Deb puts her hand to her mouth. She’d forgotten too. ‘God, that marathon.’
‘Mini.’
‘Mini, my arse. It was a nightmare. I had a hangover before I even started. Had to stop twice to have a cup of tea with the St John’s Ambulance people. Threw up outside Caius. It nearly killed me, Fi.’
‘Good for you, Deb. Nearly being killed means you’re getting somewhere. I should know,’ she says. ‘Christ, when are they going to bang a gong or something? I’m ravenous. This place is worth gazillions and they can’t even give us a bowl of peanuts.’
‘Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served!’ someone bellows nearby – right behind Robot Man, in fact, who drops the handkerchief with which he is still trying to pat his hand dry. Not sure how well his evening is going. Odds on someone tipping their soup into his lap are currently, I reckon, around three to one.
‘Who was that?’ I whisper to Deb, as we join the polite stampede in the direction of the dining room.
‘Who?’
‘The teeny-weeny one.’
‘Ah. Currently worth in the region of a teeny-weeny hundred and sixty million, if the FT is to be believed. That’s what he sold the company for, at any rate, and it was all his baby from the start. Not bad, considering.’
‘Considering what?’
‘Considering what he was like before.’
‘But who is he?’
‘Hobbit. Tim Hobson. Don’t you remember? Tiny Tim, the shaggy one on the staircase next to ours?’
‘That’s Hobbit? But he was all hairy. I mean, really hairy. You couldn’t tell which way he was facing most of the time. I never knew which bit to talk to. Wasn’t he a mathematician?’
‘And some. Stuck around here, did his PhD, which should have been of interest to about three people. Except it turned out to be perfect for, what’s it called, cryptography. Which then became his thing. So he got the research funds, started his own software business, and grew into the teeny-weeny man you see today. He still lives around here.’
Ahead of us, Hobbit is shaking his watch and holding it to his ear. I still can’t square him with the Tim of old; it’s like looking at a chart showing the evolution of man. I vaguely knew he was clever back then, and passionately Marxist, but I thought it was the kind of clever idealism that meant he would live in bedsits and drink own-brand coffee and go on marches and sit in the launderette doing sums on the back of betting slips. Now, the geeks have inherited the Earth. Tim probably has his own plane.
‘How did you think Fi was?’ says Deb. ‘Same old, same old?’
‘Same old, same young. She’s Fi.’
‘Amazing how she just seems to forge ahead, whatever gets in the way.’
‘I know.’
‘She may be the only really good person I know.’
‘And the only really happy one, too.’
We both go quiet for a second, despite the clamour around us. I know Deb and I are asking ourselves the same question: is somebody like Fi able to do good because she’s happy? Or did she become happy by doing good?
It’s the sort of question that Roger Graham over there, the lanky chap with the Omar Sharif moustache, probably used to write essays about when he was here. Roger did philosophy and once asked me out to the pub ‘to work through my theories of ethics’. I presumed that he simply wanted to go to bed with me; that’s certainly what it sounded like at the time, and I gave serious thought to saying yes. Except when we got to the pub, he produced two half-pints of cider and a copy of Aristotle, and really did talk about ethics. For an hour and three quarters. I ate three packets of crisps just to keep my strength up, then left. I wonder if he remembers that night.
We are being herded now, everyone clustering around the seating plan, hoping not to be plonked next to the person they split up with three decades ago. I see my name next to someone called Marcus. Marcus? Did I know a Marcus? Was he the one I nicked an LP from? Outlandos d’Amour, I think, just when The Police were becoming huge. What if he wants it back? What if that single loss has somehow triggered a lifetime of deeper vanishings? If he can’t stand losing—
‘Kate Reddy! I thought it might be you!’
I spin round, like someone about to be mugged. Rosamund Pilger. Roy has no hesitation in supplying the name. Typical Roz; even in my memory, she’s barged to the head of the queue. Roz, the countess of careers advice and the queen of mixed metaphors, then as now.
‘Roz! How lovely. How are you?’
‘Terrific. As you see. And you? I heard that you had to junk that job of yours.’
