‘So,’ she said, after the first savouring drink, ‘Christina. Quiz time. Who was the Babylonian general?’
Christina sipped at the glass. Then she put it down. She hesitated, toying as she did so with one of the beige feline’s high-class foil tubs of catfood that sat upon the workboard. It looked like pâté de foie gras.
‘I have no idea,’ she said at last. ‘Sorry. Anything to do with Delilah?’
‘Wrong!’ Judith cried gleefully. ‘So, you’re obviously not here as a student of English literature?’
‘Well, as a matter of fact –’ Christina began.
‘Nor theology either,’ Judith said. ‘I suppose that goes without saying. Nor ancient history, of course. Nor history of art. How is it that your mind is so delightfully underfurnished?’
‘Well,’ Christina said, rising to the provocation. ‘There’s a lot more to reading than the Bible. Anyway, the Old Testament is a Protestant’s book.’
‘Wrong again,’ Judith said, sounding something like the Red Queen. ‘Major hijack there. The Old Testament is a Jewish book, from Genesis right through to Zachariah. I think, by the way, that you will find it on your syllabus and that you ought to have read it in advance of coming up.’
‘Are you an English fellow?’ Christina asked, suddenly suspicious. ‘Or are you trying to wind me up?’ Judith did not seem to her at all like the other undergraduates.
‘I’m a doctor,’ Judith said. ‘Medical doctor. I’ve got myself a little niche here in neonatal research.’ Then she said, ‘My husband is an English fellow. I pick up these little snippets vicariously.’
‘Well, if he’s a fellow, why isn’t he here, mingling with his new students?’ Christina said. She felt her impertinence justified in view of Judith’s confrontational style.
‘ “Mingling”?’ Judith said. ‘Ah, well. He doesn’t “mingle”. And he certainly doesn’t attend functions.’
‘Why doesn’t he?’ Christina said.
By way of reply, Judith topped up Christina’s glass. ‘Drink,’ she said. ‘It’s free. Free to you, that is. Not to me.’
It was embarrassing to Christina thereafter that she could not be sure how she had behaved. It seemed to her quite unthinkable that Judith had set out to get her drunk. Judith, so striking, so beautiful, so dynamic, had singled her out, had chosen her from among the entire undergraduate assembly, and she, Christina, had very probably, ungratefully, blown it.
The whisky on her empty stomach had certainly gone to her head but, even though she felt hazy, Judith’s company was a sort of compliment and a challenge which she was reluctant to relinquish. For want of a chair in the secretary’s kitchen, Christina sat cross-legged on the floor with her back up against the fridge, so that the shapely columns of Judith’s long legs in their sheer black tights rose before her. Her brain, lumbering towards connections, connected in consequence with legs; with the secretary’s legs in white tights.
‘So why does our hostess dress like Bonnie Prince Charlie?’ she said.
‘ “She”?’ Judith said. ‘The cat’s mother? Her name is Fiona Campbell.’
‘Why is she wearing that kilt?’ Christina said.
‘Why not?’ Judith said. ‘She’s a Scot.’
Something was stirring clumsily in Christina’s memory. ‘The Campbells,’ she said, ‘they were all traitors, you know. I expect she’s a traitor.’
‘What exactly are we talking about here?’ Judith said. ‘If it isn’t too much to ask.’
‘We are talking,’ Christina said, ‘about the Battle of Glencoe. I did it in history.’ She paused, trying to get her mind back on the rails, just as she heard Judith’s guffaw.
‘Glencoe?’ Judith said. ‘Glencoe? Could you be drunk already by any chance? And what’s your usual tipple, then, little Chrissie? Dr Pepper’s Sarsaparilla?’
‘I know a song about the Campbells,’ Christina said. ‘But I always used to think it was about camels.’ She paused. Then she sang the first two lines and followed these with the refrain:
The Camels are coming. Aho! Aho!
The Camels are coming. Aho! Aho!
The Camels are coming to bonnie Lochalin,
The Camels are coming. Aho! Aho!
Her diction had become so slurred, that Judith appeared to have misheard her.
‘Loch Levin?’ she said. ‘But that’s my name. Judith Levin. Just fancy all those camels coming to liaise at my loch.’
