Jess laughed.
‘God, no. Mark can’t stand him. To be honest —’ Jess lowered her voice — ‘I think Emmanuella’s starting to be of the same opinion. Sorry, I know he’s your friend, but —’
‘No,’ I said quickly, ‘he’s not my friend.’
‘Oh.’ A pause, and then, ‘So there’s nothing to worry about.’
We exchanged home addresses and phone numbers before we parted, written in blue ballpoint on torn-off corners of paper from her notebook. I held hers in my hand and stared at it, admiring the curl of her rounded letters: the fat s, the jaunty j. She smiled and yawned and stretched.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk next week.’
I stood dazed at the top of her staircase. The stairs swam before my vision, my eyes defocusing uncontrollably. I prepared to wince my way down the staircase, sighed and gasped and waited for redemption and realized it had already come to pass.
In the morning, my pain came in dull twinges, like a blurred telegraph signal nagging and then falling silent and nagging again. I woke early and sat in bed, with the blankets tented over my one good knee, the other a thickened mound by its side, as the dawn slowly revealed the room. At 8 a.m., without thinking too hard or for too long, I limped down the staircase and into Chapel Quad. The quad was deserted, the flagstones mossed up with frost. I placed the foot of my crutch with care, glad I had brought it, and thought again, with an echoing flutter in the centre of my being, that I would always be afraid of falling now.
It was early to call but my parents are early risers.
‘It’s time to come home,’ I said. ‘Can you pick me up tomorrow? Or Wednesday?’
‘Oh!’ said my mother, a half-mocking half-laugh behind her words, ‘you’re not staying there for Christmas after all?’
I said nothing.
‘Have you finished your work?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I’m finished.’
I wondered and worried over when might be the right moment to call her. Not too soon, for fear of being too demanding. But not too late, for fear of seeming uninterested. But she telephoned me first. It was Boxing Day and there had been dinner the day before with Anne and Paul and talk of Major and Heseltine and the threat from the Liberal Democrats. Anne had asked searchingly about my work, the societies I had joined, and seemed only partially mollified by my mother’s explanation about my knee.
‘Next term,’ she said. ‘Hilary term is when it all kicks off. You have to be ready.’
Later that evening, the telephone rang.
‘Hello,’ she said, ‘it’s Jess. Do you remember me?’
‘Yes, of course I …’
There was laughter in the background, a man’s voice.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I’m driving to Oxford the day after tomorrow, almost past you. It’d be no trouble. Do you want to be rescued?’
‘Yes,’ I whispered into the telephone. ‘Yes, I do.’
She picked me up in an elderly estate car. My parents, grateful to see me with a friend, a girl, had been over-enthusiastic, winking and smiling. We bundled my bag into the car and left as soon as we could.
‘I’m sorry about them,’ I said.
‘If we’re going to get on,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to stop apologizing.’
‘Oh, I —’
‘Don’t do it.’ She was smiling, still looking at the road. Her lips were pressed together hard and I could see a dimple in her left cheek.
‘I … what?’
‘Don’t apologize for apologizing.’
‘I … um …’
‘What?’
I furrowed my brow. The conversation seemed to have escaped from me rather more quickly than I’d hoped.
‘I’m just, well. I don’t know what to say now.’
She grinned. We were nearing a red traffic light. As the car came to a halt she leaned towards me and kissed my right cheek, then turned back to her driving.
‘I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you tell me how your Christmas was? How were the dreaded Anne and the leech-like Paul? Did you get any good presents? Any good arguments?’
And so I did.
I noticed something on that drive that continued to be true for as long as I knew Jess. Her presence calmed me, like a soothing hand in the centre of my chest bringing quiet to every muscle fibre and threaded sinew. Infatuation cannot last, and even love may be less certain than I’d once hoped, but this essential quiet, the stillness she brought to me, that lasted. Mark said to me once, ‘She’s like God to you: she inexplicably calms inexplicable fears.’ And in this, as in so much, he is irritatingly right.
We arrived in Oxford at 3 p.m., when the sun was low on the horizon. We drove north, through the city centre and up into Jericho, a maze-like Oxford district, its tangled streets lined with Victorian labourers’ cottages. It had been a cold, bright day but now the clouds had begun to gather and a few spots of rain burst on the windscreen.
‘Is it Mark’s house we’re going to?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Jess, ‘it’s his house. He’s … yes.’
‘Is he a second year? Living out?’
‘No, he’s a first year like us but he’s …’ She breathed out a long breath. ‘Well, he’s rich. You’ll see. He’s good fun though. A bit … unexpected at times, that’s all.’
We turned a corner on to another terraced Jericho street and saw that it was a dead end. The end of the street was a high wall.
‘Is it one of these terraced houses?’ I said.
She smiled and shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Not Mark.’
We parked the car and walked to the end of the road. It was only as I levered myself from the car and felt a sudden thrust of pain in my knee that I realized I had forgotten about it all this time. I eyed my stick, half-hidden by my suitcase on the back seat of the car, but could not bear to take it with me. I wanted so much to appear normal to this girl. Ahead, Jess was already striding towards a battered green door set into the dead-end wall at the end of the road. The wall was high, almost as high as the houses, and the top was covered with rusty barbed wire. Jess pulled a key out of her pocket, raised her eyebrows, fitted the key into the lock in the green door and turned. She opened the door and we walked through.
*
Beyond was a garden, or what might once have been a garden.
It was large and dark and dense. So large, in fact, that it was impossible to gain any sense of its size from where we stood. Trees, perhaps once planted in ornamental fans, had broken through the rusted metal staples holding them back and grown together to form a tight mass of branches. To our left and right, we could make out the traces of paved paths heading through the undergrowth, but these were too densely thicketed to admit us.
Ahead, though, someone had clearly recently hacked a way through. Swathes of the thickly massed branches had been cut, and a winding path led away from the door. Jess grinned at me and walked boldly forward. I, regretting my stick, glanced back and saw a crest embossed high on the wall. It was a shield containing a small circle with, engraved beneath, partially obscured by bird droppings, the two words ‘Annulet House’. I turned back and followed Jess.
Overhanging branches and overgrown bushes blocked our way; the path was moss-sodden and squelched as we walked. All around us climbing vines trailed down and brambles caught our clothes. But among the devastation we could see traces of the place’s former order. Through the leaves and moss, I spotted a mosaic pavement ten feet square, cracked and discoloured. At one point, rounding a corner, we were suddenly faced by a massive statue of the god Pan, goat-legged, pipes to his mouth, his face and body pockmarked and lichen-streaked. I thought I glimpsed a sundial in a clearing to our left, unreachable by sun.