The academic year had not fully started. Term was not due for another two weeks. Parties left their mark on the city center. In the mornings, there was glitter wedged between the cobblestones; cans of beer placed politely on top of public rubbish bins. There was a McDonald’s on Cornmarket Street: it played Vivaldi to the undergraduates slumped sideways at 5 a.m., waiting for a Happy Meal to take back to their rooms. Outside it, concrete slabs of benches were divided with sharp metal rails. The last of September slipped into October but the heat held time still. Halloween displays remained stacked full with decorations and chocolate next to near-empty coolers of ice cream—in the evenings, I ripped a share bag of candy off one, and fished a Cornetto out of the other: dinner. I queued for self-checkout machines and blended in with lines of students clutching tins of chopped tomatoes and sliced bread.
And when the next opportunity to do so came, I delivered an apology to my neighbor. I said, I’m sorry for asking whether you’re a racist, and after a while he managed a smile and said, Ah well, I suppose it’s always better to check. But some awkwardness still cast its pall, so I asked, Who else lives here? And invited him in for a conciliatory cup of tea. He didn’t speak to them, but there were five other tenants in separate rooms, and below us, a couple in the converted basement flat. Some of them had been there as long as him. He could hear them when the floorboards squeaked or the doors slammed, or when the smell of the coffee they had brewed seeped around the adjoining rooms. I began to recognize them this way, too. I listened for creaks on the landing when I came out of the shower to make sure the hall was clear, tiptoed the corridor back to my room, trailing droplets of hastily rinsed shampoo. Quickly, I discerned nuances in tread and gradually an association between them and different smells from the communal kitchen: heavy tread, mango curry; skittish run, boiled rice; soft, slow step, garlic and chicken. When each set of footsteps retreated back into its room, I crept down to inspect the leftover crumbs and tea towels, and dishes piled like stained white ghosts in the sink.
Nothing happened. I tried to watch the news with my neighbor, but often found I couldn’t. He laughed at it, which horrified me. I watched reruns of Friends instead and resented the fact that Monica never asked any of the characters for rent, even when she worked a waitress job in a diner, even when she couldn’t get a catering job for four months. I listened to the laugh track echo around her purple and chintz living room: dull, soothing monoglossia. The arc of the Friends’ lives changed, but the times never did. Characters got better jobs, got married, upgraded the apartment and left for better housing, and the laugh track stayed the same—was that meliorism? I wondered. No presidents got impeached, Twin Towers did not fall. New Yorkers walked around the city, unheeding of bomb plots, or terror, or war. If the show had managed to trundle on long enough for the markets to crash, would Chandler have lost his job? Perhaps Ross might have left his lectureship and museum in the wake of the budget cuts to education. But would I have wanted to watch that? What else did anyone with comfortable enough means ever really do, except look at the news and accept the circumstances of the world so long as they did not interfere with the general course of what it took to live a life? I watched it as it was and did nothing, turning screens on and off in my room.
But on the seventh day, there was a knock on my door, and a woman in a hoodie and pinafore peered into my room. She said, Rubbish? Clean? She had a face gently carved with freckles and lines; a coil of graying brown hair. Her English rolled and lisped. Spanish? I asked. She shook her head. Maria, she corrected. Maria came in and began to unburden me of any simple responsibility I might have had in that room. And when she made to spray cleaning fluid on the sink, when she took out rags for the bookshelves’ dust, when she plugged the Hoover in and set the brush to roll and suck along the floor, my cowardice overtook me. I left for a walk.
Outside, I found Ghislane leaning back from the house, taking in the Paters’ plaque with her phone’s camera lens. It was perhaps her absorption in this task, perhaps the hedge that obscured my coming out, which meant she did not see me. I approached her from the side and made my best attempt. I said, Are you looking for me? But she seemed confused. It was never what I thought. Her eye roved and shuttered. She took the measure of the light, angled, cut, and framed. Finally, instead—I’m writing on aestheticism—and—Why are you here?—and—I wonder what they do with this place now. I shrugged. She began to talk about how incredible it was, Pater having a plaque when all his life he was deemed a vacuous and immoral pleasure-seeker on account of his being gay. I made to talk as well, but her phone buzzed, and she was away.
A beat. I stood. I checked Instagram. Ghislane’s account. And there, already, a selfie in front of the house (swipe) a closer crop on the plaque (scroll down) Pater quoted below the post overall. The impress of a personal quality, a profound expressiveness, what the French call intimité, by which is meant a subtler sense of originality, the seal on a man’s work of what is most inward and peculiar in his moods and manner of apprehension: it is what we call expression carried to its highest intensity of degree.
The top of Ghislane’s head in the selfie blocked out a stain of bird shit on one of the first-floor windows. I looked at the window itself, less spectacular than what I had just seen on my phone. The brickwork was less defined; lighter. I looked back at my screen—she was radiant around it, and it looked better. When the house belonged to her, it was a magnificent thing. I resumed my walk.
At the end of Broad Street, the petal-pink pub; its dark wood interior; the overspill of future ministers onto the pavement, past its doors; and there, visible, their uncertainty, their apprehension towards a girl holding an India pale, paid for with her government loan. (I walked.)
