‘So, are you coming?’
‘In a minute… I just need to…’ Eleanor gestured helplessly at the books piled around her corner of the library table, an ill-constructed semicircular wall, sprouting pencils and torn scraps of paper, where she was trying to keep track of relevant paragraphs. The books weren’t the ones she had been recommended; those had already been whipped out of the library by the smarter, faster members of her year group. Instead she was trawling through turgid tomes that were in no demand whatsoever, desperate to unearth any snippet of information that might assist in the otherwise impossible task of tackling an essay entitled ‘Beowulf: Poet or Warrior?’
It was on being presented with these four words the previous Wednesday, her third week of term, that Eleanor had started facing up to the realisation that she was stupid. Worse still, she was a fraud. Since arriving, she had so far cobbled together just one composition, on whether Thomas Hardy was more of a social reformer than a novelist, managing an answer of sorts by drawing heavily on Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which she had been fortunate enough to study in the sixth form with Miss Zaphron. It had garnered a few dry words of encouragement from her college tutor, a softly-spoken Irishman with kind grey eyes, who had then offered a respite of sorts in the form of a two-week spell looking at Dickens, with whom she was also lucky enough to have had some previous acquaintance.
But Anglo-Saxon was another matter. For that, she and her peers had been directed to attend the overheated, chaotic rooms of a man called Dr Pugh, who resided in another college and who preferred to rain down his words of wisdom, and much spittle, from the top of a set of library steps parked against one of his many book-stacks. With his domed hairless head, beady black eyes, glittering behind thick lens spectacles, Eleanor found herself unable to look at him without thinking of a bald-headed eagle, about to swoop onto his prey. When he announced the Beowulf essay, flinging down each word from his favoured perch, along with fluttering copies of a recommended reading list, the rest of her group had jumped to catch the pieces of paper like gleeful children chasing leaves, but Eleanor had stayed in her chair, frozen by the certainty that there was no way she would be able to answer such a question satisfactorily in seven years, let alone seven days.
‘So, are you coming or not?’
Eleanor could hear the mounting impatience in her companion’s voice. She was a girl called Camilla, also a Fresher, but studying History not English. Her own few books had been cleared away and buckled into the smart leather bag she wore across her chest. She occupied the room next to Eleanor’s in the modern honeycomb of a block where the college housed most of its first-year students. Bumping into each other within hours of their arrival, they had braved the first meal in hall together and stuck to each other’s sides ever since.
‘You go on,’ Eleanor urged. ‘I’ll catch you up.’
‘But we might not eat lunch there. Billy said there was a chance of hooking up with some others—’
‘That’s fine.’
Camilla fiddled with the strap on her shoulder bag. ‘The point being, that if you don’t come now you might not find us.’ She spoke in a whisper, even though it was past one o’clock and they were the only two people left in the library.
‘I know. That’s okay, honestly.’
Still, Camilla hesitated at the corner of the library table. She was well brought up. She had heavy straight blonde hair, cut in ramrod lines, so that her face looked as if it was perpetually staring out of a small window. She had come from an established girls’ boarding school and acted with all the confidence Eleanor both feared and expected to find in the produce of such places: a strong voice, strong opinions, coupled with a brusque self-confidence. She played hockey and tennis and had signed up for college rowing. She had big green eyes, set at a feline slant, and wide nostrils that flared when she was amused, which was quite often.
‘Are you spoken for?’ she had asked Eleanor, having invited her in for a coffee just minutes after they met. Her own identical box of a room had already been transformed into a homely, softly lit collage of lamps, beads, spreads, posters and knick-knacks, causing Eleanor to reflect with shame on the lacklustre efforts of her own unpacking: a few books on the desk, her toothbrush and paste on the edge of the basin, the big old suitcase still spilling with the heavy winter clothes that had proved too bulky to cram into the room’s meagre wardrobe.
‘No,’ Eleanor had admitted shyly, thinking of and dismissing the unsatisfactory and intermittent fumblings with poor Charlie Watson.
