HOLLY
Autumn 1992
Nine
Sophie Greenaway curled her legs beneath her in the capacious armchair and smiled at Dr Howard Blackburn, the renowned medieval English scholar, as she looked up from the essay she was reading aloud.
It was the second week of Michaelmas, and Holly watched their tutor watch the other girl: saw his eyes follow the easy flick of those legs in their black opaque tights as they crossed and uncrossed then languidly rearranged themselves, her feet tucked underneath her bottom. Most of the week, Sophie wore rowing skins: the regulation navy and pale-blue kit which marked her out as a member of the college women’s first boat. But not, it would seem, for Howard’s tutorials. For those, it was a short tartan mini, loafers and opaque tights.
She was reading about courtly love. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The concept of loving with no expectation of consummation; of admiring from afar; of humiliating oneself in the adoration of a fair lady – and risking her disdain or disapproval – to prove one’s chivalry. One’s essential knightliness.
Sophie’s essay wasn’t particularly illuminating. Holly could detect nothing that she hadn’t read herself in the York Notes she had skimmed through before turning to C.S. Lewis and A.C. Spearing; nor was it in any way elegantly written. It was a solid essay. What she would later know as beta-minus material. But that didn’t matter. What mattered to Holly was that Sophie looked as if she was the sort of woman who, six centuries earlier, would have noble knights falling at her feet. While Holly would be a peasant, Sophie would be on the receiving end of courtly love.
She recrossed her legs and Holly was entranced. While Alison was pretty, Sophie had a different quality to her. A type of beauty that looked as if it had evolved through the generations; or perhaps her ancestors had been consciously bred to look like this, for hers was a look that belonged to a certain class. Legs that were effortlessly thin even at her upper thighs; delicate bones and arched brows; and thick dark hair that she flicked, to Holly’s irritation, from side to side. Her eyes were a startling blue and so wide that she could use them to obvious effect – as she was doing now – to suggest innocence or incomprehension. If Holly had had to describe her in a single word, she would have picked ‘classy’. But that was the type of word her dad would use. It didn’t come close to capturing the essence of her.
Holly found it incongruous that they had been paired up like this for the term among the seven students reading English in their year at Shrewsbury College. Medieval literature with Dr Blackburn and then the Anglo-Saxon translation class. Sitting in Howard’s study, she felt exposed. Her DMs were planted on the carpet between two piles of books that teetered like all the other piles in the room, those crammed on coffee tables or perched on the edge of the bookshelves that ran the height and breadth of one wall. She shifted back into the armchair, loosely covered in a plain worn velvet. The fabric was soft beneath her fingers and she stroked it, eyes flickering from the books, to the vast windows opening onto the quad, motes of dust floating in the sunshine, to the gaze of her tutor – a quizzical smile on his face – as he watched Sophie’s legs crossing and uncrossing once more.
‘And what about you? Do you agree with Sophie’s interpretation of Sir Gawain’s motives?’ Dr Blackburn dragged his eyes from her tutorial partner and fixed them on her.
‘Um, well . . .’ And suddenly Holly found her voice. She spoke of Sir Gawain’s conflict between chivalry and desire and, as she gained confidence, she could sense that not only was Dr Blackburn looking at her with more interest – ‘That’s an unusual interpretation but I like it’ – but that Sophie, her beta-minus essay forgotten, was sitting up and joining in, was forcing herself to think beyond the pass notes she had copied verbatim, perhaps. In any case, the attention was collegiate, not unfriendly, and when they left the tute – as she found herself now calling it – it seemed natural that the two of them would have a cup of tea together in the tea bar. Besides, Sophie said she had a proposition for her.
The plan was that they would divide up the Anglo-Saxon translations and take it in turns to research the bulk of the medieval English essays. Sophie had a lever arch file of notes, given to her by an accommodating second-year whom she had plied with drink the week before.
‘Are you sure that’s all you had to do?’ Holly didn’t mean to sound intrusive and yet this goodwill seemed excessive.
