The Reading Party

by Fenella Gentleman

  It was a reassuring surprise. For a start, Chloe had removed herself or been banished; Gloria was still at the roll-top, wrapped in that cardigan of hers; Eddie, on his sofa, was motionless; and it was Rupert in the campaign chair, legs stretched before him, crossed at the ankle. The dynamics had changed; it was a model of silent application.

  I sat down at the only remaining place – the little side table between the windows, where you could check the goings-on, should you need to, in the mirror above your head – and parked my wodge of papers. There was no chat and barely a shifting of positions as I spread my notes in a great arc beside my chair.

  Remarkable how quickly you could sink back into the same mental space. I reread my paper, checking the logic of the croppings and reorderings of the previous morning, and felt reassured. It was now coherent and compelling – I could even imagine applause at the end, if I turned it into a lecture, when the argument was so satisfyingly brought together. As for the question of where it should be published, the answer seemed suddenly obvious: it should go where it would make waves. And so what if people were taken aback! Since when had I fussed about that? Now wasn’t the time to be feeble.

  It wasn’t until Loxton’s shoes appeared in my line of vision that I registered the time. An interruption – damn!

  In the kitchen there was Mei, patiently waiting to do her turn with the shopping, and to my surprise there was Jim, offering to give us a hand. The transparency of the gesture was sweet: the dour Jim was indeed warming to the gentle Mei – a lovely thought. Did it matter if he took a short break? Surely not. He was too dogged by half – deserved a bit of fun. I would defend him if Loxton complained.

  In the little town we wandered down the tiny high street, chatting inconsequentially over the crying of the gulls – an awful sound, like cats wailing – as we bumped our way along the narrow pavement. I looked at Loxton’s list. Tyler had added the things he and Chloe needed; then there was a gap, followed by ‘Chocolate?’, the ‘C’ billowing in his cursive script. How had he guessed? Or was he thinking of the others? Either way, it was propitious: there in front of me was the confectioner’s with its yellow-filmed window display revelling in the trappings of Easter – the colourful tiers of egg boxes, the fluffy chicks with their orange legs strutting around the straw beneath, a nest of pale blue mounds and a garden gnome peeking out from behind the clumps of fake daffodils. I paused to look, wondering whether the kitty might run to some chocolate extravagance, wanting to give Jim and Mei some space.

  ‘Do you mind if I nip in here?’ I asked. ‘You could do the bakers and have a wander while I finish off?’

  Jim seemed uncertain, shifting the empty basket from one hand to the other. It was Mei who murmured about seeing the harbour. She was more single-minded than you might think, not really bland at all.

  When I returned to the car park they were just ahead of me, each holding a handle of the shopping bag suspended between them, each with a loaf under the outer arm. Jim said they’d been doing some research of their own. There was a clear view to the warehouses from the harbourmaster’s house – he would have seen everything that went on along the quayside as the boats unloaded. They could picture him at the window with his telescope, watching. It made it easier to understand his hold over the little town.

  Hadn’t Jim said something about a girlfriend back home? That would complicate things. The details had gone from my mind, but it didn’t stop a flush of concern for him and Mei, both so lacking in guile.

  *

  It was a jolt, coming back to Carreck Loose after the sounds and smells of Mevagissey. You might expect a house with that many people in it to be rowdy, but it was still and silent, as if it were empty. For all we knew the students had decamped to the little beach, creeping out without Loxton noticing – or he might have taken it into his head to change the routine and whisk them off on a morning walk. But no: bowed heads were visible through the dining room window as we opened the back door. So we kept our voices low and unpacked the bags. Job done, Mei and Jim returned to their books, Jim charged with sending Eddie to give me a hand.

  And in Eddie came, stretching his arms wide and then standing by the table with them locked behind his head, assessing the task but doing nothing.

  When he saw the paper bags of sweet-shop gaudiness, he sprang out of his trance. ‘Hey, Easter eggs! Don’t you just lurve things that are bad for you?’ He tipped out the Creme Eggs, one hand hovering as they rolled wonkily across the table, the other scrunching abandoned paper. ‘My absolute fave! How did you guess?’