‘Clever you. Good. I dumped mine before coming up. We might have some fun then, might we not?’
Eleanor had nodded, grateful – and faintly alarmed – to have found such an amicable and adventurous friend so early on. But three and a half weeks into term and Camilla was tiring of her, she could tell. With the proximity of their rooms, she suspected she had merely provided a convenient starting point for Camilla’s social ambitions; the first rung on what would be a tall ladder. She had not yet stopped Eleanor from sharing her company, but an air of endurance had crept into the arrangement. Several other people were now being made much more obviously welcome; people like the charismatic Billy Stokes who was behind that day’s nebulous lunch plan.
A fellow historian with a cherubic smile and the big square body of a seasoned rugby player, Billy was one of those who seemed to know everyone he passed in the street, sharing not only Camilla’s armadillo confidence but also her apparent determination to put having fun above the priorities of academic work. Eleanor marvelled at and envied their insouciance. She did not dare to slack off her own studies for a moment. Stupid people had to work harder, she knew that. More to the point, she literally could not afford to enjoy herself in the cavalier manner that they did. Lunch with Billy and his friends would mean drinks, food, then more drinks, necessitating the recurring shame of having to remind them all that she was on a tight budget.
It had taken Eleanor a couple of weeks to realise this herself. What had once felt like riches was evaporating at terrifying speed: books, stationery, tea, coffee, milk, bread, sugar, the couple of subs for societies to which she had boldly and misguidedly committed herself during the course of Freshers’ Fair had already proved such a drain on her finances that she was starting to wonder how she would last the term, let alone the year. Her new friends claimed to share such anxieties, but then joked easily about increasing overdraft limits and wheedling more money out of their parents. Eleanor laughed with them, inwardly picturing Vincent’s granite face, knowing there was nothing more to come out of him, financial or otherwise.
Camilla at last conceded defeat and took off. Eleanor twirled her pencil in a show of careless farewell, but the moment the library door swung shut, she stabbed the pencil’s lead point into her palm, repeating the attack until she had created a circle of deep pink indentations in her skin.
The silence of the old room was suffocating. No one else needed to work through their lunch hour, she reflected bitterly. No one else was so stupid. ‘The Pride of Broughton’ the Head, Mrs Mayfield, had called her in Leavers’ Assembly. Looking back on it now, recalling the self-conscious prickle of pleasure on her scalp as all heads in the small school hall had turned to stare, Eleanor could have laughed out loud.
When the door creaked open a few minutes later, she hurriedly pretended to concentrate on her notes, watching out of the corner of her eye as a tall young man with dusty brown hair strode down the central aisle, peering between the bookshelves, clearly in search of a person rather than a book. He was wearing a shapeless cabled grey jumper that looked home-knitted, and loose black jeans, from the bottom of which protruded the pointed toes of scuffed desert boots. He clicked his fingers as he walked, as if keeping beat to some rhythm inside his head.
Eleanor adopted a studious frown and started to copy out a sentence from one of the dense texts in front of her. Beowulf is composed of 3182 alliterative lines…
‘Excuse me?’
She glanced up. He had wide blue eyes and a clean-shaven face. A year or two older than her, she guessed. His hair was remarkably thick, the sort of hair that swelled outwards as much as it grew downwards. He had a pencil tucked behind one ear and several pens sticking out of his front jeans pocket, snagging on the hem of the jumper.
‘Have you seen Miss Coolham?’
‘Er… I don’t think so. Who is she?’
‘The college librarian,’ he said, clearly surprised. ‘Very tall, quite old. Hair like a Luftwaffe pilot. Scary lady.’ He pulled a face. ‘She normally sits over there, under Samuel.’ He gestured at the large desk set at the foot of a plinth sporting a marble bust of a man with a bulbous nose and long hair.
‘Samuel?’ Eleanor echoed faintly, inwardly still cowering at the ignorance of having forgotten the name of the person in charge of her own college library.
‘Johnson. The dictionary man.’
‘Yes, of course, the dictionary man.’
