by Angela Huth
Left, then, to themselves, they tried to be practical. As was natural to them, they took an academic approach to the problem. One Fellow brought in a Sandersons chart with a thousand choices of colour, each one illustrated by a tiny chip. This was solemnly passed round. Small random crosses were made by each Fellow against shades of yellow, cream, rust, blue, green, grey and brown. Reference numbers were solemnly taken down. It was agreed further research would be undertaken – what research, and by whom, was not specified. Not a single member of the Governing Body suggested their method of solving the problem was impractical and once more they left the meeting dizzied from studying such myriad specks of colour, their eyes tired and confused.
Some three months later a speck of ‘apricot’ was finally voted for, though not unanimously. A few of the younger, more revolutionary members, sick of the whole mind-numbing matter and hoping the Governing Body meetings might no longer be preoccupied by discussions of Sun Yellow versus Moon Blue, suggested inoffensive white would be a compromise no-one could quarrel with, and the matter would be settled. White! The Warden jumped to his feet, and roared his disapprobation. They had not, he snarled, spent so many hours’ valuable discussion about the colour of the Senior Common Room’s walls to come up with the pathetic suggestion of white, had they? He thought the idea insulting to their intelligence. The fire of his feelings rallied enthusiasm among the older, wearier members. And so Apricot Queen, ref.no. 12/4M won the day.
What had not been taken into account by the troubled Fellows is that a snippet of colour on a chart bears no relation to swathes of paint slapped on to walls. When the College painter had finished, they were surprised to find something unexpected, and nothing like the apricot they imagined they had chosen. What colour . . . exactly . . . had emerged? It was hard for any of them to say. The Latin tutor called it Sub Rosa. The gay Bursar saw it as Blush. Others swore it was Autumn Copper, Creamy Beige, Pink Sand, Magnolia, Chocolat au Lait (the French tutor) – Sandersons’ language had had its influence. Amazingly, though no agreement could be reached as to what it was, there was unanimous feeling that it was not offensive. It was safe, uncontroversial. It could stay. No-one could face further research and more voting.
Having settled, then, for the no-colour walls, the next thing on the agenda was curtains. By now, the academics’ long struggle with mundane matters had begun to pall. Tempers and patience were both wearing thin. There was a tetchy meeting when the Motion for Contrasting or Matching was thrashed out. Finally, the distinguished members of the Governing Body, en bloc, made an outing to a small curtain shop in Summertown. There, they found their ability to find the right book in a glance was of no help whatsoever when it came to choosing between hundreds of cottons, chintzes, damasks, velvets and easy-to-wash satins. So another safe decision was made by the three Fellows who had not escaped for a reviving drink in the nearest pub: rust corduroy.
This was made into thin little curtains, not quite to the ground (despite the size of the budget) and hung from modern pine poles quite out of keeping with the room’s grand proportions. They turned out, triumphantly, to cost hundreds of pounds less than the estimated budget, which made up for any visual disappointment.
There was but furniture and lighting left to choose. Exhausted by now, they agreed that one of the more artistic Fellows, who had had shares in an art gallery in the 1960s, and who knew where he could get black leather and steel sofas at a good price, could do what he liked. . . .
This story had been told to Martin by a Fellow of St Crispin’s, Timothy Lovat, their host tonight. Martin had relayed it in great detail to Ursula, knowing what enjoyment it would give her. Now, a glass of minor champagne in hand, evening sun agreeable through the windows, she looked round at the beautiful bones of the room and thought: what a waste.
Her attention then turned to the Fellows and their guests. The men were mostly distinguished-looking in their fine gowns of gathered black stuff – oblivious, probably, of the snow of dandruff that uniformly settled on their shoulders. Many of them seemed to suffer imperfections beyond their years – faulty eyes, hair dry as hay, mulberry cheeks and noses. Such things, Ursula supposed, were the price of the learned life, crouched indoors over books by day, gorging four-course dinners and quantities of wine most nights. But she had nothing against the dons. Their unworldliness, their innocence about insignificant afflictions such as scurf, she found rather endearing. Their minds you could not but admire, even if some of them were unable to convey with any infectious spirit the amazing thoughts that went on within them. Ursula had spent many a stimulating evening sitting between Metaphysics and Ancient Greek, Philosophy and Medieval History, Anglo-Saxon and Mathematics. She had discovered that once a Fellow diner had found out her husband’s subject, and which College he belonged to, he felt at ease. Then, it was not difficult happily to engage him in conversation about his own subject.