Past the pub, Wren’s rotunda. Its duck-egg-blue dome. The curve of a hall. The Bodleian’s castle of books adjoining. In both, the turnover of robed crows graduating; in both, their black wings flapping; in both, the echo of what they swear fealty to. That centuries-old chant, Do fidem, binding them to what they’ve learned. Underneath, the same boys with a difficult relationship to what predicate a subject may reasonably perform within its clause. Boys who believe in teddy bears and plovers’ eggs as a political cause. On the wind, their performance; the ceremonials, the Latin few of them know. (I walked.) Do fidem to that ceiling of angels painted centuries ago. It all ascends: the admirable smoke and drink and the deep armchairs and the pleasant carpets: the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and privacy and space. Three years spent having dinner delivered from an invisible kitchen to a well-adorned hall. A degree in pursuit of public service while white gloves put out plates of slow-cooked duck with an orange-and-ginger sauce. (I walked.) Do fidem, out they come. Picture them polishing shoes and a CV. The bridge sighs. What would there be to make them, if not where they came from? Intellectual freedom depends on material things. Everywhere, the heavy wooden doors and keyhole’s false promise. Everywhere, the push and pull of magnet strips, the binary code: a database and no chance of entry so random as finding a piece of metal to turn in a hole. (I walked.) Everywhere, languor. Do fidem. What keeps it pretty? Do fidem. At what point does intention evolve?
At Turl Street, I stopped for coffee and imagined Maria letting herself into the other tenants’ rooms. She removed spit and toothpaste from sinks, she lifted hair from carpets, she opened windows and let fresh air overtake all other smells. She unhooked her master key from her belt and made steady progress; knew the house as a whole to be able to clean out any trace of us having been there.
Now put it this way: not they, but you. Once, presumably, this quadrangle with its smooth lawns, its massive buildings, and the chapel itself was marsh too: teams of horses and oxen must have hauled the stone in wagons from far countries and then with infinite labor the gray blocks were poised in order. Oxbridge is an invention; “I” is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. How much can be composed from guilt, and the place that you are in? Infinite amounts and nothing at all. (As I walked, I scrolled.) Points won: there is the gravel, you are a woman, you are brown, you have made it here. Points lost: there is the turf, you were born bourgeois in your comforts and desires. Now see them both and decide which is true. When you lean into one, you watch the other rescinded. Nil pwa, the twenty-first century’s great game is to collapse all of history into a pixel; an impression; a now. Who are you then? (I scrolled.) You are brown and bourgeois, and the internet does not believe you exist. You believe in equal opportunity and the welfare state. You believe in home-ownership and a competitive CV. Riot or march, all it comes down to is neoliberal shame. Points won: a sandwich and change to the man in blankets in front of the college stone. Points lost: the stone has an entryway, the pass to which you own. The common room, the carpet, the armchairs: you know, in no small way, the privilege of a place can depend on the absence of the wrong body as much as the presence of the right one. It is not impossible to shift the relationship between tradition and what is strange. Now you are inside, and does it occur to you to ask him in? Do fidem: no need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anything but oneself.
(I scrolled.)
Once I felt I had walked for long enough, I turned back. The room was clean and Maria was gone. I ran the tap for a few moments. I upset a pillow. I trekked grass and dirt from my shoes into the carpet, sprayed some perfume in the air, and threw my coat on an easy chair. Ghislane’s post itched at the back of my skull and, because of it, a well-worn line: To see the object as in itself it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly.
I had always thought Pater was ahead of his time. The book that sentence had come from, The Renaissance, practically foresaw Instagram, with its insistence on dogged individualism as a mode of perception, its insistence on personal aesthetics as vision and feeling. I took my copy down from the room’s shelves; began walking in circles with it in one hand and Ghislane’s Instagram account on my phone in the other. Only two weeks had passed since I had last looked properly at her account, and still she had managed to fill her immediate grid with unfamiliar posts. I scrolled through what I had not yet seen and tried to find a Pater quote to ascribe to each one.
First turn around the room. Pater argued that for something to have true value—value which could touch and alter the soul—its maker would have to transcend the conventions of their era through the absolute expression of their own temper and personality. That which was unique and utterly subjective to one’s self in the context of set environments, in other words, a good amount of egoism, was the source of beauty and worth. And there Ghislane was: wearing subfusc and utterly herself in the middle of a thirteenth-century college hall and portraits of distinguished alumni surrounding her on every wall. When her makeup was perfectly done. How she held a tiny, striped Mansur Gavriel with both hands. The entire setup was so immaculate I came to a halt. This was not the absolute expression of her. Who enshrined her onscreen as though they did not exist? I knew they were there, holding the phone. Could I pull my thumbs in opposite directions widely enough across the screen; zoom to check whether their reflection could be found in those aged luminaries, instructing her pose? Would the oil paint be shiny enough for that? I looked for Ghislane’s caption—giving the company some spice—and found it was Paterian enough.
