With the influx into the small room, Portia felt this was her chance to depart. She did not want to in some way get sucked into dinner in Hall tonight. Too much work to do on my thesis, she thought, without a trace of irony.
But her escape was momentarily blocked by the entrance of a vision of angelic beauty. A woman wearing a gold lamé dress that clung like a mermaid’s skin stood in the doorway. Portia, svelte as she was, wondered how many hours in the gym were required to produce a figure that could have been sculpted from marble. Adding to the illusion of flawlessness, the woman’s complexion, thick as cream, might never have seen the sun; her hair had been artfully arranged into a haloed perfection of light-and-dark blonde strands. This could only be Lexy Laurant.
The goddess, on entering the room, looked immediately, as if instinctively, at Lady Bassett, who offered a weak grimace of acknowledgement on her own freckled, lived-in face. It was probably meant to be a smile, but seemed somehow hostile, even threatening. Lexy returned the grimace, and gave Sir James a passing, haughty glance. Then, with a sniff, she turned heel and shimmered away.
It was altogether a somewhat childish performance, and someone—no one was later sure who it was—was heard to mutter: “God, but don’t you just want to choke her sometimes?”
–––
It was much later that night that Portia saw, or rather heard, Sir James and his wife again. Portia had gone out to collect her takeaway, brought it back to her room (along with the guilty indulgence of a fairy cake from the Elizabeth Barrett Bakery), and watched the BBC on the telly as she ate. Then she’d turned again to working on her novel, and several hours passed without her noticing they’d gone. She’d sat until the room grew quite dark except for the cone of light cast by the desk lamp against the burnished wood of her writing table.
“An atmosphere of tension,” she wrote, then crossed out “tension” and wrote “fear?” She looked at the words in her notebook, bought new that evening from Heffer’s. Why did she feel that so strongly, she wondered? The words had come unbidden, unrelated to the novel. Try as she might, she could not shake off the sudden sense of a fatal change, as of tectonic plates shifting beneath the buildings of St. Mike’s.
She stood and stretched out the ache from the back of her neck, and shook the writer’s cramp from her hands. A walk before retiring was needed; maybe she’d ring to see if St. Just was still at work. She knew the college dinner had ended—along with the perfumed night air, several voices had wafted up through her open window as people left the Hall. She’d smiled as she overheard someone say, commenting on the meal just consumed, “That was pureed spinach, I’m nearly certain, but what was the fowl? Was it seagull, do you think?” The Bursar had struck again. Meals in Hall tended to feature gristle flanked by minute traces of meat. It was the reason so many students became vegetarians. In most cases, it had nothing to do with regard for their friends in the animal kingdom. Oddly, the Bursar was not offended by the unremitting student complaints about the food. To the contrary, he regarded it as the highest compliment to his ability to feed a large number of people for a pittance—a veritable song of praise to his incessant ingenuity.
Portia walked downstairs, past the SCR, now filled with visitors gathering for their after-dinner port, and headed towards the Fellows’ Garden. It was where she often walked, regardless of the weather, to settle her mind at the end of the day.
She’d forgotten the visitors had been granted access to the Fellows’ Garden that weekend, and came upon the couple by surprise. The door into the garden stood open, and they didn’t see or hear her, too engrossed were they in conversation. Instinctively, she stood back until she was hidden from their view.
They sat on a bench that was screened by a trellis, the vines trained into the shape of a heart. The Garden itself was in the design of a French Parterre, with low plantings divided by gravel footpaths and the whole surrounded by walls cloaked in English ivy. The large Garden was overlooked by a first-floor gallery over a cloister walk, with the gallery leading to the dining hall.
“It’s just a feeling I have, James.” The aristocratic, nasal tones of Lady Bassett were unmistakable. “It would be better if we left. I’ll just claim a mysterious virus—you know the kind of thing. We can make it right with the Master at a later date.”
“Perhaps you’re right, India,” His answering voice, low and soothing, also carried clearly to where Portia stood.
“Do you mean it?”
“If it makes you happy, of course I mean it. I’ll have a word with the Master. It’s just a bit awkward, that’s all.”
