Matriculation: (The Oxford Trilogy #1)

by Riley Meyer

  He smiled his gleaming smile. There was no disciplinary James today.

  “Yes, Bertha does spoil things somewhat.”

  “One of my favourites is actually Wide Sargasso Sea.”

  “Oh, really,” James said, turning himself fully towards me (and to my satisfaction leaving Jessica out), “how interesting.”

  Wide Sargasso Sea was a sort of sequel to Jane Eyre that set to humanise Bertha, Mr. Rochester’s mad wife in the attic. I did like the book though to say it was my favourite might have been stretching the truth a little. But look, you had to win the points when the opportunities came to you.

  “Any others?” he asked.

  I hesitated.

  “Would I lose any points if I said A Single Man?”

  James looked at me, silent for a moment. I’d deliberately chosen a book about a gay lecturer at a university. And a gay lecturer with a habit of eyeing up the young students. OK, sure so the lecturer in question was depressed and old, rather than hot and athletic, but it was as close as I could think of.

  Finally, he nodded, and I wondered if I’d gone too far.

  “Very good,” he said, but his voice was muted.

  I was sure I had gone too far when he then turned back to Jessica and said, quietly:

  “Well, let’s start the class, shall we?”

  *

  The rest of the class went almost without incident and because it was twentieth-century literature and not twelfth-century literature, I managed to keep up at least half the time. Every time I got an answer right or said something even half-way insightful, Jessica shot daggers at me, which of course was only more incentive to do it again. When we were making to leave, James called me back, asking if I could stay for a minute.

  Fuck, what was this about?

  Obediently, I nodded and waited while Jessica gathered her stuff. She cast one last look back into the room and then left.

  When I heard the cottage door closed behind her, I looked up at James, my heart beating hard.

  “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to the chair closest to his.

  I dutifully sat and waited. This guy made me nervous, but at least he got Mark out of my head for a moment.

  “So,” he said, “how’s your first week at Oxford been?”

  My mind raced back along the events of the last five days. It was now Wednesday, some five days after I’d arrived, but it felt like I’d been here for almost a month. Thinking about it this way, my growing attraction to Mark seemed a little preposterous, a little immature. But the way we’d kissed that night—that meant something, right?

  OK, so I admit it, even James couldn’t get Mark entirely out of my head.

  “Lots been happening?” James prompted, smiling softly.

  “Yeah, sorry, lots. It’s one of those things,” I explained, “time speeds up when you’re in a routine, just going about your usual things day-to-day, but it slows right down when things are actually happening, when you’re in a new place, or, uh, meeting new people.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  He let this reply hang in the air for a moment, giving it a depth of significance that I couldn’t quite plumb. Did he mean his life was going fast, or slow?

  “Is this your first time out of—” he paused, “is it New Zealand?”

  “Is the accent that obvious?”

  He smiled.

  “Don’t make me do an impression.”

  “Likewise,” I shot back, thinking of his perfect, posh elocution.

  He laughed, his face turning warm and approachable.

  “Fair enough.”

  “But to answer your question, no it’s not my first time out of New Zealand. I travelled around Canada for a year, WOOFing.”

  “Woofing?”

  “It’s this programme where people offer you free room and board in exchange for a day’s work, like harvesting fruit, splitting wood, cleaning gutters. It sounds like a nightmare but actually it was amazing. Best year of my life.”

  The stories I could tell from that year were endless and most of them not appropriate for public dissemination.

  “And you did this when?”

  “About four years ago. Just after I left school.”

  “Ah,” James said, “I didn’t think you were one of the eighteen year olds.”

  “Is my maturity so obvious?”

  OK, so I was flirting again, just a little.

  “More like,” he answered carefully, “you don’t seem like you need to ask your parents whether to get up in the morning. You seem like your own person. Some of the other students—and this isn’t just limited to the first years, I’m afraid—they need someone to teach them how to have a normal conversation. How to wash their hair.”

  “That sounds like a fun job for you.”

  He smiled at my sarcasm.

  “Yes, my desire to impart knowledge to the next generation only goes so far.”

  There was a pause. He stood up. I hesitated and then stood up too, so that we were standing opposite each other, less than a metre apart.

  “You know, I wish I’d done something like your ‘WOOF’-ing year.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I’ve never actually lived outside the UK. Hell, I haven’t lived outside the south of England. Missed opportunities, I guess.”

  “Well, it’s not too late,” I said.

  He tilted his head from side to side, as if to say: Maybe, maybe not.

  “Sometimes things get away from you, take on their own momentum. A wife and kids can do that to you.”

  A wife and kids?? I struggled to control my expression.

  James looked abstracted, his bright blue eyes were distant, casting themselves over his memories and, by the looks of it, finding them wanting.

  “You’ve got to make the most of things,” he said finally, and giving me the full force of his piercing eyes (fuck, he was beautiful), “and for you that means making the most of Oxford.”

  “Well, sir,” I said, with a knowing look, “are you making the most of Oxford?”

  He twisted his lips and seemed about to break into one of his censorious frowns. In the end though, it went the other way. Then, he did something unexpected. He reached out his hand and touched my chest.

