HOLLY
3 October 1992
Eight
It was as if Holly was on a film set – or in an episode of Morse, perhaps. Yes, that was the view, seen through her mullioned windows. A golden quadrangle, a hard blue sky and the dome of a library seen on the college prospectus and on the postcards of Oxford she had bought when she had come down for her interview. The Radcliffe Camera, or the Rad Cam as she supposed she would soon call it. Eighteenth century. Iconic. Less a dreaming spire and more a honey-coloured pepper pot. An image snapped by tens of thousands of tourists, every year, and now, it seemed, the view from her window.
She still couldn’t quite believe it. That she was here in this room – or couple of rooms. For she had a ‘set’: a large living room or study, with its oak-panelled walls, huge seven-drawered desk and battered leather sofa, and a small bedroom off it: a single bed wedged against more panels, cloistered away.
‘You’ve done well in the room ballot,’ the porter had remarked as he’d handed over a heavy mortice key, and she had. She’d come fourteenth, apparently; which meant a set of rooms on the first floor of the sixteenth-century Old Quad; not a room in the Victorian Gothic ‘New’ Quad; or exiled in the 1970s annexe across town. The dark stained stairs creaked as she climbed them, stretching up the steep, uneven steps and noting how they had warped and worn in the middle under the tread of centuries of students. And when she had pushed open the heavy oak door, which squeaked as if in a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, she had almost cried out in delight.
‘Bit different from home, isn’t it?’ Her father’s voice broke into her thoughts. Pete Berry peered at the casement above a panelled window seat. ‘That looks like it’ll get a bit draughty.’
He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and rattled his car keys; rose onto the balls of his feet.
‘Just a bit different.’ Holly ignored his criticism of the practicalities of her room as she peered at a sundial on the opposite wall of the quad: blues, white and gold with a regal thread of red. Back home, she had half a bedroom: her side Spartan compared to her younger sister Manda’s with its mass of Rimmel make-up and plastic jewellery. No view from their window except the dark red brick of the house opposite; the slate of the roof and the clutter of chimney stacks, topped with TV aerials. The smudge of a charcoal-grey sky.
‘Well, I’d best be getting off then.’ Her father was uneasy in these surroundings: perhaps uneasy in her presence. No use playing the proud father when he had disappeared six years earlier, leaving his wife and two kids. He was only here because she had had too much luggage to carry. She wished she had packed more lightly rather than deal with the embarrassment of their small talk in the Nissan Micra; his overt jolliness – a mix of pride and barely suppressed chippiness; perhaps even nerves – that filled that tinny space.
Her suitcase and rucksack sat between them.
‘Well, bye, love.’ He came towards her gruffly, opening his arms. He expected a hug. She stood stiffly inside them.
‘I’m proud of you.’ He pulled away. ‘No driving down cul-de-sacs for you, hey?’ A driving instructor, he laughed at his customary quip.
‘No, I suppose not.’ She managed the expected smile.
‘You be good.’
Like you? She felt like asking, for it was his habitual philandering – a compulsion to seduce the women he taught; and his surprising success at this – that had seen him abandon family life. She let it go. ‘I’ll try,’ she said.
‘Good girl.’ He rattled the keys in his pockets, again; didn’t think to offer her any cash: for she had a full grant, money was tight and it wouldn’t have occurred to him to do so. ‘Well,’ he said again. ‘Best be going then.’
She didn’t suggest finding a pub for lunch, or even the local Wimpy bar. Down in the quad, her peers were streaming out into the autumn sunshine with their parents: a river of navy blazers and smart camel coats topped with shining, well-cut hair. A peal of laughter rang up: a father throwing his head back then placing an arm around his boy’s shoulder. A mother put her hand to the small of her daughter’s back; steered the tall, blonde girl towards the porters’ lodge, past a trolley piled high with matching luggage. There was a uniformity to these families. Slim, tall, well dressed. Entitled. A sense that these students arriving to start college were at ease: that they knew they belonged here.
The thought of being seen with her dad – with his too-loud laugh; his black leather jacket and his paunch hanging over his jeans – made her nervous. Every single thing about him would jar.
‘Yes,’ she said, and swallowed for she still wanted to cling to all that was familiar while she could feel herself trying to repel it. ‘Yes, perhaps you had.’
Left alone, she could relax. Or try to. She lay on her bed – unmade, for she would do that in a minute – and stared at the ceiling, then sprang up for she was jittery, too excited to keep still, her stomach a jumble of nerves. She wouldn’t venture out into the sunshine of the quad just yet, though, but would get her bearings; find the toilet – at the top of the staircase, she thought the second-year that had shown them up here had said – perhaps see if she could find her neighbours. On her way up, she passed a cubbyhole, set back in the panelling; a cupboard cut away to reveal a small fridge. She peered inside. No milk but, on the wire racks, three bottles topped with fat corks held fast with wire and decorated with gold labels. Even she, who had never seen a bottle of the stuff in real life, knew this was champagne.
