House of Windows (2 page)

Michael’s phone was endlessly engaged or off when Nick tried it at five past each hour. At nine, he gave up and settled down with a packet of biscuits by way of dinner, stacking them into a tower and forcing a birthday candle into the top one until it split. He propped the candle between the pieces and lit it, sighing as it promptly listed to the side, dripping wax down the edge of the stack.

I wish that this time next year I’ll have a First in my Part
IA exams and some friends
. The puff of breath sent the candle tumbling across the table, painting a streak of wax after it.
Birthday candles are not meant to be bad omens
, he told it, tossing it into the bin. The attempt at humour felt pathetic, worse than the silence.

Sighing, he curled into one of the new kitchen chairs and opened his notebook to the page where he’d been working out a series of formulae for integrating trigonometric functions involving powers. He’d been playing around with the formulae since he’d printed out the first term’s example sheets from the Maths Faculty website, hoping to find some shortcuts for his Differential Equations course. So far he’d been guessing at the formulae, working from simple examples to see if he could spot a pattern.

Tapping his pen against his cheek, he glared at the page. There had to be a reason that
sin
ⁿ
acos
^m
a
seemed to follow different rules when
n
and
m
were both odd or even, versus when one was odd and the other even. That couldn’t be right, unless there was some principle at work like two negatives make a positive, while a positive and a negative make a negative. Or maybe the whole thing was wrong: some random quirk of only using examples with
n
and
m
less than ten.

‘If I were a maths genius, I’d understand how it all worked,’ Nick told his Caffeine Addict mug. ‘Though I’d probably still be talking to myself.’

With a sigh, he crossed his arms on the table and lowered his head on to them. While some of his university materials
looked horrifying, he had to believe the lectures would explain everything. After all, the Faculty was too big to be comprised entirely of geniuses. Most of the others had to be like him: clever enough to use logic to plod their way to the correct answer, rather than having it appear, miraculous and fully formed, in their heads.

Chin propped on the heel of his hand, he let his eyes blur on the chart of formulae. He jumped when his phone beeped.

Nick pushed himself to his feet and scowled his way into the sitting room. ‘So much for the birthday pizza,’ he told the mess of boxes, or maybe he only thought the words: he was so used to no one being there to hear that sometimes he wasn’t sure what he said aloud and what stayed in his head.

The road outside grew dark, then orange with the glow of the streetlights. The overgrown shrubs in the tiny front garden became alien: leathery and shiny, highlighted with poisonous stripes of reflected colour. Even though it felt like conceding defeat to admit that it was dark – that his birthday was almost over, no chance of rescuing it now – he put on the kitchen light, then both of the living-room lights, then the hall light, and the light over the front door, and still the house felt huge and strange and empty; even with the stereo
blasting out cheery cheesy pop music, it was full of echoes and shadows.

He trudged upstairs for a jumper, took out the brand-new blue cashmere. Then he remembered Michael’s look of puzzled surprise as he’d watched Nick unwrap it that morning, forgetting for a moment to pretend that he was the one who’d picked it out, rather than Secretary Sandy.

His favourite jumper was at the bottom of his box of A-level textbooks. Worn and disreputable, with holes under the arms, it no longer smelled of his grandmother, but there was something in the texture of the weave that
felt
happy: the echo of a memory so far down in his soul it was all emotion, a burst of colour and warmth, adrift from time and place. The smell of fresh lemon cake and jam pastries. Flour on his nose, batter smeared into his clothes. Laughter, and games, and walks in the woods. Great Adventures to the nearest town to buy books. Soft warm
enormous
towels after a bath. Story after story before sleep.

Her photo smiled from his bedside table. He turned the frame so that the glass reflected the light, hiding the picture.

By the time he’d taken the brand-new duvets, pillows and bed linen out of their packaging and made his bed, then Michael’s, the house was starting to feel more familiar: there was something homey about the way he hadn’t stretched the fitted bottom sheets enough, so the mattresses showed where the fabric wouldn’t pull down to the bedframe. He already remembered which part of the floor in his new room squeaked, and which step made the most noise on each
staircase. His books were on the bookcase. His clothes in the chest of drawers.