“I’ll tell you what’s jolly well awkward is Lexy’s being here. I think it’s one of her blasted games, James, I really do. She so loves creating a scene. Don’t you remember?”
He shifted. Something in her tone seemed to have affected him. He sat for a long moment, looking at her, then took her hand in his.
“Let’s talk about it in the morning,” he said, his worry clear in his voice. “If you still want to go then, we’ll leave.”
He stood suddenly. Portia, afraid of discovery, shrank back and started to slip away. Just then, she saw something flash in the shadows of the cloister walk, the shape of a woman in a dress of gold lamé—a most unsuitable costume for undercover observation (and surely a bit of overkill, even for dinner in Hall).
Portia also had the sense that someone else was watching this little tableau of spies and espied. She felt rather than saw a shadow draw back from a window in the library overlooking the Garden, a window which stood open to the summer breeze. A lack of privacy was always a feature of college life. Making her escape, Portia nearly collided with someone as she turned a corner, heading for the main stairs.
“I’m looking for Lexy,” the man said, exactly as if everyone in the world would know whom he meant, as much of the world would. Fully taking in Portia’s appearance, he smiled appreciatively. “But you’ll do,” he said. He was a broad-shouldered, dark-haired man of muscular build. His broad smile displayed perfect white teeth, and he spoke perfect English with an overlay of accent from the Southern Hemisphere. He announced that he was Geraldo Valentiano, as if this, too, were a name she would recognize.
“I haven’t seen her,” Portia lied, without quite knowing why. It had almost certainly been Lexy in the gold lamé—what were the chances another woman would be wandering the college in a similar dress?
“She’s probably mooning about the college somewhere. She told me she always did that when she was upset, even twenty years ago.”
“Upset?” asked Portia.
“You don’t want to know. She’s been moody since we got here, and it’s looking like it’s only going to get worse. Now she’s disappeared immediately after dinner, and I’ve half a mind to leave her and go back up to London. If she had been a proper wife to James none of this would have happened, anyway. Are you free?”
Portia, not knowing if he meant free as in available, or free as in no charge, felt that one answer would suffice for both.
“No,” she said, brushing past him and up the stairs. Good heavens, she thought, letting herself into her flat. Much more of this and I will have a thoroughly jaded view of men. She thought with more than a little longing of St. Just, her eyes lingering on the most recent bouquet of flowers he’d brought her, which stood in a vase on a table in her front hall. A single petal had fallen on the table. She wondered if he were still at work so late.
She looked up at the sky, spotted a bright star, and wished upon it. But her prayer wouldn’t be answered just yet.
LIGHTING UP
The next day with its full schedule of lectures and tours passed without incident, and Saturday evening arrived. Sebastian and Saffron were in her room in St. Mike’s, where they had just made love, and they lay rather self-consciously folded in one another’s arms. They had seen magazine ads, mostly for perfume, of how this pose of sybaritic abandon was supposed to look: glistening, tangled limbs and tousled curls; heads thrown back to
gaze into one another’s eyes in spellbound, satiated adoration. But because Sebastian did not adore, only Saffron held her head at this awkward angle. And it was much too cold in her room for abandoned limbs.
“Time to go,” he said.
“I know,” she replied, too quickly. Her voice, which she had tried to train since meeting Sebastian into the self-confident bray of the upper classes, usually betrayed her, this time breaking in the middle of the two short syllables like a schoolboy’s. She cleared her throat and aimed for a lower register.
“I have work to do,” she added firmly but unconvincingly. He was making moves to get out of bed. Think of something to ask, quickly.
“How’s it going with the parents? Have you seen them today?”
“Yes. It was ghastly. Bloody Lexy being here is causing no end of strain. I’ve even wondered …”
“Wondered?” she asked, treading gently, gently. It wasn’t like Seb to “share,” as the American students would say. These few sentences were as gold to her. She didn’t want to rush at him, make him clam up.
“I told you. I’ve wondered if she has some vague hope of getting back together with my stepfather.”
