He could not take it in his stride, what he had found himself saying, or the response that was no response, like a final step on the staircase disappearing under the foot. The world around him shivered and trembled, and as he thought of it, he had to shut his eyes against the world. That afternoon he devoted himself to Browning, not in an armchair but sitting at a desk, reading one monologue after another, making notes as he went. The desk faced the wall, and he found he could concentrate. Only sometimes did Browning’s energy, his cryptic shouty manner, pass into another room where the meaning subsided into blankness, and Leo found himself once again knowing what it was like to say I would like to taste your cunt to a woman he had hardly met, mistakenly thinking they might have been flirting, and for her to dismiss him briskly. She had no reason on earth not to tell everyone. She came out of the episode really quite well.
And at suppertime he found himself sitting not so far from Tree, and she was sitting as she always was with Clare, but also with Tom Dick and Eddie and that egg-breathed girl called Lucy, the one who had got in by doing theology. He could not hear what they were saying, apart from one moment when Lucy’s braying voice cut through the noise of the hall, saying, ‘But I don’t understand – what on earth did he think –’ and a little later, ‘How disgusting and pathetic,’ and that was it. There was no doubt about it. He could hear that the conversation had begun with them listening intently to what Tree had to say, and she was making light of it, but by the time the soup had been taken away, Tom Dick was at the rapt centre of attention, telling them all what he knew. He was squaring this somehow with his account of his history, the suggestion that he had gone to a different sort of school from the one Leo had gone to, and that nevertheless Tom Dick knew all about what Leo was like from – what? Youth orchestras? Sports teams? Was he saying that Leo’s mother was his family’s housekeeper? Impossible to guess, but he was doing it. They were all rather gripped, and some people in the seats surrounding them, people who, surely, were in the second or third year, had started leaning in and asking fascinated questions, their elbows propping up, their fingers making decisive and principled points. Only once could he hear what Tom Dick was saying, and surely he was meant to hear. The pudding had arrived, and Tree had pushed hers away. Tom Dick stopped talking in his lowered, muttering way, and said, with brisk clarity, ‘Those shy people – they can say anything. And if you’re not going to eat that, I’d love to taste your –’ But there was a burst of laughter, immediately followed by a burst of scolding for Tom Dick and the boys who had laughed. Lucy was rubbing the shoulders of Tree, making exuberant noises of scolding and pity, saying, ‘It’s not at all funny, it’s not funny at all, poor you, poor Tree, poor thing,’ and putting her in her place. Leo knew he shouldn’t have said what he’d said, but he now felt that he’d politely given Tree a bold possibility as an equal. She’d turned it down as women sometimes turned down the offer, but the consequences of her refusal were to reduce her within her group to the girl from the comprehensive. Now she was the clever, pretty, helpless girl with the northern accent, the one they had to be kind to.
‘Are you going to eat that?’ the boy sitting opposite Leo said. He hadn’t touched his pudding, and everyone else had finished. The boy was sharp-eyed, alert, a flop of black hair over his Asian face. ‘I’ll have it if you aren’t. I’m starving still.’
‘Here you go,’ Leo said and, with a difficult entanglement between legs, feet and long bench, pulled himself out and walked briskly to the door. With a bit of luck, people might think he was feeling ill.
Now he was the fresher whose idea of flirtation was to ask a girl whether he could lick her cunt, or in some retellings if he could finger her, or in a version that took only two days to emerge, to say to the woman, ‘Can I smell your cunt?’ and for her to give the prompt response, ‘I hope not – I had a good wash only this morning.’ It happened in the street, at the freshers’ bop, at a lecture on Dickens, in a sandwich queue – any number of places. The girl screamed, or slapped him, or reported him to the authorities, or shrugged and coped with it as women always had to. The thing that never altered was that it was Leo. He was the man who had said that thing to a girl, and in the rapid establishment of friendships in waves of warm, amused laughter, he was the one who was left holding the turnip in protest and puzzlement. One day he turned up at his weekly tutorial to find that, as Mr Bentley briskly and amicably explained, he wouldn’t have a tutorial partner from now on, since Mr Allsop – a devout member of the Christian Union and the Tolkien Society – had decided he wanted to be paired up with Miss Britten in future. Mr Allsop had not been much of a social connection, but he had been somebody to talk to from time to time, to ask politely how things were going with the Matthew Arnold essay. If Tim Allsop had been told that Leo asked girls if he could lick their cunts, then everyone knew.