And it’s not like I had any real friends back in London to miss
, he was telling his desk lamp when there was a scratching at the front door.

His father blinked in surprise when he pulled it open. ‘I didn’t think you’d still be awake.’ Michael pasted on a smile a moment too late to render the words glad.

‘Coffee?’ Nick called over his shoulder as he led the way to the kitchen.
Birthday cake, if you’ve remembered one?
he mumbled into the cupboard. ‘Are you off early tomorrow?’

‘No, I’m good to go down to College with you, like we said. Anyway, how’s everything here? You should use the household card if we need any pots and pans, stuff like that.’

Nick sighed. ‘I guess I should learn how to cook spaghetti at least.’

‘Well, we’ve made boiled eggs before,’ his father said. ‘I seem to remember your mother saying that roasting a chicken and potatoes was just putting everything in the oven until it was brown but not black. Think we could manage that.’ The words puffed out in jolly staccato bursts: a ‘ho ho ho’ of overwrought cheer.

‘I don’t remember her cooking. Not with Roger,’ Nick said softly.

Michael’s face fell. ‘She had a fad of it the year before we separated. Bought a whole shelf of recipe books and half a ton of ingredients. Lasted a few months. She was just getting the hang of baking when …’ He stopped to rub at the bridge
of his nose. ‘Anyway, she lost interest. You know how it was.’ He picked up his phone again. ‘Better just reply to this email.’

Twenty minutes later, Michael was still sighing over his phone.

‘Think I’ll get to bed then.’

His father glanced up with a smile. ‘Night, Nick. Thanks for holding the fort.’

Michael was fully focused on his mobile when Nick paused to dither in the doorway before turning himself around again. His steps sounded heavy on the stairs, but his father didn’t call after him.

‘It’ll be tough for a while, but we’ll get there, right?’ Michael had said the night Nick first installed himself in the guest bedroom of his London flat.

If we’re not there after four years, I’m not sure it’s happening
, Nick told the face looking out at him from the window behind his bed. He shuddered at the expression that met these words, slammed off the light. His reflection vanished, leaving the window clear. Below, in the garden, a cat leapt on to a fence post. It stalked towards the house then settled, looking up at the sky, its eyes silver in a shadowed face.

The dream, when it came, wasn’t a surprise. He was back in his STEP admissions test, only he didn’t seem to understand any of the questions because they had apparently been written in the Cyrillic alphabet. He was telling himself not to panic,
that he just had to put up his hand and point out that he’d been given the wrong paper, when someone knocked a metal pencil case off a desk somewhere behind him.

There was a dull clang as it hit the ground: a rattle as pens spilt out and across the floor. But the sound didn’t fade as it should have. Instead it echoed back and forth across the room, building until it rolled like thunder.

A soft tinkling started to chime below the roar just as a pen came to rest against his toe, under the exam desk.

And suddenly his feet were bare and the pen was wet, slippery. And then it started flapping, flicking frantically against his foot. The floor of the classroom was slick with water. The dying echo of the dropped pencil case faded into a faint clapping of fins beating against the ground.

He woke with his heart rushing, the blood loud and tight in his ears.

Moonlight was falling through the open window, shining through a cobweb on the other side of the glass. As it billowed in the breeze, the walls seemed to ripple in the darkness as if seen through water. Shuddering, he wrenched himself to his knees and swung his arm out under the window pane. The cobweb felt like a shadow on his skin.

Walking down to College the next morning, they could have been in almost any town where the homes were primarily narrow three-storey Victorian townhouses of grey or red brick, with white-painted eaves and shallow front gardens: a low wall, an overgrown shrub, a paved path to a tiny porch with a gloss-painted front door. A little triangle of park provided a landmark as they turned down another street and suddenly Parker’s Piece opened before them.

