Читать книгу The Friendly Ones - Philip Hensher - Страница 13

1.

Blossom was no sooner in the house than she said, in her new, booming voice, ‘Is that boy Tom Dick back in Sheffield?’ Behind her, the two boys were stumbling out of the car, pulling heavy suitcases. Leo gave his sister a brisk kiss on the cheek, and bobbed quickly, arms open, to embrace Josh. There was not much bobbing required, these days, and for Blossom’s boy Tresco, none at all – he was as tall as Leo. Blossom was wearing a white blouse with a brilliant velvet scarf knotted about her neck – Georgina von Etzdorf, Leo believed. Had she put on some weight? Or it might just be a new hairdo, falling to her shoulders. It was a flatter, closer one than Blossom’s accustomed chrysanthemum of hair, made big with Elnett. He didn’t recognize what Josh was wearing – a blue shirt rolled up to just below the elbow, and chinos with pink espadrilles. Apart from the colour of the espadrilles, it was what Tresco was wearing.

‘Tom Dick,’ Blossom said again. ‘I thought I saw him on the street as we were driving through Ranmoor. No mistaking him.’

‘Not as far as I know,’ Leo said levelly. He separated himself from Josh, who had rather thrown himself into his father’s arms; he gave him a rumple round the head, a pat on the shoulders. ‘I haven’t seen him for years. Because of his height, you mean – that’s why you thought it was him?’

‘Frankly somewhat surprised to see him here, but perhaps – Just leave them there, darling, we’ll take them up when we know where Grandpa’s put us. I would have thought he was off in Paris or New York.’

‘I really couldn’t say,’ Leo said.

But you couldn’t snub Blossom: she was too inured to it. It wasn’t worth it, either. Blossom was going to get things going where Leo had just stared at them, then buried his face in his hands. She looked about her as if something was missing.

‘Where’s Grandpa?’ Tresco said. ‘Isn’t he here to say hello?’

‘He’s at the hospital giving your granny a hard time,’ Leo said. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

‘Gasping for one,’ Blossom said. ‘Look, boys, put them in the room that’s got the pony posters in. The one next to the bathroom. Or your spare room, Leo, what do you think?’

‘Not in my room,’ Leo said. ‘I don’t know where Daddy thought he was going to put everyone. We’ll sort it out later.’

His heart plummeted to think of his son and nephew going into his room and seeing, perhaps, what lay on the bedside table: a fat envelope with sheet after sheet of a letter inside. He wondered if it were best simply to say to Blossom that he had woken that morning to find a love letter lying on the mat. It had been pushed through the door at some point between him and his father going to bed, and him finding, around a quarter to seven in the morning, that he couldn’t sleep any longer. He couldn’t remember the last time he had had a love letter. Perhaps he had never had one.

2.

It had been on the mat when he stumbled downstairs, an envelope with his name on it. Opening it, he had assumed disaster. The parts of his life that would supply catastrophe to him were so many that he overlooked for the moment why his employer, his ex-wife, his son’s school would have decided to deliver whatever bad news they had by hand in the middle of the night. Leo opened it – it was his habit to take a deep breath and open anything fast and start reading, to get it over with. His heart beat: in his dressing-gown he could feel himself beginning to sweat. For some moments he did not understand what he was reading – the handwriting was neat, purposeful, educated and pleasant. The statement of love came soon, and then it seemed to him that he had opened a letter not meant for him. In ten minutes he had understood what he had opened. He pushed it into the pocket of his dressing-gown. Upstairs, there were the noises of an old man unwillingly rising: a groan; a fart; a shuffle and a yawn that went through the gamut. Leo composed himself.

He had had letters of love before. Girls had sent them – they liked to send them when it was all over, he remembered. Catherine had sent one or two, but there was something dutiful about her letters, a sense that if she was marrying this man she had better choose to invest in him, do things properly. They were still around somewhere. A letter out of nothing was unfamiliar to Leo, and, here and there in the next few days, he would take the long composition to a solitary place and go over it. He was convinced that one day he would be rather proud of getting this, and prouder still of his decent, dismissive and respectful response to it.

At the moment, however, the overwhelming reaction he had to it was embarrassment, and it seemed to him that this letter, alone among all professions of love, spoken or written, had succeeded in creating a swift emotional response that was utterly authentic, that could never have been faked to please anyone. In the past women had said that they loved him, and he had said that he loved them back: he knew how to make it authentic, with the eyes wide and the mouth open; he knew even how to fill his heart with love so that it looked right. Sometimes he had said that he would always think of them, but he just couldn’t – he didn’t know how – and once or twice he had managed to cry. It was easier to make yourself cry than to make yourself laugh.

But now, a divorced man, a failure, with a son, Leo sat in the middle of the afternoon in his parents’ house and looked at the words the girl next door had put on paper, and it seemed to him that no confession of love had ever succeeded in summoning a feeling with half the terrible authenticity of the embarrassment he now felt. He could hardly look at the sentences: Aisha saying she had known she loved him when she saw the watch he wore, too loose for his dear thin wrists. Were his wrists thin? Or dear? His eyes shut. And when they opened again there was Aisha’s missive, promising that one day she would look out of her window and see him in the garden, except that then it would be his garden and his house, and the garden and house he shared with her. Had he read it correctly? She was young, so young: she had thrown herself on his mercy and he would let her down very kindly. He would not even quote what she had said about the beauty of a man’s face striking like an axe at the frozen heart.

‘What’s that?’ his father had said once, coming uninvited into his room. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

‘Nothing,’ Leo said. His father sighed, turned, left. Perhaps that was how his parents’ marriage had begun: with a confession of love that rested on nothing.

And love? What was love? Leo looked out of the house he had always lived in, its windows and doors, into the street and into the garden behind, and he understood. The thing about love between adults: one confessed it, and the other allowed it, endured it, refused it or let the other down gently, decently. It was a test of character, how politely you refused another’s love. Hand outstretched, a smile, a shake of the head, a kiss on the cheek. She was so young, this girl, and Leo, he had been through everything.

He felt that he might want to share the letter with his sister Lavinia, but only with her. She knew all about love, and about guarding it. The rest of them would never know how gently he had let down the Indian girl who lived next door to his mother and father.

3.

The postman in December always arrived later than usual – all those cards; sometimes he didn’t get there until half past ten or eleven. Leo, at eighteen, had been waiting for the postman before going to school. School either mattered now or it didn’t. The postman would be carrying a letter offering him a place at Hertford College, Oxford, or one containing a polite rejection. He wasn’t going to delay the news because he needed to hear what Mrs Allen was going to say about Antony and Cleopatra.

