Chapter 17 2010
Viola walks down to the river, a cut-out shadow angling against stone. Even after a year, the limestone beauty of Cambridge has not ceased to affect her. She still wonders at the fact that she is here.
She knew it would be difficult for her father, her going.
Be careful, he’d said. Lots of murders over there, I hear.
Taxis hummed behind him, and she could see in the way he was leaning one hand on the car for support how her departure would shatter him.
But looking around herself now, the choice feels inevitable.
How could she not have been charmed by the Waugh and Forster of it, the stained-glass library light, the tall, wild stalks flourishing in hidden quads, the young ambitious bodies thirsting for knowledge and its distractions.
At times she feels like she could stay here forever, wandering through a world of beautiful hypotheticals, growing closer to perfection, academia’s controlled infinity.
“Oy oy.”
Clapping her shoulder is her best friend, Niamh, in high-waisted jeans and septum piercing, her energy glowing like an LED light.
They became friends out of the circumstance of adjacent rooms and inseparable out of a shared love of philosophy.
At times, Viola feels she is taking an additional course in Niamh, learning how to write an essay on caffeine fumes and the remembered fragments of drunk conversation, how to conjure up the subtleties of intersectional feminism with an expertly raised eyebrow, how to correctly use the word craic.
“All right, stranger?” Viola ties her hair, long again and irrepressible, off of her neck and into a low ponytail, a piece falling to frame her mother’s delicate nose, her thick-lashed eyes.
“Yeaaaaah,” Niamh exhales. She pulls a pair of oversized sunglasses off her buzzed head and onto her nose, and they take off alongside the river.
Niamh came back last night in a state, arguing with her latest boyfriend on the phone.
She always returns from weekends in London with a new fling.
Her lovers have been, in turn, French, Portuguese, Ghanaian, Belgian-Somali, and Glaswegian.
Cheapest way to take a world tour, she says.
Men or women, she doesn’t exclude. She drops them as soon as they try to make her become anything she doesn’t want to be.
Niamh loops her arm through Viola’s and sighs. “Why can’t people understand: debt is a battering ram. It’s the principle of it. I just feel like relationships should be active. You shouldn’t have to force anyone into being with you today based on how they were with you yesterday.”
“I get that,” she says. “But I think commitment is romantic. Is that lame?”
“I don’t think there’s anything unromantic about prioritizing your own interests—particularly if that interest is pleasure,” Niamh says. “It’s trying to control other people that kills the mood.”
Viola thinks about this. “But I think promises have value. Otherwise, how else do you trust anybody? Or hold anybody accountable?”
Niamh laughs. “Anyone ever tell you you’d make a good lawyer?”
“Not in a while.”
“You’d make a killing in contracts.”
Niamh, whose papers read with a casual brilliance, has no interest in besting her, or trying to show up her deficiencies, or even trying to change her mind—her manner is entirely sincere. She only insists on drawing Viola’s attention to complexities she avoids looking at.
The river courses darkly, a cold continuum traversing out to the North Sea. They turn away, and the damp autumnal streets of Cambridge gather around them, cobbles and ancient walls.
“God, I need to piss,” Niamh says.
Viola lingers outside of an old Gothic church while Niamh runs in to use the toilet, thumbing through cheap cardstock prints of famous paintings.
“Anything good?” Niamh asks when she comes out.
Viola plucks out a grotesque, prancing Botero, its clownish fat rippling along behind it.
“Sexy.”
“Get it, I dare you.”
“Come on.”
“I’ll buy it for you. But you have to promise you’ll hang it over your bed.”
“Okay, fine.” Viola feels impish, watching Niamh pay for the print in coins that still feel comically large in her hands.
“You have to tell all your lovers it’s serious.”
“Ha ha.” They both know she doesn’t have any of those. Niamh has a habit of poking around Viola’s horrible virginity, a function of her pickiness, her quest for the ideal in all things.
Niamh pauses at a corkboard and removes from her bag a stack of freshly printed pages advertising an experimental production of The Bacchae set in a techno rave.
“Rowan said if I put these up I could have free wine.”
“Who’s Rowan?”
“You know Rowan.”
“Oh. That Rowan.”
