A flock of rooks flew up from the trees in front of them, swirling upward and blocking out the sun. The sky darkened and Julius shivered. Suddenly, he felt as if by coming here he had unleashed some kind of misfortune. Julius didn’t look for portents, but the black cloud of birds unsettled him.
Then Rebecca looked at him, and she saw the uncertainty on his face. She smiled, and just at that moment the cloud of birds dispersed and the sun came out again. She wrapped her arms around him.
“Thank you for bringing me here. No one’s ever done anything like that for me before.”
He felt a surge of relief. He wanted so very much to make her happy.
—
They arrived back in Oxford at midnight, sun-kissed and windswept. Early the next morning Julius crept out of bed without waking Rebecca and went off to work, his conscience unable to negotiate another day off. He hoped no one would notice that, rather than being pale and washed out from his illness, he was actually looking rather healthy as a result of his roof-down seaside sojourn. No one questioned him, though, because no one expected him to lie. Julius was nothing if not trustworthy.
When he got back at six o’clock, he found Rebecca had unpacked all her things and was sitting on the bed, surrounded by a pile of prospectuses.
“Did you book your ticket?” he asked. She was supposed to go to the travel agents, once she’d checked at the bank that the money had come through from her parents for a replacement.
She shook her head.
“I’m not going back,” she said. “I want to stay here. With you.”
Julius laughed. “You can’t.” She couldn’t possibly be serious.
She looked up at him from the middle of the bed, wide-eyed.
“You don’t feel the same as me? As if you’ve met the love of your life?”
“Well, yes, but . . .” It had been an incredible few days, he had to admit that. And he was smitten, if that was the right word. But Julius was sensible enough to realize you didn’t make momentous decisions off the back of a quick fling. He was dreading her going back, but he had sort of assumed that was it, that they would make promises to meet up during the holidays—“vacation”—but deep down he suspected those promises wouldn’t be kept, that once she was back in America, her memory of him would fade. It would be a classic holiday romance, a high-octane memory to reminisce over until something else came along.
Rebecca, it seemed, thought differently.
“But it makes perfect sense. I want to major in English literature. It’s my absolute love. So I want to do it in the best place in the world. Which is here in Oxford, right?” She held up the prospectuses.
“Well, yes. I suppose so. Or Cambridge.”
“I’m smart enough. I know I am. If I can get into Brown, I can get into Oxford.”
Julius laughed again. Not at her, but at her confidence. The girls he knew were never as brazen about their abilities. They were brought up to be modest and self-effacing. Rebecca wore her brilliance with pride.
She crossed her arms. “Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not. I just think you’re being a bit rash.” That was an understatement.
“I’m not getting on that plane.”
Julius gulped. She was serious. “What are your parents going to say?”
“How can they argue?”
“Easily, I’d have thought. Aren’t you supposed to be going to college?”
“Yes. But you know what? It never felt right. I was just going because that’s what I was expected to do. But this feels right. I can feel it here.”
She pressed a fist to her heart. Julius looked at her warily, not sure if she was serious. He knew plenty of fanciful girls, but they usually had a limit to their capriciousness. He felt anxious: clever, willful, and rich were a deadly combination, and he was pretty sure Rebecca was all of those. He’d got enough insight into her life to know it was very privileged.
Which was why she felt entitled to the ultimate privilege.
“It’s what I deserve.” She scrambled off the bed. “I’m going to get a job. Right here. In Oxford. And I’m going to take the entrance exam and get a place to study here next year.”
She looked a little crazed. He wasn’t sure how to handle her. The usual arguments weren’t going to work. He decided to pretend he thought she was joking.
“It’s all the fresh air,” said Julius. “It does that to you.”
“You think I’m kidding, right?”
Julius scratched his head. “I’m not sure you’ve thought it through.”
“Sure I have. I mean, what’s the problem? Why not? Seriously, tell me why not. It’s not like I’m running off with the lead singer of a rock band. I want to go to the best university in the world. Surely that’s a good thing?”
She was one of those infuriating people who made the craziest of ideas seem utterly plausible.
“Look, why don’t you book your ticket, fly home, and talk to your parents. If they agree, you can come back.”
“Am I freaking you out?”
“Well, yes, actually. A bit.”
She came over and put her arms around his neck. He breathed her in, his heart pounding. He felt weightless from lack of sleep and too much of her. He felt electrified, but he also felt responsible, because he knew his reaction would dictate what happened next: their future. He should take control, slow things down a bit.
“This is the most amazing thing that’s ever happened. You and me. Don’t you feel that?” she demanded.
“Well, yes. It actually is. Amazing. I am . . . amazed.” Julius could see she was carried away. Would there come a moment when she stopped to think and realized she was fantasizing? That her vision was riddled with complications? “But I still think you should talk to your parents.”
As he said it, he thought how boring he sounded. But he wasn’t going to be responsible for her screwing her life up or incurring the wrath of her family.
“I’m going to. Right now.” It didn’t seem to occur to her they might not think it a good idea. “I think they’ll be really excited. My dad loves England—he did an exchange when he was just a bit older than me and spent six months here. It’s why he sent me over for the summer. Where’s the nearest phone?”