It was a Tuesday. He was squatting by the door, where he could see the postman’s approach. The envelope fell, crisp, white, bearing a red crest, and Leo tore at it.

‘Well?’ Mummy said. She had been waiting too.

It said exactly what it was supposed to say, and after half an hour of celebrating, of phoning Daddy at his surgery, even, Leo thought he should phone Tom Dick. But there was a strong possibility that Tom Dick wasn’t celebrating, and he thought that he might, after all, go back on his word and find out what had happened at school, later.

He didn’t see Tom Dick that day. He was impossible to miss. The next day they were in a French class together, and from the way Tom sloped in, Leo decided to lower his eyes and be as tactful as possible. But Miss Griffiths, the first thing she said was ‘I hear congratulations are in order, Tom, and Leo, too,’ and Tom Dick said, ‘Vous auriez pu m’abattu avec une plume,’ which was joke French for ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather.’ He grinned, self-consciously, not engaging Leo’s gaze at all. After the lesson, Leo caught up with him. ‘When did you hear?’

‘Got the letter yesterday. You?’

‘Same. What did you get?’

‘Two Es. And they’re giving me an Exhibition.’

‘Fantastic. Congratulations.’

‘Well, congratulations to you,’ Tom Dick said.

What was he supposed to think of Tom Dick? He hadn’t been quite sure what he was supposed to say at the beginning when the head of the sixth form had said to him, ‘And the other boy who’ll be taking the Oxbridge entrance with you – it’s Thomas Dick. Do you know Thomas?’ Of course he knew Tom Dick. He was six foot seven inches tall. He seemed perfectly nice. He was in Leo’s French set for A level, but otherwise was doing German and history. They weren’t friends exactly – how could they be? It would have looked ludicrous – but Leo could see that Tom Dick was a solid, hard worker of a kid. He had a book of idioms that he added to, pencil in hand. The A-level French group had gone to Reims in the spring; they had practised their French in visits to champagne manufacturers and in lists of questions that Mr Prideaux had put together for them to ask in patisseries, of stationers, of ordinary members of the public in the streets of the handsome city. The patissiers stared, and admitted they had never quite thought why that particular cake was called a religieuse. On the Thursday night Leo had gone to a bar with two girls, less serious than him, and had drunk Calvados; Tom Dick had bought and annotated newspapers. Leo could put together a flamboyant argument, could make the case for this or that being the case in Pagnol or Mauriac. Tom Dick could just get the sentences right, learning and producing showy and frankly ugly subjunctives in the passé simple – ‘Que je l’eusse su,’ he had said once, requiring even Miss Griffiths to pause and roll her eyes and work it out mentally before saying, ‘Very good. But you would startle a Frenchman if you ever said that out loud.’ Le Noeud de vipères was the same, a matter of list-making and significant points, principal characters, important themes, the subjunctive in the passé simple.

The Oxbridge classes had taken place in the sixth form terrapins that sat in the playground. The Christian Union had been turfed out of the smallest classroom, where they usually met to talk about God on Wednesday lunchtimes, and instead Leo and Tom Dick met there with Mr Hewitt, the head of the sixth form. He had been getting boys and girls into Oxford for years now, he said – one every other year, on average. They had a good relationship with Hertford College, so it would make sense to apply there. The rest of the time, he gave them old Oxford entrance exams to do, with much speculation about what the examiners would be looking for. You cannot weep for the heroine while admiring the zoom shot; societies, like fish, rot from the head; ‘He is very clever, but he will never be a bishop’ (George III on Sydney Smith). Discuss, the questions finished.

Was Tom Dick a friend of his? It was Miss Griffiths’ favourite joke, in a French class, to go through the class names and call the next person Harry; often, talking about the Oxbridge entrance, that had been him. You could see that Tom Dick had heard this one before, and that he didn’t like being shackled together with anyone for classroom purposes, and the purpose of an old joke. Perhaps Leo ought to have liked it even less.

Tom Dick was not a friend in the sense that his friend Pete was a friend. Afterwards, Leo thought that he and Pete loved literature as much as any human being had loved literature, those two years. Pete obsessed about D. H. Lawrence; he chanted him to the skies, and, when his memory faltered, he and Leo could produce endless amounts of D. H. Lawrencey shouting. On the first day of spring, the wind blowing and the sun blasting into your face like fury, there they were, in the middle of the street, shouting, ‘Come to the flesh that flesh has made! Unravel my being and drag my soul, yes, my body and blood and soul, to the wet earth, and fire me up, O Fate …’

They could keep it up for hours.

Pete was his friend. He could have reconstructed Pete’s bedroom from memory, the hours they’d spent there. He’d converted Pete to Blandings Castle but not to Jeeves – Pete said that the Blandings cycle was touched by a sense of the infinite, by Life, and outside the window the Empress of Blandings was waiting, savage, to devour everything. Wodehouse didn’t know this, but it was so. That was Pete’s phrase, learnt from Lawrence, and he said it about everything. It was so, and that was the end of the debate. Leo loved Pete’s mind: he had the most original ideas about everything. Once they took a trip into the centre of Sheffield to look at an electricity substation. The cliff of blank concrete soared above them in the rain, a spiral of frosted glass to one side its only link to the world. Beautiful brutality, Pete said. It made you feel that the only thing man ever did in the world was to punch a hole in its being. It made you feel, that was the thing. They stood in their cagoules, the rain frosting over Pete’s little round NHS glasses, the cars running past the electricity substation and the old cardboard-box factory. Probably they thought the pair of them were doing anything but what they were doing, admiring beauty and – after twenty minutes – chanting D. H. Lawrence at the great concrete wall on the other side of the road.

‘Why don’t you put in for Oxbridge?’ Leo said once, in the pub where they thought they could get away with it. Pete was untidy, scowling, pugnacious, and he kept his hair in a short-back-and-sides: he didn’t hold with sideburns and big hair and anything that would come and go. It made him look older than he was, though not always old enough to get a drink. He could have been in employment, even.

‘I’d love to,’ Pete said. ‘But it’s not for me.’

‘I don’t see that,’ Leo said. ‘It’d be for you if you got in.’

‘There’s no hills,’ Pete said. ‘I couldn’t be doing with no hills. Oxford – no hills. Cambridge – definitely no hills. It’s Leeds for me. That’ll suit me all right.’