From time to time Leo found himself walking towards Tom Dick, whose name these days was Thomas. Perhaps in Hall, or perhaps outside, walking round the quad, once or twice on the staircase going up to Eddie’s room on the second floor of Leo’s staircase. Tom Dick had won a game that Leo had hardly known he was a contestant in. Each time, he would look down towards Leo; they came towards each other and, without saying anything, he brightened his eyes to a terrible gaiety, drew back his shoulders, bared his wet teeth in something that might be a smile, or a parody of a smile, or the beginnings of laughter. It was for his friends to avert their eyes; Tom Dick was always surrounded by his friends, laughing at his sallies, impressed by his hands folded behind his back and his elaborate stories of life in India and life in the absurd ruin of a house in Yorkshire. Every year had a scapegoat. The gazes of others turned elsewhere. They understood that it could have been them.
Above all, in his room alone, trying to get on with what he was there for, the books and with literature, he found his mind returning in a transfixed way to the sentence he had spoken to her. It was like the return of the mind to a sentence in Daniel Deronda, worrying away at it, unable to believe that the sentence that had said so much might have disappeared. The sentence he had said to the girl had indicated what he was, and what he might become. The sentence – this sentence and that sentence – was always there. This sentence: Was she beautiful or was she not beautiful? This sentence: One day I want to taste your cunt.
‘Your father’s done something awful,’ his mother said. There had been a note in the pigeon hole in the porter’s sloping hand – Pls call your mother. He had been writing letters each week to his mother and father. There was plenty to tell them, even if you left out what they probably wouldn’t understand. He had passed the time of day with people, and he said hello to people when he saw them – it was not hard to put up a good face. It was only three years, after all. He spoke to them occasionally, on the phone, but the payphones were at the bottom of a staircase, and he knew that anyone waiting could hear what you were saying. There was always someone waiting. So his phone calls, once a week or so, were brisk and cheerful, and over in five minutes. He phoned his mother, as requested.
‘Here we go,’ Leo said heartily.
‘He’s put his back out. I don’t know how he did it. It’s never happened before. He’s had to cancel his surgery all this week. It’s very inconvenient. I’ve got to go in there every ten minutes to listen to him making his awful jokes and pretending to be cheerful.’
‘I bet,’ Leo said. ‘Is he mobile?’
‘No ‒ I said I was having to go in there every ten minutes. He can’t do anything. He’s upstairs in bed with his knees drawn up pretending to be cheerful and in reality complaining about absolutely everything. Ordering me around like a … doctor. I’m ignoring most of the orders, as you can imagine. He can just about get to the loo. He says it’s sciatica rather than a slipped disc, but in my opinion –’
‘He’s the doctor,’ Leo said.
‘Yes,’ his mother said peremptorily. ‘Ordering me around like his receptionist. But the point of this – shall I call you back?’
She called him back.
‘As I was saying, the point is that, aren’t you supposed to be picked up a week on Saturday? Was that the date? Well, obviously, I can’t leave your father in the state he’s in,’ Celia said. ‘You know what he’s like. But then rather a marvellous thing has happened. I was down at Sainsbury’s with Hugh and there, in the detergent aisle – Do you know who I mean by Edna and Keith? Keith, his surname – Keith Archibald?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘Keith was a nurse in the hospital where your father did his training. He’s long retired now. Edna, poor woman, she’s very nice-natured but, your father always says, a little bit simple. They’re very happy and pleasant, a very nice couple. Christians. Keith was a pillar of the Northern General Christian Staff Association. They’ve come to our rescue. It’s their Christian duty, apparently, to help out their neighbours wherever possible, and this time we’re their neighbours, and they don’t mind driving down in their car, picking up your stuff and driving you back to Sheffield. It’s ideal.’