  Typical. If they were for anyone, it wasn’t him.

  ‘Don’t be such a solipsist.’ I said. ‘We didn’t – you just got lucky. But if they’re such a favourite, you can decide when we get to eat them.’

  Eddie was all for pleasure now not pleasure later, so we agreed to have the eggs with coffee, instead of at teatime. That decided, he set to and together we assembled the lunchtime spread, chatting all the while about Restoration comedy, which he liked and which he’d be doing before Prelims. I asked if he’d come across a friend of mine who was researching the female playwrights of the era, but no, he hadn’t heard of her or of them – he hadn’t thought there were any. What about Aphra Behn? Oh, was that a woman? He hadn’t realised. At school they’d done Vanbrugh, and he’d seen Congreve too, but they were later, weren’t they?

  I was shocked. Here he was, studying English literature, and he hadn’t read the first woman reputedly to earn her living as a writer? Nope, he was afraid he hadn’t, but he promised to order her up from the stacks when we got back. What about female actors, and the significance of having the King’s mistress on stage? Yep, he knew about that, but he hadn’t been looking at it from my perspective. This wasn’t about being a historian or gender politics, I said, and anyway he shouldn’t presume. How could anyone understand a comedy of manners, devoid of its social context? You’d miss half the jokes. Oh, he said, he just liked the bawdiness: it was so explicit, so liberating. Fun to act. He’d been Lord Foppington in The Relapse in the sixth form, which had been a hoot.

  The glibness was oddly undermining, as if someone more worldly had shown me up as an obsessive. And he was still at it, gaily saying he’d never been taken to task before.

  After that we moved on to the business of acting. It was easy to see why he was spending so much time with the University and College drama societies – even why he liked farce: he had a facility for mimicry and almost total recall of large chunks of what he was reading.

  ‘But how do you remember it all?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh that! That’s the easy bit. My father always says the brain’s elastic – the more you make it remember, the greater its capacity.’ Eddie finished what he was chopping and pushed the pile to the edge of the board. ‘He found that out doing medicine. Once you learnt the trick of memorising all that anatomy, remembering more just wasn’t an issue. So he learnt poetry too. He can still recite screeds of it.’

  ‘And the difficult part?’

  ‘Inhabiting the character. Definitely. It’s much harder getting inside a personality, suppressing your own and finding theirs. That’s why I like farce – the characters aren’t complex, so it’s easy to do.’

  As soon as he said it, it was obvious that the flamboyant Eddie might find invisibility a challenge. At least he’d admitted it – not what you’d expect. Perhaps not so insufferable after all.

  ‘What about directing?’ I asked.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Have you ever considered directing instead of acting?’

  But before he could answer, the others began to troop in. That was one of the frustrations of the Reading Party: somebody was always interrupting an interesting conversation. Still, even broken ones – like the tantalising snatches with Tyler – were better than nothing, and you had to remember you were in credit overall.

  Besides, the conviviality was wonderful, the interruptions almost worth it. By that stage, our fifth day together,
lunch had become a noisy affair. Loxton no longer dominated and even Jim was vocal. People were always getting up and down: they knew where things were, would disappear into the larder to retrieve the mustard or go to the fridge when the butter was getting low, leaning across the table as they came back to deposit what was missing, loudly pulling their chairs back into place, tapping a shoulder two places down, calling out if that didn’t work, pulling a face if anyone hushed them down. Even the two big Easter eggs were started without so much as a by your leave. It was like the gatherings we’d had in my last house in York, when we cooked brunch on Sundays for a rabble of friends, except that in Cornwall there was the exhilaration of new relationships, all jumbled in together – nothing was stale.

  The chocolate and the weather helped. That day it was glorious. The kitchen, which drained of colour when mist or cloud lowered over the promontory, was bright with the contrast of blue sky, green meadow and grey stone wall outside, and the glitter of red, blue and gold foil within. The door into the conservatory was open, so we could feel the warmth and smell the geraniums. Even the sea looked enticing, meeting the sky in a sharp line, as if two pieces of clear blue film had been laid alongside, one merely paler than the other. It demanded a visit.

