In the morning, I’d done the Civil War paper, produced a spooky simulacrum of a second-year essay on Crown and Commonwealth, and then put together in a mood of perplexity another essay on the Diggers in Northamptonshire – I seemed to watch myself tying off the ends and summing up as I might have watched a technician assemble with wires and solder some specialized but obsolete device. ‘Yeah, it was OK,’ I said, when we’d come out into the steeply shadowed quadrangle at the side of the Schools – symbolic quadrangle of high dark buildings on three sides but open to the street on the fourth, the airy wall through which, with the last paper done, we would pass out into the rest of our lives.
Coming in again after lunch for the Age of Empire, climbing the stone stairs and taking my place in the vast lofty room, I found my sense of estrangement extended to the hundreds of others popping their mortarboards under their chairs, sitting forward, aligning their pens and waiting for the order to turn over the paper and begin. I had just the same neighbours, I hadn’t noticed them before, and I felt the current running through them all in their gowns and bow ties, heads throbbing with figures and dates and clinching quotations, about to write for dear life, all these personal reckonings happening in unison, with just a side-glance of rivalry as the race began. Staveley, the friendless scholar from Trinity, seemed by just sitting with his hand on the unopened writing-book to reach out for his First and his fellowship. He’d trained for this moment, and you knew he had no pity or feeling for the others who had failed to prepare, whose drunken whoops from outside the King’s Arms had reached him as he worked each night until closing time in the top-floor reading room across the street. Next to him, beautiful Stapleford was in improvised subfusc, Jim Morrison hair tied back in a rubber band: there was something charming in his lack of expectation. I couldn’t see Tim or any other friends, round the corner in the L-shaped hall. Wyatt, Wynford and Zukofsky made up the back row with me.
Now the clock in its pedimented housing showed the hour and the invigilating don said, ‘You may begin!’ – something courteously conditional in the phrase, to my ear, as I looked through the questions. I was almost pretending to myself I could do it, when I knew, for the first time in my life, that I couldn’t. The typography, the layout, the gleaming cream paper were entirely familiar, they were every exam I had taken and triumphed in till now. Time: 3 hours. Answer one question from Section 1, and any two questions from either Section 2 or Section 3. I put my hand to my brow and peeped under it at Wyatt, a large dark-haired man writing left-handed and very fast with his arm round the page and his tongue peeping out. I looked again at the options in Section 1, with a ghostly lost sense that if they’d asked me a year ago about the East India Company I could have let them have it, but that anything I wrote now would be a mere sociable summary, as I might have explained it to someone in the pub, with none of the necessary data that Wyatt must be summoning up, as he sat back and blinked at the clock before sitting forward and scribbling some more.
I went halfway to meet the first question in Section 2, on British rule in India after the First World War – it should have been a gift, a sort of premature reward, but I had a broody feeling that Burma, which was part of the Indian Empire till 1937, was my private subject, on which I couldn’t and shouldn’t be examined. I understood it as much through Orwell as through any textbook. I saw it in the Atlas of the World, with its tapering tail cut off and pinned on a later page: I knew the physical essentials, the mountains, the rainfall, the three rivers. But really my feeling of possessing the place was a well-guarded ignorance, an unbreakable reluctance to learn. All this I seemed wordlessly to recognize. I got over the page, still with the morning’s sense of puzzled detachment from my own actions, and with something else unpredicted rising, and rising. I saw myself playing Mosca, the sweaty chill of exertion, Marryat on Curzon in my bag in the Green Room, looked through blindly between rehearsals; I was acting revising, but the play, all that time, was my life. I took in the shock and admiration of those who assumed I was so confident I could bring off both things at once. And I had a huge success with it – the Times reviewer had no space for Ed Newman’s Volpone, the piece, like the show itself, had been all about me. And then, since the play, a strange lethargy of avoidance, afternoons on the river, a never-faced feeling it was now too late to catch up. Now the reckoning had come, and what I’d been stubbornly preparing for was my own failure – an idea so new and repellent that the only way forward was to seize it and brandish it.
