutor to receive the results of my collections. I could not delay.
‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘Hope it goes well. I suppose …’ He frowned. ‘I might not see you again.’
I stared at him, puzzled.
‘I’m … er, well, I’m leaving Oxford. Talked it through with Boycott. It’s all for the best, probably. It only gets harder from here and, you know, if it hasn’t been good so far …’
I was aware of the seconds ticking by. Dr Boycott would be caustic if I was late. Nonetheless.
‘But where are you going?’
He wrinkled his nose. ‘Manchester. My UCCA reserve. Jumped to take me when I called.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Um.’ I did not know what to say. It was as if Kendall had told me he had been diagnosed with a chronic and painful disease. I do not defend this; this is how we thought.
‘It’ll be good,’ I said at last. ‘Better than here. Big fish, small pond — be nice not to be running to catch up all the time.’
‘Yeah,’ said Kendall. ‘Not so many bloody tutorials, away from Boycott and all this …’
He stopped and looked around. The quad was peaceful in its medieval splendour, with ivy-covered walls, clipped grass and stone arches. Beauty is a lie, but it is so hard to spot.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘good to get away from all this. But sorry, I have to run. Good luck with everything!’
I started to walk away.
‘No problem,’ said Kendall. ‘I might catch you later, yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sure.’
‘I need not tell you, Mr Stieff,’ said Dr Boycott, ‘that these are disappointing results.’
Dr Strong, sitting by his side, nodded silently.
My knee ached — I had forced it upstairs at a sprint to reach the office on time. It was displeased with this treatment and produced short, stabbing pains, enough to make me gasp.
‘We had such high hopes of you, but you seem to have —’ Dr Boycott paused — ‘fallen far below them this term.’
‘I’m sorry Dr Boycott, but I —’
Dr Boycott interrupted me.
‘Nonetheless!’ he flourished the exam paper. ‘Your answer to the question on Lagrangian dynamics was good. Thus, I think we may say,’ and he looked to the right and left, as though speaking to a large and attentive audience rather than merely to myself and the taciturn Dr Strong, ‘that we have hope! Put your back into it, Mr Stieff. We need a sprint from you this term, a sprint!’
‘Yes, Dr Boycott,’ I said. I found I was a little overwhelmed by having been told that a single answer of mine was good.
‘Run along, then,’ said Dr Boycott. ‘More effort is what you need this term. More effort.’
I hobbled from the room, strangely elated. I would go and see Kendall again, I thought, put my arm around his shoulders and commiserate with him properly. I walked back as fast as I could manage, my knee spitting embers in the cold, but when I reached Chapel Quad Kendall was gone.
6 First year, April, first week of term
We took up Mark’s offer. Of course we did. Jess discussed the matter with her eminently reasonable parents, who, having assured themselves that the house was adequate and the friends not intolerable, took the view that this was a natural stage in their daughter’s fledging and if she wanted to live with her friends she should not be prevented.
My parents were suspicious and wondered not unnaturally — though at the time it seemed wholly unreasonable — whether after my bad first term I should be changing my living arrangements. Strangely, it was Anne’s intervention that swayed them in the end. She had been at college with a third cousin of Mark’s — on his father’s side, which contained a lot of House of Lords relations of whom Mark was entirely dismissive — and convinced my parents that I was finally ‘mixing with the right people’ and that rent-free living arrangements were common among this group.
The Junior Dean of Gloucester College initially frowned upon the idea, saying, ‘We are keen to integrate all members into college life, at least in their first year.’ There it was Jess who argued the point, drawing attention to her membership of the college choir, attendance at chapel and excellent reports from her tutors. Little was expected of me, perhaps because I was known in college primarily for my injury. The arrangement was grudgingly allowed, although — it was made clear — we could not expect any reimbursement of rent and other fees paid in advance.
Jess and I became closer over that term, partly because of the joint battles with college authorities but also quite naturally. I wanted her and was surprised to find that she liked me too. She seemed quite as content in my company as I was in hers, and I found I did not really need other friends in college. We would spend the days at lectures or in the library, and then in the evenings we ate dinner together in hall and Jess — if she did not have orchestra rehearsals — would practise her violin while I read. It was, for Oxford, a very settled time. Franny joked that we already seemed to have been going out for years and this pleased me. After a few weeks of this life I wondered if we needed to move into Mark’s house at all, or whether we could continue just as we had been.
But the wheels were already in motion. We moved into the house in March, towards the end of Hilary term, and began to get to know one another’s habits and routines. I learned, for example, that Mark suffered from insomnia and frequently read his theology set books in the music room at 3 a.m., listening to 1930s dance records, and that for all her apparent nonchalance Franny worked harder than anyone I’d ever known — even Jess or Guntersen. Simon already harboured ambitions — he read, with intense seriousness, a multi-volume biography of Winston Churchill and Tony Benn’s diaries, and I once walked into his room to find him addressing an empty armchair with the words ‘Now really, Prime Minister …’. Emmanuella, despite her privilege, was an excellent cook, and the house was frequently filled with the aromas of Spanish cuisine.
One morning in April, Jess and I knew instantly from the insistent staccato of the knock at the door that the person trying to wake us up was Franny and no other.
Jess opened the door. Wordlessly, Franny marched into the room and slammed the door behind her. She was in her long white night-dress, her hair frizzy and wild.
‘Have you seen who’s in the kitchen?’ she said at last.
We shook our heads.
‘We’ve only just woken up,’ I said.
‘You’ll never guess who he’s bloody brought home this time.’
At least twice a week, Mark brought a young man home — often a ‘townie’ rather than another undergraduate. Once there had been a boy from sixth-form college. All of these had been agreeable if taciturn — a succession of crop-headed young men shovelling down cornflakes and leaving with a brisk ‘cheers’. There was the slight matter of illegality to detain us, but as Mark himself was officially below the age of consent for gay sex at that time the whole thing seemed so uncertain as to be better ignored.