Fervor, page 3
Elsie asked if she could go. Some girls from school were meeting at the cinema in half an hour.
“And you won’t be joining them,” Eric said.
“I thought you were worried I was getting anti-social.”
“Don’t be clever with me. And can you put that fucking stone away.”
She was rolling it under her chin. She stopped rolling it and held it in her left hand.
Eric opened his palm. “Actually, you know what, give it here. Now.”
When Elsie shook her head, he grabbed her forearm and wrenched the stone from her grip, surprised by his own violence. The wrist of her left hand was red, and in a moment she was massaging it, like someone newly freed of handcuffs.
She looked at her father with horror and confusion, tears blurring her eyes.
“We only want you to be happy,” Eric said, pocketing the stone.
Minutes later, having retreated to the bathroom, he stood before the mirror; a pair of frightened eyes stared back at him. With his hands clamped onto the towel rack to stop himself shaking, he replayed the conversation in his head, a conversation so like the ones he’d been on the receiving end of throughout his childhood—the ones that were no doubt instrumental in forming his watchful, closed-off, tightly sprung character—and he promised himself that whatever the provocation, he would never lose his temper like that again. Not with his own children.
In his frustration, he hurled Elsie’s stone from the bathroom window, and heard it crack against the road outside, then skitter down the street.
Remarkably enough, Eric’s dressing down had the desired effect. The next two weeks saw a steep improvement in the quality of Elsie’s work. She began participating in class again, raising her hand to answer questions before she was called on. Her teachers said it was like having the old Elsie back, though no one was so tactless as to say the one from before her grandfather died. She was even getting on better with the other girls; Meredith invited her to come ice skating one weekend, and someone called Pauline asked her teachers if she could sit next to Elsie in science, as everyone else was horrid to her.
Then one night, Hannah got in late and found Eric sitting at the foot of the stairs, the phone nestled in his shoulder and its cord wrapped around his finger. Aside from the light hanging above the downstairs landing, the house was dark. Still buzzing from the meeting she’d had with her agent to discuss her manuscript, and a little tipsy from drinks with a former colleague, she knew at once something had happened. Her husband looked ridiculous, crouched there in the hallway. He hadn’t changed out of his suit, still had his shoes on. He hung up on whoever it was without replacing the phone in its cradle, just squeezing the button below the earpiece.
“Where the hell have you been?”
Was Eric drunk? She’d told him that morning she’d be back late. Now she slung her coat over the banister and asked, with deliberate calm, what was going on.
“Elsie’s gone! Do you know how many people I’ve called? I even tried your parents, you can imagine how that went down. She never came home. The boys are clueless. Fat lot of use the school’s been. They didn’t even notice, can you believe it, no one even saw her going. With the fees they charge, you’d think they could post someone at the gate—”
“Slow down. You’re not making sense.”
“She’s missing, Hannah. Don’t you understand? It’s late, it’s dark out, and nobody knows where she is.”
Hannah took this in with a nod. Something kept her from exploding into panic. A small miracle: Hashem had blessed her with the cool lucidity demanded. “You’ve called the police?”
“She’s fourteen years old, for fuck’s sake.”
Hannah bent down, cupped her hand around the back of her husband’s sodden neck, and pressed her thumb to the base of his skull.
“She’ll be back,” she said. And then, as if editing herself, “We’ll find her.”
THREE
I met Tovyah Rosenthal in the Autumn of 2008, on my first day of university. Although I was given the room next door to his, a whole term had to pass before we were friends. Even then it was rocky.
His name was spoken often in freshers’ week, on account of his mother, and sometimes you heard people describe him as not normal. The other historians resented him; in seminars and tutorials he was both brilliant and a complete jerk. He once told a fellow student that the depths of his stupidity were “unfathomable” and another that her presentation was “barely sane.” Outside class, he was a solitary kid. Studious, quiet, unobtrusive. And so, when it became clear he wasn’t interested in the social life of the college and couldn’t be drawn by bringing up his mother’s controversial writings in earshot, the bulk of students might have forgotten Tovyah was there, closed in between walls of books, working towards his inevitable first.