A door above her opened and a face peered out. A boy, a young man really, older than her, with a mass of long, auburn curls and a look of lazy amusement on his face.
‘Plundering my supply?’ His voice had a plum in it.
‘No . . . honest.’ She straightened as if caught red-handed.
‘Ned Iddesleigh-Flyte.’ He held out a hand. Bemused, she climbed the remaining stairs towards him and took it. ‘PPE. Third year. Where were you at school?’
She was bemused. ‘Liverpool,’ she said.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘I meant: which school.’ A pause. ‘I was at Eton.’
She felt like laughing. He was kidding.
‘Really?’ It was the best she could manage and she hated herself for not coming up with a proper put-down: something that would nail him firmly in his place.
‘Really,’ he said, though it sounded like rarely: a different word entirely from her guttural intonation that rose up with its second syllable and which she realised now she might have to abandon. His long vowels stretched through the silence as she thought of something to say.
‘Anyway,’ he rescued her. ‘What’s your name, dear neighbour?’
‘Um, Holly,’ she said, bracing herself for the inevitable. ‘Holly Berry.’
‘You are joking?’
‘No.’ She was used to this reaction; used, too, to trotting out the same embarrassing explanation. ‘I was conceived on Christmas Eve. My Dad has a sense of humour – or likes to think he has, anyway.’
His smile widened and he threw back his head, like that father in the quad below: perhaps it was him she’d spied. ‘Well, it’s certainly memorable. Holly Berry. Are you prickly?’
‘I can be.’ Was that the best he could do? A childhood’s worth of taunts surfaced but her tongue lay fat in her mouth, incapable of forming a better retort. Blood flushed up her neck as the silence yawned between them, exposing her gaucheness. She needed to say something: anything to wipe that smirk off his face.
He gave her that smile again: a wide, languorous grin from a boy who knew he had the world at his feet. Though he wasn’t all that. Manda, who was experienced, or more experienced than her, wouldn’t look at him twice with that shaggy mop of hair. She liked her men – and they were men – to look neat. But then Manda would never apply to Oxford. ‘Why would I want to go somewhere stuck-up like that?’ she had asked Holly, whom she also viewed as stuck-up. She wanted to go to Manchester and had started a BTEC in business studies at the local sixth-form college. Studying English – reading English, whatever that meant – was a waste of time. Far better to start earning straight away or to do something vocational. Something that you knew would make you money.
Holly wasn’t preoccupied with making money. She was reading English because it was the subject she was good at. ‘Exceptional,’ her A-level teacher had said, before suggesting to her mum that she might apply for Oxford. ‘Some of the colleges are becoming aware that they need to be diverse about their intake: I really think she has a chance,’ Mrs Thoroughgood had explained.
She had got into her first-choice college: a choice she had made because it looked particularly pretty in the prospectus and was central and close to the libraries. Though she had realised the percentage of freshers from a state school like hers would be low, it hadn’t occurred to her that she might meet someone like Ned. She had heard of Eton, of course, but only in the way that she had heard of the House of Commons or Buckingham Palace.
And now she had an Old Etonian as a neighbour. She needed to find someone more normal, more like herself. For though she had wanted to come to Oxford to leave her old life behind, now she craved someone familiar.
‘Is there anyone else on this staircase?’ she said.
Alison Jessop wasn’t on her staircase, it transpired; nor was she reading English. But Holly gravitated towards her as inevitably as an iron filing drawn by a magnet’s strength. It was her laugh that caught her attention: a warm, full-bellied sound coming from this small, pretty girl, flicking her hair and beaming up at a boy on the other side of the dining hall, across two rows of dark tables. Above her hung heavy oils of notable alumni: an Archbishop of Canterbury, a prime minister, a Nobel Prize winning novelist and an actor. Either side of her were earnest boys – her fellow mathematicians, Holly later learned – with the pale complexions and pustules, the lank, greased hair of those who spent too much time in the library. Alison – with her guttural laugh and hot pink top beneath her short, black gown – provided a blast of colour, a hint of glamour against the sombre wooden panels and gloom of a hall lit by flickering candelabras.
