Gifted and Talented (4 page)

Stopping at a crossroads, he watched a family carrying what looked like most of the contents of a house – chairs, a TV, a bookcase – and Richard wondered briefly what it would be like to have a child starting university. That his and Amy’s marriage had been childless had been her only source of unhappiness in an existence in which everything else seemed a delight. But of course, if they had had a child, he would be bringing it up himself now, alone. And what would that be like?

Difficult, Richard imagined. All the students he could see here seemed to have two parents. Adoring, concerned, proud parents into the bargain. The place was packed with happy couples and blissful families; what on earth, he wondered bleakly, had possessed him to think it was somewhere he could come and hide and try to forget? It seemed to him now that nowhere on earth was more likely to remind him of everything he had lost.

He cycled faster. The woman in the car had only delayed him further. He was late, much later than he usually was. This was entirely due to the advanced hour he had retired the night before, when he had been obliged to attend a tedious drinks reception marking his arrival as Master of Branston. It had been as exhausting as it had been wearisome and unexpected.

He had understood that, being one of the university’s lower-profile colleges and in line with its – pretty crazy – appearance, Branston was less formal than most. But, no. An entire line-up of other college heads had been present, some, frankly, caricatures. The Master of St Alwine’s, for instance, was as ludicrously anachronistic as the foundation over which he presided was rumoured to be. He’d been resplendent in black robes, gold lace and a floppy, feather-trimmed bonnet. Why, Richard wondered, had he gone into academia when he was obviously more suited to pantomime?

Possibly because the booze was better. As his puce nose attested, the Master’s main interest appeared to be vintage port and, while vaguely aware Richard was a neuroscientist, he was clearly struggling to understand his new colleague’s particular field, synaptic plasticity.

‘Yes, I think my wife does that,’ the Master had remarked after much thought. ‘She’s very keen on it.’

‘Synaptic plasticity?’ Richard masked his surprise. He had met the Master’s wife earlier. She was goggle-eyed with a receding chin and had talked almost exclusively about her cats. She had not seemed interested in the frontiers of brain research.

The Master of St Alwine’s had grabbed a passing sausage. ‘Every Friday morning in the church hall,’ he explained. ‘She wears loose trousers. She says it keeps her fit.’

It emerged that he meant Pilates.

‘Synaptic plasticity is about how the brain makes connections,’ Richard explained through gritted teeth. The Master was patently making no connections whatsoever, apart from with more passing canapés.

He had been rescued by a kindly classics professor who had made strenuous efforts to connect her subject with his, but Richard, while grateful for her solicitude, was unable to pick up any of the many lines she threw him. He had lost the knack of small talk, which had always been Amy’s department anyway. At parties she had flitted engagingly about, chattering brightly, charming all. Her ability to always say the right thing had consistently amazed Richard and sometimes, when examining slices of brain through microscopes in his laboratory, he had tried to spot this skill. It had been possible for some time to trace the physical process of thought, but charm, seen only in the eye of the beholder, left no such trace.

No one last night had seemed to find him particularly charming, unless you counted the junior research fellow, squiffy on the Branston house white, who had stumbled into his personal space and, over the thrusting cleavage, bursting out of her low-cut, red satin top, slurred, ‘It’s true what they say about you.’

He had met her unsteady gaze with his own, flinty one. ‘Which is what?’

‘That you’re the sexiest neuroscientist in the business. Talk about
cortex interruptus
!’

Once, Richard knew, this would have made him laugh out loud. Now he merely gave her a freezing look. It did not, however, appear to register; either alcohol had dulled her senses or the skin so abundantly on show was a very thick one. It looked it, certainly.

‘Well, Prof,’ she said breathily, leaning confidingly into him. ‘When you need a night off from the neurons just give me a call.’

Richard had strode away, appalled at the implication that he was somehow available and looking for love. That there could be anyone after Amy was unthinkable, least of all some inebriated postgraduate, pushing her flabby white breasts in his face.

The evening had ground on. There had been speeches to endure, then a terse reply of his own. Only then had Richard been able to escape.

He had bowed tightly at the assembled company and hurried off, knowing they would talk about him after he had gone. ‘Poor man,’ the women would witter. ‘He’s so closed-up, isn’t he? Of course, you know he lost his wife a couple of years ago. Yes; didn’t you know? Dreadful. Cancer. Mmm. She was quite young, too. They met when she was one of his students. Quite romantic, really. So tragic. No, no children.’

