The Shivering Turn, page 7
Wrong!
The bigger colleges, like Christchurch and Keble, have fewer than five hundred undergraduate students. The smaller ones, like Oriel, have just over three hundred. So in any one year, there just aren’t many places to be had. And given that many of the places which are available have already been earmarked for applicants whose fathers and grandfathers attended the college, or are a shoo-in for pupils from the major public schools, whose whole educational career has been shaped towards getting them into Oxford (and these two groups have a substantial overlap), there aren’t many perches left for the rest of us chickens to occupy.
I don’t mean to suggest that the people who get in through the back door are so dumb that their knuckles scrape the ground – many of them are very bright indeed – but it’s not a level playing field, and if life has placed you at the bottom end of the slope, you need to be pretty damn good if you’re going to get in.
‘So Linda wasn’t good enough to get into Oxford,’ I say to Janet.
‘Sadly not.’
I find her certainty irritating.
‘And the reason you’re in a position to judge this is because you are good enough?’ I ask tartly.
‘Yes,’ Janet says, without hint of bravado. ‘I am.’
‘So you’ll be expecting to go to Oxford yourself?’
She shakes her head. ‘No, that’s far too close to home for my liking. I’ll be going to Cambridge, instead.’
‘And you’re sure you’ll get in?’
‘I’m already in. I took the entrance examination a year early.’
This girl has the ability to make me look foolish without really trying – and I don’t like it.
‘What happened after you’d told Linda that she simply wasn’t clever enough?’ I ask.
‘At the time, she just looked disappointed. I tried to give her a reassuring hug, but she pushed me away. The next day she was sort of back to normal, but there was something missing.’
‘Missing?’
‘It was as if there was suddenly a black hole in our relationship – as if she no longer considered herself my best friend, but had decided to keep on playing the role of my best friend. I think, if I’m honest, that she didn’t really like me any more, but felt she needed to stay close to me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because even though she didn’t like me, she still trusted me – and most people need a confidante. And, of course,’ she laughs bitterly, ‘she was waiting for the opportunity to try and prove me wrong.’
‘And did she get that opportunity?’
‘She thought she did.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘It was in early March. We’d pretty much stopped leaving school together by that point, but on this particular day she stuck close to me. It didn’t take me long to work out why – when we got to the gates, there was a good-looking young man standing there, waiting for her. She kissed him – not a deep kiss, just a peck on the lips – then she turned to me and said, “This is Jeff. He’s my boyfriend.” So I said hello to him, and he said hello back – but I got the impression that he’d rather not have been there at all.’
‘What happened next?’
‘She said, “Jeff thinks science is a waste of time. He thinks that only dull people – people with no spirit – study science.” That was a dig at me, of course, because I’m a physicist. And, of course, she was also giving herself a face-saving device. So what if she wasn’t good enough to study medicine at Oxford? Medicine was science – and science didn’t matter.’
‘How did Jeff look as she was saying all this?’
‘He was looking more and more uncomfortable as time went by. But she hadn’t finished yet. “Jeff says I’ve got just the right sort of brain to be a wizard at literature,” she said, “and he should know, because he’s already a student at St Luke’s”!’
‘I imagine that, by this point, Jeff was really squirming,’ I say.
‘He’d practically melted with embarrassment.’
‘But he probably considered it was a price worth paying, if it got him into her knickers?’
Janet laughs – and it’s the deep, hearty laugh of someone who’s really amused.
‘You surely don’t think she’s letting him screw her, do you?’ she asks.
‘Don’t you?’
‘Positively not! Linda has some very old-fashioned notions. She’d never uncross her legs without a ring on her finger – and I’m talking about a wedding ring, not just an engagement ring.’
‘Unlike you?’
Janet shrugs, as if she thinks it’s a stupid question to ask – and probably pointless.
‘I lost my cherry on a summer holiday in Tuscany, when I was fourteen,’ she says. ‘He was a waiter at the hotel that my family was staying in. His name was Mario, but then that’s hardly surprising, because most waiters seem to be called Mario, don’t they?’
‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘Not a lot. I think it’s just amazing how much the sociological and anthropological aspects of our culture have focused on a fleshy tube between a man’s legs which happens to harden when it’s engorged with blood.’ She shrugs again. ‘But I suppose it’s still a man’s world, so men get to set the agenda.’
‘Tell me about Linda’s family,’ I suggest.
‘Her mother’s a nice enough woman in her way, but she does tend to see the whole of life as a drama – with her acting in the starring role.’
‘What about her father?’
‘His main problem with her is that he seems incapable of recognizing the fact that she’s growing up.’ Janet pauses. ‘Mind you, in a way, he’s right. She’s terribly naïve.’
‘Is that why you’d insist on knowing where she was going before you gave her an alibi – because she’s terribly naïve?’
‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
‘Do you know about the incident in front of the Playhouse – the one where the police were called in?’
‘Oh yes – she told me about that. Some of Jeff’s friends from St Luke’s College got filthy drunk and started behaving badly, and Linda – because she’s so easily influenced – went along with them.’