Later, Nick would tell her that she had looked terrified, and that this had both amused him and made him faintly curious. At the time, he had merely shaken his head, disappeared between the bookshelves and then re-emerged with a heavy leather tome, which he settled down to read at the other end of her table.
Eleanor laboured on, making more notes, doing her best to look engaged and scholarly.
‘That sounds painful,’ he said at length.
‘I beg your pardon?’
He pushed his book away and tipped his chair onto its back two legs, crossing his arms and hooking his knees under the table for balance. ‘Your stomach.’ He grinned. ‘Unless there is a gremlin living under your section of carpet.’
Eleanor felt the blood rush to her face. Only too aware of the rumbles emanating from her empty stomach, she had been working with one arm pinned across her lap in a bid to stifle the worst.
‘Call me Sherlock, but my guess is you haven’t had lunch.’
Eleanor shook her head, still dry-mouthed with embarrassment.
‘Me neither,’ he confessed cheerfully. ‘We could grab something together if you like. Miss Coolham can wait. And, frankly, with all the noise your innards are making, I’m not taking in much of this anyway—’
‘God, sorry—’
‘I was joking,’ he pointed out, looking bemused. ‘I’m Nick, by the way. Nick Wharton.’ He leant across the table, all mock formality now, to shake her hand.
‘Eleanor. Keating.’
‘So, do you fancy a bite of lunch, Eleanor Keating?’
‘Yes. Okay. Thanks.’ She set about trying to tidy away the circle of books, which tumbled, messing up her precious markers.
‘You could just leave that lot,’ he ventured after a few moments. ‘I mean, it’s hardly likely to get nicked, is it?’
‘No. Yes. Of course. Good idea.’ Eleanor fumbled the books into yet more chaos, aware of him watching and of what felt like the liquid state of her brain.
He held the door open for her to go down the entrance steps first, announcing as they set off that he knew a good place in the Covered Market.
Outside, the November wind tore at their clothes, rendering it impossible to talk even in the relatively high-walled protection of the college’s main quad. Once in the high street, Eleanor double-wrapped her scarf round the lower half of her face and concentrated on keeping up with her escort’s long stride, sneaking sideways glances to marvel both at the apparent warmth of the heavy cabled jumper and the simple pleasure of walking beside someone who was taller than her by several inches. He had to be six foot three at least. He moved loosely, hands in his pockets, cocking his head at the handsome spired buildings and the grey sky as if it was a balmy summer day.
Eleanor had passed through the Covered Market several times but only to enjoy its jumble of artisan stalls and peer through the windows of its boutique shops. Nick led the way to a tiny café she had never noticed, a handful of tables in chequered cloths next to a counter in front of an open cooking range. He instructed her to commandeer the only free table while he queued for two plates of sausages, baked beans and scrambled egg, having assured her that it was the only thing on the menu worth eating and offering to pay.
He ate ravenously, talking between mouthfuls about the travails of being a third-year medic and how if it hadn’t been for the pressure from his father, a consultant neurologist, he would have applied to read English.
‘I’d even like a crack at Anglo Saxon,’ he admitted ruefully, after Eleanor, sufficiently restored by some food and the openness of his manner, had confessed to the creeping sense of despair over tackling the Beowulf essay. ‘It’s a bit like German, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know what it’s like. I’ve never done German, only Latin and French, but that’s a fat lot of good.’
‘But what about the rest of your year – how are they getting on?’
‘They sort of keep to themselves. There are only six of us and they’re so brainy compared to me… the boys especially. There’s one other girl, Megan, but someone told me she’s really into the Christian Union…’
‘Oh blimey, you’ll want to steer well clear of her in that case.’ He paused briefly in his eating to skewer a finger to his temple. ‘But I bet those others aren’t brainier than you,’ he went on amiably. ‘Boys are really good at pretending to appear as if they know what they are talking about. Trust me, I know.’ He closed his mouth around his last forkful of beans, his dark blue eyes flashing.