‘I thought you said you needed to test yourself in life,’ Leo said.

‘I’ve tested myself,’ Pete said. ‘I don’t need to test myself until I fail and then understand that I’ve failed. There’s a world out there. They’re just men and women, writing their tests and seeing if you’re going to fit in. You and Tom Dick.’

‘He’s all right, that Tom Dick,’ Leo said bravely.

‘It’s just strange when someone as tall as that starts speaking French,’ Pete said. ‘German you could understand. German’s a language for tall people. French, no.’

‘Spanish?’

‘Dwarfs. Definitely. No one over four foot eleven sounds normal speaking Spanish. Short and packed with sexual energy. That’s the language for you ‒ you and your family.’

I wish it was you in the little room, talking about Oxbridge essays, Leo thought about Pete. I wish it was you. But it was Tom Dick and that was the end of it. And then the letters came and they were released from each other, or shackled to each other. It was hard to say.

That summer, it was so hot; a summer they were still mentioning with relish fourteen years later, one everyone would remember, always. The waters at Ladybower Reservoir had sunk and sunk, and you weren’t allowed to wash your car or water your garden with a hose. People went out there in their dusty cars to see what had been revealed by the water’s fall, the remains of the village that had been destroyed to create the reservoir. Derwent village; the stone walls, the outlines of dead houses sunk deep in drying mud, deep and cracking. Leo lay in the garden, trying to read what the college had advised, a book by John Ruskin called Praeterita. He had thought he knew all about Victorian literature, the subject of the first term’s study, with Dickens and Thackeray and the Brontës and Tennyson. It had not occurred to him that the Victorians wrote anything like this. He couldn’t understand it. They were twenty men and women seated respectfully in a hall, writing steadily at desks; that was how he understood it. Next door sat an old woman in black called Victoria, and her two prime ministers, Gladstone and Disraeli. They were dead by now; their numbers were hardly likely to be increased as time went on. Here was a book called Praeterita and, next to it, waiting horribly, a book called Sartor Resartus. He lay on a beach towel under the tree in the garden, hearing the remote rise and roar from inside as Lavinia and Hugh followed the Olympics from Montréal on the television, the curtains drawn against the bright day. Lavinia and Hugh usually liked to suck lemon ice lollies while watching sport; yesterday they had watched weightlifting, entranced, for hours. If he could get them to go out tomorrow – perhaps to the Hathersage open-air swimming-pool – he might ask Melanie Bond to come round.

People came round all the time. When the doorbell went in the middle of a rising roar from the television, Leo could almost see Hugh rising grumpily to open the front door to let Pete in, most often, or Melanie, or Sue, or Carol, or perhaps even Simon Curtis or Nick Cromwell. Sometimes when the ancients came back from work, there was a party going on in the back garden, Pete declaiming from the top of the rockery to the bewildered Tillotsons next door. But now the figure that came through the kitchen door behind Leo was six and a half feet tall.

‘I thought I’d come round,’ Tom Dick said, seating himself on the low brick wall round the flowerbed. ‘I wasn’t far anyway.’

‘Where do you live?’ Leo said.

‘Nearby,’ Tom Dick said. ‘Is that your brother and sister watching the middle-distance races?’

‘That’s the first thing I’m glad never to have to do again now I’ve left school.’

‘What, the middle-distance races?’

‘No, sport,’ Leo said.

‘Oh, sport,’ Tom Dick said. ‘Is that what you’re having to read?’

‘Do you want something to drink?’ Leo said.

‘Yeah, that’d be – just some squash,’ Tom Dick said. Leo went inside and made it. From the kitchen window, he could see Tom Dick, unobserved, turning and looking in an inquisitive way at the flowers. He tore off a leaf from the hydrangea then another; placed them together and lifted them up towards the sun. He tore them carefully, once, twice, three, four times, then separated them and compared, it seemed, the rips. All the time his feet were jogging on the spot. It was so hot, and Tom Dick was wearing a flannel tartan shirt and jeans and what looked like his school shoes. Leo had been wearing shorts for six weeks now, and nothing else; his legs and chest were as deep a brown as they would ever go. He watched Tom Dick, his pale face wincing against the sun, holding the leaves up.

‘How are you getting there?’ Tom Dick said. ‘To Oxford.’

‘My mum and dad are driving me,’ Leo said, surprised.

‘Oh – yes – mine too,’ Tom Dick said. ‘I passed my test last week.’

‘Congratulations,’ Leo said.

‘But they’ve still got to drive me down,’ Tom Dick said. ‘They’ve got to drive the car back or it would be stuck in Oxford.’

‘I’m taking my test next month,’ Leo said.

‘It’s brilliant, being able to drive,’ Tom Dick said. ‘I went out yesterday, drove all the way to Bakewell with the windows open.’

Quite abruptly, Tom Dick stopped, raised his hands in bafflement. For the first time he was going to talk to Leo, and then he had remembered something, three sentences in, and stopped himself. In a few minutes, Tom Dick had said something about it being nice to see Leo, that he’d see him in Oxford, he supposed, that he had to make a move. He finished the squash in one; he held the glass awkwardly; set it down on the ground. His mother must have said that he ought to go and see the boy who was going to the same college as him.

‘Who the hell was that?’ Hugh shouted from the sitting room, the little prodigy. Someone was throwing themselves over hurdles, or chucking a javelin, or something; Lavinia was clapping her hands in breathless excitement. Quite at once it came to Leo that Tom Dick had told him a lie; he had said that his mother and father were going to drive him down to Oxford, but that could not be true. Tom Dick lived with his mother alone, Leo remembered. His parents had divorced, years ago. His father lived in Scotland. If he thought about it, he could remember Tom Dick saying, ‘J’habite avec ma mère, à Fulwood, mais mon père habite Édimbourg d’habitude.’ It was clever of him to know that the French had a word of their own for Edinburgh. Leo wouldn’t have.

The ancients drove him. The brown Saab was OK, Leo felt. It was the car of a respectable GP, antique but workable. No one was going to sneer at it. And the ancients, too, they had made a fist of it, not dressing in a ridiculous way in suit and tie, like some people’s parents, not just turning up in what they’d wear to garden in. (They’d known and, after all, Leo had been fretting about whether to instruct Daddy in particular to wear a tweed jacket at the very least. They’d known about university and what Leo would be thinking about the people who brought him.) He’d been given a room in the main part of the college – not on the ground floor, like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, but under the eaves. His name was painted on the board on the ground floor, and again on the board by his door. The second year who had been assigned to show them the room formed a smiling bond with Hilary, who knew all about it.