On that first morning, my parents and I arrived later than most. As I walked through the front quad dragging my overstuffed suitcase, new students were already being led to their rooms, or milling about to make small talk, having unpacked as much as an hour ago. My mother, doing the talking for three, spoke too loudly about the beauty of the college and how lucky I was. Though my father said nothing, I thought he was coping admirably; I squeezed his hand as we joined the registration queue. The weather helped. It was a bright day for October and the sun was only half-veiled by clouds. I suspect I knew even then such days might come along three or four times in a lifetime, and this was the first of its kind since I began secondary school, seven years earlier: a day of infinite promise, ferrying this cargo of strangers whose lives were about to collide with my own. I also feared that I was bound to squander it. So far, I’d clung to my parents and spoken to no one my own age.
Amid the bustle of new students, one caught my eye. Hard to say why. He stood with his hands buried in his pockets and gazed up at the bell tower above the great hall, looking bored, even resigned. He was accompanied by a short man, heavy-set and bearded. The father—who surely had work later—sported a three-piece suit the colour of slate, while his son wore trousers that sagged at the heel and a green rain jacket, in pessimistic defiance of the Indian Summer. A third figure, no more than a child, fiddled with the drawstrings of her white hoodie, her face concealed. None of them spoke. After a minute, the man patted the boy heavily on the shoulder, handed him a satchel, and then took the girl by the hand and marched her back towards the front gate. At the exit, she spun round to take a last look at the place, and I saw this was not a child, but a young woman, at least in her twenties, her hand still locked in the man’s grip. That’s how you walk with a little girl, I thought. Now alone, the boy looped the satchel over the handle of his suitcase. Another moment and one of the second years led him to the room he’d been assigned. At the door to his housing block, he lifted a finger to touch the brickwork then quickly withdrew his hand, as if burnt. I didn’t know then that he was reaching out to touch a mezuzah, one of the little boxes fixed at the entrances to Jewish homes, containing a scrap of parchment inscribed with prayers. Such boxes offer divine protection to the house. But on the walls of the college, founded by Christians and now inhabited largely by sceptics like me, there was no mezuzah for him to touch, no seal of God’s protection.
Watching him, I found myself engrossed, and it came as a jolt when my father’s panicked voice said, “Sweetie, we’re at the front of the queue.”
Soon, the moment came for my own parents to leave. My father reminded me that if I didn’t like it, it was only the next three years of my life. My mother, swatting his arm, told me not to work too hard. As a bookish and driven child, not always overburdened with friends, I had looked forward to this moment since I was twelve. And this was their way, I gathered, of wishing me health, happiness, and prosperity. That they had come here together to drop me off, which entailed both taking a day’s holiday, was suddenly quite moving.
Newly alone, I decided it was time to start meeting people. I began by knocking on the door next to mine, and a deep voice from within asked what I wanted. When, after a moment’s hesitation, I pushed my way in, I was surprised to encounter the same boy I’d seen outside, still wearing his rain jacket. He was kneeling beside a suitcase, now, unloading and piling up books on the floor.
“Tovyah,” he said abruptly, looking up at me. And when I said nothing in response, he added, “That’s my name.”
Later, I would conclude that he didn’t look much like his famous parent, whose auburn curls and heart-shaped face regularly appeared above printed columns up and down the country. Unlike her, he had straight hair, almost black, and his bony features were sharp and serious. But, standing on the threshold of his room for the first time, I had no idea that his mother was well known.
Having taken out the last of his possessions—there were notably few—he shoved his suitcase under his bed and stood up. I’ve never seen anyone offer their hand with so much discomfort.
“Never shaken a girl’s hand before?” I asked.
“Actually no,” he said.