She was from Leeds. Her accent more muted than Holly’s: generically northern to the southerners around them with their ‘rarelys’ and their ‘orfullys’ and their As that were lingered over, warm and indulgent, compared to Holly and Alison’s As which were flat and short. She had gone to a private school and so could have fitted in but she played up her northern-ness: didn’t see it as the badge of shame that Holly feared. ‘ ’Nowt like pie and gray-vee,’ she would say in a parody of the flat-capped pigeon-fancier others assumed her to be, as they queued together in the canteen, the next day; or as she demolished the plate of food with a gutsiness that suggested she was ready to attack her life here at Oxford with the same enthusiasm.
It should have grated – perhaps would have if she had been thickset and crop-haired like Holly; or if she had looked as if she had a whippet chained up in the quad. But Alison looked as if she was born to wear a cocktail dress. Her face was angelic. Heart-shaped with big blue eyes and a Cupid’s bow of a mouth, from which an unlit cigarette often hung, the crumpled packet stuffed in her back pocket.
Her subject should have marked her out as uncool. But her contradictions – that exquisite face with its dirty laugh; the dry subject with the vivacious girl – were beguiling. And she seemed to like Holly. ‘Thank fuck I’ve found you,’ she declared, at the end of their first evening together, with the passionate ferocity that tended to characterise friendships in that first week, alliances that many spent the next term, perhaps the next year, trying to wriggle out of. She downed her snakebite and black. ‘Time for another?’
Having Alison as a friend meant that Oxford seemed suddenly more manageable. The social side, at least. The academic side didn’t sound as if it would be too difficult. They were doing the medieval paper, this term, and Victorian literature. An author a week: Hardy, Eliot, Pater, the Brontes – Charlotte and Emily – Tennyson, Browning, Wilde, Dickens, the latter given two weeks in a rare concession to the volume of his work.
Reading the novels she hadn’t devoured before she arrived was achievable; as was constructing the essays, for she was organised and systematic, working long hours and keeping to a realistic timetable for when she would need to start work on her weekly essay – 8 p.m. the night before a tutorial scheduled first thing the next day. There was a maturity to the way she studied, honed during the past few years at school when her peers shunned her and books were her comfort and her escape route from their sustained bullying. But navigating her way socially was far more tricky.
And yet it needn’t be, for now she had Alison, whom she might have found intimidating were it not for the shared geography which bound them, Yorkshire and Merseyside blanketed together as being part of a vast, unknowable grim-ooop-northness; the two of them, black sheep in a uniform flock of white. Of course there were others who stood apart from the mass of hearty, public school southerners: the overtly camp guy who left to go to Bristol at the end of his first year; a token Asian mathematician. But they squirrelled themselves away. These boys kept themselves apart from those who slipped from libraries to bars to bedrooms; from tutorials to dining halls and out into the crisp moonlit nights. They would emerge, blinking, for their exams but otherwise lived in the alternative universe of the college computer room where they found friends in similar rooms in other universities through the magic of internet message boards.
But Holly and Alison were different. Female, for one thing, in a world in which their relative rarity in a male-dominated college made them interesting. And, in Alison’s case at least, not socially inept. By virtue of her association with her funny, mouthy friend, Holly could navigate life at college and ride on her coat-tails, at least for a while.
The Saturday of their first week – the improbably named noughth week – and the noise from the cellar bar flowed out into the quad from the bottom of the staircase. A deep-bottomed, rich male laughter topped with something high-pitched and over-effusive: the sound of girls wanting to fit in.
The stairs down to the bar dripped with condensation: the moisture from more than eighty students breathing in the same stale air. Holly pushed her way in behind Alison and was thrust against the damp back of a young man, T-shirt drenched in sweat. His buttocks, in jeans, were hot against her skin.
‘Two snakebite and blacks, please,’ Alison called to the barman, an unshaven, disarmingly good-looking third-year. She reached into her cleavage and retrieved a crumpled fiver; shoved the three pounds change he gave her into a pocket of her jeans.
The floor was sweet and sticky and Holly felt nauseous as she moved through the tight-packed, pulsating bodies, the conversation ebbing and flowing then building to a roar. This part of the bar was thick with smoke, wreathing from the mouths of Ned Iddesleigh-Flyte, who gave her an ironic nod, and a group of third-year men, each dressed in a uniform of shirts, rolled at the cuffs and half-pulled from jeans that hung low at their waists, revealing a hint of a Calvin Klein waistband. Ned had a piece of string twisted around one hairy wrist.
They pushed on deeper into the bar, into the furthest section, beyond the pool table. It was late. They’d just made last orders, Holly insisting on working in the college library before Alison, bemused by her behaviour – ‘You don’t need to be such a spod’ – had dragged her down here. The students in this dark part of the bar had had a long night. She slipped on a slick of cider and jarred her hip on the edge of a dark wooden table; was briefly befuddled as someone grabbed her elbow and righted her with a casual arm thrown round her waist.