House-hunting with his father had only involved driving the streets immediately around the station rather than exploring further, while Nick’s trip to Cambridge for his admissions interview (the Replacement was drafted in to accompany him when Michael got caught up with a work ‘emergency’) had taken in the centre of town and little more. Nick had yet to walk the route from the new house to College, so though he’d spent the last few months
studying maps of Cambridge and Google StreetView, it was bewildering trying to make it match up with reality. Parker’s Piece was a little green rectangle on the map, a blurry stretch of browny-green on StreetView, not an immense expanse of torn-up grass that dwarfed the surrounding buildings – a school, the police station – turning them squat and ungainly.

They passed two football games going on side by side, then cut across on the diagonal path, past an ornate green and red lamp post with ‘Reality Checkpoint’ scribed into the paint: the Cambridge version of entering Narnia. It might as well have read ‘This is where it all gets weird. From here on, it’s another world.’

‘That’s Downing College,’ said Michael as they emerged on to Regent Street opposite the gates. ‘And ahead is Emmanuel – Emma to you, now you’re a student.’

They passed from plastic shop-window displays to the long grey frontage of Christ’s College on the right, all crenellations and regimented windows stretching to a huge carved-stone doorway. Michael led them to the left, into the pedestrian zone, turning down what Nick remembered from his maps as Petty Cury. A series of ugly 1960s concrete blocks, with shops in the bottom floors and offices above, gave way to the market: a cramped square of tiny temporary stalls, all pipework and striped awnings, with Great St Mary’s Church towering above. In a way it was ordinary enough, but not quite: like the world was slowly starting to change shape, strangeness drifting in, gradually taking over.

‘Residency rules are that students have to live within three
miles of GSM during term-time,’ Michael said, gesturing at the church tower. ‘For three miles in every direction you’re officially within the “precincts” of the University. Odd, really, since Senate House is just there.’ He pointed past the tall spiked railings around the churchyard to the building opposite. ‘Senate House is where you’ll come for your exam results. And Graduation, of course.’

Nick had seen it before, but couldn’t help thinking it uninspiring next to the grandeur of King’s College. It was too white, too stark: all clean straight lines, like a Regency stately home. Even the colonnade was disappointing, too few arches, too much heavy white stone between them. Squatting next to the soaring majesty of King’s Chapel, Senate House’s too-green, too-stripy lawn seemed staid and ordinary. A stone plinth in the middle of the grass bore a hideous urn, the copper stained turquoise with verdigris. Maybe in a different light King’s would look smudged and dirty, but in the sunshine it glowed cream and gold, all gorgeous stone tracery and tiny jutting spires, too beautiful and delicate to be real.

Here it was: the Cambridge of photos. The Cambridge that didn’t seem part of the real world, as if time existed differently here. As if the past
was
the present, overlapping, interlocking, not one or the other but both.

Nick tried to keep his gaze roving, taking in everything, but it kept returning to the folly of the King’s frontage: a long thin wall pierced at intervals with open lancet windows and topped with a stone trellis, complete with purposeless little
spires. Everything about it was pure excess. An extravagance of beauty.

I can’t imagine ever being truly miserable here.

‘Why would you be miserable at all?’ Michael asked.

Nick started, not used to his father paying enough attention to hear him when he mumbled. He was still trying to think what to say when they plunged into the gloom of narrow, cobbled Senate House Passage and the moment was gone.

‘So we’ve got Gonville and Caius on our right, but that’s pronounced “keys”,’ said Michael. ‘Oh, and remember Magdalene is “maudlin”. That’s Old Schools, behind Senate House on the left, and Clare College opposite. The gate at the end of the path goes to King’s Chapel, but it isn’t open all day: mostly you can count on it around Evensong, which you’re entitled to go to whenever you want. And here we are: Trinity Hall.’ They stepped into the Porter’s Lodge, Michael nodding to the porters at the desk as he led the way past the fireplace. ‘Now, all these little shelves are called pigeonholes.’

‘For post,’ Nick said, moving to his father’s side to peer at the names. His pulse kicked oddly as he looked for his own.

‘Remember to check every time you come through,’ Michael said. ‘Here we go.’

Derran, N.

Nick found himself smiling, reaching out to touch the name tag as if it were something extraordinary. ‘Is there always someone on duty in the pee-lodge?’

