A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy

by Charlotte Greig

  “Well, that's the way it is, Suse. It always gets boring after a while, and you have to start looking around. But there's no need to burn your boats. Stick with Jason, he's got a lot going for him. And keep Rob on the side, that's my advice.”

  I waited for her to start talking about her own romantic complications with her boyfriend and the married tutor, but she didn't. Instead she finished her tea, set the cup down on the table, and asked, “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Not sure. Jason wants me to go up to London for the weekend, but I don't really fancy it. His bitchy sister is going to be there.”

  “Well, why don't you come out with us instead?”

  “Who's us?” I asked.

  “Me and Fiona.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Down to the Concorde. Girls' night out. D'you fancy coming along?”

  “What's the Concorde?” I asked, feeling a bit of a fool for not knowing.

  “It's a disco in town, just by the Dolphinarium on the seafront. It's a gas.”

  Cassie had surprised me again. I'd never come across any students before who went out dancing in discos. Most people I knew stayed in at night and sat cross-legged on the floor, smoking joints and drinking cups of tea and listening to King Crimson records. The idea of a girls' night out was weird as well.

  “Well, I don't know …”

  “Oh, come on, it's just a bit of a laugh.”

  I didn't have anything planned that night, and it did sound like a bit of a laugh. I needed a break from worrying about Jason, Rob, and the whole ridiculous situation. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like going out with Cassie and Fiona that night.

  “OK,” I said. “Where shall I meet you then?”

  “We'll be there about nine or so.” She put on a serious academic voice. “Time to get down and shake your funky tailfeather, Susannah.” She laughed and leaned over to squeeze my arm. “See you there, then. I've got to split now, I'm late for my lecture.”

  Then she got up and left, waving briefly at Lucy Valentine, who looked up and waved back as she went past the counter.

  chapter 8

  I SAT IN THE CRYPT FOR A WHILE on my own, wondering what to do. I was due to meet Rob in a couple of hours, but I still hadn't decided what I was going to tell him.

  I knew I really ought to say it was all off, that I had a boyfriend, that our night together had just been a one-night stand. But I didn't want to. I knew I couldn't leave Jason—not yet, anyway—but I wanted to see where things led with Rob. Perhaps Cassie had been right: perhaps it was OK to string them both along until I made up my mind. It didn't seem altogether fair to keep lying to Jason, but I couldn't see what else I could do in the circumstances. It was his fault really—he was so straight and possessive, he'd never understood the way things were at Sussex. He'd never been able to see that you had to make your own rules here. It wasn't worth trying to explain it to him.

  I watched Lucy Valentine for a while scraping plates of refried beans into the bin and then I walked up to the library to drop in some books. They were all on short loan, with a yellow band stuck round the cover, but I'd had them for weeks. When I handed them in, the librarian clicked her tongue and fined me 75p, so I had to fill in a form to say I'd been unable to return them before due to serious illness. After that I got some more books out, went down to the basement, got a coffee from the vending machine, lit a cigarette along with everyone else in there, and sat reading in the thick smoke.

  I only had a day left on Human, All Too Human so I decided to finish it off and hand it back on the way out before I got any more fines. I flicked through it, looking at some of the passages I'd marked. There were a few I still didn't really understand but liked the sound of, so I copied them out on a sheet of paper. Then I folded the paper, put it in my bag, and went upstairs to give the book in at the counter.

  When it was time to meet Rob, I walked over to the Falmer Bar. I arrived ten minutes late, just to make sure he was there first. Immediately I came in, I saw him, over at a table by the window. Sitting opposite him, her back towards me, was the dark-haired girl I'd seen at the John Martyn gig. She was leaning towards him, her hand on his arm, talking to him animatedly. Something in the way she touched him told me they were lovers, or had been, or were going to be, and a pang of jealousy ran through me, as it had done that morning when I'd seen her coming up the street and letting herself into Rob's house. I thought of turning round and walking straight out of the bar, or going up to the vending machine and getting some cigarettes and pretending I hadn't seen them, but as I stood there, Rob caught my eye. Before I could turn away, he waved at me, so I had to go over and say hello.

