Starter For Ten (10 page)

'So you don't need me?'

'No.'

'Not even to come along and, you know, observe ...?'

'Not really, Brian, no . . .' and he presses play on the video. 'Right, this is Leeds versus Birkbeck in the quarter finals from two years ago. A really good match . . .' and he sits back on the sofa, with Alice squeezed in between us, her hip pressed up tight next to mine, while I try to come up with a plan to murder Patrick Watts.

QUESTION: What is the meaning of the Latin motto that accompanies the roaring lion at the beginning of Metro Goldwyn-Mayer films?

ANSWER: Ars Gratia Art's- Art for Art's Sake.

'Well, personally speaking, I have to say that I just absolutely hate it. I mean, the idea that this is some great lyrical love poem is rubbish. It's just this horny guy's poem, just this sexually frustrated, little twerp trying to get into his mistress's knickers by banging on about "Time's Winged Chariot", and not taking no for an answer. There's nothing lyrical or romantic, and certainly nothing erotic about this poem at all, not if you're a woman anyway,' drawls Alice's friend, Erin, the cat-eyed woman with the bleach-blonde crop. 'In fact, if a guy sent this poem to me or read it to me or something, I'd call the police. No wonder his mistress is coy. The poet's a complete misogynist.'

'You think Andrew Marvell's a misogynist?' says Professor Morrison, slouching back in his armchair, the long fingers of his hands linked across his belly.

'Basically, yes. Certainly in this poem, anyway.'

'So the voice of the poet and the voice in the poem are one and the same?'

'Why shouldn't they be? There's nothing to suggest any kind of distancing device . . .'

'What d'you think, Brian?'

To be honest, I'm actually thinking about Alice, so I pause for a second and play for time by rubbing my ears, as if my critical faculties were somehow located in the lobes and I just need to warm them up. It's only my third tutorial, and I got caught out last time by pretending to have read Mansfield Park when in fact I'd only seen half of the first episode on telly, so this had better be good. From my arsenal, I select the phrase 'historical context'.

'I think it's more complicated than that, especially if you place the poem in its historical context . . .' and Erin smacks her lips and sighs, as she tends to whenever I open my mouth in tutorials. Erin clearly hates my guts, though I don't know why, because I'm always smiling at her. Unless of course that is the reason. Anyway. Concentrate. 'For a start there's clearly a strong element of humour here. The use of rhetoric is self conscious, and in that sense it's a bit like Shakespeare's sonnet 130, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" ...(nice one) ...except here the poet's rhetoric renders him foolish the desperation, the extremities to which he goes to persuade his lover to succumb make him an essentially comic figure. It's the comedy of sexual frustration and romantic humiliation. It's actually the eponymous "coy mistress", the object of his unrequited passion, who has all the power here . . .'

'Well that's a load of reactionary, chauvinistic crap,' snaps Erin, who's been wriggling in her chair throughout, making the vinyl squeak with indignation. 'The coy mistress has no power, and no personality either, she's just a cipher, a blank, defined solely by her beauty and her unwillingness to have it off with the poet. And the tone clearly isn't comic, or lyrical, it's hectoring, manipulative and oppressive.'

Then Chris the Hippie with the dirty hand starts talking, and I decide to let Erin use him as her scratching post for a while instead. Professor Morrison gives me a little fatherly smile, letting me know that he agreed with me all along. I like Professor Morrison. I'm scared of him too, which is probably the right combination for an academic. He looks a bit like David Attenborough, which has also got to be a good thing in an academic, and wears a lot of corduroy, and knitted ties, and is stick thin, apart from a compact little pot-belly that looks like a cushion strapped on underneath his dirty shirt. And he listens intently when you're talking, head slightly cocked, pressing his long fingers together into a church-and-steeple in front of his mouth, exactly like Intellectuals do on the telly.

While Erin flays Chris alive, and Professor Morrison looks on, I drift off for a bit and look out of the window at the garden outside, and go back to thinking about Alice again.

Walking back along the High Street after the tutorial, I see Rebecca whats-her-name and a couple of the fuckingangryactuallys that she's always hanging around with. They're thrusting leaflets into the hands of indifferent shoppers and for a moment I contemplate crossing the road. I'm a bit wary of her to be honest, especially after our last conversation, but I've made a promise to myself to make as many new friends as possible at university, even if they give every indication of not actually liking me very much.