‘Yes, that was a while back. It was—’
‘Well, entre nous, it wasn’t much to lose, was it?’ Roz always says things like ‘entre nous’ or ‘keep this to yourself’ in the voice of a hockey coach lambasting her forwards from the touch line.
‘Actually, I am now back in the office—’
‘Good luck with that! My feeling is, if you take your nose off the grindstone, it’s curtains.’
‘Well, I do have some experience—’
‘Water under the bridge.’ Roz has, I know, made a fortune in commodities. On the other hand, she does now resemble a burst horsehair sofa, so there is some justice in the world. ‘Who are you sitting with? I’m next to the Chaplain. The Rev Jocelyn Somebody. Man or woman? God knows. Probably gay, either way. They all are.’ And, leaving me with that Christian thought, Rosamund Pilger is off, carving a path to her seat. I say a silent prayer for the Chaplain, whoever he or she may be.
8.19 pm: Having survived the Pilgering more or less intact, I am now sitting opposite a sweet woman at dinner. She clearly knows me, but I’m struggling to put a name to the face.
The fabulous memory that got me into this university in the first place is no more. I close my eyes and make an impassioned, silent plea. (‘Please, Roy, can you get me the name of the woman sitting opposite me? Think she read Natural Sciences. Brown curly hair. Friendly eyes. Slightly too much make-up.’)
‘You don’t recognise me, do you, Kate?’ asks the woman.
‘Of course I do,’ I say with more confidence than I feel. (‘Hurry up, Roy!’) ‘You used to row.’
‘Cox,’ she smiles, ‘I coxed the First boat.’
‘No,’ I say, ‘Frances coxed the First boat.’
‘Roy, pleeaase find her name. I’ll never ask you for anything ever again.’
‘Yes,’ she agrees, ‘and I coxed the men’s boat.’
‘No, you can’t have. Colin coxed the men’s boat.’
‘I am Colin,’ she says. ‘Or I used to be till I transitioned five years ago. I’m Carole now.’
Jesus. (‘Roy, you can stop looking.’)
‘Wow, that’s wonderful, Colin. I mean Carole. Good for you. I’m still the same sex, but that’s about the only thing I haven’t changed.’
‘Yes, Kate, we’ve all been through so much, haven’t we?’
Tell me about it.
10.35 pm: Well, I got through dinner. Or dinner got through me. What I hadn’t thought about were the consequences of fasting beforehand to get into the green dress. It meant that two glasses of champagne landed in a stomach which had hardly seen a carbohydrate for two months. Plus, there was the wine, which kept on coming from a never-failing source, as in a fairy tale. I should have known better, but I was strangely nervous and glugged from the glass like a toddler with a sippy cup. Then, I found out that the woman sitting opposite me at dinner, the one I couldn’t quite put a name to, had changed sex.
I mean, how is that fair? Carole seemed absolutely lovely, and definitely a big improvement on snarky Colin, which is who she was when I last saw him. Her. Them. But, after thirty years, it was hard enough trying to identify people who had stayed the same gender. All those young men either ballooned into paunchy, well-lunched Hogarth squires or looked almost painfully the same, with faces slightly sunken and peering over their glasses like auctioneers. I got the instant impression that the men were dealing a lot less well with the loss of youth
than the women. Don’t ask me why. Boys launch themselves at life, like arrows from a bow, but they drop to the ground just as suddenly, their motive force all spent. One charged up as dinner ended, breathing gusts of port over me. A barrel of a man, who would have been bald, were it not for the last wisps of hair carefully shaped into a spun-sugar nest, like a Michelin-starred dessert, over the sweaty pink dome of his scalp.
‘Kate, lovely to see you. Great dress. How’s it going?’
It takes a few seconds to see it is Adrian Casey. I deduct four stone and put his hair back on, rather good thick, dark hair that used to curl under his ears and matched his brown spaniel eyes, and here he is.
‘Oh, Adrian, it’s been so long,’ I said, kissing his cheek. Adrian fumbled in his wallet for some photos of the kids as he brought me up to date. Still married to Cathy. Nervous honk of laughter. Lives in Kent. Commutes up to London every day. Three children. Girls very bright, sailed through Eleven Plus. Boy has mild learning difficulties, Cathy organising a battalion of tutors. Hoping to get him into X or maybe Y. Pity Adrian’s old school has got so frightfully competitive.