‘Holly! What are you implying?’ Sophie gave her a knowing smile. ‘He doesn’t need these essays any more. And he said he knew what a bore the medieval paper is. God, we’ve so much to read for the Victorians that we’re not going to be able to cover them properly unless we’re efficient about handling our workload. Look, here’s one on the Pearl poet – I can plunder that for next week – and then can you read the Malory?’
‘I think Le Morte d’Arthur’s quite important. We should probably both read it, shouldn’t we?’
‘Bugger that. Life’s too short. Honestly. I want to try for the women’s lightweights and I won’t have the time if I’m going to do the Victorians properly. If you could read the Malory and fill me in, I’ll do the rest from pass notes.’
‘Well – OK.’
‘And I’ll do my share of the Beowulf translation, I promise. Oh look, though.’ She gave a cheeky grin. ‘Jon’s given me his translation here.’
‘Isn’t this cheating?’
Sophie looked at her askance and smiled, though not unkindly. ‘Not at all. It’s about being efficient. Everyone does it.’
‘I just thought . . .’ and she almost stumbled on the words as she realised they sounded so gauche. ‘I thought that doing the translations, and reading English literature from the start, was important for our understanding of its development. I thought reading the whole canon was what this degree was all about.’
‘Well, if you want to spend time translating Beowulf, you do so.’ Sophie took a swig of tea, but she seemed more amused than irritated. ‘I don’t think my doing so will make a jot of difference to my marks or to my university experience – apart from reducing the time when I could do other things.’
‘Such as?’ Holly wondered aloud.
‘Oh, you know. Rowing – and men.’ She gave a jubilant laugh. ‘That’s what uni’s about. Having fun; making contacts; doing sport. An extension of school in a way.’
Holly shrugged. Her school hadn’t been like that at all.
‘My father always says you should assess the validity of any investment before deciding on the amount you invest.’
‘Oh. What does he do, your father?’
‘He’s an investment banker. And yours?’
Holly’s heart sank. She should have seen that coming. ‘A teacher.’
‘Which subject?’
‘Cars. He’s, erm, a driving instructor.’ It would have been better if she’d been honest from the start.
‘How sweet! And useful?’
‘I suppose so. I don’t drive.’
‘Didn’t he teach you? Or did it lead to arguments?’
‘No. He’s not around much. My parents split up.’
It felt strange to unburden herself like this: to divulge so much information in one whoosh when she was essentially quite private, but this seemed to be the way at uni, she was discovering. Close friendships were being forged at a fevered rate as if the brevity of the terms – eight or nine weeks – meant the usual, cautious way in which relationships developed had to be abandoned and the process speeded up.
‘God – I wish mine would sometimes.’ Sophie put her hand to her mouth as if the words had slipped out without her meaning to. ‘Oops. Forget I said that. I didn’t mean it.’
‘Really?’ Holly was interested. Perhaps Sophie’s life wasn’t as perfect as it seemed.
‘Oh just, you know, bit of a philanderer. Men, hey!’ Sophie gathered her books together and thrust them into a bag, then picked the lever arch file of notes off the table and hugged it tight to her chest. The opportunity for sharing secrets seemed to have been slammed tight shut and the smile Sophie wore now was fixed, with none of the joyfulness of a few minutes earlier. Holly, gathering her notes together, took her lead from her.
‘Yes, men!’ she said as if she knew all about them, instead of still being a virgin who had only just turned eighteen. She ruffled her hair and pulled her baggy jumper over her jeans – a means of making herself blend into the background or at least of being sexually invisible – and followed her new friend out of the tearoom and into the soft autumnal sunshine outside.
That first term at Oxford was an education – not just in the texts of the Pearl poet and Malory, in the poetry of Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; but in life or the very real possibility of a different life. Looking back, it was as if her eighteen years had offered her just one version; and the old certainties – the food she ate; the way she talked; the way people thought – could be taken apart and reassembled so that life became brighter and harder, more textured and complex than ever before.
Later, she would remember that autumn term as a relentless feasting of her senses: a daily bombardment of new sights and smells and sounds that sometimes felt exhausting, so extensively did they challenge what she had once known.