  When I got to the table, I didn't sit down. Rob was looking flustered.

  “Hi …” he said. “Hi. I … umm …”

  The girl turned round to look at me.

  “Beth, this is … Susannah.”

  There was a silence.

  “Susannah, this is Beth.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  Beth didn't reply. She slowly looked me up and down, from my feet to my head, nodded coldly, and turned back round to talk to Rob, touching his arm once more.

  I felt as though I'd been punched in the stomach. Rob turned bright red and looked down at the floor as Beth chatted on to him, ignoring me. He seemed rooted to the spot, unable to move, to get up, get me a drink, and explain what was going on. I felt like an idiot standing there, waiting for him to do something, to take the situation in hand, and then I began to feel anger creeping through my embarrassment. Without a word, I turned on my heel and walked out.

  I headed up to the European Common Room, my heart thumping in my chest. I didn't know why I felt so upset. After all, I'd just been thinking about two-timing Rob. Why shouldn't he do the same to me? And why should it matter to me how his scrubber of a girlfriend treated me? But as I walked along, I started to feel shaky, and tears started to well up in my eyes, so I put my head down so that my hair fell over my face, and quickened my pace.

  Once I got to the common room, I got a coffee, sat down by myself in a corner, and lit a cigarette, hoping to regain my composure. But the coffee made my heart beat faster and the cigarette gave me a tight feeling in my chest. Waves of panic started to come over me. I wondered whether perhaps Jason had been right, and I should see a doctor. I felt nauseous and dizzy, and I could feel the hairs on my scalp prickling. To steady myself, I took out one of the new books I'd got out of the library and began to read.

  We knowers are unknown to ourselves, and for a good reason: how can we ever hope to find what we have never looked for?

  Reading Nietzsche always seemed to calm me down. Even though a lot of what he wrote was disturbing, it seemed to relieve me. Most of the time, in the back of my mind, I felt as though something awful was happening but none of us were talking about it; Nietzsche did talk about it, and although it didn't change anything, at least he wasn't ignoring the situation like the rest of us. As I read, Dennis came into my mind, and I wondered how he was getting on. I thought about the dream I'd had that morning, and I wondered what it meant. I thought about the hairs prickling on my scalp, and the strange feeling I had when I woke up in the mornings, after screaming myself awake, and wondered what was wrong with me.

  The sad truth is that we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we don't understand our own substance, we must mistake ourselves; the axiom, “Each man is farthest from himself” will hold for us to all eternity. Of ourselves we are not knowers.

  I carried on reading for an hour or so. During that time, nobody I knew came into the common room, so eventually I decided to walk over to East Slope and make an appointment to see the doctor. I got up and gathered my belongings, feeling better for having taken the decision. But just as I was about to leave, Rob came in.

  He practically ran over to me, grabbed me by the arm, and started babbling at me.

  “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm so sorry … I couldn't … It wasn't my f
ault, she just came in while I was waiting for you and sat down and started talking to me, and then … there you were and I … I couldn't …”

  His face was flushed and he stammered as he talked. I was irritated by his intensity.

  “Oh, it doesn't matter, Rob.” I tried to sound unconcerned.

  “Yes, it does. It does. Just let me explain.”

  “Well, actually, I'm just leaving. I've got to go over to East Slope.”

  “I'll walk with you.”

  “No, it's OK. I'd rather go on my own.” I was determined to make him suffer.

  “Please, Susannah. Just stay here a minute and talk to me. Please.”

  I sighed. “Oh, all right then. But I haven't got long.”

  We stayed in the common room for the rest of the afternoon, drinking coffees and smoking cigarettes and talking. We began by discussing The Genealogy of Morals, and then got on to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, which was the next topic for Modern European Mind after Husserl. Eventually, the conversation turned to Beth, and he explained that he had been going out with her since the first year, but that after all this time they still hadn't got it together, as he put it. She was very uptight and possessive and unreasonable. Apparently, she wouldn't sleep with him unless they got engaged. Obviously, that was completely out of the question, so he'd tried to make her see sense, told her that he wasn't into marriage and that whole scene, but she still wouldn't accept it. He ended by saying that he was getting completely fed up with her now, and he wanted to ditch her and go out with me instead, because I seemed to be a more together, mature person than she was.

