‘It’s a little fresher! Easy does it,’ went his cry, and she felt her body stiffen against the fluid brush of his fingers, the quick squeeze that she knew meant no harm but was still a surprise. Fuck a fresher, the mantra she’d heard bandied around in the dining room as the second-years had assessed the newcomers, filled her head. She glanced at the boy. Was that what he wanted? But he had already released her and was downing a pint: head tilted back, Adam’s apple bobbing as the golden liquid slipped down his gullet. She watched, fascinated; the memory of his fingers imprinted on her waist.
‘Come on – you’ll miss the action!’ Alison was calling back to her and thrust out a hand – the fingers square with chipped fuchsia nails. Holly took it and allowed herself to be pulled along in her slipstream, jostled and hustled through the crowd.
‘You all right?’ Alison called back, her face, flushed with excitement, gleaming with a sheen of sweat.
She nodded, forcing down any misgivings and giving in to a flicker of excitement building inside her; the sense that something new – and possibly illicit – was about to happen, for there was definitely something going on in the furthest corner of this stretch of the cellar bar. A crowd was gathered facing the wall, shielding a table, and a mantra was building: ‘Ros-coe, Ros-coe, Ros-coe, Ros-coe.’ The boy’s name was being chanted and then there was a drumming of several pairs of hands on the table and a great cheer erupted: a brutal cry of delight at the breaking of some final taboo.
‘ ’Fuck’s sake!’ The boy Roscoe staggered up and away. ‘I need some beer.’ His broad, pleasant face was flushed as he shoved past on his way to the bar but behind his beam she sensed some embarrassment – though perhaps it was just the effect of the drink, held high and sloshed back from a plastic pint cup.
‘Gi’s a go.’ Another boy, broad-chested as the first, called out, and his request was met with a rallying cheer.
‘An-dy, An-dy, An-dy,’ the chanting resumed as the boy was thrust through his friends and hauled up onto the table. He looked around, grinning, delighted at being cheered by his team-mates – for they were members of the college rugby team, she saw as she took in their tops emblazoned with their initials and the college crest.
‘An-dy, An-dy, An-dy, An-dy.’ And then, as he lowered himself to lie down, his back on the table, ‘Go on, my boy.’
She watched; curious at first, then bewildered and then appalled as another member of the rugby team pulled down his jeans and boxer shorts and positioned himself on all fours above the laughing Andy. ‘Salis-bury!’ The roar rose up as a third boy stood on a bench with a pint of beer and poured it down Salisbury’s naked buttocks and into poor Andy’s mouth.
‘An-dy, An-dy, An-dy’; the drumming of the table almost drowned out the calls but then there was a jubilant roar and he was heaving himself off the table, spitting beer and demanding a refill, while the half-naked Salisbury, who’d clambered off him, hauled his jeans and boxers up.
‘ ’Fuck’s sake,’ Andy half-spat his beer. ‘Fucking gross.’
‘Any more takers?’ The ringleader – the lad pouring the pint of beer – looked around and, to Holly’s bemusement, another rugby player – chest puffed out; hips rocking in a parody of a cowboy swaggering towards a fight – took Salisbury’s place.
‘What are they doing? Why are they doing this?’ The words slipped out as she glanced at the flushing Andy, whose neck was caught in a headlock by other team members. They slapped his back as they thrust him towards the bar.
‘They’re anal chugging,’ Alison shouted in her ear. ‘It’s what the rugby boys do.’
‘What?’
‘I know. That lad, the one standing up, is a scholar. I saw his gown at dinner. He’s supposed to be super-bright.’ She raised her eyebrows then turned back.
Holly watched the boy Alison was talking about as he stood above his team-mates, one hand tipping a plastic pint of beer, the other on his hips as though he were a farmer presenting his best beast at a show.
His face on top of a thick neck seemed free of malice: dark eyes glinting below a floppy fringe that was damp with sweat; pink lips, with perfect teeth, parted as he poured the amber beer then threw back his head and gave a roar.
Disappointment weighed heavy in her chest like a physical pain. These were supposed to be the brightest brains of her generation; Oxford the place where she thought she might discuss philosophy or politics – where she’d rant against the Major Government – not watch broad-shouldered lads with plummy accents drink beer from each other’s cracks.
‘Mad, isn’t it?’ Alison grinned at her and rolled her eyes but there was nothing in her reaction to suggest that she was repulsed, more that she was intrigued by this aspect of student life.
Andy, the second boy to take part, was by her side now, she realised. Released from the throng and trying to meld into the back of the crowd. He was drinking determinedly, eyes fixed on the middle distance as he downed his beer, huge shoulders hunched forward as if to minimise his presence. She caught his eye and tried to convey her sympathy. He looked away but not before she saw him flush.
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?
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