‘Mummy,’ Leo said, but he didn’t know what, if anything, he would be remonstrating about. In ten days, he would be picked up by two people called Edna and Keith, Christians, and anyone who saw them arriving would think they were his parents. Celia explained the arrangements, saying at the end that of course they would talk again; he could talk to Keith or Edna nearer the time too. He put down the phone. He winced at his own snobbery.
That was towards the end of term, in week seven. At the end of that week, there was a party. There was no avoiding it. You had to hear about it, in seminar rooms or in the dining hall or in the common room, reading the newspaper. There were invitations in the pigeon holes, dozens of them, photocopied on pink or blue paper – the same colours that Daily Info was printed on, with an amateurish drawing of someone meant to be Eddie in a bathtub with a bottle and a spliff, his eyes X’d out to show that he was incapacitated, drunk and high. Everyone knew about it – as a great joke. Eddie had invited everyone. There was a dress code; it was supposed to be a great secret, the substance of the dress code, but everyone knew about that, too. People Eddie liked were told that they had to dress in white. People Eddie had decided he didn’t like had been told that it was a Black Party, head to toe black. There were four people who, everyone knew, had been told they had to dress entirely in red.
‘It was Thomas Dick’s idea,’ Clare was heard to say. ‘I do think it’s simply brilliant. I can’t wait.’
Was there anyone he had not invited? People had been invited who had never met him, or didn’t think they’d met him. It would be happening downstairs. Even Mr Bentley had been invited, though he said at the beginning of one seminar to Tree, who asked directly, that he wasn’t sure – he would make an effort to look in. What was Mr Bentley invited to wear?
Leo smiled faintly. He tried to make a good, amused, clever point about Clough – he’d really enjoyed Clough, in fact. He looked patiently forward, waiting for the end of any conversation that wasn’t about Clough. Presently it came to an end. He got up, tried to engage one of the others in conversation – had he seen him going into Browns in the covered market yesterday? Did he think Browns was the best? – but without much success. He left the seminar room. They were talking about the party, which was going to happen in two days’ time. He’d got a shedload of beer in. Daddy’s credit card, but who cared?
He determined not to pity himself. There had been parties before, in Sheffield, he hadn’t been invited to. That had been absolutely fine. He had done something else. It was not true that this party had been mounted for the sole purpose of not inviting him, of inviting everyone but him. He thought of the pronoun in Cherokee that Mühlhäusler had talked about in his Wednesday lecture last week: the first person plural excluding the person spoken to. We-but-not-you are going to have fun on Saturday night. That was perfectly all right. He thought about it, and concluded that, since the way to and from his room could only lead past Eddie’s, he would not make himself conspicuous by going out. He envisaged his wretched smile, edging past the beautiful people in white, in black, even in red here and there, scuttling up the stairs. They should not know that he was there at all.
At six, some shrieks up the stairs; the intimates had arrived. A champagne cork popped.
At six thirty, music began; thunderous, rich, unexpected. The party was beginning with recordings of opera – was it Wagner? Out in the court, people raised their faces to the first-floor window, laughing. Many of them were already in white, a procession of virgins, lurching with bottles.
By seven the crowd noise from downstairs had dissolved voices and words into a sound, as of the sea. On top, in sudden bursts, shrieks and attempts by the rugby club to sing along.
A little later, the applause of feet in boots on the wooden stairs, up and down, coming right up to the landing outside Leo’s room. He tensed himself. He had shut and locked the outer door to his room, indicating that he was either out or not to be disturbed. It was called ‘sporting the oak’. There was nothing to indicate that he was in the room, unless they went outside and saw a chink of light between his curtains. But the rowdy ascent was some sort of race; the sprint up the stairs happened six or seven times, with cheering, and then the popping of more champagne corks, a kind of chant.
After an hour or so, the music changed: some kind of pop with drums and a screaming singer.