‘Can’t believe it, Kate, it used to be all nice thick farmers’ sons.’ Adrian was practically roaring to make himself heard in the packed hall. ‘If one was an old boy one could get one’s son into school no problem. Now it’s all bloody Russians and Chinese, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’ I think of Vladimir Velikovsky hoping to get his son, Sergei, into Eton.
‘Yes, it’s the money, you know. They’re all arms dealers. Head sees them coming and it’s like sitting on a cash register. Ker-ching! Or Ker-Chink I suppose it is now.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You know, Chinese? Chink. Ha ha! We’ll all have to learn bloody Mandarin next. Sticky?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Dessert wine? Too sweet for me, and looks like pee, but that’s what the birds have instead of port, isn’t it?’
Birds? Who was the last British male to refer to women as ‘birds’? Probably a DJ who is now doing seven years without parole for groping underage teeny boppers during the Wilson government.
I decided I needed to go and get some air. Made my excuses and left. One of my fishnet hold-ups had gradually slunk down my leg and I kept having to hoik it back up and refasten the non-stick sticky bits to my thigh. So much for Ageless Woman of Mystery – I was more like Nora Batty.
Outside the rain had stopped and the college walls smelt of time and thyme. I breathed it in, glad to have got away from Fat Adrian. I’d come here to escape all that, to remind myself of an age before every single conversation was about schools and grades and how many UCAS points your kid got for Grade 7 Distinction on the tuba. When life stretched out before us, a prairie of infinite possibility. Last time I stood in this very spot I was twenty-one years of age, a vertiginous thought. What would that Kate make of this Kate, if she could see me now? For a moment, just one, I wish I could go back and try again.
Midnight, more or less: A group of women congregate in the college’s cellar bar, on the squashy leather seats where we used to sit all those aeons ago, checking out the guys playing table football and pool. In that corner, I remember there was an early Space Invaders machine, and any conversation down here was punctuated by aggressive beeps and whooshes.
‘Do you remember that Space Invaders machine?’ asks Deb, reading my mind, or what is left of it tonight.
‘We thought it was so amazing,’ laughs Anna. ‘Imagine showing it to the kids nowadays. They’d think it was a complete joke.’
‘Probably a collector’s item,’ says Rachel.
‘Aren’t we all collector’s items?’ says Deb, waggling a bottle of red wine at my empty glass.
‘Maybe we are, but a really good vintage,’ I say, finding, to my surprise, that I really mean it. I think of Emily and how much harder it is for girls growing up now with social media. Their mistakes are magnified, any loneliness broadcast to the world. There was a lot to be said for living an unobserved life.
You know the best thing about the reunion? It has put the choices we make in perspective. Or are they actually choices? Sitting at that table in the bar were women who had started out with similar qualifications and ended up in wildly different places.
Rachel was probably the most ambitious of all of us. Arrived at college having already devoured her Law reading list and hungry for more. While we were reading novels, Rachel carried around a small, terse little tome called How To Do Things With Rules. After getting the second-best degree in the year, she joined an international consultancy firm, though not before marrying Simon in a match which was both romantic (he looked like Robert Redford) and characteristically efficient (he was her neighbour in the third year). Everything went according to plan, until Rachel had two daughters in quick succession. Eleanor, the second, nearly threw a spanner in the works, being seven weeks premature, but Rachel had it all under control, hiring an excellent nanny and moving nearer the office so she could jump in a cab and breastfeed the baby at lunchtime. Then, one morning, she forgot some papers, and went back home to see two, tear-stained, tiny girls banging at the window, faces pressed up against the glass. Inside, she went to the kitchen where she found the nanny on the phone. She had barricaded the children in the front room. After that, Rachel’s confidence was shot. ‘I couldn’t be a great career person and I couldn’t be a great mother; I was failing at both.’