‘After that particular incident, her father threatened to throw her out, you know.’
Janet laughs again. ‘He would never have thrown her out – not in a million years. He’s devoted to her. He worships the ground she walks on.’ She is suddenly more serious. ‘And it works the other way as well,’ she continues. ‘One of the reasons she so desperately wanted to get into Oxford is because she thinks that’s what he wants.’
‘When I asked you if you thought that she’d gone to London, you said you didn’t know.’
‘And I don’t.’
‘Her mother says she would never have run away.’
‘Her mother would, wouldn’t she? And actually, I’m rather surprised myself, because she’s a very conventional girl – but if she isn’t here, she has to be somewhere else, and unless she’s been abducted by Martians, she’s in that “somewhere else” because that’s where she chooses to be.’
On the surface, Janet seems to have been very open with me, but I’m still not sure to what extent I can trust what she’s told me. I don’t mean that I suspect she’s been deliberately lying to me, but the truth as she sees it may not necessarily be all that close to reality.
The thing is, I’ve experienced myself what it feels like when your best friend gets a boyfriend before you do.
It warps your perspective.
It challenges your niceness.
You want to say he’s a waste of time. You want to cast an unfavourable light on what he does and what he says, so that she’ll decide he’s not good enough for her, and things can go back to what they were.
It takes a great deal of willpower to overcome your resentment and to really be – really – happy for your mate now that she’s hitched up. I like to think I succeeded, but I’m sure there are half a dozen girls back in Whitebridge (maybe even my then-best friend herself) who will say that I didn’t.
And there are other matters over which Janet might be jealous. Linda is very pretty, and Janet is not. Is it possible that, in some hidden part of Janet’s brain, there lurks the feeling that it is unfair Linda should have both the looks and the academic success, and that when she told Linda she wasn’t good enough for Oxford, she unconsciously did it to hurt her?
‘You remember you said that you told Linda she’d never get into Oxford?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’
‘Most girls – most people – wouldn’t have done that to a friend. Even if they weren’t prepared to tell an outright lie, they’d have fudged things by saying that she might be lucky with the questions on the entrance exam, or the don interviewing her might see hidden potential.’
‘I know,’ Janet agrees.
‘So why didn’t you do that?’
‘I wanted to,’ Janet says. ‘I knew it would drive a wedge between us if I told her the truth.’ Tears have started to appear in the corners of her eyes. ‘But when you love someone – really love someone – you have to sacrifice yourself to protect them. And that’s what I was doing – trying to protect her by preparing her for the disappointment I knew was coming.’
SIX
It is a sunny Thursday morning, and I am cycling down Broad Street (known locally as the Broad), which is my favourite thoroughfare in the whole of Oxford. It is one of only two streets (the other being the High) which dissect the heart of the university, and on it – or just off it – you will find Blackwell’s famous bookshop, the History of Science Museum, the Bridge of Sighs and the Sheldonian Theatre.
But I’m not making this journey for my own pleasure. It’s strictly business – and that business is Linda Corbet.
My current thoughts on Linda run thus: (i) Linda is very keen on literature, but agrees to study medicine in order to please her father; (ii) her friend Janet tells her she will never get into Oxford, and she decides that no other university is worth the candle, but (iii) she doesn’t immediately abandon her science studies, because she is too timid to make the grand gesture, and so she simply begins to take less care over her work, then (iv) she meets a student from St Luke’s and this doesn’t just revive her interest in literature – it makes her fall head over heels in love with it, and most especially with Robert Cudlip (1612–1659), and finally (v) last Friday she tells her parents she’s going to visit a friend, packs her bag, takes her money out of its hiding place in the Enid Blyton book, and runs away.
What I don’t yet know is what was so special about last Friday. And there just has to have been something special about it to push her into a course of action that neither her mother nor her best friend thought she was capable of.
For a moment, I toy with the idea that she’s eloped with this boy Jeff, but from Janet’s description of them together, it’s clear that they were more like an unexcited Darby and Joan (and him a very reluctant Darby at best) than they were Romeo and Juliet, consumed with passion.
I’m beginning to wish that I had never taken her case on (beginning to wish: that’s a laugh!) because sooner or later I’m going to have to pay Mary Corbet another visit, prove to her that Linda ran away, and leave her with the knowledge that her daughter cares about her so little that she cannot even be bothered to let her know that she is safe and well.
I search for a distraction (who wouldn’t?) and fix on Charlie Swift, the man I’m on my way to see.
I only have a few true friends, which is due, no doubt, to my sceptical detached nature (or possibly my terror of being let down), but Lord Charles Edward George Withington Danby Swift is one of them. Charlie is the bursar at St Luke’s, a post which, in most educational institutions, would mean he was little more than a bookkeeper. But not here! Within the context of an Oxford college, being bursar makes a man a power to be reckoned with, because he does more than keep accounts and post bills – he controls the wealth.