I decided there was something of the basement-dweller in his pale looks and drooping eyelids. Still, though I would not have described him as handsome, his was a face you noticed: those wide cheekbones, at least, were impressive. As a teenager, impatient for the growth-spurt that was ultimately cancelled, not delayed, he discovered that if he angled himself to the mirror just so and pushed his ears out with his fingertips, he looked exactly like a young Franz Kafka.
He told me this that first time we spoke.
“Faces matter,” he went on. “The early mystics took physiognomy seriously. These were men who believed they’d found the means to ascend to Heaven and behold the throne of God. They had to guard their secret knowledge, of course—fearing persecution, they were rigorous about who they allowed into their circles. Anyone who wanted to join their ranks had to have, alongside a faultless moral character, the right face.”
He paused, pondered something, then jutted out his chin. “Do you think I’d have made the cut?”
I faked a laugh, unsure if he was trying to be funny.
“Of course, they wouldn’t have looked at you.”
I asked why not.
“Well, for starters you’re a woman. And for the mains, you’re not Jewish.”
Although he was precisely half-wrong, I didn’t correct him. To hear myself referred to as a woman, not a girl, was jarring. Still, it wasn’t Tovyah’s strange formality I minded. He was so fixed on telling me about himself and his opinions of the college, I’d barely had a chance to speak. And when I said I wanted to arrange my room, he followed me next door. From a cardboard tube I retrieved posters: the first Long Blondes album cover, and a still from The Virgin Suicides—Kirsten Dunst sprawled in long grass, possibly dead, otherwise daydreaming. Both had been chosen under my brother’s guidance, calculated to produce a favourable impression on my new peers. Which did not work on Tovyah, who told me Eugenides was a hack, and asked if a “long blonde” was some kind of drink. As I busied myself with unfurling and blu-tacking, he continued to regale me. Eventually I told him I would like to make a phone call. And, yes, it was a private call.
I’d been warned there’d be people like this. All the same, it seemed pretty bad luck that he was the first person I’d met, and that we would wake up each day with just a thin wall between us.
* * *
If anything, those first impressions understate Tovyah’s eccentricity. On day two, when a few of us from the corridor required an afternoon movie to soften the residual pangs of our hangovers, we went round in a circle and made suggestions. The winning film, by an all-but-unanimous vote, was Mean Girls. Tovyah, not hungover, was the lone dissenter. “Let me guess. Beneath their mean exteriors pulse hearts of burnished gold.” His own suggestion was Hiroshima, Mon Amour. When the (presumably dismal) classic of Franco-Japanese cinema was put up for election, Tovyah jabbed his hand into the air, appalled by our philistinism. Then, accepting defeat with minimal grace, he stormed off. I shared the common feeling that he was being a dick, but was struck all the same by his word choice. Hearts that neither pumped, nor beat, but pulsed.
Another instance. A common student prank was to drop a penny into a full pint of beer, goading the owner of said pint to drain the glass to save the Queen from drowning. Silly, of course, but the consequences of refusal were real enough—let the penny linger and the drink would soon take on a foul coppery tang—and many of us less experienced drinkers suffered through this spluttering ordeal in the first weeks of term. A variation was to drop a two-pence coin into someone’s dessert; the unlucky diner was compelled to eat the dish without using their hands, like a pig at a trough. My friend Jan tried this on Tovyah’s apple crumble.
“Go on, fresher, lap it up.”
Tovyah fished out the coin and held it for inspection. One side emerged custard-skinned. The reverse was heavily oxidised, stippled in green lichen. “What the hell are you doing? Do you want to poison me?”
Jan shrugged. “Just a bit of fun.”
“Hilarious. If you ever put a rancid coin in my food again, I’m going straight to the dean.”
“Easy, mate,” Jan said. He made eyes at some of us round the table.
“I could have choked. You could have fucking killed me!”
Tovyah spun many heads in the lunch hall that day and—among those who looked—he did not win friends.
