The Undertow (35 page)

The tramp looks from one of them to the other, timid. Any minute
now and he’ll have dragged enough confidence together to start on again about knowing him, about Will not belonging there. He pushes the tramp again, lightly, in the chest, and he staggers backwards, and gives Will a wounded look. Will feels for him. But he can’t stay here, babbling, humiliating him.

“Go on, go and get yourself some dinner.”

“Oh you didn’t give him money, did you?” Ollie asks. He nudges Geoff, jerks a thumb towards the porter’s lodge. Geoff nods in reply. “You shouldn’t give them money. It just encourages them.”

Geoff ducks through the College gate, into the lodge.

Will thinks, you make it sound like money is a little thing, not a necessity. That it isn’t, for some people, a pressing need, a matter of life and death.

In an instant Geoff is back, the porter following.

“Sorry, sir, I thought it was just you gentlemen.” He taps his bowler onto his head, sidesteps Will. “Excuse me, sir.”

The porter takes the tramp by the shoulder and the wrist, and then has his arm twisted up his back. The tramp struggles, flapping, in his grip. The porter winces at the smell.

“Place is getting lousy with ’em.”

Geoff slips up beside Ollie and says, “Are we for the off?”

“Ah yes. Well then, Will, old fellow. Cheerio.”

Ollie and Geoff head on up the street into town, a flutter of scarves and coat tails. Ollie says something to Geoff and the two of them burst into laughter.

Will steps back inside the College gates. He lingers in the archway, looking out at the dark bowler-hatted figure of the porter, the ragged bundle of the tramp, all fight gone out of him.

The porter looks up the street, lets go of the tramp’s shoulder for a second to put his fingers in his mouth—Will flinches at the thought of the grimy coat they’d just been touching—and whistles. A whistle in reply: a bobby’s footfalls clatter down the street.

Will watches as the old man is handed over.

“Making a nuisance of himself. Been giving him money, the young gentleman has.”

Will feels hot. Ashamed.

“He’s not well,” he calls out. “He should be in a home.”

The bobby and the porter both glance round at him, an are-you-still-here kind of look. The tramp doesn’t look round.

“Oh, we’ll look after him, sir,” the bobby says.

The old tramp is steered off across the street, looks tiny in the policeman’s steadying grip. He’ll have somewhere warm to sleep tonight, at least. A police cell is better than the street, surely. He’ll be fed. Maybe they’ll find him somewhere permanent.

Will brushes down his coat. He straightens his lapels. He should forget all about this. It has nothing really to do with him.

He could put a trunk call in to London, tell his parents the good news about the fellowship, then explain to them why it’s good news, try and make them understand the honour to be even considered, the hard work that underpins it, the triumph he feels at being put forward. And feel all the fizz go out of it as he does so.

He could ring up Madeline at her digs, tell her about the crazy tramp mistaking him for someone that he knew. Make her laugh at his good deed gone wrong. Keep the news of the fellowship to himself, at least for the time being. Because as soon as he hung up she’d be straight on the phone to her mum and dad, who would understand the significance of it all without needing an explanation, and be delighted for them both because he’d proved himself. Because he was, after all, good enough for her.

He could go back to his rooms and catch up on some reading.

He gets out his wallet. He still has a ten-shilling note. He stuffs it back into his pocket, swings himself out through the gateway. Hand pressed to the tearing muscle of his thigh, he heads back up the hill.

He goes into the Mitre, where Jeanie works. He orders a pint. He offers her a drink. She accepts coyly, seems flattered to be asked: he’s a university man, an Oxford undergraduate, that simple fact lends him substance here. Jeanie is pretty, in a soft and pink and friendly kind of way. He’s heard how friendly she can be.

It’s a quiet night. He talks to her, asks her questions. She leans in, sips her gin and orange. He catches her eye and smiles and she smiles back. There are dimples in her cheeks. And then he shifts on his barstool and winces, and he sees her smile collapse. She asks what’s wrong, and he says, Nothing, nothing, and then just hints at his pain—an old injury. And her eyes soften, and she reaches out to touch his arm. This is easy, he thinks. This is something I can do. By the time her shift is over he’s had four pints, she’s had two gins, and his leg doesn’t hurt that much any more. He walks her back to a damp-looking lodging house up Cowley Road, and slips into the dim hallway, and she hushes him up to her room, where he screws her on her little creaking bed.

