Three Rooms

  I resented the turn of subject for the sake of the conversation’s ease. But yes, I had, and added that his sister was impressive too. She dealt in languages, taught Greek to Virginia Woolf so that Woolf might hear the birds better.

  He hadn’t read any Woolf; he wasn’t sure what I meant. But he’d been seeking a way to make a connection between us land and added that I could tell him about Greek birds and the Paters sometime, at which I faltered. I knew the Paters had lived in Oxford but I had always imagined them in wood-paneled rooms in a college elsewhere. It hadn’t occurred to me that they might have lived here, where I was to live, too—where there were floors to be swept and windows to be cleaned, where the accomplishments of their lives were carried out in tandem with boring, ordinary things. But the impression formed. Clara and Walter: eating breakfast, untucking sheets, locking the front door. Suppose something probable, like porridge after waking up to the cold. If I made porridge and let the smell of oats and milk waft through the corridor, would time collapse in on itself and allow me to glimpse the house both as it was now and as it truly was in its origin? Did such things leave a memory; was it possible to imagine the permeability of time in a room?

  My neighbor said likely not, and sixteen years wasn’t that long to spend in one house.

  I was confused. Of course it was.

  He put his tea down and tried not to look sad. Did it seem like a long time to me?

  This was the last of the morning. Outside, the light hit the tips of the trees, then diminished farther down each trunk, blocked out by the shadow of the house. The garden grew outwards, farther away from the building where the sun had better reach. He let the silence hang and waited for me to speak. When I didn’t, he offered, My parents have lived in their house for almost thirty years.

  This forced me into deeper silence still. His words voyaged around the room and found nowhere to settle. Seeming to realize this, he made to stand. My room is the one across from yours, he informed me again. I play guitar, so if it gets loud just let me know. You can knock anytime. He stopped at the door. I’m going out for a formal tonight, if you want to come.

  I shook my head. I had already been told to save my evening for a meet and greet with the English faculty. It would be postgrads and teaching fellows, mostly. My neighbor smiled. You won’t like it, he said. I told him I might. You won’t like it, he repeated. I suppressed the urge to scream and smiled back instead.

  All the same.

  All right, he said. Well, when you get bored, come after.

  We swapped phones. He tapped his number onto my screen, and in exchange, I made myself into numbers on his, too. He waved it in the air as confirmation of receipt. He left the room so easily I began to dislike him a little less.

  * * *

  Sink and unframed mirror. The southwest corner of the room. My phone, propped up between the faucet and the wall, and my lips in the mirror, and my fingers doing their little tap, tap over them with a tissue, blotting lipstick. All to the sound of my mother: Do we think that dress is the right choice for a work party, and my mother, Did you make sure they got the inventory form, and my mother, Are you making friends, and my mother, I miss you, when will you come home? The soft little worries running alongside the tap. I let them go down the plughole. It wasn’t enough. Some aspect of them stayed, as though they’d filtered from the faucet into the glass of water I’d had before leaving for the meet and greet. I got lost on the way to the English faculty and ended up late.

  When I found it, from the outside, the building looked like a Bond lair. The whole thing was designed in rectangles by someone who had evidently misunderstood the purpose of Brutalism. For all its sparseness, the building radiated luxury. Rooms done in glass and dark wood spoke, sonorous through their large open windows. The thrum of conversations trickled out leisurely, unhurried. It spread itself out over the building’s brickwork and its flat roofs. The whole thing made no attempt to disguise its status as a new-build; threw itself still further into the role by sitting at odds with a decrepit church and silent, adjacent cemetery. I crossed the road and looked at the graves of well-known men whose afterlife it was to watch their work occasionally reinterpreted, but for the most part ignored by twentysomethings on the pavement opposite. I found Pater’s grave, then resumed my own place on the other side of the street.

