Читать книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke - Страница 14

Two days before the end of my final term, I was stopped by a Modern English Language tutor on the stairs of the department after finding I had failed my degree. He asked, a little hurt, why I had never been to one of his lectures in three years or, indeed, to anyone's lectures or classes whatsoever.

‘Is it drugs?’

‘Well, no. I just haven't washed my hair for a while. I've been a bit all over the place.’

‘You're sure it's not drugs? It's always drugs. Sure? Well, why didn't you come and see me? Everyone else does – the place is swimming in doctors' notes. It's exams.’

I figured what the hell and told him everything, including how I'd been sacked from the travel agent's for absent-mindedly selling forty tickets to Glastonbury on a coach that didn't exist, and he looked at me, still very kindly, and said that if I'd come and told him about all this a month ago he could probably have bumped me up to a Pass, though some of my papers had been truly terrible, he said, really, for shame. ‘You just wrote “no time to finish!” at the bottom of all these blank pages.’

Through the window of his room, where he had ushered me, you couldn't quite see the Waterstone's where I had stolen the books. I told him about that too. He nodded and said nothing, leaning forward in his chair with his hands latticed on his knees, occasionally unfolding them to hand me a tissue and looking down at my feet, dirty in their sandals, so that I could cry unwatched.

‘It's too late to do anything about all the paperbacks. But since you've clearly never opened the textbooks, you can simply put them back, can't you?’ he said, as gently as Denholm Elliott chiding Helena Bonham Carter to be a better person in A Room with a View. ‘What are you planning on doing now? Isn't there anything you're interested in doing? Something you particularly like?’

I couldn't stop crying long enough to reply. Where was Wilson? Who was going to protect him?

‘Nothing you like? Nothing you love doing?’

‘I like the movies …’ I said, uselessly.

He asked if I'd be interested in a work placement on a local paper where he knew the deputy editor. I said I didn't think I'd make a very good journalist, but he looked so pained I immediately changed tack and agreed, putting on a face that I hoped suggested I was worthy of redemption. Later that week I did what he advised about the books, like a tooth fairy – one that leaves Bauer's Grammatical and Lexical Variance in a heavy bag by the lift. As I made my way out of the shop, an assistant pursued me with the bag.

‘But I don't want it!’ I said.

‘Well, neither do we, to be honest. We have trouble giving this stuff away in the holidays.’

So I went round to Foyles and left it there instead.