  My heart leapt into my mouth.

  But he was touching the greenstone necklace hanging from my neck. He held it and ran his long fingers over it, feeling the texture and turning it in his hand.

  I looked down, watching him do it, my lips only inches away from his hand. I noticed the thick blond hair on his forearm, the lines of muscle working underneath. Every sense in my body was tingling, feeling each brush of his hand, each movement of the cord of my necklace like they were being branded into me.

  I looked up at him, breath short, and found his whole body only a foot away from mine.

  “Interesting necklace.”

  I stammered out a reply.

  “It’s, uh, greenstone. Pōnamu. In Māori, that is.”

  He raised an eyebrow, but I was too busy standing absolutely still to work out that gesture meant. He was still holding the necklace. I felt the back of his fingers brush against the sternum. My body responded, without my permission, in the form of a southerly stirring.

  “Well, Rafe,” he said, talking quietly, almost in a whisper, “you’re quite the enigma.”

  His eyes locked onto mine. I could hardly breathe.

  I’ve got to say, I liked the idea of being an enigma. But I tried to like it quietly because his eyes seemed to pierce me right the way through, to read my thoughts as though they were emblazoned on my forehead. And my thoughts, well, let’s just say they were becoming a little incriminating.

  Finally he dropped the necklace. I slumped a little, tension releasing from my back and chest as if I’d just been playing a game of Russian Roulette and I’d gotten the empty chamber.

  He smiled at me.

  “You can go.”

  “Uh, okay.”

  I
gathered up my bags, conscious that I felt very hot and had probably gone bright red.

  Just as I was about to leave, he called me back.

  “Oh, and Rafe?”

  “Uh huh?”

  “Shall we have dinner in the next week or so?”

  “Huh?”

  I must have looked so utterly flummoxed by this that he decided to throw me a lifeline. Fuck, I was putty in his hands!

  “Dinner,” he explained, “at high table in college. Another of those Oxford traditions. The college advisor—that would be me—is meant to take their students—that would be you—for a dinner with the Senior Common Room. You’ll come and meet the fellows, we’ll go to dinner at high table, and then go back to the SCR for too much port and an aperitif.”

  “Ah, okay. You’re my college advisor?”

  “I’m afraid so. Hope that’s not inconvenient for you. It’s very convenient for me,” he said, and let this hang for a beat before picking up the thread. “This term you’re my only advisee. So it’ll just be us at dinner. Well, us and all the fellows. Quite the motley crew. You’ll see.”

  I nodded and muttered some thanks, for the lesson and for the dinner invite.

  He smiled and watched me as I bumbled out of the room.

  I had so many conflicting impressions running around in my head that I forgot the way to the front door. I went through a door on my left and ended up in a bedroom, James’s bedroom. Like the rest of the house, it was tastefully decorated with books in every spare cranny, and then there was the large bed, lit up by a shaft of morning sun. There was a water glass on the bedside table, half-empty. Was he sleeping here? What about the “wife and kids”?

  Shaking myself, I spun around and left the room, thanking every god in the pantheon that I didn’t run square into James and get caught peering into his room.

  As I left the house and returned, with some relief, to the cool air of the deer park, I looked around for the gardener with the snake tattoos on his powerful forearms.

  He’d gone but his words came back to me. I thought about how he’d warned me about the tutors—and maybe about James in particular? Considering the absolute state I’d been a few minutes ago, the warning was starting to make a bit more sense. But what had he meant and what would the gardener know about it?

  Anyway, I thought to myself as I set out across the park, if it was James he’d been talking about, I wasn’t sure if it was a warning I wanted or an invitation.

  As it turned out, that morning I’d gotten both.

  12

  I’d finished my first week at Oxford. To say I’d done it relatively unscathed would be a lie. I was nursing wounds to my pride of both the intellectual and the romantic variety.

  My week of tutorials had been so hard I’d almost cried trying to read something in Old English at 2am on Friday morning, and I’d been so swamped with reading that I hadn’t managed to attend a single lecture.

  But, foremost on my mind at the moment was the fact that I still hadn’t heard anything from Mark. The photo of the neighbour’s note I’d sent him had a big blue tick next to it; he’d seen it, but hadn’t replied.

  The only contact we’d had was running into each other in the dinner line in the dining hall. I’d said hello and he’d nodded, pulled away by the no-doubt scintillating conversation of Tom, Jason and the rest of the scrum.

  I knew I had to confront him, to talk to him properly about what was up. I told myself I was too busy, with all my classes I hadn’t even had time to think, but in all honesty I was scared that if I confronted him I’d get the answer I didn’t want. A part of me was nursing the hope that Mark wasn’t actively ignoring me—that he hadn’t freaked out after we’d had sex—but that he, like me, was just overwhelmed with work.

  When I suggested this, hopefully, to Maura she’d said, in her least convincing voice:

  “Sure, sure, my fine thing, that’ll be it.”

  I got so desperate for his attention that, in a flash of inspiration in the middle of the night on Thursday, I’d re-installed Grindr, going through each of the faceless profiles to search for any hint that Mark was lurking there. A message popped up from a guy I’d been fucking in New Zealand asking if I wanted to come over.