  The party could be characterized as one only by the sight of a drinks table around which various huddles had formed, each member clutching a glass of champagne. Everything had the air of being slightly stretched. The leather on the sofas shone too brightly, as though strained. The floorboards were bare. Nevertheless, someone had taken great pains to decorate. Noticeboards with numbers for help centers and bits of poetry had been spread all over the walls; there was a placard, and it read—“Join OxfordConnect today for alumni and student events. Available via Apple and Android.” I looked around and in my long, thin red summer dress, immediately felt overdressed; I took my cardigan from my waist and wrapped it around myself. Everyone had already latched onto someone else in the room, and looked as though they had no intention of leaving their particular group now that it had been formed. People asked each other their names, plugged them into search bars. I found a gap in a huddle of students and approached the formation from the side, angling my body half in, half out. I could be ready to leave should they decide they did not want me. A tall brunette girl held the stem of her champagne glass while two boys asked her who she was.

  I’d slid in in time to hear that her name was Ghislane.

  The boys looked at each other, their heads began to sway. O-o-o Ghislane. One day she’ll find her fame, they sang. The girl winced.

  Bet you get that all the time, said one of the boys, clearly delighted. She tipped the remainder of her glass down her throat and said, Fuck off, into it with some dignity. They did not. Ghislane fixed on me. I think I recognize you, she said. You were walking around town earlier.

  She had widely spaced eyes and a long, broad nose. She chewed on her small, wet lips and waited for an answer. With her schoolgirl skirt and turtleneck, with her tailored jacket and darting, impatient gaze, she looked somehow very grown-up and not grown-up at all. There were probably only three years between us. Standing before her made me feel inexplicably unsophisticated.

  I told her it was possible, yes.

  Okay, she said, accepting her escape route and guiding me towards a table with more champagne. A hand at the small of my back, a steer and request: Please let’s get away from them.

  I was trying to pick up the pace. What was that song they were singing with your name in it? I asked.

  She winced again. Ghislane. Stupid song from the nineties about a guy whose girlfriend leaves him to be a fame whore or whatever. The #MeToo movement should have killed it except someone made an argument about female agency, so it lived to fight another day. Then someone—a man, obviously—began moaning that it was just an objectively good song and that we—she crooked her fingers in air quotes around the word we—should be allowed to sing it as long as we recognize it as of its time. Really, you’ve never heard it?

  I shook my head. This earned me a look of admiration.

  It actually is meant to be a classic. Sad girls on the internet quote it when they want to look deep. She passed me a glass of champagne.

  That seems like an unfortunate thing to share a name with. I was trying to sound sympathetic, but she shook her head and said no-o-o. The syllable went up in impossible crescendo. It echoed the tune of what the boys had sung earlier. Ghislane fixed me with a firm look: in fact, she was named after it. Having established this, she examined me more closely. What did I do?

  I told her. She asked, Do you think you’ll be seeing a lot of everyone here? But I didn’t know, so she began to point out others in the room with impressive flippancy.

  What you’re looking at is mostly contemporary lit. Our year is supposed to be some grand experiment, she said. They went for as many kinds of different people as they could.
Apparently, our research proposals are all over the place. They want to see if they can breed the next great generation of literature. So . . . she considered the room over the rim of her glass. Then her mouth became a pistol, firing off bullets in expert shots: they’re nonbinary and gave a proposal on reading the canon as genderless; he’s on antidepressants doing environmentalist lit; she’s queer; she’s autistic, doesn’t speak, but a total genius; he’s obviously a Tory but he’s working on something he’s called “literature for the working class,” whatever the fuck that is; she’s a sweetheart, but she says she gets terrible SAD, so I’m guessing she won’t be much fun once the weather turns . . . and she’s really annoying, don’t talk to her. She glanced around the room to make sure everyone was accounted for, then pointed at herself brightly: Oh, and I have ADHD. So, yeah! What about you? Have you been here long?

  I felt incredibly tired. I thought about it, catalogued what might be most true in my head, but all I had to offer up was the fact that I had been in London before. And of course, Ghislane said, you’re BAME. She delivered the pronouncement with great solemnity. It was good that I was here. She’d come from London, too. Did I miss it? I shook my head. I was too recently gone.

