The Whole Day Through (10 page)

Sulkily told of how he had been singled out, Laura had shrugged, deep in her own revision of Graph Theory, and advised him simply to ignore the invitation or say no as he had more important things on his mind than being nice to old fogeys. But he knew it wasn’t done to say no and a school friend, the one who disliked Amber so because she laughed out loud when he made a pass at her – he remembered that detail now – impressed on him that, being a scientist, the warden often had senior research fellows or surgeons among his guests, the very people who might be considering Ben’s applications in the months to come.

So he ironed a shirt, nailbrushed the worst of the food stains off his only suit and joined the small clutch of undergraduates huddling outside the warden’s lodgings at twelve-thirty. The warden’s wife astutely pressed them
all to circulate and interact with the all-important grown-ups rather than mooch in corners with one another.

Ben hadn’t thought of this for years. Now he distinctly remembered, however, how he had been charged with a huge plate of chicken satay on sticks, which was still such unfamiliar fare then that the warden’s wife impressed on him he was to warn people it contained peanuts and was quite spicy.

They were entertained in a beautiful first-floor room overlooking the warden’s private garden. The Georgian portraits, highly polished floor, old silk rugs and pillowy sofas conveyed an air of adult privilege that was as intoxicating as the unaccustomed midday sherry. He soon found he had forgotten all about revision, or at least forgotten to worry about it, and was enjoying himself. He fell into conversation with an affable, bow tied art historian from the Courtauld whose erudition and worldliness would have been intimidating had Ben been sober. With something alarmingly like flirtation, he ordered Ben not to move because the satay was so preferable to the slightly slimy vol-au-vents on offer. He introduced Ben to the portraits, explaining, in terms Ben failed to remember, why Ramsay was so much more interesting than Gainsborough.

‘But painting’s not really your thing, is it?’ he asked, wolfing another piece of chicken and waving to the warden’s wife in a way that kept her at bay.

‘Not really,’ Ben said. ‘I mean, I look and sometimes I like but…’

‘Yes, quite.
But.
What does interest you?’

Ben thought of the revision he was skipping to be getting rapidly drunk in that beautiful room and started to talk about syphilis.

‘In which case you must meet The Jellicoe.’

‘Who?’

‘Harriet!’

A woman who had only just come in and seemed happy to be claimed kissed him briefly then was introduced to Ben as Professor Jellicoe, Virus Queen.

‘Really, Howard,’ she protested, but the art man had abandoned them in search of fresh prey. ‘ Sorry,’ she said. ‘Is virology your thing too or had you just bored him?’ When Ben explained that it was and that it was what he should at that moment have been revising, she said that was easily remedied as he could sit by her and have a sort of tutorial. ‘You’ll be doing me a favour,’ she said, ‘as I was dreading this and I have no small talk. What have you read recently?’

He mentioned a year-old article on Marburg Virus and she countered it with two other suggestions including a great tome called simply
Filoviridae
he couldn’t possibly read in the time left before the exam but whose thesis she would do her best to summarize for him.

When they proceeded into the dining room she brazenly evicted the Eng Lit student placed beside her in favour of Ben. ‘Well, I’d be no use to
her,
’ she said. As soon as they sat, she politely but irrefutably informed the student on her left, who in any case was a physicist, so
of little interest to her, that she and her other neighbour had
much to discuss
. For the next ninety minutes she grilled Ben and drilled him, suggesting which topics he should concentrate on and which lines of argument would play best with the doctors she suspected were marking his papers. And she scribbled a bullet point summary of the
Filoviridae
argument on an old airmail envelope she produced from her bag.

‘Thank you so much,’ he stammered, when it was announced that coffee would be served in the room where they had first assembled. ‘I just wish I could have taken notes while you were talking.’

‘Waste of time,’ she said. ‘What you don’t remember without notes will be of no use to you in an exam in four days’ time. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. You’re hoping for a first, naturally.’

‘Well…’

‘The college is, of course. That’s why you’re here.’

He thought of Laura, who passionately wished for a first in maths to please her parents, but had not been invited to one of these lunches, and felt treachery, then guilt, then an unexpected and sickening slippage in his feelings towards her.