Rachel resigned and the family moved to Sussex where she had two more children. Between them, the four kids do twenty-three activities a week. Eleanor has learning difficulties as a result of her very premature birth and Rachel drives her back and forth to a special school some forty miles away. It’s hard, though not impossible, ‘so long as you get all your ducks in a row’. The family schedule is colour-coded and runs like clockwork; the girl who chose How To Do Things With Rules as her school book-prize makes sure of that. Somewhere along the way, Simon deviated from the plan and ran off with a yoga teacher who Rachel calls Bendy Wendy. ‘But, honestly, Simon was useless anyway. We’re better off without him.’ In short, my friend Rachel, who should have been a High Court judge or Prime Minister at the very least, became one of those Tiger Mothers who reduced me to a puddle of incompetence at the school gate. Was that a choice?
Beautiful, half-Russian Anna, whose face I instantly transposed onto the heroine’s when I first read Anna Karenina, is a foreign correspondent in a man’s world. Night shifts, drinking with the boys, chasing the next story. Never a shortage of great boyfriends; ditched one and the others would form a longing queue. In her mid-thirties, a routine smear showed up something on her cervix. Mixture of radiotherapy and chemotherapy followed; eventually they took away her womb. The men deteriorated after that. Now living with a ‘restaurateur called Gianni’ (a violent waiter who sponges off Anna, according to Deb). Would love to adopt, but being a functioning alcoholic makes that difficult, she says, though not impossible one day. That wonderful face now marooned in puffy plumpness, Anna sports the colourful, enveloping scarf that big women wear to shield their bodies from unkind looks and thoughts. Was any of this a choice?
Anna sits next to me, cooing over pictures of Emily on my phone. ‘God, she’s so like you, Kate. What a knockout.’
‘Emily doesn’t think so. She’s so self-critical.’
‘Girls never think so.’
‘Surely you did, Anna? You were the fairest of us all.’
Anna shrugs. ‘No and yes. I took it for granted, s’pose. Didn’t cash it in at the right time. Then it was gone. Not like you, Kate. You’ve done everything brilliantly. Career, great marriage, great kids.’
‘It only looks like that from the outside,’ I protest, thinking of lying about my age at work. Thinking of how I feel being a minion to boys almost half my age. Thinking of not having had sex since New Year’s Eve. Thinking of a man I must not think of, because I’m too old for fairy tales and we don’t live happily ever after, we just carry on. Thinking, suddenly, that the one
thing I wouldn’t change from the past thirty years is my wonderful children.
1.44 am: Drunk and disorderly? Not exactly. I don’t need to be drunk to be disorderly, as I once mistakenly emailed somebody. But I’m both. At least I think I am. There was a time when I would not have weaved – woven? weavered? – back across the court like this without a gentleman, or at least a boy, to prop me up. But now I am alone, unpropped. Improper but unpropositioned. It suddenly feels strange. Lonely.
‘Hello!’
So much for solitude. It’s Two-Time Ted, lying in a flower bed. He looks like he’s fallen out of a window.
‘Hello, Ted. How you doing?’
‘Am pished, Kate. Quite frankry am pished. Sho shorry. You’re sho beautiful, d’you know that? Why d’we break up? I mussht avbin mad.’
‘You were two-timing me with Debra, Ted.’
‘Wash I?
‘Yes.’
‘Debra Richajjjjssonson?’
‘Yes.’
There is a moment when Ted could apologise for his youthful treachery. Instead, with a dreamy smile, he says, ‘Lucky bassshhtard. Freesshom!’
I find this a lot funnier than I should. ‘We never had a freeshom, try again – threesome – Ted. Debra’s in the bar. Why don’t you get out of the flower bed and say sorry to her?’
He stands up, tries to brush the earth off his trousers and misses. I turn him around and point him towards the entrance to the bar. Even in his present condition, Two-Time Ted is a more solid prospect than any of Deb’s online suitors.
‘Hello!’ I’ve just got rid of Ted when I’m hailed a second time.
‘Roz. Where you off to?’
La Pilger is wheeling a small expensive suitcase briskly towards the Porter’s Lodge. She appears to be completely sober.
‘Got a car waiting. Got to get to London. Got a seven am in Canary Wharf.’
How Hard Can It Be? Page 24