After eleven, a couple stood and had a conversation in the court. There was some acoustic peculiarity, and Leo found he could hear everything they were saying with the precision and intimacy of a paranoiac. He knew what people like that thought about him, if they thought about him at all. They were enjoying themselves. He should not think badly of them or of what they were saying about him, with hilarity.
By midnight, he had read nearly four hundred pages of Martin Chuzzlewit.
At some point after midnight, or perhaps after one, a long and prolonged argument between someone who might have been egg-smelling Lucy, certain of her rights, and a weary-sounding porter took place on the stairs. The music, which had turned to something like Yes, was lowered.
In a while, a girl’s voice rose in complaint or hysteria, and answering it, Tom Dick’s voice, but amplified somehow, through some megaphone. Up the stairs the voice came, and it was chanting something in French. ‘Si vous jugez,’ it said. ‘Si vous jugez – vous serez souvent trompée,’ and the trompée was full of delight in itself, plumping down on the word at having found precisely the right one. ‘Trompée. Parce-que ce qui paraît n’est presque jamais la vérité, la vérité, la vérité …’
It was unfamiliar to Leo, but he understood it well enough. He had sat for long enough at school listening to this voice painfully negotiating subjunctives to understand the words it was now producing in drink and disdain. And now the voice said, still through the megaphone, ‘I know. I know. I’ve got a marvellous idea. It’s marvellous. Listen listen listen. Let’s have some fun. Let’s just have ourselves some fun.’
Leo’s hand had been gripping his book firmly for some time now. He realized that he had taken in nothing of Martin Chuzzlewit for dozens of pages, his hand turning them in a mechanical rhythm. But now the voices downstairs hardened into a two-syllable call, voices joining in and stomping. What was it? He tried not to listen, but there it was. ‘Shy boy. Shy boy. Shy boy.’ They were coming up the stairs, half a dozen people by the sound of it, and still chanting, ‘Shy boy shy boy shy boy.’ They were hammering on his door – it was banging through both locked doors. He had not thought that was what people had concluded about him, that his withdrawal and solitude was down to a pathetic shyness. The judgement of everyone around him had gone from grateful contempt for him saying the worst thing you could say to a girl to hilarious contempt for him as someone who could not speak to anyone. Shy boy. Shy boy. Shy boy. In ten minutes or so they went away – it was Tom Dick and Eddie and voices he did not recognize. The music downstairs had long been turned up again.
He didn’t sleep until five, and woke again at eight. There was no point in not going to breakfast. Besieged, he had had nothing to eat the night before. He was not going to pity himself. He was going to get on with life, and do well in his degree, and read all the books he had wanted to read. He was going to walk past the Beckettian detritus on his staircase, the bottles and bodies and torn waste of the morning after debauchery, a man continuing his duty in a landscape that would not support it. He almost put a tie on.
He sat on his own in the dining hall. There was hardly anyone in apart from the rowing squad, back from an early-morning practice and getting through a mound of bacon. To his surprise, a tray was placed opposite his, and someone sat down. It was Geoffrey Chan. It had not occurred to Leo that anyone else in the college could have suffered from the party downstairs last night, rather than enjoyed it. Geoffrey Chan came to the point.
‘If I had a record player,’ he said, ‘I would put it on full volume, this morning, the most unpleasant music I could think of, and get it to repeat for several hours, and go out for a walk.’
‘I don’t know that anything would be enough,’ Leo said. ‘I’m sorry. It was bad enough for me, two floors up.’
‘Yes,’ Geoffrey Chan said. He set down his spoon in the muesli and, with his second and third fingers, chewed at an itch at the base of the thumb on his other hand. There was something excessive about the energy he did it with, like a dog gnawing at fleas in its toes. ‘It was very bad.’
‘They didn’t invite you,’ Leo said.
‘Oh, no,’ Geoffrey Chan said. ‘They didn’t ask me. They don’t know me, in fact. Everyone in this college, if they gave any thought to the matter, they certainly think that I’m studying maths.’
‘Maths?’
‘You know – because of. No. I’m actually a historian. You wouldn’t know if you weren’t actually in my year and in my seminar group. Or I suppose if you were a mathematician. You’d know I wasn’t a mathematician then.’
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