Christina began carefully to rearrange her mind. It felt like a heap of bent forks. The effort of doing so felt tangentially like arranging old forks into one of those baize-lined boxes with an interior labyrinth of purpose-built grooves. She dwelt for a moment upon Granny P’s cutlery box which had had little ivory labels telling you which fork and spoon went into which groove. Dessert Forks. Dessert Spoons.
Granny P had told her that ‘Mummy’, as a small child, had thought the spoons were for using in the desert. That was because in England dessert was called pudding. And in Alice in Wonderland, the pudding had had little legs and shoes, and Alice was not permitted to eat the pudding, because it had already been introduced to her. There was a picture of the pudding making a bow. Rotund like fine Mr Five; like the fat Jesuit; like the secretary’s croaky beige raven-cat. ‘Alice, pudding. Pudding, Alice.’ ‘Christina does not deserve her dessert.’
Camels lived in the desert, she reflected, but how was it that everything had suddenly to do with camels? She had once gone with her father and her sister to the zoo on one of those afternoons – always far too many of them – in the aftermath of her school report card. The camels had been out walking with their minder as the girls watched. They had ambled by, slowly, slowly, looking disdainfully at Pam and Christina, eyes popping from their silly little tortoise heads.
And, as they walked, they had kept on dropping their turds; huge, steaming turds. There were so many of these and so big, that the camels had had to have a special boy whose job it was to walk behind and shovel the droppings into a cart. It had given the girls a fit of the giggles.
‘I guess that’ll be the job for you, Chrissie,’ her father had said. He had been lecturing her, just previously, on ‘Achievement’ and ‘Application’. ‘That’s if you should ever get tired of washing the floors in McDonald’s.’ Christina could remember that she had stuck her fingers in her ears, but it was a fallacy that this expedient ever blocked out what people said.
‘Dung Person,’ her father had said. Then he had indulged himself in a spot of alliteration. ‘Dung Person to the Dromedaries,’ he had said. ‘How about it, Chrissie?’
‘Anyway,’ Christina said out loud from her position on Fiona Campbell’s floor, ‘they were camels. Who says they were dromedaries?’
‘Chrissie?’ Judith said. She was kneeling beside her. ‘Chrissie, can I get you some black coffee?’
Christina yawned. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘you keep on calling me Chrissie. Do you know that? Why do you keep on calling me Chrissie?’
‘Is she all right?’ somebody said, and the room was suddenly full of blurred legs. Even the secretary’s legs were there, in their unbecoming white tights.
‘If you’re a beggar-man in Goa,’ Christina said, ‘then you most probably haven’t even got any legs.’ She uttered a heavy sigh which she directed towards the assorted knees. ‘There isn’t any God as a matter of fact,’ she said. ‘That’s all a lot of mumbo-jumbo.’
‘Chrissie,’ Judith said again, ‘get up. Don’t do this to me.’
‘There were these people that used to call me Chrissie,’ she said. ‘But that was quite a long time ago. Before I ran away.’ She smiled sleepily at all the knees. ‘I ran away in a taxi,’ she said. ‘And then I refused to go back.’
‘Who is she?’ said one of the pairs of legs.
‘I’m Christina,’ she said. ‘I was named after one of the Great Redeemers of Israel. First you draw three circles and then you have to colour them in. Then it’s called the Trinity.’
‘Chrissie,�
�� Judith said. ‘Hey, sweetie. This is getting embarrassing.’
‘But they have to intersect,’ Christina said. ‘The circles. They have to intersect. And the bit in the middle – the gold bit – that’s really important.’ Then she slid gently sideways and fell asleep on Fiona Campbell’s floor.
Christina had got into Cambridge. Cambridge University – as Dulcie wisecracked – not the Cambridge branch of Spud-U-Like. She had got there, not from Roland’s boarding school, but from Dulcie’s inner city comprehensive. Christina liked to think that she had got there on her own – but with a lot of help from Dulcie.
Initially, after walking out on her family and abandoning her place at Roland’s school, Christina had succeeded in getting her parents to accept that she would live and go to school with Dulcie. She had done this using Mrs Jackson and Father Zak as intermediaries, and her parents had eventually agreed to the idea as an alternative to having Christina abandon school altogether.