‘Isn’t it just – lovely?’ Mummy said, looking out of the window.

‘That’s obviously the most important thing,’ Daddy said. ‘That you study somewhere Mummy thinks is lovely. Of course Cambridge would be lovelier, according to Mummy.’

‘I wish your father would …’ Mummy said. But she wasn’t quite clear of what she wanted. Hilary was going to goad her, of course, and comment on her saying that the college ought to be lovely where her favourite son was going to study. All the same, he was pleased, today, too. The row – the proper, full-scale row – could take place on the way home when Leo would know nothing about it, never hear until Christmas that Daddy had seriously threatened to abandon Mummy in the car park of a service station in the middle of nowhere.

‘Isn’t that – what was his name? That very tall boy? Wasn’t he at school with you?’ Hilary was looking down at the quadrangle. ‘What’s he doing here? Look at him, doesn’t he look a complete package? He looks so serious, the way he’s standing. Do you think he had to bend down to get through all these tiny medieval doors? I’d like to see that.’

‘He got in,’ Leo said. He came over. Tom Dick was there with an anxious, small woman in a piecrust-collared blouse and an aquamarine suit. Tom Dick was wearing what he had worn when he’d come round, a tartan shirt and a pair of jeans with, now, school plimsolls. His mother had dressed up. She was only five feet two or three at most; they made a conspicuous pair. They were carrying a cardboard box each; the mother was limping somewhat.

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ his mother said. ‘Having someone here you know the first day. He’s a nice boy. Isn’t he?’

‘I don’t remember hearing anything about anyone else getting in at all,’ Hilary said. ‘Is that it, then? Do you know where to go? You don’t want us to unpack everything and put your books on shelves in alphabetical order, I don’t suppose. Ce – stop staring out of the window. Leave Leo to what he’s got to do. I’ll treat you to a cup of tea in an Oxford teashop if you play your cards right.’

Then they were gone. Leo almost congratulated himself – he had come quite close, he felt, to having an argument with his father, and had walked away from it in a grown-up manner. That was the thing to do. Leo was to reflect – not then, but at some point weeks later, when everything had gone wrong – that he had spent almost every day of his life with his mother and father. You could probably count the days he had seen neither, and the number would be less than fifty. It hadn’t appeared to be an important moment, their going just at that point, leaving him in a sculptural landscape of brown cardboard boxes and a cheese plant balanced on top, like a De Chirico interior. What had happened was a strange thing, the sudden vision of his parents as if they were complete strangers, as anyone would see them, his father warm and jocular, taking his mother’s hand in a courtly way as they left. They had flung themselves into the world again; Leo had been delivered to this place and had shut the door. For a few moments he could hear the click of his mother’s footsteps as she went briskly down the wooden staircase, and even something that might have been a word or two, exchanged bravely, a little laugh. He was, at that moment, thrilled and excited that the parents had finally gone. Out there was a library that had a copy of every book in the world – in this college there were people who had read and understood every book in English literature, whom he was going to meet. Downstairs, waiting for him at the Fresher’s Mingle that started at six tonight, was a whole new exploratory world of cunt.

Next to him at the Fresher’s Mingle was a boy, and Leo might as well start with him. He was glad that he’d made the decision about what clothes to wear, and had put on a pair of jeans and a shirt – that looked about right. One or two poor saps had put on their interview suits. The boy who had come in at the same time as him and had taken a glass of sherry was in jeans, too.

‘Hello,’ Leo said. ‘I’m Leo. Are you starting here?’

‘Am I starting here?’ the boy said, with a theatrical spasm at being addressed with a question. His movement was like a fountain driven sideways by a burst of wind.

Leo smiled.

‘Yes, I am,’ the boy said. ‘Is this normal? Do we meet everyone like this?’

Leo wasn’t quite sure what the boy meant. ‘What are you studying?’

‘PPE,’ the boy said. He smiled, an open, big smile, but not particularly aimed at Leo.

‘I’m Leo,’ Leo said, persevering just for the moment.

‘Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Leo,’ the boy said, ‘and I’m sure we’ll meet again some time and have another interesting conversation.’

He walked away. Leo caught the eye of two girls who had been watching this; they seemed familiar. They covered their mouths, giggling.

‘That was tough,’ one of them said, a girl with untidy black hair wearing green slacks. ‘He looked quite normal, too.’

‘Probably one of the geniuses,’ the other one said. She had red hair, straight down, and granny glasses; her macramé waistcoat was from another time altogether. ‘I’m Clare and that’s Tree. I remember you, you were at the interview, looking nervous.’

‘I’m nervous now,’ Leo said. ‘I’m really nervous.’

‘Oh, why?’

‘This is the cleverest room of people I’ve ever been in,’ Leo said, for something to say.

‘Well, you’ve found us, which is something,’ Tree said – Tree? Oh, Teresa.

‘I know,’ Leo said. It was going quite well.

Then a man arrived – he was dark and unshaven, a mop of curly hair about his ears. ‘Here, you,’ he said to the girls.

‘Oh, not you again,’ Clare said. ‘He’s on my course,’ she said to Leo. ‘We found him staring at the same noticeboard we were staring at. And then he came up to charm my mum and get me to make him a cup of Nescafé. You’re supposed to meet new people, Eddie, not hang around with the ones you’ve already met.’

‘I’ll meet this chap, then,’ Eddie said. ‘I’m Eddie. Who the hell are you?’

Eddie’s voice was raucous, posh, confident, but he did not seem to be daunting the girls. He was the sort of man you would expect to meet on your first day in Oxford. Leo introduced himself.

‘I’m sick of meeting people I knew at school,’ Eddie said. ‘I thought I’d get away from them by coming to Hertford. Isn’t it hell?’

‘I don’t know anyone from school,’ Tree said tranquilly. ‘I’m the first person who came from my school to Oxbridge, as far as anyone knows or could remember.’

‘And I went to Bedales,’ Clare said. ‘So it’s a total mystery how I came to be able to read and write.’

The evening was like that. As he went round the room, the energetic conversations he had were with people who, he could see, were dull; the ones who wanted to talk to him about what A levels he’d done and what grades he’d got. The sticky, difficult ones were with people who were sizing him up, not very successfully. They didn’t ask what his father did for a living, and once he brought it up anyway – he was a doctor’s son, there was no reason for anyone to look down on him.