‘Consider my research programme at Imperial when making your applications.’

‘I will. Of course I will,’ he gushed. ‘Thank you.’

‘Have you got a girlfriend or something?’ she asked bluntly. Almost everyone had left or was leaving the table and they were virtually alone there.

‘Er. Well, yes,’ he said. ‘We’ve been going out for two terms now.’

‘But nothing serious? You’re not engaged or anything?’

‘No,’ he admitted, perplexed.

‘Good,’ she exclaimed, gently slapping the table edge beside her. ‘You’ll think me old-fashioned but there’s nothing more depressing than students just embarking on important research who go and get married. Such a mistake. Such a drain. Either they drop out, because they suddenly need to make money, or they simply lose their focus and I end up having to dump them. If she’s really keen, let her down gently but let her down all the same. At least for the next few years. Your work
has
to come first. I never married exactly but I
settled
very young – I thought it was just part of being adult – something one had to do – and it was such a mistake.’ She thumped the table again.

‘You’re not together any more?’

‘Yes. Still together and happily so but –’ She touched his forearm and her grasp was like steel as she looked so deeply into his face that he could smell the wine on her breath and see a stray eyelash that had caught on her cheek. ‘Love is an amazing thing but – there’s no nice way to put this that won’t sound arrogant but what the hell – for exceptional people, for people like you, it’s nearly always
diminishing
.’

Something in the way she said that word chilled him and, as she stood to obey the repeated summons of the
warden’s wife to come and admire something rare that was flowering for the first time in the garden and bade him a curt goodbye, Ben stood too and found he was shivering. It wasn’t cold or fear at work but a kind of excitement, as at something momentous that had to be done but would require courage and a stern, monastic steadfastness.

He broke up with Laura that afternoon. If she had wept or raged at him or even argued he wouldn’t have gone through with it. He assumed she would argue, half-hoped it, and that she’d convince him to change his mind. He heard again now with chilling clarity his pompous, cack-handed explanation that he wasn’t ready to get serious, that he couldn’t afford to commit to anyone because of the need to focus on his further studies.

All she asked was, ‘Is there someone else?’ to which he quite honestly – for it was true at the time – answered no. ‘So it’s me, then?’ she asked to which he said,

‘No. Of course not. It’s me. It’s all me.’ Which, he now reflected bitterly, was also true and had continued to be the case. All the mess began and ended with him and his egotistic dithering and need for approval.

As he left her rooms and hurried down the long staircase that led back to Holywell Quad, he had started to shudder with adrenalin again. He had felt sorrow, of course he did, but also a self-dramatizing thrill at the enormity of the sacrifice he had just made. He might never meet anyone as lovely again. He might be doomed
to become one of the boffin bachelors the students laughed at, the sort with odd socks or egg stains on his tie. But it would be in a noble cause; he would have dedicated himself like a monk or, more alluringly, some kind of chaste knight.

He sought out his school friends, who shared a set of rooms overlooking the garden, and told them at once, so as to make it real and stop himself wavering. Once again he half-hoped for a stay of execution, that these naysayers would suddenly change their tune, tell him he was mad and she was one in a million and that he must run back to her at once and beg.

They were startled but they were also relieved and only now told him in full all the reservations they’d entertained about Laura but had only hinted at before, about her suitability for him. This denigration of her pained him but he couldn’t explain why he had split up with her without sounding grotesquely ambitious and it was easier to let them make assumptions than have them tease him. They saw he was suffering and had the decency to change the subject but he was astonished at how easily destroyer had come to be treated as victim and every consideration shown him in the hours that followed was another splinter in his soul.

The fault was his not hers, as he had told her, and if he made himself break off from his furious revision to think of her, all that came to mind was the sad pallor of her face as she’d watched his windbaggy self-justification.

It was only after his exams were done and once his friends introduced him to Chloë and she had treated him to the college ball that he began to convince himself there
had
been something wrong about Laura, even as Chloë fulfilled Professor Jellicoe’s gypsy warning to the letter by joining her father in pressuring him to pursue a clinical rather than a research route.