In the event, it had not been difficult for her to make herself eligible for a place in an English state school, since, for the two-year period of the girls’ sojourn in Roland’s boarding establishment, she and Pam had been registered as ‘resident’ at her grandmother’s house. This had been an expedient piece of dishonesty to which her father had subscribed in order to allow for the possibility that the girls – who might wish, at some point, to study at British universities – would then be eligible for Local Authority grants.
Then there had been that extraordinary willingness of Dulcie’s prodigious mother – a single parent who laboured most nights in the geriatric ward. Dear Mrs Jackson, who had so hospitably accommodated her for the duration of her A-Levels. The whole thing had been quite a lesson in the school of life. It had been the best thing in the world.
Dulcie’s house grew plastic dustbin bags and dog turds in the front garden. Since it was en route to the White Hart Lane football ground, it sometimes also grew crushed lager cans and styrofoam burger boxes. The dogs were two in number and their job was to keep intruders at bay. They approximated to German Shepherds and were kept permanently tethered to a large, plyboard kennel. Once a day, Dulcie’s brother Wayne laid out two battered enamel pie dishes in which the dogs rooted greedily until their muzzles had worked the dishes beyond the locus of their tethers.
Inside, the house was immaculately clean. It was ruled on sound matriarchal principles by Dulcie’s mother and, in her absence, by Dulcie who showed every sign of donning the mantle triumphantly.
‘Me mum reckons she don’t really mind,’ Dulcie had said one day – once the protracted negotiations had seemed finally concluded. ‘You can doss in my room wiv me. It don’t matter to her.’
‘Fuckin lezzies,’ said Dulcie’s brother, who wore his hair cut square and upright, like a box of sprouted mustard cress under a carmine red designer baseball cap.
‘Knock it off, derk,’ Dulcie said. ‘Go give your fuckin brains a blow job.’
School was a breezeblock and aluminium structure, built over a sort of minefield that Dulcie helped her negotiate. But being in the Sixth Form had helped quite a bit, so long as one visited the loo only in packs and avoided the smokers’ dugouts. It was not half so much like Lord of the Flies. It was more like adult education classes undertaken in a discontinued warehouse visited by swirls of urban litter. The teachers and her classmates were all fairly pleasant, especially given that Dulcie’s former henchman, Tracey, had by then left.
In the beginning, Christina’s life had been dominated by the tremulous expectation that Jago would make contact. She had written to him, almost daily at first, but Jago had never replied. This had been extremely difficult for Christina, especially as it had not been possible for her to cry herself to sleep at night – not in a shared bedroom containing a single two-foot-six divan and a limited area of floorspace.
Yet somehow, somewhere around Easter – somewhere between her mastery of Standard Deviation and her assignment on the Albigensian Crusade – Jago had suddenly ceased to impinge in quite the same raw and piercing way. While his silence and his betrayal and his absence still caused heartache, the ache was more like scar tissue; less like an open wound.
She had agreed to submit, for her parents and her sister, the briefest two-monthly bulletins pertaining to her state of health and welfare – but only on condition that they made no attempt to write to her, to telephone her, or to pay her any visits. She also declined money from them. Her food, clothes and incidental expenses, she paid for herself, out of her earnings from part-time jobs.
Dulcie was a miracle. She offered faith in the human species. In a post-literate world, where the TV screen came four foot square and existed, for her brother Wayne, as a daily sixteen-hour opiate, Dulcie read books. She had been turned on to books in the junior school by a young Australian supply teacher who had admired the enormous ribbon bows in her hair and had taken her class to the local library, where the librarian had issued the children with readers’ tickets.
Very soon Dulcie’s greatest source of annoyance was that the librarian restricted her to three books at a borrowing and would not allow her to change the books more than once a day. Occasionally there had been those dreadful days when, having walked the lengthy distance between the library and the house, she found that she had forgotten herself and had already finished all three of her books before she had got them home. As she grew older, she read voraciously and widely, having no snobberies, no preconceived hierarchies, nor any notion that the books she read were, somewhere, received with accolades or brickbats by literary critics.