'Hiya,' I say.

'It's the Dancing Queen! How you doing?' she says, and hands me a leaflet, urging me to boycott Barclays.

'Actually my grant money's with one of the other caring, humanitarian, multinational banking organisations!' I say, with an incisive, wry, satirical glint in my eye, but she's not really looking and has gone back to handing out leaflets and shouting 'Fight apartheid! Support the boycott. Don't buy South African goods! Say no to apartheid! . . .' I start to feel a bit boycotted too, so start to walk away when she says, in a marginally softer voice, 'So, how ya' settling in, then?'

'Oh, alright. I'm sharing my house with a right pair of bloody Ruperts. But apart from that it's not too bad . . .' I had thrown in the hint of class-war for her benefit really, but I don't think she gets it, because she looks at me, confused.

'They're both called Rupert?'

'No, they're called Marcus and Josh.'

'So who are the Ruperts?'

'They are, they're, you know - Ruperts,' but the remark is starting to lose some of its cutting edge, and I wonder if I should offer to hand out leaflets instead. After all, it is a cause I'm passionate about, and I have a strict policy of not eating South African fruit that's almost as strict as my policy of not eating fruit. But now Rebecca's folding up the remaining leaflets and handing them to her colleagues.

'Right, that's me done for today. See you later, Toby, see you Rupert . . .' and suddenly I find myself walking down the street side by side with her, without quite knowing whose idea it was. 'So, where're we off to now, then?' she asks, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of her black vinyl coat.

'Actually, I'm just on my way to the City Art Gallery.'

'The Art Gallery?' she asks, intrigued.

'Yeah, I thought I'd, you know, check it out?'

She wrinkles her nose, says, 'Okay. Let's "check it out"!' and I follow her down the street.

Ah, the timeless old check-out-the-art-gallery ruse. I've been waiting to try this for some time actually, because it's not really possible in Southend, but this is a proper art gallery; hushed library atmosphere, marble benches, security guards dozing on uncomfortable chairs. My plan, ideally, was to bring Alice here on a date, but it's good to have a dry run with someone else first, so that I can work out my spontaneous responses in advance.

I don't mind admitting that my response to the visual arts can be pretty superficial; for instance, I often have to resort to pointing out that someone in the painting looks like so-and-so off the telly. Also, there's a certain amount of art gallery etiquette that I need to get the hang of - how long to stand in front of each of the paintings, what noises to make, that kind of thing - but Rebecca and I soon settle into a nice, comfortable rhythm; not so fast as to seem shallow, not so slow as to be deathly bored.

We're checking out the Eighteenth Century room, standing in front of a not particularly remarkable painting by someone I've never heard of, a Gainsborough-esque Lord and Lady stood under a tree.

'Amazing perspective,' I say, but drawing her attention to the way objects get smaller as they get further away seems a little basic, so instead I decide to take a more Marxist, socio-political approach.

'Look at their faces! They certainly seem pleased with their lot!'

'If you say so,' says Rebecca, uninspired.

'Not an art-lover then?'

"Course I am. I just don't think that because something's been put in a big, bloody gilt frame, I should be obliged to stand around in front of it for hours, rubbing my chin. I mean, look at this stuff . . .' Hands still plunged in coat pockets, she gestures dismissively round the room, with the bat's wings of her coat '...portraits of the idle rich surveying their ill-gotten gains, chocolate-box portrayals of backbreaking rural toil, paintings of spotlessly clean pigs. I mean, look at this monstrosity' - she gestures towards a creamily pink, plump nude reclined on a chaise-longue - 'soft-porn for the slave-trading set. Where's her pubic hair for crying out loud! Have you ever in your life seen a naked woman who looked like that? I contemplate telling her that I've actually never seen a naked woman, but I don't want to blow my artistic credentials, so I stay quiet. 'I mean, who's it actually /or?'

'So you don't think art has any intrinsic value?'

'No, I just don't think it has intrinsic value because someone somewhere decides to call it "art". Like this stuff - it's the kind of crap you see on the walls of provincial Conservative Clubs . . .'

'So I suppose, come the revolution, you'd burn this all down . . .'