  Martin and Barnaby were now standing by the wicker chairs, matt curves of crazy-paving chocolate in their hands, considering.

  ‘What’s the verdict?’ I asked, holding the tray of coffees, waiting for them to choose.

  ‘Oh, a definite yes. We have to go. Much more fun than playing up here.’ Martin returned a scrunch of green foil to the tray and turned to Barnaby. ‘You agree, don’t you, Barny?’

  ‘Yeah, the beach it is. And rounders.’

  Ah. So we wouldn’t have Tyler perfecting our technique at Frisbee.

  ‘Actually, I meant the flavours,’ I said. ‘Which do you prefer, easy-going Galaxy or Bourneville sophistication?’

  ‘Not bothered, so long as it’s chocolatey.’ As if to make his point, Martin polished off his last snap of shell and smacked his lips.

  ‘And going in? Are you still thinking of going in?’

  Barnaby nodded. ‘Of course. Why not?’

  Behind us, Loxton came up with his pipe, puffing. He was a milk-chocolate man here, I’d noticed – on holiday from the SCR fare. Tyler liked it dark.

  ‘Do I gather you have yet to change your minds?’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘And Sarah’s encouraging you?’

  ‘She hasn’t said no.’

  ‘I can’t pretend surprise.’ He paused and then seemed to change his mind. ‘Well, that would be another first. We’ve had games, but we’ve never had swimmers.’ A further puff of the pipe. ‘How many of you are being rash?’

  ‘Rash? Who said anything about rash?’ Martin puffed his chest and beat it with both hands. ‘We’re hardened. We’ve got the boat on the water before most people wake up – or at least we used to, until you all made us work so hard.’ He raised his arms, now expansive in his patch of sun. ‘Me. Barny. P’rhaps Jim.’

  ‘I was forgetting. Always admire a chap who rows. And a Blue, too! Or is that Barnaby?’

  Before either could answer, I stepped in. ‘Hang on a minute! The women row too – we’re just as hardy. It was the women, not the men, who were Head of the River last year – ask Gloria.’

  Loxton was punctilious. ‘I stand corrected. Sarah always picks me up when her sex is being maligned. Either way, men or women, you must take towels. And coats.’ He looked at the southerly horizon. ‘Yes, you must take coats too. No one’s to catch a chill on my watch.’

  Then, in his infuriating way, he turned to me just as Martin had suggested a master might turn to the house matron. ‘You’ll see that they have enough coats, won’t you?’

  The others were bound to be watching, Tyler among them. ‘I’m sure they can look after their kit without help from me,’ I said, pleased even as I realised how it had come out.

  ‘Good one!’ said Martin. ‘You can count on Sarah to give as good as she gets.’

  He was such an ally.

  I picked up a discarded Creme Egg, which threatened to ooze fake yolk on the sill in the wake of a sticky gloop of opaque egg white, and turned back to the kitchen, saying to nobody in particular. ‘All done? All ready?’

  It took us a while to get down to the shore. There was the walk across the fields, with their pretty wild flowers, to get to the soft undulations around the cliffs; then the trudge on the slopes until we reached the bulge above the main bay; then the clamber down the tiny path that trickled between the gorse bushes and boulders, negotiating protruding shards of slate and sudden lumps of stone and worrying about spraining our ankles. At the very end you were almost forced to do it on the run, with a leap and a crunch onto the flat of untouched beach.

  As it happened, our timing was perfect. The tide was out, the sea looking still in the distance but slopping gently to and fro against the boulders by the rock face, and swelling and ebbing near the centre of the bay. A great expanse of sand – more like a very fine shingle really; grey, uneven and elongated, being slate-based – lay between the water and the bowl of the cliff, at such a shallow gradient that it was kept in a state of glistening wetness several yards deep as the water threw itself up the beach and dragged back to the depths. Further back was a shorter, moon-shaped stretch where the sand was out of the water’s reach, soft and dry, and here we dumped our things and the wooden bat.

