Roger was a great success at Oxford. I do not mean that he became a professional undergrad who took up oars and organised summer balls, because he didn’t, but having been rather lonely and rather resented at school as haughty and precocious, he found recognition in Oxford’s less philistine atmosphere and time-honoured elitism. Given his family background he had none of the common grammar school chips on his shoulder in the face of that great concentration of ex-public schoolboys. His tutors fraternised with him as a man who was going places. He loved the ancient music, in spite of its interweaving with the Church, which he professed to despise. Admittedly, such men of God as one encountered in Oxford appeared much too sophisticated to concern themselves with the mere naivety of belief. I perceived Christ Church as a place dominated by the temporal presence of Cardinal Wolsey. To my vestigial Methodism, wrapped latterly in the cloak of Jacob’s Marxism, this appeared very shocking, that the churchmen should be the king’s men, creating and transmitting an ideology of control to the ruling class. I also didn’t care for the ex-choir school boys, clad in their Harris tweed, with whom Roger played the violin at weekends. I like people to defy stereotypes and these lived up to them. Roger considered it a churlish irrelevance to speculate upon their voting habits, when they made up the stuff of decent string quartets, but it got on my nerves to listen to their in-group Oxford talk. It was the era of student revolt, after all, and they talked, instead, of being ‘up’ and ‘down’, of reading in the ‘Bod’ and pedalling down the ‘High’, of ‘handshake’ and ‘Ninth Week’. I never got used to people being ‘up’. Up what? Up a bloody pole, like Simon Stylites? And ‘don’ is a word I couldn’t use. I found it embarrassing. My teachers were teachers, not ‘dons’. Jacob was never a don. A don to my mind evokes a person more than commonly incompetent at boiling an egg or tying a parcel. A person combing cobwebs out of his hair. A person brewing up magical green sparks in the potting-shed with batty conviction. Dr Faustus. A person always in mortar-board and horn-rims crashing eternally through the dean’s cucumber frame. I took to reading breakaway Trot newspapers to provoke Roger’s musicians as I hung around among the music bags and overcoats, waiting for Roger.
‘Is that prescribed reading at the LSE?’ one of them said to me once.
‘I’m not at the LSE,’ I said. This same character once observed, hilariously, to Roger that, ‘Just because I believe in God, your girlfriend thinks I’m Bolshie,’ which, even Roger admitted, was highly amusing.
Only once during my visit to Oxford did I meet a truly delightful man. I met him on a wall near the science buildings where I was waiting for Roger. An Australian graduate student in mathematics, he was, called Donald O’Brien. The son of a policeman, I discovered, descended from an Irish convict labourer.
‘You attached to this here Uni?’ he said. His terminology delighted me in its unbowed colonial assertiveness and made me laugh. I told him that I was not.
‘They don’t on the whole breed them like you around here, if you’ll pardon the liberty,’ he said. I confess that this blatantly chauvinistic remark pleased me, since Roger had recently found a female piano accompanist from Dartington Hall with upper-class vowels and dowdy clothes like Jane’s whose presence reduced me to panic. I think I always knew that Roger would, in the end, abandon me for some Roedean-educated bishop’s daughter who played the harpsichord; for some second cousin of the Huxleys who dissected frogs. It made me clinging and vulnerable.
‘It beats me,’ said my Aussie, as we watched the oncoming drizzle, ‘why nobody thought of turning this place into a penal colony and exporting the British populace en masse to Australia.’ The idea was logical in its simplicity. It caused me to acknowledge – perhaps for the first time – the uses of the mathematical mind.
‘Do you not like Oxford?’ I said.
‘Sure, I like it,’ he said. ‘It’s a real place. Leaving aside that the colleges are like boarding school, the women are either nonexistent or ugly as sin, and the colonial Mafia like me talk about nothing but beer and pissing. The movies, I hand it to you, are a bit of all right. You can’t sit around in the rain, baby. Come and have a drink with me.’ I missed my chance with him. I passed him up, being as resolute as the unspotted Lucrece that nobody but Roger should ever know whether or not I bore a mole upon my breast. I remember thinking with affection as he left me that he made ‘can’t’ rhyme with ‘ant’.