To be fair to him, these were stressful times. At most universities there’s an idea you let students have a week to settle in before work starts. It’s supposed to help with the homesickness, the abrupt departure from the only world you’ve ever known. Before I went up, my brother told me freshers’ week was the time of his life, then hastily added that I should avoid getting carried away. He didn’t want to imagine his little sister spending her time as he had, stumbling between nightclubs and hitting on strangers.
He needn’t have worried.
We arrived on the Monday, and on the Tuesday we were invited to drinks with our tutors before formal hall. That summer, the senior academic in the English department had retired. This left Dr Phillips to run the show, a prim medievalist whose research concerned devotional poetry and land taxation in thirteenth-century England, precisely no one’s idea of the life and soul of a party. According to Phillips, serving wine at the initial meeting between students and faculty set the wrong tone. Instead, we were greeted with apple juice and biscuits, and assigned our first essay, due the following week: “We should not condescend those who lived through past eras for their ignorance. They are what we know.” Discuss the novels of Charles Dickens and George Eliot in light of this quotation. Dr Simms, the college Victorian, asked if we had any questions.
I had one, which remained unvoiced. When exactly did we get our seven days in the shallow end?
Everyone was daunted, but Jan was livid. “Doesn’t she realise that it’s supposed to be a holistic education. You read the books, sure, but you also have to go out and get smashed.”
He seemed to know what he was talking about, so I nodded. Silently agreeing with people because I assumed they were cleverer than me was a newly acquired habit. If this continues, I thought, I may come to dislike myself. Like Tovyah, Jan had caught my attention the day we arrived. He was unignorably attractive: a natural blond, and tall enough that he was forever bobbing his head under doorways as he entered rooms. He seemed to know a lot of the other freshers already. I wondered if they’d all been at school together, but on reflection that seemed unlikely.
We weren’t alone being set work so early. Most students had been addressed similarly by their tutors, and you heard a lot of complaints. “What’s the point of having a noughth week if you have to work in it?” Of course, the academics had their rejoinder. Outside the chapel I heard Dr Aylesham, the dean, say: “This way you get the jump on first week. Don’t want to be playing catchup all term, now, do we?” It was a total scam. At school, I’d been led to believe when you got to university the academics no longer acted like teachers. Instead, they were merely gatekeepers of the intellect, people who would speak candidly in seminars and, if you earned their trust, take you to exclusive parties, where the boundaries between generations dissolved.
The only student on their side was Tovyah. “Can you believe people are actually complaining about how much work they have? If all you want to do is scoff pills and get laid, you don’t need to enrol in the country’s oldest university.”
I suggested that people might want to do the partying and the studying. Tovyah considered this. “But why?” he said, confused. “Why would anyone want that?”
The Social Committee did its best, despite the workload, to give us a good time. They organised pub crawls, raves, football initiations, and traffic light parties, not to mention the non-drinking options—Jenga club, ice-cream Wednesdays, friend speed-dating. On the Saturday night, capping everything, was our first bop: a fancy-dress party in the college bar. “That’s where the hooking up will kick off,” Jan predicted. “One or two marriages might one day trace their origins to this fateful Saturday.” The theme was the Golden Age of Hollywood, and I searched charity shops for a hat like Ingrid Bergman’s in Casablanca.
When Saturday came around, however, there was an announcement tacked to the cork noticeboard outside the common room. Students huddled. Spotting me outside of the circle, Jan broke the news.
“They cancelled it, they’ve bloody cancelled it.”
“Cancelled what?” I said.
“We’re not getting a freshers’ bop! One of the deciding moments in the formation of a year group, and we don’t even get one.”
Turned out it was disciplinary. The night before, two students on a freshers’ pub crawl fought outside the Gardeners Arms. Both ended the night in a cell, one with two teeth short of a full set. As the dental patient was Vice President of the Junior Common Room and his adversary was Social Sec, it was determined that the incident reflected badly on the whole nature of freshers’ week. Hence cancelled bops, cancelled foam parties, even cancelled get-to-know-you Jenga.
