HOLLY
16 January 1993
Fifteen
The college library smelled of books: a smell that was dry and sweet – as if the scent of parchment had been distilled to that of clean, crisp straw. It didn’t smell like a bookshop: a place in which the scent of the books was muddled by the rain on customers’ coats or the fug that they brought with them: the tuna sandwich gobbled on entering the shop and quietly belched, or the beer, still warm on the breath, that had been swilled at the King’s Arms moments before.
When Holly first entered the mid-seventeenth-century library, it was the scent of these books that struck her. A smell unmarred except by a hint of instant coffee that wafted from the chief librarian’s sturdy pottery mug. Next, it was the books themselves: stretching from the thickly carpeted floor almost all the way up to the barrel-vaulted ceiling, its panels painted the delicate pale pink of a baby’s fingernail and a soft mint green, divided with gold, and studded at each intersection with a white ceiling rose.
There were ten shelves or more of these books, reaching all the way up each bookshelf from the leather-bound encyclopedic tomes at the bottom to the paperback textbooks that you needed a wooden ladder to access, the struts creaking as you shifted your weight on the way to the top. There were sixteen bays in all, each lined with these shelves and divided into English literature; French, German and Italian; Ancient Greek and Latin; philosophy, politics and economics; geography; theology; music; history of art; law. History had its own college library as if the subject matter was so immense it could not be contained within these shelves. She didn’t know if the chemists, biochemists and mathematicians borrowed textbooks but she rarely saw them here and imagined that most of their knowledge was gained not in such a quiet, studious space but in the forensic environment of a lab.
It was early morning: eight-thirty. One of her favourite times of the day when the library was almost empty – only herself and the chief librarian, Mr Fuller, a scurrying figure she nicknamed Mr Tumnus after the faun in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; who emanated tension if a student dared to talk loudly or, worse still, entered the library to find a friend, not a book. He liked her, though. She watched as he gave her a quiet nod and then busied himself with the set of small oak drawers in which the books were indexed: the authors alphabetised and then the titles. The university library, the Bod, had an electronic catalogue but these things took time and there was no hurry, here, for such a system. Though the books were pristine, a soft layer of dust coated the screen of the library computer. Order was preserved by index cards: some yellowed with the titles typed fifty years earlier, others handwritten. The system had worked for a hundred-plus years and there seemed no need for it to be altered. There was still a role for those small oak drawers.
The librarian trod briskly down the carpeted corridor to shelve returned books and to rearrange a pile pulled out overnight and then abandoned. But apart from the tread of his brogues and intermittent tsks at the apparent selfishness of the students, the library was silent. Just Holly and those tens of thousands of books.
She stretched out, enjoying the shaft of sunlight that streamed through the vast east-facing window beside her and dappled her notepad; motes of dust dancing in the brightness, the shadow of the traceried stonework demarcating her book. A staircase crisscrossed inside the windows of the college on the other side of the square and she spied the smudge of a figure running down it and wondered, yet again, at the exquisite beauty of this place and at its mystery: all those lives, all those stories being played out alongside each other in libraries, dining rooms and boat houses; bars and nightclubs; museums, gardens, even punts.
If university was a place of discovery then there were thousands of lives being reinvented or found: narratives written and rewritten; sexualities tried and discarded; political allegiances tested, altered, and abandoned over the length of an eight-week term.
The freshers who smiled proudly for their first formal group photo were not the same students who threw their mortarboards into the air and pelted one another with eggs and flour – some self-consciously; some with the sheer thrill of relief – as they left the Exam Schools, three years later. Life – intellectual, social and sexual discovery – would have embraced them all.
And she was ready for all this. Already, just one term in, she could feel herself altering: her accent softening as if the warmer Oxfordshire climate was melting her lilting cadences; her self-belief increasing as she let her guard down, just a little, and allowed herself to believe that she had just as much of a right to be here as anyone else. The thought caught her short. Did she really believe that? Well, yes. Just a bit. She still felt an imposter – but maybe others did too? ‘I’m the token girl mathematician,’ Alison had admitted glumly, late one night as she had pored over a textbook that might as well have been in Russian for all Holly could make of it, then drew a neat black line through her calculations. ‘Brought in to meet some gender quota.’ And then. ‘I feel such a fucking fraud.’
Holly was happy here, though. Her chest constricted and swelled in one fat throb as the thought reverberated through her. At Oxford, she could be entirely herself. Particularly here, in this library, where the whole point was that she could immerse herself in this womb of books and no longer have to pretend that she wasn’t clever. At school, she had been consistently bullied for being bright until she had shrunk in on herself, no longer offering answers to the teacher’s questions; hunching her shoulders and fixing her eyes on the floor as if to make herself invisible. If there was a crime worse than being bright, it was failing to disguise the fact under layers of sarcasm and thick mascara. At her school, the overriding aim was to get a boyfriend and being clever could only militate against that.
And then, in the final year, with it known that she would apply for Oxford, she had become defiant: had begun to speak up again and to acknowledge her cleverness, though tentatively at first. This is who I am, she effectively said, every time she found herself raising a hand to respond to Mrs Thoroughgood’s questions on free will and determinism in The Mill on the Floss or on Bertha Rochester as Jane Eyre’s doppelganger. She could see the end of school now: could count the remaining months and smell the freedom that would soon be hers; could sense the escape from the girlish cliques, the continual bitchiness, the insidious belief that if you weren’t pretty or slim or wore a sufficiently short skirt or tucked in your tie in precisely the right way – skinny with the fat tongue thrust between the top second and third buttons, you had no worth. On the last day of her exams, she had stalked into the Shakespeare paper, her thighs rubbing together under her frumpishly pleated skirt, her tie unashamedly fat, and she had written her heart out. Her worst tormenter, Tori Fox, had asked how she had found it, and she still hadn’t dared to tell the truth; hadn’t risked confessing: ‘Actually, it was pretty easy.’ But when she got her four straight As, they all knew.
She stood up to stretch and to glance out of the window again, at one of the finest views in Oxford. The Gothic tower of St Mary’s offset by the classical Radcliffe Camera; a thrusting phallus of a spire outshone by a rotunda, study trumping worship; self-containment beating self-aggrandisement, over and over again. Perhaps that was why she felt so content, here in this spot on the west side of this cobbled square where she was surrounded by libraries with the square’s centre showcasing the prettiest of them all. All of this beauty and history and tradition existed to celebrate and facilitate studying. She need never feel apologetic about wanting to read a book – or be herself – again.
And so none of her social fears really mattered. She knew she would never be part of Sophie’s clique but perhaps it wasn’t a huge issue. She had friends outside college: those earnest, ambitious boys on the student paper, who talked of applying for work experience on broadsheets or at the BBC – perhaps had even already done so; and Alison – with whom she could down a pint of cider in the college bar; and who she knew still unaccountably liked her, even if she was too inhibited when she dragged her to the Park End Street nightclubs – her clothes wrong and her movements stilted; her body too gauche to really let herself go.
She was free of the fear of being deemed wanting – for here, she was finally realising, there were a few other people who were sufficiently different; enough for her to feel as if she could somehow fit in. For the first time in her life, or the first time since very early childhood, she belonged. And she could relax. The low-level anxiety that had coursed through her veins every day at school, and that had only ebbed away on the bus home, as she sought comfort in a Twix gobbled in a rush of relief at having survived another day, had disappeared and would only surface intermittently – when she sought Sophie out among her other friends. It was a new and completely wonderful feeling. This strong conviction. This sense of being happy and at ease.