HE IS AS NERVOUS
as one of the rabbits that have come loping out across the gravel, finding their way up from the meadows to pick the green shoots of the primroses. Ears up, prickling—scattering when a light comes on in one of the upstairs windows. And this place, more than any other, makes him feel calm and focused. He often writes here. If he feels this jittery here, then he’s in a bad way indeed.

The room is tucked away towards the back of the building. The tall Georgian windows look out across the leafy twigs of the rose gardens. The green and red leaves have been unfolding themselves this week, in the first mild days of the year. Later, there will be buds twisted tight as fists, then there will be the great lush lolling heads of the roses, silky pinks and velvety reds. They come into their full gorgeousness only as the students leave, while the city sleeps through summer.

His desk faces back into the room, towards the bookcases and the faint stripes of the wallpaper. The bust of Milton looks outward though, towards the roses.
Through the Sweet-Briar, or the Vine, or the twisted Eglantine
. No gardener, the young Milton: sweet-briar and eglantine are just different names for wild roses. Which just goes to show that you can get your verse perfect, you can get it correct and satisfying as a crossword puzzle solved—you can get the scansion and the lineation and the meter and the rhythm absolutely undeniably right and true, and then life just comes along and trips you up with inconvenient facts. Though Milton probably wouldn’t have minded, if he’d known. For all he was a formal stylist, you can tell he loved the messiness, the irresolvability of stuff. All that heaven lets slip. Satan, in other words. Form, for Milton, is the tongs you use to pluck the hot coals from the fire.

This is a formal place. There is order here. Even nature is kept tidy:
the clipped roses contained within their neat gravel walks. He likes to take a stroll through the Botanic Gardens with a postgraduate and a cigarette. Over time he’s got to know his hellebores from his heliotropes, almost by osmosis. A heliotrope, he thinks: a device of the sun.

He glances at his watch. She is uniformly punctual. And she is due in a minute. He has arranged the tutorial for six thirty, which is the latest time it is reasonable to schedule a tutorial. The corridors are quiet. The old fellows have sloped away to pre-dinner drinks in the SCR, or are flapping off home on their bikes.

If he just moves to the corner of the window, he can see out onto the street. The wall, and the railings. She’ll be along in a minute.

Beneath the window the bushes stir, and a blackbird hops into view. It bounces across the gravel, flutters up to a perch amongst the thorns, opens its throat wide, and pours out song.

And there she is.

She flings her leg back over the saddle—she never steps over the frame even though it’s a lady’s bike, an old blue Puch—then she locks it carefully to the railings. She comes swinging breathlessly through the gate and up the path, almost at a run. In through the front door of the building, up the corridor, to his door.

And then she stops. Every time. The headlong rush, and then the pause. It’s what started him thinking about her. Really thinking about her, in a way he’s never thought about a student before. You worry about the odd one, the smellier ones, the glittery-eyed, the ones who show up and then can’t talk. But you don’t
think
about them, don’t find yourself wondering about their motives, their inner lives, the pulsing of their youthful hearts. It’s just that pause before knocking. That moment when she stands, breathing, dewy with sweat, in the corridor, and he stands, alert, listening, reaching for his cigarettes, inside.

He tugs his jacket straight, smoothes over his hair, then, rethinking, ruffles it again. Drags thumb and forefinger across his moustache. He goes to light his cigarette, thinks better of it, slips it back into the pack. He can offer her one when she comes in. He looks at the smooth white panels of the door. His heart is hammering. He hears a shuffle as she does something—arranges herself in some way, does whatever it is she does. Catches her breath after the bike. He can almost believe that he can hear her breathing.

Then she knocks.

“Hello,” he calls.

He turns to his desk, slides her essay across the leather surface. Her
looping inky blue. His pencil scribbles. It is careful, thorough, balanced. And the plan for this tutorial, in so far as he has got a plan, is to elicit a bit more wildness, a bit of daring.

She knocks again.

“Hello, come in,” he calls louder.

She eases the door open, sneaks round the edge of it. She blinks at him. “I wasn’t sure if you said hello, or no.”

“Hello,” he says. “Why would I say no?”