Martin was at her side, smiling. ‘The usual,’ he said.
‘The usual.’
The usual were the wives.
The merest glance at them gave understanding to the decision, in many Colleges, to invite them to dine as infrequently as could be considered courteous. They were not, at first sight, a spirited or attractive crowd – indeed, many gave the appearance that being an academic’s wife was no easy matter. Years of silent suffering from their husbands’ selfish and single-minded dispositions had caused them to languish, fade, give up. All most of them were left with was the automatic duties of wife and mother: children, children’s schools (a favourite competitive conversation among them) and charity work. The teachers and academics among them were less cowed, but inclined towards militancy and aggressiveness. Both groups were united in their sartorial indifference. With few exceptions, their clothes were either dull or ugly. (At one Christmas dinner, Ursula remembered, a St Crispin’s wife had chosen an aertex shirt, grey flannel skirt and walking shoes as suitable clothes to accompany candles, magnificent silver and rare wines in the sixteenth-century Hall.) The fashion among them was unkempt hair, no make-up, and hairy legs glowering through Hesh-coloured tights. It was as if to make any effort with appearance would be an admission of frivolity: attraction proclaimed lack of seriousness, effort was not worth it. Ursula found herself enraged by such attitudes. She often asked Martin why dons chose such women. He thought it was because most of them were so ensconced in their work that they did not notice – just as they did not notice stale rolls, or lack of salt, pepper, candles and flowers at High Tables. Total preoccupation with one subject, he said, can preclude aestheticism in others.
Ursula’s eyes journeyed through the women, colourless as female birds by their husbands’ sides, looking for an exception. There was just one. She stood by the window, talking to Professor Pruddle, Warden of St Crispin’s. Ursula quickly realised that the woman was not a university wife, but a guest, and in her innocence had made some effort.
The results were endearingly eccentric: a wintry dress of gold and black, wonderful earrings, Edwardian hair of tawny grey streaks. She was a handsome woman past her prime – solid, bulging, soft, with aristocratic nose, good cheekbones, tawny eyes to match her hair. As she smiled at the Professor, a childlike dimple appeared at one side of her mouth. Ursula wondered about her, a rare sort of creature not often found in Senior Common Rooms.
The man beside her, dinner jacket straining over a solid paunch, stared into some middle distance, not even pretending to listen to the conversation. Thick eyelashes gave him an incongruous, youthful look, belied by the plumpness of jowl, and a fine, but anxious, forehead. Ursula wondered about him, too.
‘Stop looking,’ Martin said, and took her elbow.
Guests began moving towards the door. In the crowd, Ursula found herself beside the man with the staring eyes. Their glance met, as did their simultaneous polite smiles. Then he stood back, indicating Ursula should go through the door first. She swooshed down the stairs on Martin’s arm, to the gushing sound of her silk skirt.
�
�Who’s Pruddle’s guest?’ she whispered.
‘No idea.’
‘Hope I’m sitting next to him. I like his face.’
‘No such luck. I’ve checked. You’ve got Timothy and PPE. I’ve got the gold.’
‘Ah well,’ said Ursula. But she did not mind because, unlike Rachel, she had no expectations.
One of the rewards of anticipation is the enchantment it lends to any scene. As Rachel followed Pruddle’s furfuraceous shoulders into the Hall, she felt as if she was entering a magical place, very different from the bleak Hall she remembered from her own undergraduate days. She glanced up at the husky arch of the high ceiling, the dark portraits of former Wardens united in their sombre reflections, the spears of late sun slanting from each window into the brown light. She listened to the chorus of squawks as the undergraduates rose from their seats, uninterested in the grand guests who gushed up to the High Table, and was back as one of them – nothing but grim young women, in those days: no wine on their tables. And now she stood, curiously excited, by Pruddle’s side, as he mumbled a Latin grace. As she sat down, Rachel’s gold skirt plumped out at the sides, leaping to join the grubby black folds of Pruddle’s gown.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, pushing it away as if it was a dog.