“There’s a cracked idea.” Saffron gave a gentle snort of contempt, to mask her guilty realization of how similar were their situations, hers and Lexy’s. The Americans would probably tell them both it was time to “let go and move on,” and they’d be right. How easy it was to spout brainless platitudes.
“Isn’t it just? I really don’t think James would be that mad, but you never know … he’s such a stick; I never understood what my mother sees in him, really … I wish she’d go away … stay away from them. If anyone hurt India, I swear … ”
Saffron, thrilled at these disjointed disclosures, wisely kept quiet, but she was thinking, not for the first time, that Sebastian could be a bit of a mummy’s boy. He’d do whatever it took to make his mother happy and keep her that way. The thought of James leaving his mother to reunite with the gorgeous Lexy—she could see it made Sebastian livid.
“Maybe you could have a word?” she suggested tentatively.
Sebastian, no longer listening, swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for his rucksack. He had brought his kit with him to save time. He always did that. She knew how much rowing meant to him—she was reconciled to the fact he wanted that Blue more than he wanted anything, certainly more than he wanted her—but couldn’t he at least pretend reluctance to leave? Maybe it was time, fretted Saffron, to start a slimming regime. She had put on a couple of pounds lately … The words of a Tracy Chapman song went through her head, as they often did when she thought of Seb:
Maybe if I told you the right words
At the right time you’d be mine.
“Couldn’t you …” she began. Don’t say it.
Sebastian began pulling on his rowing shorts and shirt. He reached for his warm-up top.
“Couldn’t I what?” His back was to her, which made it easier. Whatever you do, Don’t Say It.
“Couldn’t you stay, just a bit? This once?” Oh, fuck. She knew better than this. She had no mind left when it came to Seb. Fuck fuck fuck it. Keep your face still and flat. Don’t let him see.
He turned. He wasn’t angry, as she’d feared. It was worse. From the condescending, pitying smirk on his face, Saffron had her confirmation that those were not the right words. Those were precisely all the wrong words, lined up in the wrong order, and said in the wrong tone of voice. And definitely at the wrong time. Full points.
It was his leaving a bit early that had thrown her off, she thought. Otherwise she’d have been smart enough, calm enough, to keep her mouth shut.
Sebastian said nothing, just knelt to tie his shoes. Then he picked up his rucksack and headed for the door. As he was leaving, he threw over his shoulder the three little words that made her heart, which had plummeted like something thrown through an open trapdoor, lift again with hope.
“See you tomorrow.”
But his tone was dismissive, like a king ordering the removal of a chamber pot, and she worried over this for a long while, playing and replaying the whole scene in her head. Rewind. Couldn’t you stay? Oh my God, what had she been thinking? Play … just a bit? This once? Rewind. Just a bit?
Anger, the only fitting response to his boorish behavior, never entered into it. The option of never seeing him again wasn’t a choice that existed for Saffron. She was too amazed, too in awe, that Seb had ever looked her way in the first place, let alone chosen to spend time with her.
That the awe was the reason he would leave her one day—that she knew already.
–––
The path to the boathouse skirted the sanctum of the Fellows’ Garden, so Sebastian missed witnessing any scenes that might be playing out there. He walked instead along the outside brick wall of the garden, even though he had long since learned how to take a forbidden shortcut through whenever the coast was clear. With all the visitors, he doubted the favored meeting spot would be clear tonight. He passed by Gwenn Pengelly—he recognized her from the telly. She was headed away from the tennis courts towards the main building. She seemed to want to engage him in conversation so he just gave her a wave of his hand and kept going.
He looks dark, she thought. Obsessed. Too serious for his age, that one.
Sebastian quickened his pace. Having dawdled, he was late now. He had his routine, and it seldom varied; it unsettled him when it varied. He hadn’t missed a day on the water except when a red flag warned of foggy or windy conditions, or the stream was running too fast. First, he’s have a warm-up in the gym, including a spot of weight-lifting and a stint on the much-despised ergometer, then he would carry the single scull from the boathouse and feed its awkward length into the river. He would lock in the oars and, grabbing both oars in one hand, step lightly into the narrow scull, maneuver expertly into the seat, and secure his feet onto the footboards.