His father laughed. ‘It’s pronounced “plodge”. And, yes,
any time you’re likely to be here there’ll be someone on duty. Just remember that most of the porters are ex-military at TitHall and act accordingly.’

Nick couldn’t help the snort.

Michael rolled his eyes. ‘There’s no point sniggering every time someone says it.’

‘They seriously couldn’t think of something better to shorten it to? Like T-Hall? Or you could say you were “in THrall”. It’s a cheat but it would be funnier.’

Michael sank on to one of the wooden window seats looking out into Front Court and took off his shoe, tipped a shard of pebble out of it. ‘You have to remember it’s pretty recently that the University opened up to more than a token number of students
not
from public schools, let alone
girls
, so you get what you’d expect from a language invented by Etonians.’

‘No wonder the locals mock the students.’

Michael pushed himself back to his feet. ‘Townies, Nick. Students are gownies and locals are townies.’

‘I know. There was a “basic Cambridge vocab” list in my Induction pack.’

‘That’s practically cheating. You’re meant to spend at least the first term never quite sure what anyone’s saying.’ Michael turned from the window with a grin only to start when he realised that Nick was standing at his shoulder, beaming up at him expectantly.

Nick’s smile faded with his father’s. ‘What’s wrong?’ His eyes darted away from his father’s sudden worried frown. ‘Did you remember something about work?’

Michael coughed, dug his hands into his pockets. ‘No, no. Just thinking I’m … Well, I’m really proud to be here with you today. Pretty cool to be introducing my fifteen-year-old to College. Wonder if I’ll bump into anyone I know.’

Nick moved his face into what should have been a smile, but somehow wasn’t.

Michael ducked his head and pushed through the wood and glass p’lodge door into Front Court, hurrying down the central flagstone path while Nick dawdled behind, staring up at the stone buildings all around. To the left and right were two storeys of tall windows under grey slate roofs set with a third storey of matched garret windows. The stone blocks of the walls, a strange creamy golden-brown, seemed almost to glow. To the left and right, the courtyard buildings were broken on the ground floor by an arch: on the left side was the chapel, marked out by a pair of two-storey stained-glass arch windows, a third smaller one perched up in the far corner. On the far side of the courtyard, opposite the main gate, was a double set of dark wood doors; above, the walls rose up to a triangular apex, decorated by moulded scrollwork and a crest below a grey-painted hexagonal plinth bearing a little cupola: thin white pillars supported a tiny silver-blue dome surmounted by a finial spike emerging through a golden ball.

The courtyard itself was quartered into neat little squares of lawn by a flagstone path edged in cobbles. Along the walls, narrow flowerbeds and window-boxes spilled over with geranium and lobelia and wallflowers. The girl in tiny pink
hotpants standing in the centre of the courtyard, tapping a message into her mobile, was jarringly alien.

Nick had memorised the map of the College, but like everything else in Cambridge it was far more higgledy-piggledy than any plan allowed for. Michael cut right in the centre of the courtyard and through the low, narrow arched tunnel into North Court, all brown brick and black bike racks. He led the way up the steps to the left, past the bar, to the JCR.

‘Junior
Combination
Room,’ he reminded Nick, ‘
not
Common Room.’

Nick gave a hum of assent as he stepped up to the huge plate-glass windows that fronted the tattered room, turning his back on the stained carpet and filthy cushions upholstered in vomit-coloured fabrics.

‘Mumbling again?’ his father asked. ‘You’ll have to learn to speak up in supervisions, you know.’

In the glass, his face tightened with irritation: his mother’s face, pale and pointed; her eyes, sullen and difficult and far too intent for anyone’s comfort. ‘I always speak up in class. You’re the one who said I shouldn’t talk so much if I don’t want people to think I’m showing off.’

‘Well, that’s what’s so great about Cambridge: it’s
all
about showing off whenever you can,’ someone said.

Nick and Michael turned as one to find a tall, dark-haired young man standing behind them.

‘Ah, sorry for interrupting. I’m Tim. Professor Gosswin said I’d find you here around now-ish. She’s um …’

‘In one of her moods?’ Michael asked, with a grimace.

