The two of them have been sleeping on the single bed, he against the wall, and she, lying on her back, next to him. Once, unable to bear her cramped position any more, she slipped off the bed on to the ground, her pillow with her. That was early in the morning. Now it is light. She gets up before him; she rummages among the shelves. She finds a jar of biscuits, and begins to eat them. When she peers through a crack in the curtains, she sees a hedge, and, barely visible above it, pinnacles and rooftops, the dreaming spires. Soon, outside the window, because it is summer, there will be visitors, a goose and a gander, one with pale brown feathers and the other with dark, translucent colours. Like the first tourists to discover a town, they explore the lawn together, though each, doggedly, keeps its distance from the other, maintaining a tangential, somewhat covert, relationship with the other’s self-absorption, like the English couple, Henry and his wife, who are always separated by a few paces during their humdrum walks in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. The days belong to these two, with their fussy, academic interests; they do not seem to be in the first flush of love, but in a period of retirement, discovering earthly wonders; and when a window is half opened, they quack acknowledgingly, rather than gratefully, at the thrower of crumbs, but never trouble themselves to look straight at a human face.
She wears her fluffy slippers, quietly opens the door, and goes to the bathroom so as not to disturb him; she solemnly washes her face, brushes her teeth, and combs her hair for almost a minute with her head bent sideways, as if thinking or remembering. Outside, she can hear other students making their first disconnected movements, the tentative noises, like those of a musical instrument being tuned, gradually accumulating and amplifying into a larger significance. She had never thought that she would give so much of herself to that boy still sleeping inside. He makes her angry, now that she loves his college and friends more than her own, and her heart is heavy with the distance she will have to travel. They were friends at first, they took walks, and then he wanted something more—and had she, too, wanted it?—and she found it more and more difficult to say no, to make him unhappy. And when he was unhappy … She makes herself a cup of coffee, and takes it back to the room. She will have to go now, she says, but she will be back in the afternoon to help him pack. I’ll go and start my own packing now, she says. She wears her trousers and shirt, which are lying on the chair in the shadow, and picks up her things.
Stepping outside, into the clear June day, she inhales the air and hugs herself, and, with quick steps, crosses the road confidently, missing two oncoming cars on either side. She feels relieved, as if Oxford were new to her; as if nothing had happened, and she had not known him, or any of the other people. It takes two years of rainy days, of human contact, to feel this moment of freshness. This is what it should have been like in the beginning, not the newcomer’s worries and desires, lived from moment to moment, the reckless craving for companionship and communication. She smiles and nods at the working men in overalls and the scouts coming in; she is happiest acknowledging people she has come to know by sight. She begins to run towards her own college, as the path curves, and students like herself come out in twos and threes from the gate, quite blind to her, and others go past singly and swiftly on bicycles. She is still running down that path lined with bicycles, where flowers have blossomed on the hedges, and the canal flows on the other side. A group of American academics wearing suits, who are here to attend a conference, emerge, unled, in an excited, bustling train from the doorway like schoolchildren who have lost sight of their teacher. She is coming back to her college in the morning, with its comforting hivelike rooms with large windows, in which students have woken up and parted their curtains, and their study-table, books, and table lamp are visible. She must say goodbye to her scout before she forgets, and to the boy who sits in at the porter’s lodge in the evening, who once used to bravely dye his hair different colours; she must give them her address. Then, if she has time, she will walk down to the Bodleian to see if that book she had ordered before her exams has arrived; she still feels tempted, as if it were the treasured vestige of a discarded habit, to take a look at it. Will that leave her enough time to meet her tutor in North Oxford before lunch—that man whose ordinary, trustworthy name appears beneath the complicated and obscure titles of certain books she will put into her bag tonight, who used to write god-like but compassionate notes in an awesome hieroglyphic on the margins of her essays—and then come back in time to help him with his packing for the summer? The thought wearies her. The thought of parting, of never meeting again, of having to repeat to each other that they will see each other in December, of knowing that he will start again; Oxford wearies her. Just to study here, and go to the library, and walk up the stairs and come down again to have a sandwich at lunchtime; she could do that for ever. But it is never as simple as that. If she could choose, what would she choose? She is going back home to her parents and her wonderful, wisecracking sister, she will never mention it to them, and then she will get married. If she is married, she would like to have a baby in a year, it is something she has thought of, in a vague but intense way, for a long time. She will begin another life.