This newness was everywhere. She could be wandering through Christ Church Meadows and see a cow staring at her through the dense November mist; its huge head contemplative and mournful – for, of course, students could keep Longhorn cattle on the Meadows and had been doing so since the fifteenth century; would run back over Merton Street’s cobbles and be surprised by a bowler-hatted porter; or a couple of boys, inexplicably in tails, staggering back to college, arms around each other’s shoulders like the most amorous of lovers, an empty bottle in their hands. She could duck into the labyrinthine covered market and be surprised by the ripe reek of fresh meat, and the sight of a deer, hanging upside down by its haunches, perfect apart from the neat shot to its head. And then she would see the same species, in a deer park in the centre of this city, hours later, flitting dewy-eyed and fearful.
That Michaelmas term was partly characterised by food. Jacket potatoes in polystyrene boxes oozing butter and baked beans and bought from the kebab van on the High Street when she missed hall – as she soon learned to call dinner. Vast quantities of lasagne and garlic bread, shovelled down by the rugger boys and boaties and by her and Ali, as autumn crept on and the nights turned cold. Steaming mugs of tea and toasted sandwiches in the college tearoom or the Queen’s Lane teashop, where you perched on stools and people watched through windows wet with condensation. Venison, and port – consumed for the first time at a formal hall; so delicious she tried to steal the wine, in a crystal decanter, being stopped by a college servant, and having it removed, ever-so-gently, from her hand.
There was a new language to be learned: tutes – for tutorials; battels – the bills for each term; Mods – first-year exams; subfusc – the black and white dress worn for formal occasions; collections – the exams at the start of each term; exhibitioners – students who gained first-class marks in their yearly exam; scholars – who achieved this in subsequent years. A new academic terminology to understand: Marxist theory; feminist theory; as well as the lists of the critics she would be reading and the lecturers she would be listening to.
She bought postcards of the dreaming spires from Blackwell’s and propped them on the mantelpiece above her fire; Blu-tacked a large print of Klimt’s The Kiss in her bedroom, drawn by the opulence of the gold leaf and the quiet knowledge of being loved that played across the woman’s face. Because it was what she thought she should do, she invested in a college scarf: a thick navy and pink weight of wool that she thought looked pretentious tossed over one shoulder and instead wound round and round her neck so that she breathed into it as she blew out and became snugly hot. She did not join the Oxford Union – the debating ground for past prime ministers and political leaders; and the environment where future politicians gathered, in their mustard cords and tweed jackets. Young men – and they were invariably men – aping the behaviour of older ones.
She began to shed her baggy jumpers and started to wear hoodies; to try leggings with her trusty DMs, though her thighs were still wide and cumbersome compared to her friends’. Her glasses – dark-rimmed, NHS ones – were hidden when she wasn’t in the library, and she experimented with kohl pencil, heavily applied at the corner of her eyes. She joined the student paper, and began to review student drama; attended meetings of the student Labour Party and volunteered for the telephone counselling service, Nightline. She marched, angrily, to Reclaim the Streets, holding her rape alarm tight as if Oxford’s potential rapists were primed at any point to pounce. After a couple of weeks, she stopped carrying it for her world of the quad and the High Street, the pubs and the faculty, seemed so safe, so cossetted, compared to anything she had experienced back home that it felt like an affectation. Besides, although in a college with a mere eighteen girls in her year, she received little male attention. Ned would offer an ironic grin; the two boys reading English in her year would be perfectly friendly but no one appeared to be interested in her, sexually. Why would they when there were the likes of Alison – who spent her nights drinking or clubbing – or Sophie, the epitome of an athletic young woman, to try their chances on?
It didn’t bother her, or she told herself it didn’t, and her passion was channelled into her close female friendships. The bond with Alison – so different from her in so many ways – grew stronger the night she found her slumped, unconscious, on the toilet, after a heavy session in the bar.