And make no mistake about it, most of these colleges are wealthy. Much of the wealth is based on land, often gifted to them by the various warriors, cowards, wise men, drooling idiots and plain homicidal maniacs who, over the centuries, have worn the British crown. And land in England (a very small country with a very large and increasingly pressing population) is hugely expensive, especially when it lies as close to London as Oxford does. Nor, when I talk about land, do I mean a couple of large fields – it is said (though I’ve never checked this out myself) that you can walk from St John’s College, Oxford to St John’s College, Cambridge without once stepping on land which is not owned by one of those two colleges.
I met Charlie – the man with the power! – during my first week in Oxford, at a reception in the Master’s Garden.
To say that I felt out of my depth at that reception would be as huge an understatement as calling what sunk the Titanic ‘an ice cube’.
For openers, I was a woman in a college which had only started admitting women the previous year (and still had precious few).
But that was nothing compared to the other disparities.
I was a northern girl, and when I looked around me, I still half-expected to see smoking factory chimneys, not Matthew Arnold’s dreaming spires of the Oxford colleges.
I was lower middle class – it was years since Dad had push-biked around collecting insurance payments at people’s back doors but, even so, his trousers still bunched at the ankles, as if his body retained a physical memory of cycle clips.
I was state educated and talked with a heavily vowel-based regional accent, whereas most of the people around me spoke in that lazy drawl which is almost the secret language of the more expensive public schools.
And last but not least, there were my clothes. We were all wearing subfusc, which is a strict requirement whenever the Master is present at an event. That meant I was dressed in a dark jacket, white blouse, black bow tie, dark skirt, dark stockings and black shoes, as well as a commoner’s gown which only reaches down as far as the top of the buttocks, and so is generally known as a bum freezer – all of which should have helped me to blend in.
Right?
Wrong, because all the other girls’ outfits were top-of-the-line Jaeger, and mine had been purchased at Ramsbottom’s (‘Down-to-Earth Prices for Down-to-Earth Folk’) Spring Sale.
As I stood there on that lawn, ignored by all these people who seemed to know each other – and had no interest in ever knowing me – I had never felt so alone in my life.
I was just about to attempt to slip away unnoticed when I felt someone tap me lightly on the right shoulder and heard a plummy voice say, ‘Hello, you seem to be a little down in the mouth. What’s the matter, my dear – won’t the other children play with you?’
I swung around, furious at being so openly ridiculed, and saw Charlie for the first time.
He was in his early forties then – a tall, stately looking man with hair the colour of pale straw. I was on the point of telling him what I thought of him (I may well have been about to use the word ‘arsehole’ once or twice) when I saw that, despite his words, the expression on his face was completely free of malice.
‘I’d ignore them, if I were you,’ he continued. ‘They’re so terribly cliquish. But then, the nouveau riche always are.’
‘The nouveau riche!’ I repeated incredulously.
‘That’s right,’ Charlie confirmed. ‘Take that chap over there.’ He pointed to a young man whose face could not have been more flushed with aristocratic arrogance if he had put a saddle on a convenient serf and was riding him around the estate. ‘I happen to know that only a couple of centuries ago, his family hadn’t even got a pot to piss in.’
‘Only a couple of centuries ago!’ I repeated, teetering uncertainly between gratitude at being rescued and a protective belligerence which had not quite gone away. ‘Is that meant to be some kind of joke that only people already in the know would really understand?’
‘Most certainly not,’ Charlie said. ‘In Oxford, as you’ll find out for yourself when you’ve been here a while, we tend to take the long view on such matters.’ He paused, and looked down at the glass of white wine he was holding in his hand. ‘This Pinot Gris is perhaps just a little too fussy for my taste,’ he continued. ‘What do you think of it?’
I thought it was only the third glass of wine I’d ever drunk in my life, and I was in no position to judge.
‘I’ve tasted better,’ I said, casually.
Charlie just grinned.
‘Have I said something funny?’ I asked.
‘No. I’m smiling because I’m embarrassed.’
‘Embarrassed? What about?’
‘About putting you in a rather difficult position.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I said the wine was a Pinot Gris, but now I realize it’s a Chablis, and you – having known from the first sip what it really was – have been wondering whether to correct me or just let it pass.’
My first impression had been the right one, I thought – the only reason he was talking to me was that it gave him the chance to humiliate me.
‘What kind of sick bastard—?’ I began.
‘There’s no shame in not knowing about wines, you know,’ Charlie interrupted me.
‘There might not be, but it certainly feels like there is here,’ I replied.
Charlie looked around him.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he agreed. ‘What I’m really in the mood for now is a pint of best bitter in the Eagle and Child. Would you care to join me?’
‘I would,’ I told him. ‘I’d like that very much.’
As I get closer to St Luke’s, I find myself pondering on the architectural mélange that is the University of Oxford.
The Taj Mahal, or the Church of Notre Dame de Paris, to take just two examples, are the products of a single magnificent vision, but Oxford colleges are much more piecemeal add-on affairs – less overarching concept, in other words, and more Lego – and St Luke’s is a perfect example of that.