Second turn around the room. Now who Ghislane was. Now a gold quilted throw on the bed. A hook, dangling beads off the wall; the drawn curtains, decanted whiskey, and Dove deodorant aerosol. The box of Weetabix and the used bowl, and the Anne Carson on the shelves; the paper on the desk and the pen angled neatly, just so. The staged authenticity of the room. Ghislane called it, My true messy self. And of course, Pater likewise agreed that one could accomplish their function in the choice and development of some special situation, which lifts or glorifies a character in itself not poetical. To realize this situation, the artist has to employ the most cunning detail, to complicate and refine upon thought and passion a thousand-fold. I assessed the cunning detail of my own space and found it not poetical enough. I took my coat from the easy chair and put it on a hanger. I lit a candle. I fussed my duvet until I felt better. I began to take my third turn around the room, but knocked my knee on the corner of my desk and found myself dizzy. I sat on the floor to judge the succeeding photo as the last.
Ghislane well knew what an event was when it occurred and stood with admirable readiness to arrest it. It could be anything. Such as: my girls. So—an event was several girls clasped to each other on Ashmolean stairs, becoming caryatids in neon tops and Topshop jeans. The tops of their heads crested the username in her header. They held it up. They were attentive to the shutter of the lens. And Ghislane was aware, there was no doubt in my mind she was aware, that in documenting this she had created a new sort of mythology with a tone and qualities of its own. Pater supposed that when the ship-load of sacred earth from the soil of Jerusalem was mingled with the common clay in the Campo Santo at Pisa, a new flower grew up from it. I looked at the girls immortalized laughing on the museum’s moldering steps. The bloom of their camisoles and the stalks of their legs. Because of Ghislane’s phone, they would always be there.
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end. To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits; for habit is relative to a stereotyped world. I laid myself out on the floor; contemplated the ceiling and allowed myself to be pissed off. Even Pater had made his impressions in a permanent room. Here I was, having walked circles in it, looking at Ghislane, who, with her song of a name, could dispense herself anywhere there was a radio or a phone.
I lay on the floor until I heard a knock; stiffened—but it was my neighbor, nudging the door open with his shoulder until I tipped my chin. I watched, critically, his big strides in. He gave me a once-over and concluded, Tea?
I raised myself up on my elbows and shot back, Do you ever drink anything else? Could we do orange juice, just to mix it up?
He put the kettle on anyway. The Renaissance fell into his line of sight as he did and he picked it up.
So this is the Pater chap.
Mmm.
Lovely of you to take the time. Go on. I still want to know all about him.
I went back down on the floor and mumbled, It wasn’t for you, I was trying to see something.
He didn’t take offense. I told him what it was I had been doing, and he finished making the tea. He placed a cup delicately by my side; stretched himself out next to me on the floor, balancing his in both hands on his stomach. Finally, he said, I don’t get it. I looked at him, and he went on—You’re the one who sleeps here, not her. Pater’s long-dead. What difference does it make who lived in this house before?
Well—I looked back up at the ceiling—that blue plaque outside probably added an extra hundred quid to our rent for a start.
I’m pretty sure the university did that.
I went on as though I had not heard. Ghislane seems to have found a new way to impress herself on a space that doesn’t just rely on the physical. She filters herself into places via Instagram. The photos she puts up are perfectly posed; they’re an overall representation of her taste and personality laid onto a profile that works as an overall microcosm of her self. And it works so well, she can do it with anything, even with photos of settings which clearly don’t belong to her. Our house, for example. She uploaded this ridiculous photo where you can see her looking beautiful and quoting Pater in front of it, so it looks like she’s far more familiar with it than she really is. See? I thrust my phone at him until he put his tea down and accepted it. We lay side by side. He had his arm in the air and Ghislane’s Instagram hovering above us. He squinted at the gray glow of assorted pixels.
Impress herself on a space, my neighbor repeated with deliberate slowness. So because she took a picture of the house, she now lives here? Should I be cutting her a key?
Listen—I went up on my elbows again and made sure he could see the irritation on my face. Take your bastard tea and get out. But he took this as a joke. Okay, he said when he’d finished laughing, in the first place, it’s your tea we’re drinking, but let’s say what you’re proposing does matter. Clearly you’ve got a nice grip on how important Pater is to this place. So you’re fine, no? Take a photo of the house. I’ll be the first to congratulate you on living here, too.
I grabbed my phone; went to sit up properly out of frustration, but in so doing knocked over the mug he had placed next to me. I scrambled; ran to the toilet for tissues. When I got back, I found him just the same, watching the stain soak into the carpet.
For fuck’s sake, I snapped, and shooed him away so that I could clean the mess. He laughed again. Look, you’re already ruining the place, he said. It’s definitely yours now.
The tissues kept disintegrating before they could properly soak up the tea. I gave up using them and fished the T-shirt of my pajama set from out under my pillow. I was on my knees and he was stood two paces away, watching me attend to the patches of umber blossoming from out of the carpet into my clothes. It’s not mine, I said. It’s not mine because I don’t know how to do the thing Ghislane does. And now I’m going to have to pay for this stain out of my deposit. And you’ve made me ruin my fucking pajamas.
I looked up at him. He sighed. It’s okay, he said. I get it. The limbo between terms gets me a bit funny as well.