There was another question that Leo had not anticipated at all. A girl with a half-open mouth and a cocked eyebrow asked him first. ‘What did you do in your year out?’

He hadn’t had a year out, and said so with a smile and a shrug. She had an odd, eggy smell, this girl, and he didn’t particularly care that she gave a short, dismissive laugh and replied that she supposed he was keen to get at it, couldn’t wait for university. ‘So what did –’ Leo began, but she had turned away, shrieking as she recognized someone from school. And then, in the way of things, someone was answering the same question there, just behind him and, apparently, above his head.

‘I taught English in India,’ a male voice was saying. ‘It was amazing. It took a day to reach the village. I don’t think they’d seen …’ and there was something familiar about the voice. Leo half turned, and there was Tom Dick, talking about his year out in India. It was the same voice as six weeks ago, but the vowels had changed, and the volume, too. Tom Dick was talking confidently to a small group of girls and a clever-looking boy, dark, saturnine, energetically nodding. Tom Dick’s summer, stuck with his mum, had been transformed into a year out in India.

‘How amazing,’ a posh girl with big hair was saying, a girl almost as tall as Tom Dick. ‘I went to India last year, with Mummy and Daddy. We went to Rajasthan. I adored it. But the poverty – didn’t you find the poverty awfully upsetting?’

‘That was what I was there for,’ Tom Dick said. ‘It was frightful. But one coped.’

‘Where were you?’ a boy in the group was saying, but Tom Dick could all at once be said to become aware of Leo, a foot away. With that he became aware of himself. His high face was in the room, talking energetically with lies, rat-a-tat, to entranced faces a foot below his own. Was that what you did? Leo moved away. Once, later on, they turned and moved at the same time, and found themselves facing each other. Leo asked if Tom Dick was all right, observed that it was good to see him, and Tom Dick made a shocked, embarrassed grunt in response, twice. They might have been spies on a shared mission in a crowded room.

The next morning Leo left his room early, and went out to walk the streets. It was a beautiful day. He went into the porter’s lodge, and read the notices on the board – here they were informal notices; the ones about work were on the subject boards behind glass. There was something called Daily Info – a large yellow sheet, close-printed, with details about film showings, cinemas called the Penultimate Picture Palace and Moulin Rouge, lonely-hearts adverts as well, which Leo read with interest. His mail would be in a pigeon hole; he looked in the wall of pigeon holes at Sk–Sz, but there was nothing for him. He left the college, and walked down past the Bod, as he was practising saying, past the beautiful circular library building and down the little pathway by the side of the church. The sky was a malleable blue, the stone everywhere the yellow and texture of soft fudge. He was going to like this. Later in the morning, there would be a meeting of the English students – undergraduates, he corrected himself – in one of the dons’ rooms. He wondered if they were supposed to take Praeterita and Sartor Resartus.

An elegantly shabby figure was stumbling towards him, wandering from side to side across the broad pavements of the high street. It was the boy from last night – Eddie, the girls had called him. Leo smiled broadly at him, in greeting, raised his hand and finally, with certainty, said, ‘Hi.’

The boy stared at him, paused. ‘Do I know you?’

‘We met last night,’ Leo said. ‘In Hertford.’

‘Oh, God, yes,’ Eddie said. ‘Hi, hi. Sorry. Rough night. Just going back for a few hours’ sleep.’

He stumbled past Leo in the general direction of their college. Leo had gone to bed at eleven or a little later; he had finished the evening with a dull pair of mathematicians called Mike and Tim in the college bar, sitting in the corner listening to them explaining Dungeons and Dragons. It had been perfectly nice; he had not thought there was an option for any of them to go out and not come back until eight in the morning.

There was a principle there, and the principle was this: you don’t refuse something that has been willingly opened to you. Leo would not refuse the hand of friendship, or question it. That was what he would do, not say, ‘Do I know you?’ to someone who greeted him, not dismiss people. When something was openly offered to you, the gift of friendship, a greeting, a smile, you should smile and accept the kindness that someone had offered, making themselves vulnerable.

It was not like him to come up with principles of behaviour. It was the significance of the day – his first day – that had done it. But there was a class at ten – a class or a meeting. He was going to go to it, and for the first time, he would be there to be introduced to a world that knew everything. Before now, the paths that he could have taken towards knowledge had come to an end, and you could see the end from where you stood. A set book led to twenty books in the school library; and those led to two hundred books in the central library; and that was good enough for most people, especially since you would never meet anyone else who had read what you had read. Now he felt as though the doors were being flung open onto sunlit downs where minds, like lambs, gambolled and grazed in herds. The doors of the Bodleian were still shut and locked. It was too early for anything but breakfast. He wanted to go to the library now, this second, and begin to read a book he had never heard of. They were all in there.

4.

‘Where has your uncle gone – Daddy, I mean?’ Blossom said.

The two boys were in the kitchen. For the fourth time in ten minutes, Tresco had gone to the fridge, opened it, peered into it and shut the door again. There was nothing in there – nothing but what Blossom had fetched back from the supermarket that morning, when she had shopped for meals, not for the idle little snacks that Tresco was after. Josh looked at his aunt. The way she had put the question confused him, and he said nothing. ‘Where did your daddy go, Josh?’ she asked again.

‘I don’t know,’ Josh said. ‘He said he had something to do and then he went out.’

‘He didn’t go out with Grandpa?’

‘No,’ Tresco said from the larder, his voice muffled. ‘Grandpa went out earlier. He went out in the car. I think Uncle Leo went for a walk, or maybe he was going to catch a bus somewhere. Doesn’t your dad have a car?’

‘I don’t know,’ Blossom said, exasperated. ‘I really give up. If anyone wants me, I’m in the bath.’

Josh raised his eyes at that, watched his aunt go. It was half past one. Josh had lived an irregular and unpredictable life; he did not always know where he was going to be sleeping in a week’s time. But the adults in his life took baths at the same time of day, before breakfast, or at any rate in the morning, before they got dressed. Tresco came out of the larder. He looked enviously at the empty plate in front of Josh, the orange-smeared remains of the beans on toast he had made himself. Josh made himself look back.

‘One of Mummy’s baths,’ Tresco said eventually.