Eleanor smiled back shyly, her mind fast-tracking through the unpromising males with whom she had hitherto been acquainted, all of them classmates, some of them glib talkers, some not, like Charlie Watson, with his big kind face and thickset body, who had carried his own silence and shyness like a heavy load. It had been one of the main reasons she had felt drawn to him.
‘It’s mostly bluff,’ Nick concluded, watching her carefully, ‘remember that. So where did you go to school, anyway?’
‘A tiny place in East Sussex, Broughton – you wouldn’t have heard of it.’ Eleanor hesitated. It didn’t seem a good moment to mention that she was the daughter of a vicar. A motherless daughter of a vicar. Even without the Christian Union thing, all of it felt embarrassing, like something that needed confessing to, rather than fodder for general conversation. ‘I am the first person in the entire history of the school to have done Oxbridge,’ she said brightly instead. ‘I only managed it because I had masses of extra lessons. There was this teacher there who liked me… she…’ Eleanor stopped. She had been about to say that Miss Zaphron had believed in her, but it sounded too grandiose.
‘Wow. Congratulations in that case. Loads of people feel daunted here at first,’ he added kindly. ‘It soon wears off. Don’t be afraid to use your own brain would be my advice.’ He beamed at her encouragingly.
Eleanor felt her insides dissolve, not with hunger, but something else that she would have found impossible to describe; close to embarrassment but more pleasant, and without the side-effect of the red face. It somehow made it difficult to continue eating. ‘So, you would have liked to study English?’ she prompted, grabbing at the question purely as a way of diverting attention from the sensation.
‘Oh yes. Sort of. In my dreams, at least.’ He sat back, smiling and pushing his empty plate away.
‘And who are your favourite writers… if you don’t mind my asking?’
It was like she had pulled a trigger. He seemed to explode forwards onto his elbows, landing with such vigour that the table tipped sideways. ‘Amis. Obviously.’ He held the table down, as if it might leap again of its own accord.
‘Obviously.’ Eleanor slowly carved a tiny piece of sausage. She assumed he meant Martin rather than Kingsley. But she hadn’t read either.
‘Mainly for The Rachel Papers, but Money is right up there too. Then there’s Fowles, because of The Collector. And D. H. Lawrence, not so much for Sons and Lovers, or even Women In love, or Lady Chatterley – not that one can discount any of them, but in my view The Rainbow is his true masterpiece. And then there’s Forster of course, not so cutting-edge but still a genius; though when it comes to geniuses, Nabokov has to take the biscuit, for Lolita, obviously, but then there’s Laughter in the Dark and…’
Eleanor gawped as he plunged on, scooping up Conrad, T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare in his wake. It was like watching a small typhoon. A typhoon which made her heart race.
‘He was a lepidopterist, did you know?’
It took a moment to realise he was expecting a response. ‘A… what? Who?’
‘A butterfly lover. Nabokov. And as soon as I found that out, I just thought it was significant… I mean…’ A new group of students were hovering, pointedly eyeing their empty plates, clutching discarded coats and hats, their faces pink and steaming from the outside cold. Nick did not seem to notice. He was still talking in a rush. ‘Take Lolita – it’s almost like he has ensnared this beautiful specimen of youth, of nascent sexuality, and he wants to keep it – to keep her – pinned under a glass so he can scrutinise and feed off it and…’
‘Isn’t The Collector also a bit like that,’ Eleanor ventured, seizing one of the rare moments when he paused for breath, ‘at least, doesn’t a girl get taken prisoner…’ She lost courage, having only indirectly heard about the Fowles book from Camilla, who had pronounced it the creepiest thing she had ever read; but Nick was already slamming the tabletop in delight.
‘Brilliant. That’s a great thought. A great connection…’ The people clutching their coats exchanged glances and shuffled to another vacated table. ‘Fowles and Nabokov as literary lepidopterists… hey, that works really well.’ He sat back, subdued but visibly pleased. ‘I like the way things connect if one looks at them hard enough.’