But Pruddle did not hear. He was dipping a huge spoon into a bowl of thin gruel, chasing after the few grains of pearl barley. Rachel picked up her own spoon. She looked at the woman opposite her. White hair cowered close to her head in a ripple of waves. The pale surfaces of her face were jarred by scarlet lipstick that ripped across her mouth. Municipal make-up, Rachel thought: the splash-of-colour school much admired in city parks. The woman’s knobbled eyes were on Rachel’s cleavage. Rachel smiled, returned her giant spoon to its place. She was unable to attempt the gruel.
In a moment, she thought, luxuriously, she would turn to the beautiful man on her left, whom she had noticed at once in the Common Room and prayed she might be placed beside him. But while he listened to a woman with rimless glasses and bloodless mouth on his left, and Pruddle continued to prod in abstracted silence at his soup, she looked more carefully at the High Table and observed how bleak it was, and felt the illusions of a few moments ago slipping away.
The dark stretches of oak were curiously unadorned: just four islands of salt and pepper, she counted, on the whole length of the vast table, within reach only of a privileged few. Two silver candelabras stood far apart as telegraph poles. No flowers. No side plates. No napkins. Nothing to deflect from the huddle of glasses at each place, awaiting their important wine.
Rachel picked at the plaster-hard sides of her cold bread roll, and marvelled at the fact that the great and wise men at the table apparently did not notice its imperfections. She leaned a little to her left to read the name on the card in front of the exquisite don. Dr Martin Knox, it said. He turned to her immediately.
‘Mrs T. Arkwright? Pruddle’s guest?’
Rachel nodded. In a flash she saw him standing at one end of a punt, guiding the boat into a tangle of willow, laughing at the cliché but enjoying it all the same.
‘Pruddle has quite a line in exotic guests,’ Martin said. ‘They come from everywhere but Oxford.’
Rachel blushed. Once again she patted at her brilliant leaping skirts. This time they pawed at Dr Knox’s thighs, and he noticed.
‘You’d never get the wives daring to wear such gold,’ he added, smiling. ‘They’re mice where clothes are concerned. You should hear my wife on the subject.’
My wife. The words ran off Rachel with as little effect as warm water. After all, she was not in search of infidelity. She wanted merely to be rewarded by some small response to her signals.
‘Which is your wife?’ she asked.
Martin nodded towards Ursula, at the far end of the table.
‘The one in blue.’
Rachel took in the grave face, the wild hair, the look of dutiful attention on her attractive face as the woman listened to the Fellow on her left, a crumpled man with mushroom-coloured skin.
‘I’d call that sea green,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s lovely.’
She might have guessed no man so handsome as Dr Knox would be without a wife. She took a sip of pale sherry. But his unavailability, even for lunch in a punt, somehow spurred her on. She could afford to be outrageous. Quite by chance, not really caring, she might even win him that way.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it, about colour?’ she said. ‘How we can never prove what anyone else’s colour is to us? I mean, your rust might be my brown. I can never understand why people always refer to an olive skin, can you? Olive is green. People don’t have olive skins. And yet it’s become an established cliché, hasn’t it? People don’t question it any more, they just think they know what each other means. And then there’s the curious thing of peach pink – nothing like a peach. And apricot – a terrible insult to anything but a tinned apricot, don’t you think? People go on using such descriptions because they’re too lazy, or too unimaginative, to be more precise. Though I suppose perhaps it isn’t possible to be absolutely precise, because colour’s such a subjective thing. . . .’ She could hear herself babbling, the words spewing out, in order to stop herself asking the unavailable doctor what she really wanted to know.