She smiles. “I don’t know.”

“Have a seat.”

He gestures to the old chintz settee. He still gets a kick from the fact that he has a settee in his room. She slips off her jacket, perches on the edge of the seat and roots in her bag for a pen. He helps himself to a cigarette, offers her one. She stops rooting to accept, then has to dig around again with one hand, the cigarette clamped unlit in the other. He shifts his ashtray—a carved wooden font of a thing—into her reach. He feels her watching him move. Those big liquid eyes.

First few weeks, he’d find himself just thinking about her. Wondering how she was getting on with the reading. He’d imagine a room for her up at Somerville: he didn’t actually need to imagine—they can’t have changed that much in ten years. A narrow bed, a bookcase, a desk. Across the hall, a long room of wooden stalls each with a porcelain sink to wash in. Where she would strip wash. Rivulets of water rolling down her naked back, down to the tilt of her hips. He’d shake the thought away. Try to. Turn the pages without taking in the words, nod along in meetings. He started daydreaming about how it might happen. A chance encounter in the Radcliffe Camera, late, empty: hands touching over Lydgate. Chaste, really: a kiss between the bookcases that no-one but they would ever know about. Now, by the last week of Hilary Term, things have progressed considerably, in his daydreams at least. In his daydreams things are far from chaste. Drives out into the Cotswolds in his Austin Allegro; sex in the dappled shade. But his imagination scuppers itself: there are always walkers, birdwatchers, balloonists. He imagines her here, in his study, last tutorial of the day, and she will stand up to leave, but instead of going she’ll come towards him, unbuttoning her blouse. But someone always blunders in, wanting to clean or to borrow a book, and he is snapped back to reality, to the faculty meeting, item eight on an agenda fourteen points long, with an uncomfortable stiffness in his underpants, and Catherine Aldridge looking at him quizzically over her new glasses.

Catherine’s at Somerville. She must know Sarah.

He has to stop thinking like this. It is not appropriate. It is not good.

He moves in to light her cigarette with his Ronson. Her eyes go slightly squinty, focused on the conjunction of flame and cigarette tip. As she leans towards him, her small breasts dip forward into the shadow of her blouse. He lifts his gaze to the business of his own cigarette. She blows out a cloud of smoke. She’s not very good at smoking, but she’s working hard at it.

“Before we start,” she says.

Which is not like her. It could be the beginning of a fantasy itself.

“Mmm,” he says.

He turns away and limps to his desk, sliding in behind it to be confronted by the white blind eyes of the statue. He creaks it slightly to the right, so Milton’s eyes are angled to the far corner of the room.

“I just wanted to say—”

“Mmm.”

She’s flicking the ash off her cigarette unnecessarily. She looks up at him. He’s never been that bothered by brown eyes before. Madeline’s eyes are blue. Her irises are blue as irises. Blue as the dashboard light that says your headlights are on full beam.

“I wanted to say,” the girl says, “just really, thank you. For the term. For your help. For everything.”

Madeline has the fire lit. It glows red through the boxy grille of the fireguard. She meets him in the narrow hallway, feet in grey socks on the tiled floor, drying her hands on her apron.

“Oh, hello.”

He kisses her. He hangs his coat up on the peg.

“I didn’t expect you for a while,” she says.

“Finished earlier than I thought.”

He grimaces inwardly at the truth of this. Her attention is half back in the living room, over her shoulder. The door is open. The child babbling in there. He’s been at work all day; he should be allowed some peace and quiet now. He’s earned it. A drink, the paper, dinner. That’s what he needs. But Madeline is already turning away into the sitting room.

“Come and see,” she calls.

She kneels down beside the baby, who is sitting in a washing-up bowl in front of the fire. She’s not a baby, not really, not any more.
She’s eighteen months, a toddler. But until there is another baby, she will be the baby. And there is not going to be another baby.

“Dadda!”

The little girl splashes her hands down in the water, sending up spray, looking up at her father, grinning with her new teeth. Madeline folds her skirts in under her knees, kneels down. He’s always astonished by the child’s enthusiasm for him. He doesn’t really get it. He’s tired and busy and he keeps shunting her away to get on with work. He rubs the chill out of his hands, creaks down onto the fireside rug. She’s lovely. He smiles at her.