“There’s a pay phone downstairs in the hall,” said Julius. “But you’ll have to reverse the charges . . .”
She was out of the door. He imagined her parents in their perfect New England kitchen being shocked to discover that they weren’t going to be driving to the airport later that week to collect her after all. He wondered if they were used to flights of fancy from Rebecca. Whether she would come upstairs in a few minutes, crushed and dissuaded.
He listened to her voice floating up the staircase.
“Oxford is me, Daddy. As soon as I got here I knew. This is where I want to be. This is where I want to study. It’s in my bones and my blood and my heart and my soul . . .” Julius raised an eyebrow. She was very convincing. “You know how wonderful it is. You told me yourself. You’ll just have to come back here and see for yourself. If you don’t agree with me, I’ll come home with you. That’s the deal, Daddy.”
Wow. She was a fierce negotiator, all right.
She came back up the stairs and jumped into the middle of his bed.
“Daddy’s coming over. He thinks it’s a fabulous idea, but he wants to see everything for himself.”
Julius looked round his room. “He’s not going to be too impressed with this.”
Julius loved his bedroom, but it wasn’t the sort of room that would gladden a father’s heart. He’d painted the walls inky dark purple. They were smothered in postcards he’d collected over the years, of his heroes and heroines, from Hemingway to Marilyn Monroe. There was a record player in the corner—his biggest investment—and a stack of records four feet long. A mattress on the
floor served as both a sofa and a bed. His clothes were hung on a makeshift rail: charity-shop suits and a collection of hats. He was quite the dandy. In another corner were a kettle and a gas ring. Despite his best intentions there were more empty takeaway cartons in the bin than he could count. There were so many more interesting things to do than try to conjure up something nutritious in the health hazard that was the kitchen downstairs. Julius liked food, and cooking, but he didn’t want tetanus.
“It’s fine. I don’t have to show him this. I’ll tell him I’m staying in some all-girls’ hostel and I’m looking for someplace permanent. And we need to make sure you stay out of the way.”
“Oh.” Julius was a little stung.
She put her arms around him.
“I didn’t mean that like it sounded. If my dad thinks there’s a guy involved, he’ll drag me back home by the scruff of my neck. Give it a few weeks. Then I can casually mention you. Maybe you could come to New England for Christmas!”
Julius nodded, not a little daunted by the plan. It was all going a bit too fast for him. They had, after all, only just met, and she had turned her whole life upside down on the basis of a few nights together. Yet he had to agree: the attraction between them was undeniable. He was enchanted by her; she was besotted with him. It was physical and mental and spiritual. All-consuming and intoxicating. He was secretly delighted by her nerve. He was fairly sure he wouldn’t have the same mettle. He, after all, had nothing to lose by going along with her plan.
—
By the time Rebecca’s father arrived the following Thursday and checked into the Randolph, Rebecca had persuaded Julius’s manager to give her a part-time job in the shop. Luckily for Julius, no one put together her arrival and his absence earlier in the week. On her first day of work there, she sorted through all the miscellaneous boxes of old books in the stockroom and either returned them or put them out on the shelves, a job no one ever wanted to do.
And she worked her way through the colleges and grilled several of the admissions tutors as to the likelihood of her getting a place to study. She came back with a sheaf of past papers. She had less than two months to get up to speed for the entrance exam.
Julius was impressed. When this girl wanted something, she went all out to get it.
“I knew my life was going to change as soon as I met you,” she told him. “This is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me. I can’t believe I could be packing to go to the most boring college on the planet right now.”
When Julius answered the door to her after her visit to her father, he didn’t recognize her. She was dressed in a pair of gray trousers and a white blouse, her hair parted in the middle and tied back in a neat ponytail. She burst out laughing when she saw his puzzled face.
She pulled her hair out of its band and started to undo her shirt as she pushed her way past him and headed up the stairs.
“He thinks I’m a genius,” she told Julius, her eyes flashing, her hair snaking onto her neck. “We walked around all his old haunts and he’s totally fallen back in love with Oxford. And it will be such a status symbol—none of his friends will have a daughter at college in England. He’s paying my rent, and my fees if I get in. I have to go home for Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter. That’s the deal. It’s a small price to pay.”
The two of them fell back onto the rumpled sheets, laughing in delight, at each other and the thrill of her new adventure. Julius couldn’t resist Rebecca’s enthusiasm or her guile or her body. There was a tiny little voice that warned him to be careful, but as he raked his fingers through her red hair to mess it up again, and ran his mouth over her small, round breasts, it was easy to ignore it.
He was older and wiser than she. He thought he could manage her, although Julius recognized this was something different, attraction on another scale to anything he had experienced before. Was it infatuation, he wondered, or would it become true love? And if so, which kind? Love, he knew from books, was not always a force for good, but he would do his best to make his so.
Yet he had a feeling Rebecca would not be able to control her feelings in the same way he could. She was far more passionate and impetuous. In just a short time, he could see she was a little bit of a fly-by-night, and the last thing you did with fly-by-nights was try to pin them down. He would give her his heart, and his head.