It was she who held Alison’s long blonde hair back as her friend vomited into the pan; she who wiped her mouth with a paper towel and brought her a glass of water; who splashed her face, as tenderly as a mother would a child, and half-carried, half-guided her back to her bedroom; who sat up with her that night, terrified she would choke if she didn’t keep watch.
Alison’s jeans had been pulled down when she’d found her there and there had been something so vulnerable about her being so exposed like this.
‘What if one of the lads had found me?’ her friend wondered later.
‘They’d have been embarrassed.’
‘Well, yes. But what if anything had happened?’
‘Nothing would have happened. You weren’t in a fit state to do anything and you were about to throw up.’
‘I don’t know.’ Alison had chewed at a cuticle and Holly noticed that her once-neat nails were becoming bitten down, the quicks ragged. She gave a hard, bright laugh: ‘Not sure everyone would be put off by that.’
If this bonded them – the more confident girl becoming more noticeably appreciative, the relationship equalling out a little – then it was through their Anglo-Saxon studies that she grew closer to Sophie. Every Wednesday, they would sit together in the college library swapping halves of translation, and laboriously copying them from each other before Sophie found a photocopier and so cut their sessions short.
Holly would watch her friend from the opposite side of the desk and wonder if her hair would grow that thick if she abandoned her masculine crop, and how she could make her caterpillar eyebrows as elegant and refined. And what about her dress sense? Sophie wore short skirts or Levis, if not in rowing kit, and Holly wondered if a pair of these, though way beyond her budget, would somehow make her legs look longer; or give her that elusive status: mark her out as being cool.
She would watch Sophie’s looping writing – a swirl of purple ink spiralling from a fountain pen across lined A4 – and compare it favourably to her own biro-ed mass of letters. Holly’s work was neat: Post-its, fluorescent marker pens; a ring binder with different sections demarcated by card and plastic files that could be reinserted – she was a stationery junkie – but her actual handwriting was a scrawl. It was as if there were so many ideas inside her head that they fought against each other to get on to the paper. A flurry of jumbled letters – a witch’s hand or a substandard clerk’s – was the result.
That hour spent comparing translations, checking each other understood what the Green Knight was doing at a certain point, or whether they could discuss it convincingly, was one of the highlights of Holly’s week. Before now, her cleverness had been a mark of shame – something she was secretly proud of but which she knew she shouldn’t advertise, not even here, where there was currency in suggesting that you crammed for your tutes: a week of work concertinaed into a few twilight hours.
But Sophie was frank in her appreciation of Holly’s hard work – for, invariably, she did the lion’s share, Sophie popping a note in her pigeonhole the day before, admitting that the early mornings spent rowing were taking a toll on her and she hadn’t quite found the time to manage her half.
‘Oh, you are clever,’ she would tell her, repeatedly. ‘Not like thickie old me.’
‘Come off it. You’re not thick.’
‘A solid Desmond, my father thinks.’
‘A 2:2?’ Holly translated. ‘Well, that’s OK.’
‘Exactly. Far better to enjoy myself. A solid degree, a rowing blue and a nice chap – hopefully a future husband – that’s what I want to get out of being here.’
Holly leaned back. There were so many parts of that sentence that were foreign to her – so many that struck her as completely wrong – and yet she couldn’t help but smile at Sophie’s frankness. There was something so uncomplicated about her: this fresh-faced girl, a former county runner and lacrosse captain and now member of the college boat club’s first eight, for whom life was about seizing opportunities and making the most of her advantages: those long legs crossed and uncrossed in front of poor old Howard; and, yes, the ability to flatter her tutorial partner into doing most of the work.
Holly knew she was being manipulated but it was done in such a charming way that somehow she didn’t mind. Sophie was steely: willing to get up for those chilly, 6 a.m. starts on the river when most students were still hunkered under the duvets; persuading second-years to hand over their essays with no sense that she needed to reciprocate at all. Holly had no doubt that, at the end of the three years, she would have the rowing blue, the future husband – or a potential future husband – and probably, because luck always shone on the likes of her and she would know how to use it – a just-scraped 2:1.