Chloë was demure, sexually a little shy, or at least she expertly conveyed that impression in their first weeks together. By comparison the almost sexless casualness with which Laura would drop her clothes and her honest eagerness to fall into bed came to seem odd, unfeminine, even slightly unhinged.

Chloë and Laura didn’t know one another except as names and faces but colleges were small enough and Chloë was jealous enough that she found out about Laura with time and grilled girlfriends who had known her even slightly so that whenever the question of Ben’s past love arose she would talk disparagingly about ‘your North London hippie with the slutty friends’ and established an official version of Laura as a muddy-soled bad girl and anarchist. It couldn’t have been further from the truth but it flattered her by comparison and flattered him too, as though he had been somehow tamed but retained the capacity to run a little wild.

He emerged from his guilty reverie to find himself staring at the seminar room clock and suddenly knew that all that mattered to him would be waiting in the disabled
parking spaces down below. Tolerance stretched to its limit, he stood in such a hurry the plastic beaker that had held his juice clattered off his table to the floor. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered as colleagues and drug reps looked round. ‘Sorry. I’ve just got to er…’ And he slipped out. He’d plead a migraine, a stomach ache.

The lift stopped at an intervening floor, then at another. He cursed and pushed through a swing door onto the stairs and ran down them, dodging slowcoaches and apologizing to startled faces he encountered as he lurched around each twist in the stairwell.

The disabled parking bays Laura favoured were tucked into an unpromising side alley, the kind of lost courtyard that endlessly extended and adapted hospitals must have created the world over, which only the initiated would have any hope of finding. He sprinted out into the internal service road that led to it. Then he froze, panting ludicrously, and quickly backed into a doorway before she could spot him.

He had barely had time to see her reversing the old Austin out of its space and only now remembered that it was the time when she was collecting her mother rather than dropping her off. Of course she wasn’t alone and of course he couldn’t jump out into her path when Professor Jellicoe was there, beadily intelligent beside her.

As they passed him he dared to edge out to watch them go. The car was entirely uninteresting, old without character, an old lady’s once-red automatic, undramatically scraped and dented from some negligent reversing.
Taking in its departing rear view then becoming aware of his sweaty shirtfront and racing heart, he felt deeply the absurd pass to which he had brought himself.

Because of the lingering smell of an institutional lunch – fish pie, today, and pineapple sponge with custard – and the early afternoon collecting time, the Falls Clinic had more than ever the air of a geriatric kindergarten. Had the patients emerged proudly clutching paintings on sugar paper or spaceships made from egg boxes and yoghurt pots instead of letters for their GPs, the illusion would have been complete. Today they had even endured story time in the shape of a cheery chat from a health visitor about the importance of keeping well hydrated whatever the continence challenges.

‘A patronizing ninny,’ Mummy pronounced. ‘With one of those bottle-top degrees.’

‘Now how can you know that?’

‘I asked her.’

‘Mummy!’

‘Well, I’d nothing to lose. I shan’t be going back.’

‘Why not?’

‘They’ve finished with me, apparently. I’ve had my
allocation of clinic hours
and presumably they’ve gathered all the data they can get from me. Sorry,’ she added. ‘Tough on you.’

Laura attempted protest but it came out feebly and Mummy ignored it.

‘I suppose I should sign up for classes. Architectural history, maybe, or a language. But they tend to happen in the evening and I’m so bloody sleepy then.’

‘Why ever should you?’

‘Oh. You know. Get out of your hair for a while.’

‘It’s your house. I should be getting out of yours.’

‘Quite right, girl,’ Mummy said rather sharply. ‘Have an affair or something. Sorry. Filthy mood. It’s the ninny’s fault with her MA in Medical Humanities and Dance. I’ll be better for a nap. Sorry.’

Back at the house, Mummy retreated to the downstairs lavatory while Laura put the car away then ushered her onto the tiny stair-lift that had only been installed with difficulty – the stairs were far narrower than the modern average – and helped her onto her bed. She took off her shoes and drew the curtains for her. She could tell Mummy was tired because she made no attempt to take off that day’s going-out frock.