Until she had met Christina, it had not occurred to Dulcie that books were a pleasure one could share. Being a bright and popular girl with a great well-spring of joie de vivre, she had always had so much else to share without needing that as well. But, having discovered Christina as a kindred spirit in this area, she brought to bear on the shared, literary experience, a brilliant, satirical edge. Revelling, as they did, in each other’s company, the girls together tapped a nerve; mined a seam. They moved together through classroom, corridor and playground, quoting, laughing, improvising and wisecracking. They enacted spontaneous comic sketches in a hundred different voices.
Sometimes – especially when they were juggling – they communicated entirely in literary quotations. Dulcie had at last taught Christina how to juggle and they had devised a system of juggling in tandem. It had something of the quality of playground skipping routines that younger girls perform to popular nonsense rhymes. The trick was to juggle in sync with the rhythms of one’s favourite quotations, which were, in themselves, being used as code and shorthand for sparky social comment.
Dulcie had some unexpected literary favourites. Beatrix Potter had always offered a world of unfamiliar, ironic gentility and also, occasionally – as with the starvation coma of the Tailor of Gloucester, or the bankruptcy and dispossession of Ginger and Pickles – one of harsh, capitalist realism. And her ‘Alack, I am worn to a ravelling’ was a quotation as much in use as James Joyce’s Mother Grogan. So, also, was ‘Indeed, indeed, you will stick fast, Mr Jackson,’ which became a routine put-down for her brother, as he grew into the sofa, in front of the television screen.
T. S. Eliot was another favourite, whose exquisitely turned, Edwardian snobberies were lent an unintended edge by the force of Dulcie’s accent. She was addicted to Eliot’s ‘young man carbuncular’ who was pressed into service, once again, for the purpose of undermining her brother. Social climbing, or any hint of pretension, in a schoolteacher or a politician, would instantly have the victim categorized as ‘one of the low on whom assurance sits as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire’.
Dulcie had a particular soft spot for sloppy plotting and could bring the house down in class over Shakespeare’s nonchalant inconsistencies. She adored the ‘second son’ of old Sir Rowland de Boys – and for no other reason than that Shakespeare had catapulted him into the cast at three minutes to closing time.
Sir Andrew Aguecheek and th
e Lure of Logic Lane
And then, one day, a Cambridge don had come to address the Lower Sixth. A talent scout, he, in bifocals and open-toe sandals.
The college, of which the don was a distinguished fellow, had been anxious to reform itself. It had come to be troubled by the nature of its undergraduate intake which was predominantly male and white, and privately educated in prestigious boarding schools with long traditions of academic excellence.
In its attempt to cast the net more widely, the college had embarked upon a campaign of talent-spotting by setting up liaisons with the heads of urban state secondary schools and sending out some of its fellows as ambassadors and missionaries.
In the case of Dulcie and Christina’s school, the college had possibly boobed in the nature of the ambassador it had, so defencelessly, sent forth. The man had watery, pale blue eyes and white, floor-mop hair. He had a squeaky, high-pitched, class-bound voice, and his complexion was pale as unfired China clay. He was beanpole-thin and he wore his sandals with grey wool socks. Furthermore, he had evidently bicycled to the railway station, because he had forgotten to take off his cycle clips.
‘What a Charley,’ Dulcie said. ‘Fuckinell, Chris.’ It amazed her to the point of incredulity that the Cambridge don wore a plain gold ring as evidence of the married state.
The headmistress, none the less, had had no hesitation in recommending to him four of her Sixth Form pupils. All of them, on this occasion, happened to be girls. It was apparent to her that all four were in possession of intellectual gifts that set them well above their peers. They were all of them poised, confident and articulate girls and all of them had performed consistently well.
Christina Angeletti was among them. The Head had been delighted with Christina, a newcomer to the school; a sudden and unexpected arrival, but for all that, Christina had settled extremely well and had proved to be a valuable addition. She was a strong, bright, independent girl, and it did not concern the Head in any way that she was hardly the product of the humbler sort of background that the more egalitarian collegiate members had had in mind. With the notable exception of Dulcie Jackson, neither were any of the others. They were splendid girls, the lot of them, and that was the end of the matter.
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