‘Yeah, something like that. We might want to take our time heading down there.’

‘Can’t be anything I haven’t seen before,’ Michael said. He stepped closer to the windows. ‘Is one of these a door?’

‘Here,’ Tim said, sliding a panel to the side. ‘She mentioned you did a summer as her research assistant too.’

‘Give or take quarter of a century ago, but I doubt much has changed,’ Michael replied as he stepped out on to the flagstone patio, while Tim saw Nick through the door then slid it to behind them. ‘She still wind up to a tantrum with the whole gnashing of teeth thing?’

‘Yup. Did she
really
throw a hedgehog at the Bursar once?’

‘Neither of them was very happy about it. To be fair, Gosswin meant to grab the budget, not the hedgehog – and don’t ask me why there was a hedgehog on her desk – but she didn’t actually throw it. Mostly because they became … rather attached at that point. I hear it’s still an Addenbrooke’s A & E record for Most Erudite Swearing.’

Tim glanced over his shoulder to grin at Nick, quickly losing his smile when all he got in response was a look of bored disdain. ‘Sorry. Should have introduced myself properly,’ he said, stopping to hold out his hand.

‘You did. You’re Tim.’

‘And you’re Nick and your proud dad’s Michael Derran. Gosswin filled me in. Ready to dare the lion’s den?’

Nick’s look darkened into a glare. ‘Yeah, tea with my Cambridge Tutor is going to be
so
much more intimidating
than my first week in the Sixth Form Common Room aged thirteen.’

Tim laughed. ‘I cannot wait to see you and the Prof face off in a glaring competition. Do you play chess?’

‘No.’

‘Pity. Gosswin does her best glaring over chess.’

‘She didn’t say it was a requirement at my admissions interview.’

Tim beckoned them to follow as he set off towards the stretch of Latham Lawn just visible past the buildings to either side of the steps down from the JCR. They turned to the right, following a curving building of deep red brick and grey stone tracery. Nick frowned up at it, trying to work out when it had been built. Some of the elements looked gothic, but surely the bricks weren’t quite the right colour and the doorways weren’t the right shape …

His father’s hand, tugging at his elbow, startled him.

‘Try to be friendly, Nick,’ Michael whispered. ‘This Tim’s a nice kid. He’s not patronising you, so relax a little. Try a smile. You’re not going to make any friends frowning.’

Nick dropped his gaze to his feet.
Yeah, he’s so eager to make friends with me he spent most of the time buttering you up. And he looks like he’s good at sports.

Michael heaved a sigh. ‘And stop
mumbling
, Nick. I know you don’t mean anything bad by it, but it’s really very off-putting.’

Tim was holding open a thick, age-blackened oak door under a high arched gateway.

‘Did you take them via Ely Cathedral?’ The voice echoing from above was lemon juice and smoke, like a growl poured over cracked ice.

‘Wanted to give you time for a constitutional in case all that shouting earlier had tired you out,’ Tim called back, bounding up the wood-panelled staircase. He gestured them through a doorway to the left as he stepped into a kitchenette on the right.

Nick stopped at the threshold in surprise. The room was full of light, streaming through a grand bay window taking up almost an entire wall of the spacious study. The floor was uneven burnished wood, the walls entirely books, floor to ceiling.

‘Note that young man there.’ Professor Gosswin gestured to where they could hear Tim thumping about in the next room. ‘He is a rude and reckless boy. Your father and godfather always conveyed a very healthy level of terror in my presence. See that you do the same.’

Nick squinted into the darkness of the corner where the Professor was sorting books on to her shelves. ‘Tim said we had to have a glaring match. You may not have realised this from my interview, but I’ll win.’

The Professor turned. ‘Indeed,’ she said coldly, looking him up and down.

Nick met her sharp gaze. ‘Indeed,’ he said.

‘I think this might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship,’ drawled Tim, shouldering the door open and carrying a laden coffee tray over to the desk, where he had to
balance it precariously on a corner while he moved a stack of papers to create a level space.