I stood up and turned, too sure to be self-conscious, I knew my unexpected action would impinge for no more than a moment on the thoughts of those sunk in concentration beside me – I was going to the toilet, forgetting the rules, not asking permission. I went swiftly and quietly, eyes ahead, eyes down, to the closed double doors at the back of the hall, and tugged open the right-hand door with a swallowed sense of the last chance and then, outside on the unpeopled landing, of no return. I went down the great stone staircase, fast but not leaping, heard footsteps above me, and a voice, stern, anxious but reined in, and now I ran, across the black and white marble expanse of the hall floor, in its passive indescribable emptiness, amid the pressure of sixteen hundred young people, in the rooms opening off it, intently and silently writing, and out, in a surge of reckless triumph and catastrophe, into the everyday High Street. Running footsteps behind me, ‘Hello . . .! I say, Mr Win . . .!’ and I did glance back, to see the winged invigilator bearing down the long broad slope of the pavement, but I ran, and fast, back to college by an unobvious way, and with a feeling as I strode past the lodge and into the quiet quad of being a trespasser. I dreaded meeting Humphrey, and nipped along the kitchen corridor and into the quad from the back to avoid passing his window, where I would have been an impossible and heart-breaking sight.
In my room I dropped the catch on the door, the air unbreathable, among the books and papers I’d stared at a mere fifty minutes before, the scene of fraying preparation for the thing I’d discovered I was not going to do. I tore out of my subfusc, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, denim jacket, snatched up my wallet, and then a notebook, from a feeling already forming that all these involuntary actions would need to be accounted for. Then I left college by the back gate and made my way with a lifetime’s gathered knowledge of the place through college quads and gardens and back lanes to Magdalen Bridge and off out down St Clements till I reached South Park, where the vast open slope seemed either to swallow me up or to offer me up – I climbed in a long diagonal to the summit, and sat under a lime tree with a view of all Oxford, old Oxford, towers and spires cupped unreally between hills, flattened and condensed, like a picture from an age before perspective, an illumination. It was the view of the city from the opposite side from Boars Hill, and closer up.
What I’d done was both startling and inevitable. I couldn’t tell yet if the crisis was over now or if it was just beginning. I didn’t want to explain myself, I put nothing in the notebook, and I wondered if in fact there was a way back – Humphrey would argue for me, passionately, if with a painful sense that the trouble had been brewing for months. They might allow me a resit, under special conditions – everything would be focused on undoing my mistake and bringing to its proper conclusion the serious story of my first-class education.
To get to Gloucester Green I worked out a route, through Christ Church Meadow and up as best I could through the fenced-off rubble of St Ebbe’s. My sense of dodging like an outlaw was the ragged upshot of having no plan, of acting irrationally, and with an instinctual feeling that I had to be kept from reason. Even so, to be sitting on the bus as it started up and headed towards Botley had something appalling about it. The familiar tree-lined road, along which Mum and Esme had ferried me for three years at the start and the end of each term, seemed to pass like a viaduct over an abyss, the bus pulling in time after time and opening its doors to let me off while I sat tight at the back. The other passengers were old people, women with shopping, students turning in their seats to chat with each other in the weightless summer of their second year. None of them had any idea about me.
I plucked the cord and got down at the Boars Hill turning, and when the bus moved off I saw myself six weeks earlier, with my bottle of rosé and no knowledge Nick existed. A van came past, a breeze stirred the roadside hedges, and in the vacant afternoon I walked on, past Robert Bridges’ house, and Masefield’s, where Graves had lived for a while in the cottage in the garden. That seemed a lovely idea, till I caught through an open gate the famous view of Oxford, or the view of Oxford caught me. A baler was turning at the bottom of the field, clank and rumble of haymaking, swallows diving. High up in the ash tree beside Walter’s gate a thrush sang a mad scene, made it up as it went along, wild piercing runs and unconnected afterthoughts, mimicking the nearby finches and blackbirds before it came back to itself.
The cars weren’t there – Walter must be in college – no, he’d have gone to meet Stella by now, out of Schools, and their shared relief that her paper was done would be cut through already by the hardly believable news. My drama now became his – theirs, my friends’, who were thinking their way backwards, for signs this was coming, well, the play, of course, a huge part, and other things, probably much earlier on, thought of sometimes but never talked of, the underlying strain that someone like me must be under. No one answered the front-door bell, for a minute the breeze hissed and died in the beeches overhead, and the absurdity of finding myself here alone passed through me in a wave of despair. I thought loosely of my friends as a group but there was only one person I wanted, and trusted to help me – he was in some obvious inexplicable way both the cause and the solution. I stood back and stared up, where two upstairs windows on the front of the house were wide open, and catching the sun. I strolled round the side with the remote sense I’d had on and off of trespassing, and slouched about to show I felt at home. When I shaded my eyes with my hand to peer in through the dining-room window, I saw myself with unexpected brilliance in the oval mirror that hung over the sideboard, peering back. From the corner of the house you looked down over the lawn where we’d played croquet, and there on the grass by the bench was Nick, with Jenny. It had never occurred to me that Jenny would be with him.