In his more philosophical moments, Richard felt that his situation as a widowed and grieving neuroscientist was an oxymoron. It was a contradiction in terms, a philosophical joke almost. More than most, he was aware that he and Amy’s entire marriage, viewed from one angle, had been nothing more than a sequence of neurons firing in a particular way. They had both been mere collections of habits, preferences and impressions, all products of excitation and inhibition in the flabby grey computers they carried in their skulls. At one stage he had hoped that thinking of it like that would help him bear it. But now he knew it just made it more depressing. The only thing that helped him was his work.

Towards the labs he pedalled on amid the parting families. Under a Venetian-style bridge linking a pair of venerable college walls, a woman in a leopardskin coat and aubergine hair was theatrically hugging a girl with a bright pink fringe. A man with a beard, sunglasses and a grey woolly jumper waved from beside a nearby Dormobile covered in CND symbols.

Beside the gates of St Alwine’s, a tall, beautiful but impassive-looking boy was clashing cheekbones like rock ledges with an elegant woman and distinguished-looking man.

‘Bye, darling,’ the woman cried as they climbed into their shiny black car. The doors shut with an expensive clunk and the growl of an expensive engine followed. As the boy raised a hand in farewell, his signet ring glittered in the sun.

The atmosphere was one of carnival almost; every pavement seemed full of smiling, waving people, car doors slamming, engines starting, people hurrying back and forth with bags and boxes. Richard was unable to suppress a wave of misery so powerful it made his knees shake.

He changed gear and cycled faster, as if the physical effort would offset the dread suspicion that he had done the wrong thing in coming here at all. Perhaps he should have turned down Branston. He almost had, but at the last moment, after a particularly miserable New England weekend as the end of the summer term approached and when the sunshine, flowers and general golden youth had almost been too much for him to bear, he had got on a plane and gone to the interview.

England – why not? A change of scene would do him good; a change of continent even more so. Branston, in addition, enjoyed a location close to the internationally famous neurology department where his real interests lay.

The college, so glad to have him interested, had readily agreed to his terms, which were that he was there first and foremost as a research scientist. They could put him on their masthead, website and brochure if they wanted, but he would remain essentially uninvolved in the domestic and pastoral business of the college. After all that had happened, the last thing Richard wanted was to be hosting tea parties for undergraduates. Not least because, in the past, that was something Amy had loved.

At the ghastly drinks reception, some college heads had blithely described the lunch and dinner parties they gave regularly for their students. ‘We aim to provide a family atmosphere,’ one Master had cheerfully said about his teacake-and-toasting-fork gatherings in front of a roaring fire. Richard had shuddered. A family atmosphere was the very last thing he would be providing. Nor would he be spearheading attempts to drum up money, which, according to many college principals, was what they spent most of their time doing. ‘We’re basically just fundraisers,’ one had said. Well, not him, Richard vowed. What money Branston needed, it could raise itself.

Admittedly, Branston had never mentioned such a thing. Nor had it said anything about teacakes. And the final point in its favour – the most important point of all, in a sense – was that the college had an almost unbelievably horrible garden, all dark trees and bald lawns, litter and weeds, positively emanating neglect and abandonment.

A garden, in other words, that could not remotely remind him of his wife. Amy had been a passionate plantswoman. It wasn’t just that her fingers were green, every other bit was too. She had spent every spare minute in their garden at home. Selling the place after her death, he had held out for the right people, and had taken a lower offer because he could tell the buyers would look after Amy’s back yard. She had particularly loved English gardens and at various points over the years he had trailed after her as she paced excitedly past Stowe’s temples, through the white beds at Sissinghurst, by the fountains of Hampton Court, round the lake at Chatsworth, all the time exclaiming at eye-catchers, admiring ha-has, gasping at effects achieved by great sweeping avenues of beech and chestnut.

The further the plane taking him for the interview had got across the Atlantic, the more certain Richard grew that the college gardens would be a deal breaker. Those of the university were famously picturesque. In the taxi to Branston his dread had reached its peak, merciless images of roses against old stone, time-worn, wisteria-framed doorways had filled his imagination. He had considered turning round, there and then.