Rowan once walked in on Viola coming out of the shower on staircase seven, sopping and naked, and she had screamed (truly screamed), and his evening on mushrooms had taken a turn for the worse.
Men were a rare sight at Sylvia’s, their all-female college, let alone six-foot-tall men in fur coats. She found it difficult to forgive him.
“Oh, look, it’s that guy,” Niamh says, pointing at another flyer. “From that film.”
“Who? Oh.”
Of course, it’s Orson Grey. She still watches all of his films, including the risqué psychodrama where he walked stark naked through a car wash in the dead of night.
Hollywood seems unsure what to do with him these days, his heartthrob status passing with his youth.
She’s followed the turbulent relationship with the Armenian supermodel (off-again).
Of course he still features in her imaginative landscape.
Of course her breath catches in her throat when the camera zooms and the light hits his lip just so.
Is it funny yet, the heft of her crush? Is she ready to surrender his memory to hopeless humor? No.
“I can’t believe they keep asking these celebs to the Union,” Niamh is complaining. “Absolute star-fuckers, if you ask me. Have some genuine political discourse for Christ’s sake.”
A key turns inside of her, an engine igniting.
It’s happening. The cosmic approach she spent years imagining, as inevitable as it has always felt.
The only obstacle is The Union: the beating political heart of the university, full of future cabinet ministers and technocrats, a place where loud voices carry and men (still, largely men) grow exercised about freedom of speech and rituals of debate.
Generally, she avoids it. Its denizens are experiencing their time at university in an entirely different way, as though it were already behind them.
As though they are simply steering their past selves from their lives beyond this city, using them as conduits for weightier midlife aims. Does it make her equally guilty, the sensation she is having now, that everything she has done to get here has only been a prelude to this encounter?
After Niamh has finished stealing a pin from (and balling up) an advertisement for the Conservatives Association, they cruise toward their feminine enclave.
Across the ancient green, buses are collecting frazzled tour groups.
Darkness descends so early here, and if you don’t look carefully, you might collide with a cyclist bearing some improbable object—a double bass, a Christmas tree.
“Pub?” Niamh asks. It’s a sensible suggestion, under the dimming sky. But no. She needs to run, to think.
“I’ll catch you later,” Viola says. Legs activating already, carrying her through the porter’s lodge, past the mail room slotted with personal pigeonholes, circling the manicured quad, skipping up staircase seven and into her room (reassuring thunk of the door), jeans, shirt stripped to the floor, her articulated ribs, her unprovocative breasts.
And then it begins: the binding of her chest, the fluorescent green shorts and top, hair pulled back tight now, curls coerced onto her scalp.
Quickly, into the park, past the tennis courts, over the familiar bridge, the rhythm of her own breath carrying her.
The Cam, the distant turrets. The rushes bowing over to kiss the water, the familiar unfamiliar faces bleeding into one another, into the peripheral park, the falling darkness, families clearing out, pulling away.
Consider, again, the value of a promise: an obligation created by an act of will, a sacrifice of freedom.
The foundation of monogamy, trust, accountability.
That’s romance, right? Don’t say it if you can’t keep it—faithfulness is the bottom line.
And don’t stop moving when you get to the road in front of The Granta pub, not even if you see anyone you know, not even if the person you see is Orson Grey.
Orson Grey.
Standing outside chatting to a group of girls in the smoking area.
No, this is certainly not how you are meant to encounter him, sweating and unbodying, thinking in philosophical terms about the failings of your mother.
It isn’t your fault if you make eye contact, if you hold it for a moment too long, waiting ostensibly for the street in front of you to clear (it is already clear).
Keep moving, don’t look back, don’t shatter the future just yet.
Six hours later she finds herself predictably with Niamh, at the after-party for The Bacchae, exchanging gushy comments about the quality of everyone’s performance for tiny—but crucially, free—plastic cups of wine.
“The whole cast was fit,” Niamh marvels, “but maybe we’d all be more attractive if we just played characters written for us by someone extremely witty.”
Orson. She had seen him in the flesh, a real man, distinct from the blur of characters he has played over the years.
“Cig?” Niamh is gesturing outside, where Rowan is smoking in his fur coat, still in full makeup.