Mummy overheard this. She was going upstairs, her face lit in flashes of blues, reds, purples, the sun falling through the stained-glass window above the stairwell. They could perfectly well go and see the patient later this afternoon, but just now, Blossom felt that she deserved a touch of pampering, and solitude. One of Mummy’s baths, she heard Tresco say from the kitchen, and it amused her to have one long-standing and recognizable habit. She crushed the word eccentricity as it rose in her mind. People like her did not have eccentricities: that was a middle-class, a wilful word from the place she had come from. Blossom sometimes had a bath in the middle of the day. She felt she needed one; needed solitude and the locked door and time to be alone with hot water and her thoughts.

She had brought her verbena soap and her cucumber shampoo, and rather wished she had brought some decent towels. The towels here were bald and rough, the same old white towels Hilary and Celia had had for at least twenty years. But the bathroom was, as she had always thought, a beautiful room; an irregular shape because of the turret above; the washbasin sat in the circular recess, the bath under the long, frosted window. It was deliciously hot in here – it caught the sun in the mornings, and the heated towel rail, a newish indulgence of Celia’s, hadn’t been turned off for days. Blossom locked the door; in a tearing hurry, she shucked off her pale blue dress, her white sandals, her knickers and bra. Naked, she opened the hot tap, pushed the plug into the hole; she stood before the mirror and looked at herself. The roar of water, the juddering of the old boiler surrounded her. She was safe and alone.

Four children, she murmured, not even saying the words out loud as her lips moved. Around her neck was the dear little chain and pendant her husband had bought her when the first of them had been born – Tresco, she worked out in her solipsistic nudity. He was downstairs; he was a letter T between her breasts, the points marked in tiny diamonds. And then the other children had come – three more Ts, marked with the same chain and pendant, should they ask. She liked it. The room was filling with steam; the mirror beginning to cloud. It was a long mirror, floor to ceiling. Her father had always said that you should know what your body looked like, and the foot-square mirrors in other people’s bathrooms had always struck her as shameful. Now she wiped the clouding mirror with her forearm and stepped back.

What was it, that pale thing clarifying itself into a shape? A body; she could look at it as if at –

She looked at it, making sure of the analogy. It was not an object she could analyse remotely, but it was not her either. When she looked at her body, it was as if she had turned her eye on a no doubt beautiful acquisition that had been in the same position in her house for years. And now she moved her hands over it, feeling as her used and hardened palms slid down her still soft sides how her children must feel when an adult, hardened in the edges they reached out, touched their marshmallow softness of cheek. In the mirror, there was the body you had after forty-odd years and four children; it was good for that, but the breasts were different in shape ‒ the feel of the skin underneath the hardened hands now had a grain like the grain of leather. She raised one breast in her hand, its liquid weight, its skin giving up; she lifted one leg and examined the oldest parts of her outer crust, her worn and wrinkled kneecaps, the thick yellow skin of her heels. How old was she down there, at her exhausted joints?

One day Stephen was going to leave her. Not today, not this year, but one day. She did not look as she had once looked, and she had seen Stephen’s face in the bedroom at nights, caught his expression in the looking glass over the top of a book he was pretending to read. Money would go where it wanted to go, and Stephen would dye his hair and allow himself to be taken to nightclubs. She hoped that it would not happen until Thomas was a little older.

The bath was full; she closed the tap.

And the mirror now was misting over again, with drops of steam running across her pink and white reflection, like the trickle of sweat down her side. Her shape and her colour were beautiful, she had always known, and they were still beautiful, the subject of astonishment that she was the age she was. Over her soft bottom and thighs she went, and back up again, both her hands running up her sides and into her armpits, making shapes like a curlicued vase. She adored herself.

(Downstairs, in the kitchen, the boys were discussing it, and Tresco had just said, ‘It’s just one of Mummy’s bathtimes,’ and Josh had looked at his cousin, struck by something in his voice, to discover with amazement that Tresco’s face had crumpled, his expression that of a hurt little boy. ‘Mummy and her fucking baths.’)

The body and she were alone together; out there was her life, and the people who felt it all right to come and ask her where they had put their best dress, or why that fucking useless boy, Norman, was it?, hadn’t turned up when it was supposed to be today that he … The mind returned to the world outside. She turned it off like a tap. This was her moment of the solitary. Pampering. She loved to stand and look at her body and list its properties, to identify its inwardnesses and its losses, the scars and the long passages where the skin, when pinched, could only return slowly, thoughtfully, to its original flatness. She took a step forward; she wiped the steam-clouded glass; she opened her mouth and counted her remaining teeth. Three wisdoms were gone, a molar.

But if anyone saw her yawning into the looking glass like this they’d think she was a total and utter loony, fit for the bin, a prize chump all round.

The voice of sense and business had sounded like a gavel. She was going to have her bath. She wanted to think about what she was going to say to Mummy about this stupid divorce business. There was no point standing there and staring at herself in the nuddy all day long. There was some chance, as well, that when she was done, she’d find that Leo had come back and could fill her in. She wished it wasn’t Leo: he had always been quite hopeless at this sort of thing. But now she unhooked her pendant, bundled her dark hair into a sort of bun with an old hairgrip from the bowl on the lavatory cistern, and slid with purpose into her long, hot bath. The boiler hissed. From downstairs she could hear the voice of her boy, the confident sound it made, as if calling through the woods it owned. There was sweat down her face, and steam condensed, too, and after a while she found that the salt liquid running from her eyes seemed to be tears. It was her age, she supposed, the habit of crying when no other bugger was around.

5.

Immediately afterwards, and on the diminishing occasions when somebody said to Leo, ‘But I don’t think I ever understood – why did you leave Oxford?’ he would say, ‘I don’t know, but it was just impossible.’ He had an idea. It was because he’d said the wrong thing to a girl, and the wrong thing had affected not just her but everyone for miles around. It acted like an old-fashioned map on the Paris Métro: a button was pressed, quite innocently, to a remote destination, and the lights had lit up, showing the crowd the full route. Leo had been ordinary, dim, overlooked, nothing special, and what the crowd had been waiting for. Someone to blame. After that he would never say, ‘I want to taste your cunt,’ to a woman; he had always said it enthusiastically, with tender and assumed naivety, and once in Sheffield, in a wood-panelled back room in a pub, a woman had grasped his hand, holding a pint of Guinness, and said, ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.’