‘It’s a little fresher! Easy does it,’ went his cry, and she felt her body stiffen against the fluid brush of his fingers, the quick squeeze that she knew meant no harm but was still a surprise. Fuck a fresher, the mantra she’d heard bandied around in the dining room as the second-years had assessed the newcomers, filled her head. She glanced at the boy. Was that what he wanted? But he had already released her and was downing a pint: head tilted back, Adam’s apple bobbing as the golden liquid slipped down his gullet. She watched, fascinated; the memory of his fingers imprinted on her waist.
‘Come on – you’ll miss the action!’ Alison was calling back to her and thrust out a hand – the fingers square with chipped fuchsia nails. Holly took it and allowed herself to be pulled along in her slipstream, jostled and hustled through the crowd.
‘You all right?’ Alison called back, her face, flushed with excitement, gleaming with a sheen of sweat.
She nodded, forcing down any misgivings and giving in to a flicker of excitement building inside her; the sense that something new – and possibly illicit – was about to happen, for there was definitely something going on in the furthest corner of this stretch of the cellar bar. A crowd was gathered facing the wall, shielding a table, and a mantra was building: ‘Ros-coe, Ros-coe, Ros-coe, Ros-coe.’ The boy’s name was being chanted and then there was a drumming of several pairs of hands on the table and a great cheer erupted: a brutal cry of delight at the breaking of some final taboo.
‘ ’Fuck’s sake!’ The boy Roscoe staggered up and away. ‘I need some beer.’ His broad, pleasant face was flushed as he shoved past on his way to the bar but behind his beam she sensed some embarrassment – though perhaps it was just the effect of the drink, held high and sloshed back from a plastic pint cup.
‘Gi’s a go.’ Another boy, broad-chested as the first, called out, and his request was met with a rallying cheer.
‘An-dy, An-dy, An-dy,’ the chanting resumed as the boy was thrust through his friends and hauled up onto the table. He looked around, grinning, delighted at being cheered by his team-mates – for they were members of the college rugby team, she saw as she took in their tops emblazoned with their initials and the college crest.
‘An-dy, An-dy, An-dy, An-dy.’ And then, as he lowered himself to lie down, his back on the table, ‘Go on, my boy.’
She watched; curious at first, then bewildered and then appalled as another member of the rugby team pulled down his jeans and boxer shorts and positioned himself on all fours above the laughing Andy. ‘Salis-bury!’ The roar rose up as a third boy stood on a bench with a pint of beer and poured it down Salisbury’s naked buttocks and into poor Andy’s mouth.
‘An-dy, An-dy, An-dy’; the drumming of the table almost drowned out the calls but then there was a jubilant roar and he was heaving himself off the table, spitting beer and demanding a refill, while the half-naked Salisbury, who’d clambered off him, hauled his jeans and boxers up.
‘ ’Fuck’s sake,’ Andy half-spat his beer. ‘Fucking gross.’
‘Any more takers?’ The ringleader – the lad pouring the pint of beer – looked around and, to Holly’s bemusement, another rugby player – chest puffed out; hips rocking in a parody of a cowboy swaggering towards a fight – took Salisbury’s place.
‘What are they doing? Why are they doing this?’ The words slipped out as she glanced at the flushing Andy, whose neck was caught in a headlock by other team members. They slapped his back as they thrust him towards the bar.
‘They’re anal chugging,’ Alison shouted in her ear. ‘It’s what the rugby boys do.’
‘What?’
‘I know. That lad, the one standing up, is a scholar. I saw his gown at dinner. He’s supposed to be super-bright.’ She raised her eyebrows then turned back.
Holly watched the boy Alison was talking about as he stood above his team-mates, one hand tipping a plastic pint of beer, the other on his hips as though he were a farmer presenting his best beast at a show.
His face on top of a thick neck seemed free of malice: dark eyes glinting below a floppy fringe that was damp with sweat; pink lips, with perfect teeth, parted as he poured the amber beer then threw back his head and gave a roar.
Disappointment weighed heavy in her chest like a physical pain. These were supposed to be the brightest brains of her generation; Oxford the place where she thought she might discuss philosophy or politics – where she’d rant against the Major Government – not watch broad-shouldered lads with plummy accents drink beer from each other’s cracks.
‘Mad, isn’t it?’ Alison grinned at her and rolled her eyes but there was nothing in her reaction to suggest that she was repulsed, more that she was intrigued by this aspect of student life.
Andy, the second boy to take part, was by her side now, she realised. Released from the throng and trying to meld into the back of the crowd. He was drinking determinedly, eyes fixed on the middle distance as he downed his beer, huge shoulders hunched forward as if to minimise his presence. She caught his eye and tried to convey her sympathy. He looked away but not before she saw him flush.