  Mate, I’m thousands of kilometres away.

  I sighed, flicking through the profiles of all the nearby students. There were so many faces I recognised from the college it seemed like there must’ve been orgies happening on every other floor. But of Mark there was no trace.

  To add insult to all this injury, the college had sent me a follow-up email about the second noise complaint trying to arrange a meeting for "mediation".

  It was at that point that I looked out the window down at the deer park and wished we could have a Freaky Friday–Dr. Doolittle cross-over episode. I could stroll around eating grass and looking pretty and the deer could a degree in English literature. They'd probably be as good as Middle English as I was.

  But finally it was Saturday. The academic week was over and I was safe—sort of—except that I had to write about three essays for Monday.

  I lay in bed, watching as the rectangle of light from the window slowly crept across my wall. For some reason it got light at about 5am in the UK, meaning that I’d spend half my morning dropping in and out of consciousness thinking it was time to wake up and having extremely vivid dreams.

  I considered getting up but was hoping that if I threw the subconscious dice enough times I’d get a dream about Mark. What I really wanted was a romantic short film of us together, perhaps him carrying me on piggy back across a large puddle, or wrapping his hands around my waist while I cooked him dinner, but I was also willing to settle for a beat-by-beat repeat of the experience of fucking his virgin hole...

  What I ended up getting from the World of Nod was quite different: it was a dream about Jack, the DPhil student who’d shown me around at Orientation. I’d been sleeping on a couch and he’d woken me up (woken me up within my dream), holding a coffee. He was shirtless, wearing a pair of black trackies. His smooth and pale chest was lined with the kind of lean muscles you get as much from being skinny, as from hitting the gym. But they looked right on him, sort of elegant.

  His bright green eyes sought out mine as he sat down on the couch next to me. There was a sheet over me but I remember thinking—worrying—that I was totally naked underneath. Jack had sat right by my hip, his skin separated only by a thin layer from mine.

  He pushed some hair out of my eyes and left his hand, just for a moment, resting on my cheek. Then he’d smiled.

  “Rafe? You ok? I made you a coffee,” he said in his level, calming voice.

  After that I’d woken with a start, my heart beating so fast you would’ve thought I’d just dreamt about being chased by a murderer rather than handed a coffee by a handsome classical statue.

  He was handsome, wasn’t he? I hadn’t been sure before but now I was so certain that I couldn’t imagine how I’d missed it in the first place. He wasn’t hot; he was beautiful in a remote, mysterious way. I wasn’t about to reject this omen from the god of dreams, but it'd be great to know what it meant.

  *

  When I pulled myself out of bed and down to the dining hall, I found it totally empty. I walked down the long rows of the benches, past the untended fireplaces and under the vigilant eyes of all the portraits of masters, ministers and puritans.

  I looked around once more, dumbly, and then at the clock on my phone. It was 9am. They should’ve still be serving breakfast, so what was happening? Did they not serve it on weekends or something?

  I got out my phone and sent Maura a message, asking where she was.

  Immediately I got one back that was just a series of three exclamation marks.

  My phone started ringing.

  “Rafe, you muppet.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “What do yer mean ‘what’?”

  I sighed.

  “I’m not in the mood, Maura, just tell me what’s h
appening.”

  “Oh, bee in our bonnet is it.”

  “More like a hive.”

  Now she was confused.

  “What?”

  "A hive. Like, a colony of bees. In my bonnet.”

  “Oh. I didn’t understand yer accent.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s mutual,” I replied, walking out of the dining room. I was in a shit mood.

  “You know what it is today, right?”

  “No, what?”

  I could almost hear her shaking her head in disapproval.

  “It’s only bloody matriculation.”

  “Matriculation?”

  “Yes, ma-tric-u-la-tion. Didn’t yer get the, like, fifty emails about it from the college?”

  I did have a vague email of deleting a lot of administrative emails that I’d assumed didn’t have anything to do with me.

  “Oh, vaguely, what is it again?”

  “Rafe. Check your fooking emails. We’re meeting at the dining hall in an hour and a half and then we have to process through town to the Sheldonian theatre. It’s like the official Oxford hazing ceremony, except they don’t shove our heads down a toilet. I don’t think.”

  “We have to process?”

  “Yeah, like procession. Walking.”

  “Like a graduation ceremony?”

  “Yes but the opposite. We’re proud of ourselves for doing a grand total of eff all. Think of it like a very premature clap on the back.”

  “Oh. OK, well I’ll be there.”

  She sighed.

  “Rafe...”

  “Maura?”

  “Please, please tell me that you have a suit. And your sub-fusc.”

  This all felt like a cruel joke.

  “What the fuck’s a sub-fusc?”

  She made a strangled sound like she had just fallen down a gutter. In reality, it was her estimation of my general having-my-life-togetherness that had taken the tumble.

  “Read your fooking emails. I don’t have time for this. If I’m going to meet my future husband today, I need to look a hundred and ten bloody percent. Also I told Tom I wanted him to fuck me wearing his gown and the boy’s quick but he’s not that quick. Anyway sort yer shit out and I’ll see you there. Read yer emails.”