He was in quite a good room, there in Hertford; it was under the eaves, but pleasant. The second night he was there, the whole evening, the room was full of someone else’s music. He didn’t know what it was. It kept on until after two. In the end he slept through it. The room underneath him, he thought, but when it started up at ten on the third night, he thought he would be brave and go and make a friendly comment to his neighbour, and went downstairs in stockinged feet. An unfamiliar face answered the door. He was Geoffrey, he grudgingly offered, when Leo introduced himself, and Leo realized that there was no noise of music coming from the room at all. Behind Geoffrey Chan – his name was painted above the door – there was institutional space; a poster of a South American revolutionary; two green mugs and a kettle on a bookcase with a dozen books in it. Geoffrey Chan wished him good luck. He wasn’t going to make trouble. And the noise was coming out of the room on the floor below, belonging to Mr E. Robson. There was a sweet smell that Leo identified as marijuana.

In fact there were only five people in the room, and the boy turning in astonishment to him was Eddie who couldn’t remember his name – he must be the owner of the room. He recognized the others: the posh girl from the other night with the smell of eggs and the half-open mouth, and Tree, who did English, and her friend Clare. Tree had sat next to him at the seminar yesterday, and had said she hadn’t a clue what they were supposed to be doing – she was all right, he had thought, but seeing her here made him wonder. The fifth person in the room was Tom Dick. He stared at Leo; he looked away.

‘Would you mind turning it down a bit?’ Leo said. ‘I’m trying to do a bit of work upstairs.’

‘I thought it was someone else upstairs,’ Eddie said. ‘A ching-chong Chinaman. Who the hell are you, then?’

‘I’m two floors up,’ Leo said. ‘It’s really loud.’

‘Daddy said my best chance to get in was by applying for theology,’ the egg-scented girl was saying, ignoring Leo. ‘I’m not awfully bright, not like my sister Louise. So I did what he said and it worked. He said, “Lucy – just get the summer job at Harvey Nicks for two months, selling perfume or whatever, go to Oxford and get a degree in theology, then you can, I don’t know –”’

‘That’s a new one,’ Clare said to Eddie. ‘Before long you’re going to be getting people who don’t even live on this staircase. You’re terrible, Eddie, you really are.’

‘You’ve not been in the college five minutes and straight away you’re getting us a frightful reputation,’ Tom Dick rattled off. He did not look at Leo as he spoke. His voice had changed and the way he said words. Leo had never heard anyone seriously say ‘orff’ for ‘off’ before, and it appeared to him that Tom Dick had not done it convincingly.

‘Hello, Tom,’ Leo said. ‘How’s it going?’

Now Tom Dick did look at him, with an expression of pure dislike and vengeance. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘How’s it going with you? No, no, Lucy, you’re doing it quite, quite wrong – the way you do it is –’

‘Turn it down, Eddie,’ Tree said. ‘You need to be a bit reasonable.’

She smiled at Leo, the one person in the room who was prepared to acknowledge that he had come in at all. Eddie leant over and lowered the volume on his stereo – a black plastic affair with a rigid plastic lid and separate speakers. Captain Beefheart: Leo was oddly proud to have identified Trout Mask Replica. Pete had been obsessed with it, all last year. But he was hardly through the door, not even closing it behind him, when the five of them inside burst out laughing. ‘I’ve just got to tell you,’ Tom Dick’s new posh voice insisted, ‘I simply have to make it utterly and completely clear …’

The work was what he was here to do. It progressed in a world quite separate from the quicker processes by which five people were so intimate that they would lie around together with Trout Mask Replica playing, as if they had known each other for ever. He was not sure he had really become anyone’s friend yet, and in its place was the yawning aversion of a gaze that had happened when he went into a neighbour’s room to complain about the noise.

The next day was the first day of lectures, and after breakfast he found himself walking towards the faculty with the others. It was a beautiful morning – again that shimmer of the clash of colours, the dense yellow of the stone against the deep October blue of the sky. There was Tree; she gave him a sidelong look, a half-smile.

‘We’re going to the lecture on George Eliot, are we?’ she said. ‘I’ve not read much beyond Middlemarch. I read that because Mrs Kilpatrick said it was the best novel ever. And I read Silas Marner but that was a right load of old rubbish.’

‘What’s that Eddie boy like?’ Leo said.

‘Oh, you’re there, are you?’ Tree said. ‘He’s a dickhead, really. I don’t know why everyone says he’s such a laugh and a hoot. He got us up to his room and then he played us this terrible music, one record after another. Do you know that Thomas? I didn’t know you knew him from before, from school.’

He was going to say that Tom Dick was a terrible liar: that he hadn’t had a year in India; that he had never been called Thomas in his life; that that was not what his voice had sounded like until, at most, five days ago. ‘Yes, we did the entrance exam together. He was at my school.’

‘I thought you said your school was a comprehensive or something,’ Tree said.

Leo gave her a sideways assessment. Her eyes were cast down, her face demure; she hugged her books to her chest. Her hair, which he had thought untidy and tangled, was in fact beautifully chaotic, that sweet disorder. Only somewhere in her mouth was there the suggestion of amusement.

‘Well, he said he didn’t really know you at all. He’s a funny boy, that Thomas. Lucy thought she knew someone who knew his parents but it turned out not. So what have you read in the George Eliot line?’

That, it turned out, was the question of the lecturer, almost at once. What Leo had read in the George Eliot line – the point was not its extensiveness, but the sincerity, the shock of recognition that the mass of words had come down to. He had read on after Daniel Deronda not in a spirit of completeness or duty, but only wanting to find in Felix Holt and Scenes from Clerical Life the same force of recognition and understanding that he had experienced in the face, exactly evoked, of Gwendolen Harleth. That was the book that had struck him with violence, and ever since, he had wanted to look out into the world to see a stranger’s face full of anger and discontent, to say to himself Was she beautiful, or was she not beautiful?; and in the meantime to devote himself to the means of understanding, to books and literature and the words on the page. The lecturer began by asking who had read what books by George Eliot, and asking them in order of likely popularity. In the large lecture hall, devoid of natural light, with a middle-aged man rubbing his hands, he felt that the whole question of a life’s work, of an insight that might lead to recognition, a century later, had been reduced to the opportunity to perform as good little boys and girls. He knew that, despite everything, George Eliot and he himself and anyone she would have wanted as a reader had more in common with Gwendolen Harleth than with what was happening here, good little boys and girls. Had they read Mill on the Floss … Middlemarch … Silas Marner … Daniel Deronda … Adam Bede … Scenes from Clerical Life … Felix Holt. And what was the real, the ultimate test? The number of hands being raised had steadily diminished, and as he rubbed his hands and said Romola, only two or three hands were raised. Good little girls and one boy, sitting in the front row. But that was not the ultimate test, to have read it all: the ultimate test of literature was to have set it down in mid-flow and to have thought, after a dozen words that were like fire, that here was something that struck through to you, a mind that understood. The lecturer, pleased and satisfied, started explaining about the nonconformist religious traditions.