  Loxton must have played rounders there before: he took off with Barnaby to set out the bases with the towels, the posts proving hard to see, and paced the lozenge so it sat comfortably within the shape of the bay and the balls wouldn’t be batted into the sea – three of the bases on the dry area, the other on the edge of the damp portion. By the time they’d walked back, the rest of us had formed into two teams where we stood so, as it happened, Priyam was the only woman on my side while Loxton found himself with more women than men. Serve him right! In other respects we were evenly matched. My team was the taller, at least on the male side – Hugh outstripping them all, Rupert and then Tyler coming close behind, Eddie and Martin still well above me. Loxton, on the other hand, had Gloria, who was sporty; the other girls, all potentially ‘nimble’; and Barnaby and Jim, who would fight.

  It was a rowdy game from the start. The scale of the bay, the buffeting of the wind, the difficulty of running on such a surface, all encouraged yelling and ungainliness – and of course it was a release, too, after the hours of quiet and sitting still. Approaching the first base, the one nearest the water, you had to make a quick calculation, if need be leaping aside to miss the froth. If you passed that hurdle, it seemed impossible to get round the course without stumbling elsewhere: turning the second and third corners, the dry sand gave way and sent you scrambling for balance; even on the straight a stray step might sink in, leaving you lurching wildly. No wonder, at the end of the circuit, we were each triumphant: it was a feat to stay upright.

  So there was no surprise in the unleashing of wildness – it was a glorious feeling to have the wind tingling against our faces, a stickiness growing on our hair, the build-up of heat under our coats and then the shock when, the top layer being thrown off, the cold belted through. Who wouldn’t have let rip at such a moment? But we did it in different ways. Curiously, Priyam and Mei, both normally so polite, were amongst the most raucous – Priyam screaming support as our team careered round the mounds of towelling, mittened hands cupped around her mouth; Mei jumping up and down as her side reached the end of the circuit. Tyler hollered as loudly as the rest of them and batted well too; it was good to see him flushed, panting and grinning with pleasure when he thumped back into the sand beside me, sending out a mini spray of his own. Even Loxton did his bit of shouting, though you couldn’t say that he ‘ran’. It was Hugh who looked ill at ease, a matchstick man almost lost in the shimmering distance when he was part way round the course, arms and legs splaying at awkward angles when he returned to base – he mig
ht have been made of balsa wood.

  After the first innings Loxton produced two bottles of lemon barley from the knapsack where he kept his emergency supplies – he was infuriating, the way he treated us like children – and we stood in the shadow of the rock, a clutch of pink faces tilting back to the sky as we swigged, wiping the neck with his handkerchief but sniffing loudly when our noses ran. And then Martin was chasing Gloria, and Gloria was grabbing Rupert’s velvet jacket where it flared at the hip, trying to evade pursuit, while the rest of us – onlookers only – tried not to be pulled to the ground.

  Midway through the second innings it became obvious that Loxton’s side would win. Except that, whatever he claimed, it wasn’t his team that was doing well; it was his women. At that point tribal emotion broke out: Priyam and I were supporting our sisters, the men were in similar collusion and the cohesion of the two teams was rent from within. Gloria was the last to bat and she hit the ball way down the beach as I had tried to do, sending Eddie racing to retrieve it. While he swirled around, looking frantically about him, Gloria rushed round the course, floundering a bit at the second base and then regaining her stride. By the time he’d found the ball, she’d skirted the froth and was coasting back to the final post like an athlete confident of reaching the finishing line, arms raised, exultant.

  And then the unexpected happened. Instead of slowing down, Gloria picked up speed, turning into a wide arc behind the base. As she came back and levelled with the rest of us, running inside the strip where the ground was firm, she began to pull off her sweater – tugging until it was half over her head and she nearly lost her footing. When it cleared she tossed it amongst the deposits of seaweed and carried on, unbuttoning her shirt, fumbling and slowing further. Then she stopped, bent over and we could just make out the unlacing of boots beneath the wildness of her hair. She chucked them too up the beach, in the direction of some boulders, yanked off her trousers and threw them aside along with something too small to identify – presumably her socks. And as she did it she was yelling, ‘Come on, Martin. You said you would.’