In the meantime, he showed her more of her new world. It was wonderful, rediscovering Oxford through someone else’s eyes. He’d been there over four years now, and he’d stopped seeing the beauty and the wonder in quite the same way. He’d begun to assume everyone lived in a cozy bubble of cobbles and cloisters and grassy greens and bicycles. But he was fiercely proud of it, and showing Rebecca the landmarks made him realize why he had been dragging his feet, how he hadn’t wanted to make a decision about his future in case it involved leaving Oxford, and now he didn’t have to.
He showed her his room in his old college, and she gasped at its antiquity and its rudimentary facilities and the fact it was straight out of Brideshead Revisited.
“Where is your teddy bear?” she demanded, laughing. She’d seen the TV series on PBS.
“I promise you: I couldn’t be less like Sebastian Flyte. There’s no stately home to take you back to.”
“Oh,” she said, feigning disappointment. “And there I was, imagining myself as the lady of the manor.”
“We’ll get our own little manor,” he said, pulling her to him. “It might not be Brideshead, but it will be ours.”
He took her to a concert he was playing in. He played the cello, and the orchestra was decidedly third rate, because Oxford was stuffed with brilliant musicians and players and he wasn’t up to one of the more elite outfits, but she thought he was incredible, sitting in the front pew of the church and not taking her eyes off him once during Fauré’s Requiem.
“Is there anything you can’t do?” she asked. “I’ve never met anyone who can do so many things.”
“Scrape out a tune on the cello and make a chicken casserole?” He laughed, self-deprecating to the end. She was even impressed with his cooking skills, which were self-taught and based on years of trial and error brought about by his mother’s utter disinterest in anything on a plate.
They worked out that they could stay together in Oxford for the next four years, while she studied. Julius was going to look for work that paid a little better than the bookshop, so they could find a house of their own to rent.
“You’re not to worry too much,” said Rebecca. “I only have to wire home for more cash if we get short.”
Julius looked at her, appalled. “We will do no such thing.”
He didn’t believe in sponging off your parents. It was one of the first things he taught her, the idea of standing on your own two feet. And she understood the principle, even if he knew she was still being subsidized. He couldn’t expect her to break the habits of a lifetime straightaway.
Autumn set in, and they took long walks by the river and ate sausages and mash in the pub. They wandered through all the curious exhibits in the Pitt Rivers and the natural history museum. She stared in awe at the painting of the dodo.
“Seriously? That’s the dodo from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?”
“That’s the rumor.” Julius smiled. Rebecca couldn’t get her breath.
They went to more concerts. Her musical knowledge was scanty, but Julius introduced her to string quartets and garage bands, choral works that made tears course down her cheeks, and lazy Sunday afternoon jazz.
“You make me feel,” she said. “I’ve never had so many feelings before.”
And Julius coached her for her exam, pushing her to read texts and memorize quotes and write essay after essay. Not that she needed pushing. She was more motivated than any student he’d ever met, and her memory was seemingly infallible. She could quote reams after just one reading.
“I’m a freak,” she told him. “I could recite the whole of What Katy Did by the time I was seven.”
“You are a freak,” he teased her, but in fact he was more than a little daunted by her brainpower. He thought she could probably take over the world. Yet she wasn’t wrapped up in scholarship. She wanted as much fun as the next student. He nursed her through her first hangover, let her try her first joint, gave her a driving lesson in the MG around a disused airfield—she had her American license, but gears were a mystery to her, and he was secretly pleased when it took her a little while to understand clutch control.
“So you’re not perfect,” he teased, and she was furious with him.
She took the entrance exam and was confident she’d passed. (Yet again Julius was entranced by her confidence and explained to her that everyone in England always insisted they had failed every exam they sat.) She told her parents she’d moved out of her digs and into a shared house, without going into too much detail about whom she was sharing it with.
“They trust me,” she told Julius.
“That’s their first mistake,” he replied, and she pretended to be outraged.
Socially, they were a king and queen. Everyone wanted their company, at the most Rabelaisian of parties. They were young, and they ran on very little sleep and very little money. Wine and music were all that mattered, and good conversation, and books. They talked about books day and night. They were allowed to take books from the bookshop and return them once read, as long as they didn’t damage them. They each read a book a day, sometimes two. It was bliss. She fell upon Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch and, inspired by their trip, devoured every other Daphne du Maurier she could lay her hands on. On her recommendation he discovered John Updike and Philip Roth and Norman Mailer. He wrote her his ultimate list of cult classics; she made him read the copy of Middlemarch she had bought on his recommendation when he admitted he hadn’t.
More than once, it occurred to Julius to ask Rebecca to marry him, but something stopped him. He wanted them to be financially secure, and to be able to afford a house of their own. Although he fantasized about a discreet wedding in the registry office followed by a wild party to celebrate on the banks of the Cherwell, marriage was definitely for grown-ups, and they weren’t grown up yet. Instead, he began to put away some of his wages into a savings account to save for a deposit, and if it meant just one bottle of red wine instead of two to go with the spaghetti on a Friday night, she didn’t notice.
How to Find Love in a Bookshop Page 4