  While he was talking I started to feel uncomfortable. No wonder Beth had looked me up and down like that, as though I was something the cat had brought in. I felt confused. I knew it was uncool to be uptight and possessive like her, but when he started comparing the two of us, and trying to flatter me by calling me a together, mature person, which almost made me laugh out loud, I felt vaguely guilty. On top of that, even though I hadn't made up my mind whether I wanted to go out with him or not, I was starting to fancy him again. He was sitting very close to me, and flashes of the night we'd spent together, and the time we'd kissed in the Meeting House, kept coming back to me. I realized I wasn't really listening to what he was saying as he talked to me, I was watching his lips moving, noticing the way he ran his hand through his hair, and the way his shirt opened a little at the neck when he raised his arm. At one point, he pressed my arm, and my stomach seemed to flip over. Every time his eyes met mine, I felt as though I was sinking, and I had to look away. I had a desperate urge to reach over and touch him, but somehow I stopped myself. I wasn't going to give in. Not just yet, anyway.

  “I've got to get going, Rob,” I said, at last. It was beginning to get dark outside, and I hadn't done anything I'd meant to do that afternoon. It was too late to go to the doctor now, but that didn't really matter. I was feeling more normal now, apart from the bouts of lust.

  “Where are you off to?” he asked.

  “I've got a few things to do on campus.”

  “And after that?”

  “I'm meeting up with some friends in town.”

  Going to discos wasn't the sort of thing you talked about at Sussex, so I didn't go into details.

  “Oh.” He looked disappointed. “I was hoping you'd come along to this meeting with me.”

  He took a crumpled flyer out of his pocket. It had a picture of a man with short hair and glasses on it with a banner underneath saying “Venceremos.”

  “It's tonight in the Student Union. Everyone I know is going. It's going to be a big event, really exciting. We're going to sign a petition and send it to the government in Chile, and then we're going to organize a lecture strike here on campus.”

  “Oh I'm sorry, Rob,” I said. “But I've got to meet my friends. It's all arranged.”

  I wanted to support Allende, and I knew Pinochet was a bastard, but I wasn't prepared to change my plans at the last minute just to suit Rob. And anyway, I wanted to go out dancing that night.

  Rob sighed and looked down at his shoes.

  “… But I tell you what,” I said. “Why don't you come into town afterwards and we'll meet up?”

  I was taking a risk. Jason would probably be staying in London, but I wasn't certain about that. And Rob would have to come down to the Concorde to meet me. But all in all, I reckoned it was a safe enough bet. If Jason phoned and said he was coming back, I could just tell Rob I had to get home at the end of the evening. And if Rob thought the Concorde was a bit straight, it didn't really matter. Right now he seemed keen enough on me not to mind where we met. And I was beginning to feel the same way about him.

  chapter 9

  I WAS GETTING READY TO GO OUT. First of all, I plaited my hair into sections and wet them in the basin. Then I dried them with Jason's hairdryer and combed them out so that my hair stood out in a big, soft, crimped halo around my head. I didn't have a lot of choice about what to wear: it always came down to jeans, platforms, and my old blue velvet jacket, with a selection of about four different kinds of T-shirt. This evening I chose a tight, plum-colored Biba one, with little buttons all the way down the front. I left a few of them open at the top. Then I got out my pot of Biba foundation, which was a smooth, pale brown color, and some plum-colored Biba lipstick, and applied them carefully. When I looked in the mirror, I smiled. My skin and lips were dark and gleaming, and the yellow and white of the amber and ivory necklace Jason had given me shone out against them.

  Just as I was about to leave the flat, Jason called.

  “Hello, sweetie pie,” he said. He sounded in a good mood.

  “Hi, Jason.” I was glad he'd called before I went out. Now I would know the lay of the land. “How did you get on with the milk-teeth box?”