  Ghislane put down her flute. Sometimes, she said, she would take a night bus back. She got restless. She had already been in Oxford for a few weeks. There was a coach, it ran twenty-four/seven, and she would go and stare at her old flat. She used to share it with some friends, but the lease ran out as she was leaving and they couldn’t find a flatmate in time to be able to afford staying. Which was a shame—it was a nice place in Hammersmith. She would get off the bus around Shepherd’s Bush and walk up the road she used to walk every day. It took her a while to get used to the idea that it wasn’t hers anymore. But once her new reality had set in, she went to see what the new tenants were doing in her old flat. They often left the curtains open, and from across the street, she could appraise all the decorating they’d done. Ghislane stopped looking at me and began musing over the place in her mind. Her face changed: they had made the flat wrong. They had put ugly little chairs in front of the fireplace where she had used to sit on rugs. They had stripped out the wallpaper, which had clearly been there from the seventies and smelt like it too. She couldn’t blame them for that, but—she came out of her reverie and focused back on me—the flat’s former derelict authenticity had been so aesthetically pleasing. Now it all looked brand-new. They had convinced the landlord to let them do it up in cream and chrome. On a moral level she hated all of this, she sniffed, but on a material one, she felt deprived. The extent to which the whole road had been gentrified dawned on her just as she moved out. For most of her stay there, it had resembled something more like a construction site and so she had ignored its daily goings-on. This was no longer the case. Now that the transformation was complete, she resented the fact that other people got to enjoy a yoga studio and coffee bar which she had only ever registered as a bombardment at her front door.

  I tried to speak carefully. But her move notwithstanding, wasn’t it probable they were gentrifying it for people like her?

  Ghislane raised an eyebrow. You’re swilling twenty pounds’ worth of bubbly in that one glass alone, she intoned, and waited for a response. I didn’t take the bait. She sighed, became, by degrees, visibly bored. I could see the boys who had accosted her earlier drawing in. Finally, she said, It was cheap when I moved in and Hammersmith reminded me of being at St. Paul’s. Do you have Instagram?

  This threw me a little. I said I did. She seemed cheered.

  Okay, sweet. Look, add me on that—she thrust her phone at me—we can talk some other time. I plugged my username onto the screen. She took it back and was gone. Things moved fluidly, as if staged. The boys arrived as she left, looking earnestly after her. The questions came thick and rapid. Was she leaving? What did she say? Did she say where she was going? Why had she given me her phone? When I told them she had asked me to add her on Instagram, the boys exchanged looks.

  Fuck me, one of them said, no one said it was a networking event.

  I was getting irate. They looked at me with pity, as if I were slow. You’ve never heard of her before, the other asked, have you?

  I wanted to protest. I had just met her.

  They snickered and walked away. Out of the corner of my eye I could see one remaining bottle of champagne on the drinks table to my right. I hadn’t managed to speak to anyone else. The party could not be approached in any useful way. There were, at most, only four years separating me from the students in the room, and despite the seniority of my position, it was impossible not to feel inadequately young. It would not have surprised me if the boys who had asked after Ghislane had mistaken me for a classmate—I could not claim much on them except a minimum-wage job. We had too many higher powers in common: faculty lecturers; the student finance page of gov.uk. I looked around. I was too shy to approach anyone else. I moved towards the table of champagne, wrapped the last bottle inside my cardigan, and slipped out.