But the taxi had stopped before something that looked like a nuclear reprocessing plant – the only plant visible, from what Richard could see. He had stepped out in disbelief – and relief. Branston’s brutal, unromantic appearance, so at odds with the ancient grace and gorgeousness of the rest of the university, struck an instant chord. It looked every bit as bleak as he felt; exactly the kind of featureless box he wanted to lock himself away in.

When the Assistant Bursar, an oppressed-looking woman who seemed permanently welded to her clipboard, said something disparaging and apologetic about Branston’s grounds, he had surprised her by saying they looked perfectly OK to him. They were looking for a new gardener, the Assistant Bursar had confided. Richard hoped they wouldn’t try too hard.

Branston’s porter did not conform to the traditional college servant stereotype. He did not have a moustache and bowler hat. He was burly, bald, wore an Arsenal T-shirt and sat behind the sort of sliding glass screen usually found in hospitals. He looked as if he worked out a lot, but seemed friendly enough.

Bent under her rucksack – heavier even than she remembered – Isabel paused at the pigeonholes in the college foyer, a framework of wooden boxes nailed to the wall. Each student had a named one in which their post was put.

The one with Isabel’s name on held a flyer for the freshers’ fair and a bundle of English Faculty instructions. A pigeonhole nearby, however, was bursting with thick cream-and-white envelopes upon which glimpses of beautiful italic handwriting could be seen. They were obviously invitations, and smart ones at that. There was even a bunch of roses stuffed in there. Isabel felt sorry for the flowers, shoved in as they were, without any water.

Curious, she read the name above the pigeonhole: the Hon. A.R.S. Piggott. Isabel’s thoughts flicked instantly back to the
Brideshead
conversation she had had with Olly, about the university not being that sort of place any more, and Branston especially not. The Hon. A.R.S. Piggott rather seemed to belie this. He or she – she, judging by the roses – also sounded vaguely familiar, but Isabel could not think why. She didn’t know anyone with a title.

But she had other matters to concern her, such as finding her room. The
Gesamtkunstwerk
, Isabel now discovered, was designed inside like a huge wheel. The lifts and lobbies formed the centre and corridors spoked off at regular intervals. As a design concept it was no doubt groundbreaking, but finding your way round was a challenge. The fact there were no windows was disorientating. You could be in outer space, or on a journey to the centre of the earth. Which corridor was which? They all looked the same with a strip of orange corridor carpet and rows of shiny beige-coloured doors with brushed aluminium handles and numbers and names slotted into holders.

Isabel pressed on. She passed a closed pair of pale wooden doors which, together, formed the shape of an upright egg. They each bore one half of a simple brass cross and she realised she must be at the spiritual heart of the
Gesamtkunstwerk
, the Branston College chapel. Pushing open the stiff, rather awkward doors Isabel saw an egg-shaped concrete chamber whose grey walls tapered to a rounded cone.

Was this what an unhatched chick felt like? Was it some sort of metaphor? The chapel had no windows and was entirely unadorned apart from a few pale wood benches and, at the cone end, a wooden table supporting a tall, thin, figureless crucifix. One’s faith would have to be strong, Isabel thought.

Her rucksack was pressing heavily on her shoulders now and, panting under the weight of her burden, Isabel went on, only to find herself back in the foyer. She had gone round in a circle, it seemed. She could not help noticing that, in the time she had been absent, A.R.S. Piggott had received yet another bunch of flowers.

She adjusted the straps digging hard into her shoulders and set off again, in the other direction. This time she passed a couple of perfectly globular concrete meeting rooms and the closed door of the college bar. A neat sign read, ‘Branston Bar’. Someone had written underneath, in crazed marker, ‘The Turd’.

Isabel grinned, remembering what Olly had said about the place.

Quite suddenly, there it was: Room twenty. Miss I.J. Murray.

The key was in the door, a metaphor not lost on Isabel. She took a deep breath, then turned it. She opened the door and, heart racing, stepped inside.

Her first impression was that everything was pale. The carpet and curtains were beige, the desk was of blond wood and its chair had an oatmeal padded seat. It was small, but no smaller than her own room at home. Between the desk and the small bed opposite there was just about room to edge through sideways once she had closed the door and placed the rucksack against it.