She was lying on her front to read, with her bikini top undone and her breasts squashed under her against the rug. She’d tucked up the lower part into the crack of her arse, to maximize her tan. Nick was in shorts, nothing else, and sitting cross-legged with his back to me. The sizzle of the breeze in the beeches and towering poplars made a large airy cataract of sound, and I came down the steps undetected; even my ‘Hello!’ had them doubting their senses for a moment, Jenny looked at me, quite blankly, then shook her head in a mime of surprise. ‘What’s that?’ said Nick, with his nervous but tolerant laugh, before looking round.
Jenny turned away, half sat up as she fiddled behind her back to fix her top. Nick swivelled about without getting up. ‘Dave! How did it go?’ he said. ‘Are Walt and Stella with you?’ and I saw that for them the rent in the fabric was invisible, my arrival unexpected but the timings made reasonable sense. As I approached them Nick’s smile had its mixture of humour, and concern, and calculation (I’d forgotten its exact but indescribable effect on me). I stood above them, like a child for a moment, bringing some unguessed calamity to the capable self-possessed adults on the lawn. I touched Nick on the shoulder as I stepped past him, and sat down cross-legged at the edge of Jenny’s rug – I was in the fresh shock of his presence, raised my right hand against the sun to look at him, and also to fend off the horrible feeling that I’d broken in on some everyday, never-thought-of togetherness of theirs. Well, here they were, this was where they lived, they were old friends . . .
When I’d told them, I had my first chance to examine the impact of my news. Reflected back to me, it had a scale that in the trance of escape, the passive but ingenious mood of the past few hours, I hadn’t had a chance to grasp. Jenny bit her lower lip. ‘I’m sure they’ll let you sit it again, Dave, won’t they, you could have done it today, you said yourself you’re a wizard at exams.’ Nick took longer, nodding and thinking, the nervous laugh, before he reached out a hand and took mine, gripped it as he jerked it about, to show he wouldn’t be shaken off. Then the telephone was ringing inside the house, and Jenny jumped up and went in. I sensed Nick for the first time was a little bit scared of me, or alarmed by my dependency on him. He was a friend, of my age, revising for his own exams next week, I was everything that wasn’t meant to happen. We sat like that, cross-legged, knee to knee, my right hand clasped in his left, and the conviction that he loved me held the disaster off, beyond the lawn and the house and the trees that leant forward and drew themselves up again over and over.
Jenny came out of the house and we stood and went towards her. ‘It was Walt,’ she said, ‘I told him you’re here. He’s coming back now.’ Nick had his arm round my shoulders, my hand slid round his waist, smooth skin hot from the sun. In the kitchen Jenny, with the adult presence she assumed in that room, said, ‘I think you should ring your tutor, straight away – Henry, is he?’
I took a while to answer. ‘Humphrey . . . yes, well, I suppose,’ but my idea of this talk, the shame and reproach and concern, and the tantalizing fear of being talked round to taking the paper again, loomed impenetrably before me.
‘Walt says they let people resit papers, you know, if something like this happens. It happens quite often.’
‘Yeah, but I couldn’t do the paper,’ I said.
‘Well, I don’t believe that for a minute.’ She stared at me. ‘You mean you couldn’t do it just now, or you couldn’t do it next week?’
‘Both.’
‘Well, I don’t know what happened, of course. Sorry . . .’ – she shook her head and looked down – ‘I didn’t mean to bark at you.’
Nick all this while was quiet, leaning by the sink. He had made his shorts himself, by cutting the legs off an old pair of jeans, and the square greyish bottoms of the pockets hung down an inch below the frayed hem. His legs were beautiful, the whole lean vanityless presence of him so overwhelming that I burst into tears, and it seemed to me he was the reason for breaking down, and not the afternoon’s disaster. He let Jenny walk over and comfort me, which she did stiffly, herself a little frightened. Then, as I controlled myself and took deep breaths, he said, ‘I think . . . well, you’re a perfectionist, Dave. I bet, I’m sure, you could have done the paper, but you couldn’t face not doing your best, and rather than compromise your First you thought you’d blow up the whole thing.’
I felt straight away that this was clever, and plausible, and quite beside the point. We heard a car outside, and then Walter came through, Stella tactfully behind him. She was in her subfusc, the black skirt and stockings, black ribbon tie undone. She brought a taste of the Examination Schools into the kitchen, and something more confounding, a glimpse of the exhausted relief of the hundreds who’d stayed at their desks and seen the thing through, and were waiting to reap the rewards.