  * * *

  The googling was swift, efficient. Thanks to her Instagram handle, I had her last name. Out on South Parks Road, the boys’ scoffing began to make sense. She was not merely named after a song, it was her father who had sung it in the midnineties and it had made him a hit. There was a Wikipedia page: Ghislane’s mother had also been called Ghislane. She had left them, hence the song. I had no headphones, but let it play. The sound quality was low and most of it went into the wind. It was just possible to make out the melody, whining melancholy and faux-folk. When it was done, I went back to Instagram. This was how I walked up the lamplit street. At the party I had only known Ghislane for fifteen minutes. Now, I had known her for five years. Our acquaintance fell in line with the upward momentum of my thumb. Here was Ghislane posing in front of the Bodleian in an announcement post for her temporary new home. There she was back in London, surrounded by faces I did not know. The span of her life took up as much space and time as the pixels and confines of my phone—it was like being at a museum. You walked in, everything was in galleries on show. Occasionally, you came up against barriers which stopped you from observing too closely, but for the most part, you looked freely where you liked, and decided whether or not you found it beautiful. Above all, you checked to see if other people found it beautiful too, a process by which what you were doing became less strange. Ghislane was not as famous as her father, but there were the beginnings of some distinction there, a small level of intrigue around who she was. The articles about her only extended as far back as the year, and came mostly through a slew of fashion websites which proclaimed that the last years of the decade would see a nineties revival. Pictures from her socials were set next to images of the song’s music video and offered as proof. I reached the bottom of one of her feeds and moved on to the next.

  The end of South Parks Road connected to a main one along the University Parks, running parallel to the city center. If I’d walked ten minutes north, I would have hit the road back to my room. The champagne, still held awkwardly between some knit fabric and my torso, slipped every so often with the slouch of my spine as my face and my screen got increasingly closer. I stopped walking; stood still, scrolled until the phone stopped me, flashing symbols green and red for me to choose whether to receive a call. I waited impatiently for them to go away. Then a message came through.

  Bored yet?

  My neighbor met me in an alleyway off the High Street wearing white tie and dress shoes. With these, the cobblestones did him no favors. He hobbled over to me.

  Well—there was an appraisal—you’re a bit underdressed.

  I began to dislike him again.

  I told him he hadn’t said it would be white tie, but he rebuffed this quickly with an apology and the explanation that he thought it was evident: he had told me the event was a formal. You’ll learn, he said. I told him this was unlikely, my contract was only nine months, but he beckoned me to follow anyway. I wanted to ask why on earth I would be ex
pected to spend my evenings in white tie; why an evening spent in the company of ordinary people and alcohol should necessitate wearing a gown and arranging my hair, but without looking to see whether I’d fallen into step, he had already begun to lead the way. I had no choice but to follow.

  We climbed several flights of stairs. He kept looking at me dubiously and murmuring things like, The dinner’s already done . . . not even that bad a dress . . . yes . . . no . . . oh, bugger us, it’s fine. He went ahead and through a series of complicated corridors, spouting reassurances all the way. I popped the cork on the champagne. He turned back at the sound and looked alarmed.

  How did you know I wouldn’t enjoy the department party? I asked, aggrieved.

  Wisdom of the expert. This, over his shoulder. It’s not that I knew you wouldn’t like it, it’s that I’m sure I don’t like them.

  I had known him for a day. If there was anything in me that found a reflection in him, I wanted to scrub myself clean of it. But I did not say this out loud. I took another hit of champagne and asked why that meant anything.

  There are better ways to spend your time is what I meant, he said. He came to a halt in front of a door, frowned at my dress again, then opened it, gesturing half-heartedly that I should go inside.

  I stayed where I was and glowered.

  All right. He held up his hands and apologized. The formal’s over anyway, this is just a drinks thing now. Are you trying to glower? It’s very impressive. Come on, come in. I’m sure no one will mind.

  In this way, I was ushered gently into a room full of people I did not want to meet. They were all immaculately groomed. Around them, the perimeter of the room was lined with portraits of men and women who, for some reason, regardless of the image’s style, were only ever painted in old age. From the walls, everything within was watched unblinkingly.

  I watched it, too, for a few minutes. I had not eaten. The champagne had begun to course through my head. I turned to my neighbor and said, I think I’m going to die in this room, which he ignored. There was no water in sight anywhere. I found a seat.