Isabel looked round. The cream walls were a blank canvas. She realised she could put up what she liked, be who she liked in this room. Who would she be? She stooped to stare at herself in the thin mirror fixed to the tall, slim cupboard by the door. Her own eyes looked back at her uncertainly. What now? they seemed to be saying.

She put her head outside. The corridor was quiet and empty and Isabel felt a sudden loneliness. Was no one else coming? Perhaps they were lost in the wheels and spokes of the
Gesamtkunstwerk
, as she had been. She paused to read the name of her next door neighbour.

A Miss E.S.M. Grey was in twenty-one, to the left. A cool, ladylike-sounding sort of person, Isabel thought, noting the three initials and reflecting that while she had never consciously thought about it before, she had imagined one middle name only to be the rule. But it was she, plain Isabel Jane plus surname, who was the exception here. On the other side, she experienced a faint stab of recognition. The Hon. A.R.S. Piggott. That name again. Why did she feel she knew it?

A commotion at the end of the corridor made her jump. Someone was coming. Seized with shyness, Isabel darted back inside her room and closed the door softly.

A light, breathy, girl’s voice, sounding relieved: ‘Oh, look;
here
it is! Mummy! Daddy! Room twenty-one. It’s here!’

Room twenty-one, Isabel was thinking. So this was Miss E.S.M. Grey.

The sound of a turning key echoed in the concrete corridor.

‘Where do you want this box, Ellie?’ A man’s voice; the father, Isabel guessed. She suppressed a sudden wave of longing.

As an adopted child, Isabel was not in the habit of thinking of her birth parents. It felt disloyal and, besides, there was nothing to think of, no peg to hang anything on, no picture, no sound. Only Mum was real and she hadn’t let her come. As the waves of self-criticism rose once more within, Isabel stared at the door and felt that she never did anything right.

The door was slightly ajar and she could see movement outside. Figures. After a few assorted glimpses, Isabel could put together the following: a girl with long fair hair in a long blue cardigan, skinny jeans and Ugg boots; a man with claret cords and a blue pullover; and a woman – the mother, presumably, who seemed to have dressed up more for the occasion – in a brown-printed wrap-dress and sandals with aquamarine heels. Isabel heard her, now, exclaim, ‘The Hon. A.R.S. Piggott! She’s got the room next-door-but-one to you, Ells. You don’t think it could be
the
Amber Piggott, do you?’

‘Amber Piggott? Never heard of her,’ the father said.

‘She’s been in the papers all summer. She’s an heiress, got an incredibly rich father; he owns department stores, I think. She’s a sort of “it girl”, very glamorous, kind of the new Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, but even more so, if you see what I mean.’

‘How awful,’ said the father uncharitably. ‘The old one was bad enough.’

Ellie’s door closed now, and Isabel was unable to hear anything else. She sat back on the bed and stared at the creamy blankness of the opposite wall.

So that was who the Hon. A.R.S. Piggott was. She remembered the woman’s tabloid on the train, the picture of the glamorous blonde laughing in the limo and something about her starting a degree in literature somewhere. She would never have imagined it was here, Isabel thought. But being spectacularly rich and glamorous didn’t mean you couldn’t be clever too.

Voices out in the corridor broke into her thoughts. Ellie’s parents could be heard saying goodbye, but Isabel did not look through the hole again; goodbyes really were private.

She busied herself with unpacking. She could hear the faint thumping of music through the walls. She thought she could hear Ellie’s voice too, singing along, and there were busy scraping and thudding sounds as if she were arranging her belongings as well.

Isabel’s rucksack contained mostly clothes and once they been put away the room looked similar to how it had when she had started. She decided to strike out, find the kitchen and explore the bathrooms. The bathrooms were at the end of the corridor; she remembered passing them on her way down.

Opening her door again, she set off along the soundless corridor. It was odd how dead and strange concrete felt beneath one’s feet, even concrete under a carpet.

The kitchen was at the end, as seventies as the rest of the décor, with rather battered off-white units containing water glasses, plain white plates and mugs. There was a large steel sink with a ridged draining area and a white metal stove with round black electric rings scuffed and faded in the middle as if they had seen a great deal of use over the years. There was a window with a view over the college gardens; they looked rather scrubby and unloved, Isabel was thinking. Someone was working out there, though: a woman in a funny-looking purple hat . . .