It would be easy to envy her, perhaps even despise her. And yet Holly couldn’t. Sophie represented a world that, even though she might profess to hate it, completely intrigued her.
‘You know she’s a Tory,’ she grumbled to Alison, later, after she’d mentioned to Sophie that she was off to a meeting of the university Labour Party.
‘Well, of course she is,’ said Alison.
‘And she wants to live in a house off the Woodstock Road, next year, or in Jericho – not off the Cowley Road like us.’
‘Why would she want to be in east Oxford? I expect Daddy’s buying her a house.’
‘I dunno.’ She felt suddenly disloyal, thinking of the fragments of conversation that suggested Sophie’s father wasn’t emotionally attentive; that he lived a quite separate life from his family. ‘She hasn’t mentioned that. Forget I said it.’
Alison laughed. ‘You quite like her, really.’
‘Yeah. Well, you know – she’s not that bad.’
And she didn’t find her bad, at all. She would hanker after the snippets of information Sophie dropped about her life – the details of cocktail parties in other college rooms; the casual reference to drugs snorted by school friends elsewhere, though Sophie didn’t touch the stuff; was far too preoccupied with being a wholesome, healthy rower; the tales – offered with an eye-rolling ‘boys will be boys’ tolerance – of the elite drinking societies, to which her cousin, Hal – a third-year in a different college – belonged.
‘You won’t believe what they got up to last weekend,’ she whispered, and Holly wondered if there was an element of her that loved scandalising her friend with the extravagance of the upper classes.
‘What?’ Holly’s stomach tightened in anticipation at a tale that promised to be more Brideshead than anything she could imagine. These stories – told in a breathless hurry amid a run of giggles – were like the opening of Decline and Fall, with the added thrill of having happened in real life.
‘The Libertines were at a lunch at Brooke’s on Turl Street and, when they were finished, each of them ordered a separate taxi to take them down to the King’s Arms.’
‘But that’s a minute’s walk away.’ She was befuddled.
‘Exactly! A fleet of taxis queuing the length of Turl Street, each waiting for a minute’s ride!’
‘Weren’t the taxi drivers annoyed?’
‘They were each paid fifty pounds.’
‘Fifty quid’s not bad for a minute’s job.’
‘I’m sure they were fine.’ Sophie sounded airy.
‘But they might have felt stupid.’
‘Oh, come on. Who cares? They did their job and were paid for it. God, sometimes, you’re so serious.’ She gathered her books in one swift movement that suggested the issue was closed and stood looking at Holly, still busy imagining the bemused taxi drivers. ‘Come on.’ Her voice was tight with irritation. ‘We’ll be late.’
And so Holly trailed after her, reproaching herself for the crime of being insufficiently light-hearted; of failing to see the funny side in a group of indulged young men flaunting their privilege, agonising over why she detested this sort of behaviour but still continued to be seduced by Sophie and the world she seemed to represent. She stumbled down the worn wooden steps from the library and into Old Quad, Sophie several strides ahead of her now, obviously displeased and apparently shaking her off before the tutorial where she would rely on her translation and revert to being all sweetness and light.
By the porters’ gate, Sophie stopped and smiled up at a tall young man – a boatie from another college: one good at rowing, perhaps Oriel or Christ Church. He seemed to know Holly’s tutorial partner and bent down to give her a double kiss: one on each cheek.
The light flooding into the quad glanced off his thick hair, which flopped into his eyes and his sharp cheekbones, illuminating his face so that Holly could see the curve of his mouth and his green and gold-flecked eyes. His shoulders, tapering to a slim waist, were those of a rower, and when he laughed – as he was doing now at something that Sophie said – the tone was rich but not braying. It spoke of class more than money; and of an innate, but not grating, self-confidence.
‘Who was that?’ she asked Sophie later, as they waited on the landing outside Howard’s room and her friend watched this Adonis walk across the quad to leave the college. At the porters’ gate, he turned and looked up.
‘Oh that?’ Sophie said, her eyes feasting on him, though her tone suggested her feelings were terribly casual. ‘That was James Whitehouse.’