'Och, that's a really endearing little habit you've got there, reducing people to a stereotype . . .' I follow her through to a room full of still-lifes, and decide to steer the conversation away from politics. 'What's the plural of "still-life"? Is it "still lifes" or "still-lifes"?' This strikes me as a pretty sophisticated Radio 4 kind of thing to say, but she's not biting.

'So what are your politics, then?' she says.

'Well, I suppose I'm a sort of left-wing liberal-humanist.'

'Nothing at all in other words . . .'

'Well, I wouldn't say th . . .'

'And what are you studying again?'

'Eng. Lit.'

'What's Ingletr'

'English Literature.'

'Is that what they're calling it these days? And what attracted you to Inglet, apart from the fact that it's obviously just one big, fat, juicy skive.'

I choose to ignore the last comment, and go straight into my number. 'Well, I wasn't sure what to do really. I had a fairly broad base of qualifications at O and A-level, and I thought about history, or art, or maybe one of the sciences. But the thing about Literature is, well, basically it encapsulates all the disciplines - it's history, philosophy, politics, sexual politics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, science. Literature is mankind's organised response to the world around him, or her, so in a way it's only natural that this response should contain a whole . . .' - take a little run-up - '...panoply of intellectual concepts, ideas, issues . . .'

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. If I'm completely honest, this isn't the first time I've said any of this. In fact I used this little number in all of my university interviews, and whilst it's not exactly 'We shall fight them on the beaches . . .' it usually goes down a storm with academics, especially if accompanied, as here, with lots of hair tousling and emphatic gestures. I bring the speech to its shattering climax '...so as the eponymous Hamlet says to Polonius in Act Two Scene Two, it's all ultimately about "words, words, words", and what we call "literature" is in fact just the vehicle for what might more accurately be described as the Study of ... Everything.'

Rebecca contemplates this, nods sagely. 'Well, that's certainly the biggest pile of bogus horse-shit I've heard for some time,' she says, and starts walking off.

'You think so?' I say, trotting after her.

'I mean, why not just say you want to sit round on your arse and read for three years? At least it would be honest. Literature doesn't teach you about "everything", and even if it did, it'd only be in the most useless, superficial, impractical way. I mean, anyone who thinks that they can learn anything practical about politics or psychology or science by flicking through Under Milk Wood is talking out their arse. Can you imagine someone saying to you, 'Well, Mr-whateveryourname-is, I'm about to remove your spleen, and, okay, I haven't actually studied medicine as such, but don't worry, because I very much enjoyed The Pickwick Papers ...?'

'Well, medicine's a special case.'

'And politics isn't? Or history? Or law? Why not? Because they're easier} Less deserving of rigorous analysis?'

'So you don't think novels and poetry and plays contribute to the quality and richness of life?'

The didn't say that, did I? I'm sure they do, but so does the three-minute pop song, and no one feels the need to study that for three years.'

I'm sure Alexander Pope said something pertinent that would help me out here, but I can't remember what, and I contemplate using the word 'utilitarianism', but am not sure how. So instead I say, 'Just because something isn't practical, it doesn't mean it isn't useful.'

Rebecca wrinkles her nose at this, and I realise I'm on pretty sticky ground here, semantieally speaking, so I decide to take a different tack, and go on the offensive.

'So what are you studying then, that's so useful?' I say.

'Law. Second Year.'

'Law! ...right, well, I suppose law is pretty useful.' -J|

'Well, let's hope so.'

Law makes sense. If I was in a court of law I definitely wouldn't want to argue with Rebecca Epstein. She'd slap you around the face with her Glasgow accent, she'd bark things at you like 'define your terms!' and 'your argument is specious!' In fact I don't want to argue with her now, so I just stop talking and we walk silently through the City Museum, with its glass cases of fossils and Roman coins and antique farming implements. I suppose this is my first taste of the lively intellectual cut-and-thrust of academic life. There are those arguments in tutorials with Erin of course, but they're like Chinese burns; it's just a matter of how much you can take. With Rebecca, it feels like I've been stabbed in the eye. Still, it is only my third week, I'm sure I'll get better at it, and I know deep down that I am capable of coming up with an eloquent and incisive reply, even if it won't be for another three to four days. In the meantime I decide to see if I can change the subject.