‘I dare say you’re right,’ said Martin gently. He did not give the impression he thought her outrageous, or mad – or irresistible. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever thought about the matter before. It’s the kind of thing my wife gets worked up about.’ He smiled at the thought. Rachel finished her sherry in one swoop.
The untouched soup was taken away – small frown above the white sleeve of the server, she noticed. It was replaced by a large and cold white plate. In its centre lay a fillet of opalescent fish, wrapped round itself like a bandage. It was scantly covered by a dollop of pudgy white sauce. This in turn was decorated with a single button of carrot whose edges had been serrated by a cutter, reminding Rachel of one of those plastic tools the children used for geometry. She drank her glass of white wine very fast, and wondered about the sous chef, whose possibly illustrious career began designing fancy bits of carrot in a College kitchen.
‘And another funny thing,’ she heard herself going on, the words rolling out like wobbly coins, ‘have you noticed how children use their eyes, moving them from side to side when they want to look at something, without moving their heads? Whereas grown-ups peer round with their whole head as if their eyes were static. Part of the whole stiffening-up process, I suppose.’
This time she was rewarded with a smile for herself rather than in response to the thought of his wife. Martin moved his head just far enough towards her for her to see his exaggeratedly swerving eyes. Rachel laughed.
‘Now, that is something I’ve observed, I admit. In fact, I find myself making a conscious effort to move my eyes, exercise them. I’m a great believer in exercising all the different bits so that they shan’t seize up.’
The possible double entendre in this remark caused goose pimples down Rachel’s arms.
‘Then we do have something in common,’ she whispered giddily, and drank a second glass of white wine.
‘Two things: we don’t like the fish.’
Martin had taken a single bite and pushed his plate away. Rachel had not bothered even to try it.
‘No.’
‘It’s not renowned, St Crispin’s, I’m afraid, for its food.’
‘In my day, Merton and Balliol were the four-star places.’
‘You were here as an undergraduate?’
‘Some years ago.’
She had no intention of slipping into that sort of mundane conversation. The disapproving arm took away her fish. It was replaced by a plate with something humped in the middle – from the shape it was impossible to tell if it was meat or game. The sight of its ruddy sauce forced Rachel to begin on her red wine – which she never normally drank – for courage. Silver-plated vegetable dishes were dumped at spaces down the length of the table. R
achel observed lumps of potatoes, leeks with all the life cooked out of them, afloat in water, and peas of livid green, all a little blurred at the edges. The reshuffling of courses had caused a break in communications with the good doctor. Rachel felt a surge of panic. Time was running out: Pruddle would be turning to her, any moment. She prodded at the hump of food, spoke without looking up.
‘Is the whole tricky business of marriage made more difficult by being a don?’ she asked.
She felt Martin’s curious eyes upon her. She could feel him weighing up the tone of her question, guessed he would try to ignore its seriousness and treat it lightly.
‘I don’t think I know what you mean,’ he said.
‘Such obsessive pursuing of your subject, such conscientiousness when it comes to lectures, seminars, tutorials – the pupils. It must mean a wife is so deserted. And then a lot of academics I know never seem to switch off when they do come home. It’s dash in, cup of tea, up to the word processor for the rest of the evening. Are you guilty?’
‘No,’ said Martin.
‘That’s rare,’ she said. ‘Your wife must be one of the lucky ones.’
She watched him glance towards Ursula with another swivel of his eyes.
‘It’s very difficult to get it completely right,’ he answered, apparently thinking about her observations quite hard. ‘You have to settle for a cocktail of guilt, compromise, sacrifice to some extent, fluctuating priorities, don’t you? Not perfect, but a balancing act, I suppose, that both parties must contribute to -’
‘- You’re talking in such abstracts,’ Rachel said, hearing the words emerge crushed, furred. ‘What do you mean, in practical terms?’
Her hand slurred on her knife as she tried to cut the meat, or whatever it was. Martin sighed, and she knew she had lost him. He was not really interested in the subject. Like most men, he did not like to talk about the finer points of marriage. There was no chance he was going to confide details. He had no need of her sympathy. Smug, complacent, irritatingly charming – she was wasting her time.