Our Little Secret(20)
Hertford was my college. I hadn’t expected to feel so at home in a new place, but when I arrived there mid-September and saw the gargoyles and statuesque heads along the top of the Bodleian wall and the numerous old bookshops, the blood in my body started to surge.
I’m sorry to hurt your true-blue Vermonter feelings, Detective Novak, but you must know by now I didn’t feel any affinity with Cove. Oxford, though, oh, we clicked the minute I set foot in the place.
That day was the first time I walked through a door in a door. All the colleges have huge wooden gates that remain permanently closed, but the smaller doorways within them open and close, and can be locked with keys made from medieval iron. I’d never seen a door in a door before: it felt like a kid’s book, where mice live in the baseboards. I rumbled my suitcase through the flagstone hallway of the porter’s office and onto the hushed lawn of the quad, and there I stopped and sat down on my bag for a minute. Jet-lagged and out on my own, it struck me that I had never before been anywhere so perfect. Even the placards on the two benches bordering the lawn had been polished. Little windows to tutors’ rooms sat just above the hedge line, fringed at the top by ivy, and to my left a winding stone stairwell led up to what I would discover to be the wood-paneled dining rooms of the college.
At first I didn’t notice the young man standing in the archway across from me. It was only when he snapped his copy of Crime and Punishment closed that I looked over. He was leaning against the wall by the arches in studied contemplation, his dress shirt buttoned all the way to the tie that bulged at his neck.
“Hello there, good afternoon,” he said, walking over and offering a moist hand. “I have to deduce that you’re new to the college, judging by the size of your valise.”
He was round and slightly pink.
“Can I help?” He pushed a signet ring around the base of his little finger. “It doesn’t do to struggle up the stairs on one’s own with a case twice the size of you.”
I didn’t consider myself that puny, and was about to reply when he spoke again.
“I’m Freddy. I’m sorry, do you actually speak English?”
“Do you always talk so much?”
“Gosh, no.” He crossed his arms against his shirt, the stripes of which distorted at the midriff. His hair was cropped very close to his head, as if to preempt premature balding. “I rarely talk to newcomers. So you’re American. What a relief. I was starting to think you were Eastern Bloc.”
“I’m only half American. My grandfather was something European.”
“Oh, crossbreeding—well played. Those Americans are everywhere, especially since we ship them in by droves to beat the bloody Cambridge lot in the boat race.” He paused. I stared at him blankly. “The rowing? Gosh, you are a new girl.”
Freddy never left my side the whole eight months I spent in Oxford. He was a third-year biochemist who’d also been to Magdalen College boarding school. That first day he took me to the Turf Tavern, a pub hidden away down a skinny alley I’d never have found on my own. The thirteenth-century beams over the bar were so low that even he had to bend at the knee while he ordered us half-pints of Speckled Hen.
“Some Australian prime minister set a Guinness world record right where you’re standing for quaffing a yard of ale.” He passed a glass of swirling liquid back to me and prodded at the coins in his palm. “And that’s all you need to know about that country.”
We sat on a long oak bench with a red seat cushion that was worn into hard-packed lumps. Freddy chose a seat next to me, which made it hard to look at him. It felt like we were sitting in a train carriage. When he asked questions he rattled them out with the fear of someone racing the clock, as if a buzzer would sound somewhere and there’d be no more talking.
“And is there a gentleman currently with whom you are romantically engaged?” He ran a plump forefinger around the rim of his beer glass.
I picked at the dark varnish on my nail. “There’s a guy. But we’re not dating while I’m here. We kind of are, but we’re not.”
“There’s a guy, is there? Is he terribly handsome?”
“Most girls think so.”
“Is he beefy? I bet he is. Who’d play him in a movie? And don’t say that awful vampire chap or I’ll be forced to abandon you.”
“Harrison Ford.”
“He’s a hundred years old.”
“When he wasn’t.” I took a wincing sip of the murky, warm Speckled Hen. “What about you, Freddy? Are you dating?”
“What a dreadful expression! From now on, we will not be using North American colloquialisms. Let’s get some British into you! Come on, chin chin. We’re off to the Ashmolean.”
Freddy came with me to the opening ceremony of studies, where all new undergraduates had to parade through the streets of Oxford in gowns and mortarboards in order to listen to a don speak in Latin about our responsibilities as students. Beyond Freddy, I didn’t bother to make any friends. Sure, I said hi when I passed people in the corridors of Hertford, and the porters all knew my name. But I didn’t delve too deeply into the nightlife, or trawl for friends. It’s never really been my thing.
From my college room, I could hear the rowdy bar crawls on Thursday nights and the weekend black-tie wanderers drinking from the necks of champagne bottles and shouting in plummy accents about kebabs. I never felt I was missing out. Freddy was somehow older than the average student—it was like he’d arrived at the university with all the refinement of a man in his late forties. He scorned what he termed “undergraduate thuggery” or the “yobs of college life.” We went punting on the River Cherwell, and Freddy brought a wind-up 1930s gramophone. The only time we separated was to attend lectures and tutorials, but mine were few and far between and I barely prepared for them. Not having my dad around to check up on me felt like a whole new world. I exhaled into the absence of my mother. Finally I was a flower able to grow towards a different sun, in any direction I deemed fit.