When Dad cuts me off in a letter, he writes, as if it’s never occurred to him: ‘your mother keeps pointing out that your heart has not been in the course for some time.’
Which is true. I have spent a year on a BA in Library and Information Studies at Ealing’s Higher Education College, which my father signed me up for in the week before the first semester started. It was one of the five courses he’d underlined with a red felt-tip in The Times’s Clearing List, speaking with the Admissions office himself. My A-level results had been disappointing. As soon as I found the college bar the slow slide into failure was secured.
Library and Information Studies was, as far as I was concerned, beyond tedium and full of diligent people who were not clever enough to be anywhere else. It was a course, bar the diligence, I was perfectly suited to. My diary depicts a conspicuously tedious eighteen-year-old. As I wade through the pages for clues about her personality and motivation all I can think is: this diary needs burning.
I and a Goth from Swansea spent many hours casing our fellow students and many hours in the bar. One night a boy named Jacob staggered over. It was the red hair that drew him, and soon I was bent across his sofa, bewitched by the idea that I had a boyfriend who had both a motorbike and a drug habit.
Unfortunately it would be years before I realised that promiscuous is not the opposite of frigid. The opposite of frigid is aroused, and I did not find arousal here. Apart from missing almost every lecture, when Easter came I also missed the train home. I called Mum from bed, Jacob pretending to do a station announcement as he rolled the next spliff.
‘Sorry,’ I squeaked, ‘there was a problem on the tube.’
It’s a lie I remember because Jacob pushed me into it. Some years earlier I had given up trying to deceive my mother. Perhaps I hoped she’d come to a different conclusion about me than I had come to about myself.
However, the evidence was against me. Seven years of eye-wateringly expensive education had produced only one A-level pass – a C in Classical Civilisation. Neither had mixing with ‘decent people’ secured the prospect of a relationship with one. My mother had flushed her own prospects down the marital latrine, while I seemed to be casting myself into a toilet.
There is nothing whatever I remember about that year, other than the waste of it. While Jacob two-timed me with another redhead the entire twelve months, I failed the first-year exams and then I failed the retakes. The letter Dad sent was, in his own words, ‘the toughest I’ve ever had to write’. He’s cancelled the banker’s order, and anticipates the Department of Education will be in touch for repayment. He tells me that I’m being cut off because he doesn’t like to show favouritism. It has only been a couple of years since Adrian received the same missive.
Neither does he think there is any excuse for me refusing to live up to the Gordonstoun motto – ‘showing that you can do it even if you hate it’. Which, although he has massively misquoted, is what school was like.
Then he gilds the ‘cut’ with the stories he likes to tell himself. The only reason that he stayed on in Saudi Arabia, he writes, was because we said we liked boarding. So my lies had convinced someone.
He acknowledges that the years apart have made it very difficult for us to live together. Apparently I’m at everyone’s throats. Though of course I remember it as everyone else being at mine. Still he would like me to come ‘home’ and settle down to a ‘sensible’ way of life. Naïvely and movingly he writes: ‘We could get to know each other a bit better and maybe become friends instead of all this fighting.’
I don’t respond.
When he receives no acknowledgement of the toughest letter, he rings and asks again if I will move ‘home’. I’m too distracted by Mum to answer. I can hear her voice, distantly at first, yelling from the kitchen: ‘Go ahead and invite her, but I want nothing to do with it.’ Soon she’s on top of the mouthpiece. ‘I do not want her home.’