‘“Only connect” is Forster’s mantra, isn’t it?’ Eleanor burst out, still shy, but starting to enjoy herself. ‘In Howards End? It’s the only one of his I’ve read, but I really enjoyed it. “Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted…” or something.’
‘Wilcoxes and Schlegels.’
‘The Wilcoxes being the Prose, the Schlegels the Passion.’
‘Joining forces.’
They looked at each other happily. Nick had a wide, generous mouth, Eleanor noticed, crammed with astonishingly even teeth, and there was a fleck of egg on his cheek, which she dearly wished she could brush off.
‘Wouldn’t they let you swap subjects?’ she asked eventually. There were a million other things she wanted to ask or say. She was aware of them queuing up inside her, full of excited hope, bumping into one another. But there would be other conversations, she told herself. Other opportunities. He was in her college after all and only in his third year. Medical degrees took ages – she couldn’t think straight enough to remember how long. And she was only in her first term. This was just the beginning. Her skin tingled.
Nick was shaking his head glumly in response to her question. ‘They’d say no. Subject-changing is really frowned upon. More to the point, my father would kill me. Literally. A knife through the heart. While I slept. Whoosh.’ He demonstrated with his fork, flashing a ghoulish smile. ‘Though medicine isn’t too bad,’ he rushed on. ‘In fact, I sometimes think I might make quite a good doctor.’
‘Oh, I bet you will,’ Eleanor cried before she could stop herself. She never wanted the lunch to end. Ever. It was too perfect. There was something coming off him, a sort of confidence – she felt it in waves across the table, not crushing her like all the other male confidence she had encountered, so bullying, so point-scoring, but something generous, holding her up, it felt like.
A man with a dishcloth over his shoulder rapped the table to get their attention. ‘Are you two going to get anything else or not? There’s other folk waiting to sit down.’
Eleanor leapt to her feet, apologising, but Nick took his time, because the guy deserved it for sheer rudeness, he explained, once they had left and were standing under the row of beef haunches and plucked turkeys outside the butchers next door.
‘Back to the library then.’ Eleanor dared to inject a note of regret into her tone.
Nick pulled back one of the heavy sleeves of his jumper to check his watch. She glimpsed fine gold hairs on his wrist and lower arm.
‘I’ve got to be somewhere else. I’ll catch Miss Coolham another time.’
Disappointment pumped inside her chest, making her miss a breath. ‘Bye then. Thanks for lunch.’
‘Bye.’
Eleanor ducked into the throng of shoppers streaming through the market, letting it carry her towards the High Street. Not looking back felt important. She did not want him to detect the extent of her reluctance to be walking away. But suddenly he was in front of her again, striding backwards, laughing as he bumped into people.
‘Hey, you don’t fancy coming to the PPP on Saturday night, do you? They’re showing Rosemary’s Baby. A classic. Mia Farrow… Oh, but you’ve seen it,’ he cried, misreading the shadow of doubt that crossed her face, which was about the acronym rather than the invitation. PPP, she had learned recently, referred to an academic course. Philosophy, Psychology and something she couldn’t remember. Now it was a cinema.
‘I haven’t seen it.’ She laughed. ‘Mia Farrow gives birth to the devil’s child, doesn’t she? Who could refuse an invitation to see that?’
‘My thoughts exactly.’ He laughed too, turning and falling into step beside her.
‘My dad’s a vicar,’ she said in a rush as they emerged onto the High Street. ‘At home, thinking about devils having babies, let alone going to see them, is banned.’
‘Another reason to go.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Porter’s lodge at seven? If I don’t see you before.’
‘If I don’t see you before,’ she echoed.’ Her face ached from grinning.
In one of Camilla’s many women’s magazines she had read an article about the importance of ‘playing hard to get’ if a man took your fancy. But, really, such tactics were impossible, and unnecessary, Eleanor reflected happily, giving Nick a wave as he took off up the High Street, pausing to admire the grace and agility with which he wove through the crowds. Why would two people play hard to get if they liked each other?
She strolled back towards college with her arms swinging and her scarf free and flying, the cut of the cold November air now only making her feel more alive.