I felt a blush begin to rise.
‘That’s enough, Mark.’ I sounded, even to my own ears, less certain than I had talking to Stephano.
‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘What do you go to that job for anyway? Just to pretend that I don’t pay the rent and the bills and the housekeeper and the bloody pool man too. This is what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it? Since Oxford all you’ve ever wanted …’
I turned my back on him and walked out of the summer house. He raised his voice as I left but I thought of other things and closed my ears to him.
He was sorry later. I’d known he would be. It’s the same every time.
I heard him padding around the kitchen in the early hours of the morning. He’d been crying — his eyes and cheeks had that squashed, overripe look — but he doesn’t cry in front of me any more. He’d showered — his hair was still damp and falling into his eyes. He blinked at me through his fringe and apologized over and over again until I could hardly bear to hear him keep talking.
I made coffee and we sat in the living room. We talked a little about the house, the trip to the mountains we’d planned but which he kept putting off. It was a peace offering. He wore me down, as he always does. My anger dissipates as soon as we begin to speak, and I remember how he used to be. He knows this.
After we’d talked for a while, he said, ‘What I like about having you here, James, is that you remember me. You know. No one that we see here knows. To them I’m just some English bloke with too much money who drinks too much and smokes too much and takes too many drugs. But as long as you’re here, as long as you remember how I used to be, I’m more than that. Do you see?’
I did see. I’d known all this for a long time. We’d talked about it before.
When the sun began to rise, we took cans of cider into the orchard, disturbing clouds of spindle-legged crane flies as we walked through the grass. There are benches placed at odd intervals — some whim of Mark’s from the days he still imagined holding frequent parties here. But he never had the wood properly treated and many of them have already rotted through.
We found one which still had all its struts intact, next to a rusted oil drum in which he’d once hoped to plant creeping violets. It stood empty now, half-filled with rain water, another reminder of Mark’s problem — or at least one of Mark’s definitions of his problem: that his ambition has never been quite large enough to fill up his money. We sat in silence as the sun came up, taking long pulls on our drinks and listening to the cacophonous cackle of birds awaking in the trees.
Eventually Mark said, ‘I want her back. I want Daisy back.’
I said, ‘I know.’
He said, ‘She’s all I want, all the time. Even when I’m … all the time.’
I said, ‘I know.’
He leaned closer and I put my arm around his shoulder. I kicked my legs against the oil drum. The noise of it was louder than I’d expected — a wild clanging, as though I’d struck a huge brass gong. Above us three geese honked, flying in triangular formation across the blue-white sky.
SECTION 1. The Lies
1 First year, November, third week of term
For me, it began with a fall. Not, as Mark might have said, a fall from grace. Nor was it the hopeless, headlong capitulation of love. That came later. It began simply with a tumble on an icy path. I stumbled, I tottered, I teetered, I fell. There’s no disgrace in falling. Everyone falls. But I have found that getting up has proved more difficult than I could have anticipated on that icy path in Oxford long ago.
I ran, in the first faint hum of early-morning light, along a quiet path by the river. I ran for pleasure. Night had licked the leaves of the overhanging willow trees with frost. The path was muddy, but the mud had frozen into crackling shards. My breath came in quick gasps, achingly cold, steam-snorting.
I ran in steady, effortless, piston rhythm. A full-body rhythm: my feet on the path, my thighs bunching and loosening, vertebrae and diaphragm, flexors and extensors, all the mechanisms of the human body running smooth and true. The blood thumped in my ears. I was cold but I did not feel it. I ducked my head under a low-hanging branch of ice-prickled hawthorn, moving without thinking. Running emptied me of all thought. This was why I ran. It was three weeks since I’d arrived in Oxford, and things weren’t going to plan.
There had been a plan. At least, it seemed to me there had been. My sister Anne, an Oxford graduate, had told me what to do. She had come to our parents’ house, my mother had roasted a chicken for dinner, so that she could tell me these things. I was to join societies, I was to participate in activities, I was to work extremely hard. Oh yes, Anne had said, leaning forward to wrench a leg off the chicken carcass, and I was to make friends with the right sort of people. She herself had fallen in with the Labour Club during John Major’s premiership, when the Conservative Party lay bloated and dully throbbing, like a dying star. Her boyfriend, Paul, a pale and blinking specimen, worked for the Labour Party. Great things were expected of him. I’d do well, Anne said, to find similarly influential friends. Our parents smiled as we talked. My father poured another half-glass of wine. Anne bit into her chicken leg down to the white bone and gelatinous gristle at the joint. I noticed that I was thinking of Anne. I quickened my running pace a little. My breath became more ragged. I rounded a bend, and thought vanished into a new vista of half-thawed ice-river.
Oxford is beautiful; its beauty is its plumage, its method of procreation. The beauty of the dream of Oxford, of spires and quiet learning, of the life of the mind, of effortless superiority, all these had beguiled me. Oxford was a tree decked with presents; all I had to do was reach out my hand and pluck them. I would achieve a first, I would gain a blue, I would make rich, influential, powerful friends. Oxford would paint me with a thin layer of gold.
In my first meeting with my tutors, Dr Strong and Dr Boycott, I had taken down the list of books on the smooth, white page of my notebook in clear fountain-pen strokes. The very thought of it thrilled me: an Oxford reading list in preparation for an Oxford tutorial.
One of the other men in the group — Ivar, a Norwegian — said, ‘Isn’t this rather a lot? For one week?’
Dr Strong and Dr Boycott exchanged a glance. The rest of the students looked down at the swirling green and gold curlicues of the carpet. We knew that Ivar had shamed us.
‘We expect a lot, Mr Guntersen,’ said Dr Boycott at last. ‘That is why you are here.’
Dr Strong stroked his beard impassively. His legs were stretched out in front of him, feet clad only in sandals although the cold of autumn had already begun to bite.
Dr Boycott broke into a smile. ‘I’m sure you’ll find yourselves more than capable, with a little application. And if not —’ his smile deepened — ‘Oxford’s not for you. And best to find that out now, eh?’
We seven Gloucester College physicists walked out of Dr Boycott’s book-lined study and stood, a little dazed, in the quad. The sun was passing in and out of shadow. The creeping plants covering the walls were dying russet. We looked at each other, half-friendly, half-appraising, and, with smiles, loped towards the library. I remember this as the last moment I believed without question in my intellectual powers. My dreams were there: the influential friends, the first, the running blue. All this was within my grasp. And here I was, running. Surely all must be well?