‘I’ve got to go and buy a toothbrush,’ Tree said, when their lectures were done for the morning. ‘I’ll see you back at the ranch. I’ve been brushing my teeth with a toothbrush, I thought there was something strange about it, and I realized this morning, I got a postcard from my sister Karen, I’d taken hers by mistake. I packed the wrong one.’

‘Well, it’s yours now,’ Leo said. They walked down the steps of the English faculty; she gave a bright, tight little wave to the others, a despairing shrug to the last of them.

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ Tree said. ‘Cleaning your teeth with a toothbrush you thought was yours and using one you know for a fact isn’t the right one. That’s different. So I’ll see you later.’

‘I’ve got to go and get something in any case,’ Leo said. ‘I’ll walk with you.’

‘Oh, right,’ Tree said. ‘You hadn’t read anything, then.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You hadn’t read anything. When they said, who’s read what by George Eliot, you didn’t –’

‘Oh – no. It was embarrassing. It was like being back at school. I’ve read some George Eliot.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘You know …’ But Leo was thinking what it would take to produce an account of that moment. He had read that sentence in Daniel Deronda which had made him think that somehow he had been observed, and the way he responded to that – ‘It was just a bit embarrassing.’

‘Not as embarrassing as everyone thinking you’ve not read a word of George Eliot before turning up, and it’s all Victorian literature this term. I loved Middlemarch. I thought that Rosamond Vincy had a point, though. I don’t know what she did wrong, wanting her husband to make a living and be reasonable to people she knew.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Leo said. ‘What did you do for A level?’

‘I see what you’re saying, Leo,’ Tree said with amusement. ‘But I loved the books we did for A level – it wasn’t just a test to get through. Do you know what we did? We did The Rape of the Lock. Most people couldn’t stand it, couldn’t see the point of it, but I loved it. I still love it. It was just so clever and, you know, the things it said. I had no difficulty learning the quotes for that – they just stuck there. Like a song. The light militia of the lower sky.’

‘You love literature,’ Leo said. They were in a narrow lane between high stone walls; diagonal columns of light struck solidly across their path. There was silence around and, above, the deep blue of the late-morning sky.

‘Of course I do,’ Tree said. ‘I’ve always loved to read. It’s the best thing ever. And maids turned bottles, call aloud for corks …’

‘Call aloud for what?’

‘For corks. It’s a bit rude, you see. That’s The Rape of the Lock. Didn’t you do that?’

‘No, I never did,’ Leo said. ‘We did John Steinbeck. That wasn’t so good. It’s going to be good here.’

‘Of course it is,’ Tree said. ‘It’s going to be fantastic.’

‘One of these days,’ Leo said lightly, ‘I’d really like to taste your cunt.’

It was an unfamiliar street, but as he pronounced the last word it appeared to him that it was not just an unfamiliar but a wrong street, a street in which he had found himself with no warning or explanation. The girl he was walking next to continued walking, sedately, her books and notebook under her hand, as if he had said nothing at all. He felt sure he had said the same thing in the same circumstances, and a woman had in response talked back with indirect amusement, accepting the offer without saying so, or sometimes dismissing him but without much hostility. People had said to this rumpled girl with the beautiful teeth and the wry, shrugging manner something that amounted to what he had said. There was no need for her to say, ‘Actually, I think I’m going to head off here. See you later,’ and walk briskly down a side street, not looking back.

He could not take it in his stride, what he had found himself saying, or the response that was no response, like a final step on the staircase disappearing under the foot. The world around him shivered and trembled, and as he thought of it, he had to shut his eyes against the world. That afternoon he devoted himself to Browning, not in an armchair but sitting at a desk, reading one monologue after another, making notes as he went. The desk faced the wall, and he found he could concentrate. Only sometimes did Browning’s energy, his cryptic shouty manner, pass into another room where the meaning subsided into blankness, and Leo found himself once again knowing what it was like to say I would like to taste your cunt to a woman he had hardly met, mistakenly thinking they might have been flirting, and for her to dismiss him briskly. She had no reason on earth not to tell everyone. She came out of the episode really quite well.

And at suppertime he found himself sitting not so far from Tree, and she was sitting as she always was with Clare, but also with Tom Dick and Eddie and that egg-breathed girl called Lucy, the one who had got in by doing theology. He could not hear what they were saying, apart from one moment when Lucy’s braying voice cut through the noise of the hall, saying, ‘But I don’t understand – what on earth did he think –’ and a little later, ‘How disgusting and pathetic,’ and that was it. There was no doubt about it. He could hear that the conversation had begun with them listening intently to what Tree had to say, and she was making light of it, but by the time the soup had been taken away, Tom Dick was at the rapt centre of attention, telling them all what he knew. He was squaring this somehow with his account of his history, the suggestion that he had gone to a different sort of school from the one Leo had gone to, and that nevertheless Tom Dick knew all about what Leo was like from – what? Youth orchestras? Sports teams? Was he saying that Leo’s mother was his family’s housekeeper? Impossible to guess, but he was doing it. They were all rather gripped, and some people in the seats surrounding them, people who, surely, were in the second or third year, had started leaning in and asking fascinated questions, their elbows propping up, their fingers making decisive and principled points. Only once could he hear what Tom Dick was saying, and surely he was meant to hear. The pudding had arrived, and Tree had pushed hers away. Tom Dick stopped talking in his lowered, muttering way, and said, with brisk clarity, ‘Those shy people – they can say anything. And if you’re not going to eat that, I’d love to taste your –’ But there was a burst of laughter, immediately followed by a burst of scolding for Tom Dick and the boys who had laughed. Lucy was rubbing the shoulders of Tree, making exuberant noises of scolding and pity, saying, ‘It’s not at all funny, it’s not funny at all, poor you, poor Tree, poor thing,’ and putting her in her place. Leo knew he shouldn’t have said what he’d said, but he now felt that he’d politely given Tree a bold possibility as an equal. She’d turned it down as women sometimes turned down the offer, but the consequences of her refusal were to reduce her within her group to the girl from the comprehensive. Now she was the clever, pretty, helpless girl with the northern accent, the one they had to be kind to.