Someone entering the kitchen from behind made her turn round suddenly. A girl in skinny jeans, Ugg boots and with one hand plunged deeply into the pockets of a long, baggy pale blue cardigan: Ellie, obviously.

She swished her long fair hair and smiled. ‘Hi,’ she said in the light, rather insubstantial voice that Isabel already knew. ‘I’m Ellie.’

‘Isabel.’

‘Oh, you’re the girl next door,’ Ellie smiled. ‘Fancy a coffee in my room?’

Ellie was reading history. Her room was a revelation; she seemed to have eradicated all institutional touches. The bare bones were the same as Isabel’s, but it could not have looked more different.

‘Oh, I’ve had years of practice; horrid girls’-school bedrooms and all that,’ Ellie said breezily, as Isabel, clutching a steaming mug with the BBC logo admired the colourful embroidered cotton throw on the bed and the fringed, sequinned and patchworked Indian cushions piled on top amid a couple of teddies, evidently worn by love and time. One had an eye missing, the other lacked an ear but they were, Ellie had rather touchingly confided, her absolute favourite possessions.

She had strung pink fairy lights along the top of the wardrobe and customised the biscuit-coloured shade fixed to the centre of the ceiling with magenta tissue paper. The general restful, souk-like atmosphere was completed by a thick, white, scented candle glowing on the desk and emitting a delicious citrus smell. Inhaling it, drawing in the general rosy comfort and warmth, Isabel wanted to lie down on the glittering bed amid the teddies and surrender to exotic dreams. Or else hear about Ellie’s gap-year stint as a BBC intern. Her godmother worked for Radio Four, Isabel’s favourite station. ‘Jenni Murray?’ Ellie said absently. ‘Oh, she’s really sweet. Anyway, here’s my travel blog.’

Her smart new laptop was open beside the scented candle on the desk and she was busy scrolling through a sequence of colourful pictures.

After the BBC, which Isabel would much rather have heard about, Ellie had gone to work for various charities abroad. She had helped in the favelas of Brazil and on a women’s collective farm in the Congo. She had also taught English in India and helped build a school in Mexico.

‘Where did you go for your year off?’ Ellie asked brightly as she prodded the buttons from time to time, to change the image.

Isabel felt the sudden urge to giggle. Working in ‘Bide A Wee’, the Lochalan café, hardly compared to Ellie’s altruistic globe trotting. She had been saving up for uni, not saving the world. The only social difference she had made was to persuade Miss Macpherson, the café’s somewhat conservative owner, that a patisserie range consisting entirely of shortbread was somewhat limiting and carrot cake could be introduced with no loss of life or limb.

‘Oh, nowhere amazing,’ she said with perfect truth, quickly turning the subject back to Ellie again. ‘That school sounds wonderful.’

‘It was,’ Ellie sighed, pulling a rueful face. ‘I know this sounds a bit much but I really did feel privileged to help these poor children; realised just how lucky I am and all that.’ Her face flushed, but then she grinned. ‘But it wasn’t all like that,’ she added, launching into a description of a holiday in Thailand with two schoolfriends called Milly and Tilly, both now at Exeter. ‘It was sort of like our last fling,’ Ellie reminisced wistfully. ‘They were my absolute besties.’

Isabel examined the photos on the blog of Ellie and her absolute besties. The besties had long hair, just like Ellie, although, being thinner, they were better suited to the gap-year uniform of strappy black vest top and safari shorts. In the picture, the three of them were sitting under strings of fairy lights holding pastel-coloured plastic cups the size of large plant pots, bristling with straws. ‘Thai buckets,’ Ellie explained, her voice fond with remembrance. ‘You can dance all night after one of those. Actually, I did some fire-eating.’ She giggled.

‘Fire-eating?’

‘Mm. I’d seen a couple of girls from Australia do it in Koh Jum. I really wanted to do it and it was quite easy, actually. The lighter fuel in your mouth doesn’t taste half as bad as you expect.’ Ellie was giggling. ‘Tills and Mills thought I was an absolute maniac.’ She sighed and looked suddenly serious. ‘We had such fun. I wish they could have come here too. I miss my besties.’ She turned to Isabel anxiously. ‘But we can be friends, can’t we?’