Nearly an hour later he was ready to set out. The weather being warm, the air heavy, he had brought with him a drink bottle, which he slotted behind his shoes in the scull. He took a few minutes to settle himself, breathing deeply, then used one oar to push off into the river. He began building up his pace slowly, the boat slivering through the water and leaving a ribbon trail behind. Immediately, he felt calmer, anonymous and alone, just himself testing himself against the limits of his endurance. To Seb, sculling was much harder than rowing, because of the need to keep an even pull on both oars. In a way, he preferred it, for the challenge. He thought he might always prefer the isolation of the single scull to the camaraderie of a crew boat.
He was St. Mike’s star: Everyone knew he was headed for the Blue Boat—that he’d one day compete in the famous, four-and-a-quarter-mile Oxford-Cambridge race. Kevin, the club captain, granted him more leeway than most, even though Kev, whose father was career Army, had a morbid fear of the early morning marshals and stayed well within the rules. Kev reminded Sebastian, who assessed any rule in terms of whether it served his own purposes, of a dog behind an invisible electric fence, terrified of setting one paw wrong and being zapped silly. Imagine living your life that way—Sebastian couldn’t. Old Kev even believed, when closer observation of his character might easily have convinced him otherwise, that Sebastian always operated within the rules. Even if he’d been so inclined, that was getting harder each day: There was so much congestion on the Cam a flurry of regulations had been issued to try to disentangle everyone and their oars. With the rules changing so often, the chances were good there was always someone out there illegally, rowing or spinning at the wrong place and time.
Still, trying to outwit the EMMs for the heck of it was one of Sebastian’s favorite pastimes, although their main interest was to be on the lookout for too much early noise and too many novice boats on the river. Sebastian knew just how far to push it, and went no further. He wasn’t going to risk what he already thought of as his seat in the Blue Boat.
Sebastian’s thoughts kept
pace with his steadily increasing speed, his powerful leg drive propelling the scull with ease: So what if the boats these days seemed to be filled with long, tall graduate students, some doing bullshit degrees just so they could row. I can compete with the best of them. I will win.
Sebastian was far from being a novice rower, even when he had been a novice. He had grown up near Cambridge, and knew the river well, from Baitsbite to Jesus. For much of his young life, he had withstood hot days in the sun and bitter cold mornings in the rain just to be on the water. He now knew the river, he thought, as well as he knew Saffron. Better than. He knew the moment boats had to cross at the Gut and Plough Reach; he knew where crews would be spinning, just upstream of Ditton Corner. He knew where the river narrowed to the point it was barely possible for two eights to squeeze past each other.
He knew that come Michaelmas term, between Chesterton footbridge and Jesus Lock, the junior and novice crews would be menacing everyone else out on the water. Uncoxed boats, rowing blind, the steerer’s mind elsewhere, were a particular hazard. It didn’t help that the river was increasingly crowded with rowers of all skill levels, and that long boats motoring past often had a complete disregard for the rowers, rather seeming to steer straight towards them. The “party” long boats of an evening, carrying drunken passengers, were the worst. No matter how many regulations CUCBC might pass, you couldn’t regulate against stupidity. The dangerous corners of the Cam—Queen Elizabeth Way, Green Dragon, Ditton, and Grassy—each year awaited the unwary.
An uncoxed boat was bearing down on him now, all of the rowers, to Sebastian’s trained eye, too quick into the catch, or splashing their blades about in a domino effect from the stern. He eased up and gave a shout—it was that collection of berks from Jesus again. This time of year, there were usually only town crews on the river; very few, if any, college crews like this lot; maybe the odd post-graduate crew. Annoyed at the interruption, Sebastian strove to regain his rhythm, his thoughts also changing course, to his parents, the famous Lexy, all the oldies who had begun arriving the day before. Some of them in their forties, from the look of them. Really old. It was a wonder they could walk. Losing their hair, wearing glasses in old-fashioned frames, flaunting their kangaroo paunches. Trying too hard, some of them, to look with it. And that was just the women. It was pathetic.
Death at the Alma Mater Page 5