  “Good news, Susie, the guy at Sotheby's thinks it could well have been a gift to Princess Charlotte Augusta, although he couldn't say for sure whether the Prince Regent or her grandfather gave it to her.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “No, not really. I mean, if it is a Regency piece, we're made. I've got a dealer who'll snap it up tomorrow. If it's not, I'll just have to search about a bit for someone else to buy it. Shouldn't take long.”

  “Great,” I said.

  There was a pause.

  “Look, I'm going to have to stay up here tonight. I'm seeing my dealer tomorrow. Why don't you catch the train up? I'll meet you at the station.”

  “Jason,” I said. “It's nearly nine o'clock already. I can't. Anyway, I've already arranged to go out.”

  “Where to?” There was a note of suspicion in his voice.

  “The Concorde. Girls' night out.”

  Girls' night out. It sounded good when I said it over the phone. I'd never have used such an expression to Rob, but it was the kind of thing Jason could relate to.

  Jason laughed. “Oh, that old dive. The one on the seafront?”

  “That's the one,” I said. “What's it like?”

  “Never been there, not my scene at all. Who are you going with?”

  “A couple of girls in my year. Cassie and Fiona.”

  Jason didn't know Fiona, but he had met Cassie once or twice. I got the impression he'd liked her. Most people did.

  “Well, make sure you behave yourselves. Don't run off with any wideboys. Be good, Susie Q. I'll miss you. Call you in the morning.”

  He seemed quite keen all of a sudden. Only a few days ago, he hadn't bothered phoning me at all to let me know what he was doing. Some sixth sense must have told him that things had changed and that now I genuinely didn't mind how long he stayed away in London.

  “Don't worry,” I said. “I'll be fine. I can take care of myself.”

  There was a pause. It didn't sound like the sort of thing I normally said to Jason. So I added, “I'll miss you too.”

  We said good-bye and rang off.

  I tied a woolen scarf of Jason's round my neck, let myself out of the flat, and walked down
to the seafront. The walk down to the Concorde was a long one, and a cold wind was blowing off the sea, but I didn't hurry. It was a beautiful clear night and the sky was dotted with bright stars and a crescent moon. As I walked along, I picked out the constellations and stars I knew, naming them to myself: the plow pointing to Polaris, the north star; the W shape of Cassiopeia; the three stars of Orion's belt; and, following the curve of the plow's handle, the bright star Arcturus. My father had taught me their names and how to find them when I was a child. It seemed a long time ago now.

  When I got down to the West Pier, I began to worry that I wouldn't be able to find the club. Then I saw a queue of people lining up, and knew that that must be the place. I quickened my pace, but as I drew near, I had a sudden urge to turn round and run home the way I had come. Now I was almost there, I didn't feel like going out dancing after all. Somehow being on my own with just the ruined East Pier, the cold wind, the sea and the stars for company had felt more comforting and familiar than the human world of cars and people and clubs down here in town.

  I resisted the urge to turn back, and joined the queue, wishing that I had arranged to meet Cassie and Fiona somewhere else beforehand, so that we could all have gone in together. It wasn't very often that I went out somewhere by myself, and I didn't like it. I felt self-conscious, as though everyone was looking at me and wondering why I was there on my own. I hoped to God Cassie and Fiona were inside, otherwise I'd have to buy a drink and sit down at a table by myself, which would look as though I'd just gone there to get picked up. As the queue inched along, I put my head down so that my hair fell forward over my face, wishing now that I hadn't crimped it. I could feel my nose going red in the cold night air. I thought, what with that and the hair, I'd walk in looking like a circus clown.

  Once I got nearer the door, I could hear the music thumping inside. I hadn't realized they played reggae on Fridays at the Concorde. When I got to the cash desk, there was an old black man with a leather cap on taking the money and giving out tickets. He called me darling and told me I didn't have to pay as it was ladies' night. I was relieved in a way, because I hadn't been sure how much the drinks would cost and whether I had quite enough money, but I also felt uncomfortable, as though I'd done something underhand, got in under false pretenses; as though something was expected of me—being a lady perhaps—that I wasn't going to deliver.