Chapter Eight 1891 #4
Hatfield Hall had been founded with the specific aim of making the university more accessible to those of limited means.
Servants were employed and rooms were furnished by the college, rather than by individual students; all meals were taken communally; breakfast and wine parties in student rooms were not permitted.
And how the students of the fractionally older and grander University College, housed in the Norman castle, looked down their noses at Hatfield Hall – never mind that the entire university had been founded as a cheaper alternative to Oxford or Cambridge.
Snobbery was alive and well, when Toby had supposed that the love of learning would trump all that.
He was shocked to discover that a proportion of the students were there because they could be, not because they particularly wanted to be.
He found the pointless jibes, the tossing of coppers and the silly songs infuriating.
In the two years since his brother’s death, Toby had developed a temper that flared quickly and disproportionately.
Black thoughts gathered inexorably in his head, sparking violent impulses like flickers of lightning.
He tried to ignore them, since his scholarship depended on continued reports of discipline and clean conduct.
Though he must compete with his fellows for library books, for marks and for scholarships, he still needed to rub along with them.
But he got into fights. He needed an outlet for his animosity, and boxing was the first thing he found.
He wasn’t very good at it, but since it turned out that getting hit was as effective as hitting someone else, that hardly mattered.
It also gave him a ready excuse for the cuts and bruises he frequently sported, should anyone in authority happen to notice.
Boxing, he could say; not a scuffle with local boys, or with Castlemen, when someone said the wrong thing to him, at the wrong time.
‘I say, Meriwether,’ Womersley said on one occasion, as he hauled Toby up, belching blood, off the cobbles of the Bailey. ‘You keep this up and they’ll start coming from far and wide to have a go. People love a berserker, best of all one with more fury than skill.’
He’d passed his handkerchief, while Toby spat and checked the integrity of a tooth.
‘Seriously, though. Word will get about.’
Toby heeded his friend’s warning. He couldn’t risk rustication, or a fine; and if he carried on as he was, his own mother wouldn’t recognise him the next time she saw him. After that, he tried harder to turn the other cheek. He didn’t always succeed.
Toby had met Tom Womersley by chance, on day one, by sitting next to him at the matriculation service.
They’d become friends purely because Womersley went through life assuming that a person met was a person befriended.
For him, it was generally true. He had an easy, buoyant personality that Toby’s reticence and black moods had no power to dampen.
‘What’s the matter, Meriwether?’ he said one day, when Toby was at his worst. ‘Are you practising to become a poet?’
Tom wasn’t a natural scholar but he planned to be a lawyer, so he stuck at it, passing his exams with no particular distinction.
He had curly, light-brown hair that he wore long; a broad, open face and blue eyes.
His perpetual good humour might have been annoying, but somehow never was. Sometimes, Toby envied him intensely.
After boxing he tried fencing, but the toffs were unbearable – prancing about in their ridiculous white socks. Then he discovered rowing, and it quickly became something he craved.
He rowed in the university VIIIs and IVs for a time – not the strongest man or the longest lever, but one who kept on pulling in a race, even when the exertion was making him retch.
But the single scull was his favourite. Just him in a skimpy boat with an oar in each hand, rowing by faith with his back to the direction of travel.
The weir made it impossible to go downstream, but he could scull right out of the city upstream, as the river looped through woods and fields.
Alone with his rhythmic, unchanging stroke; the surge of power when he straightened, the spatter of water when he turned the oars. The pounding of his heart. He’d find his head completely empty for that blessed while.
So he’d made it through the first year, his marks improving all the time; and through the second, when it became clear that he was on course to take first-class honours.
Honours in Classics, the handbook said, are evidence to all the world of ability and industry.
So he dug in. As to what he would do when the final year ended, and he went out into the world with his honours, he had no idea.
Most of the old city of Durham – the Bailey – was located on a steep, rocky promontory surrounded on three sides by a large loop of the River Wear, giving it the feel of an island.
The vast Norman cathedral gazed down, dwarfing everything else.
It sat along one side of Palace Green – a large, neatly mown square, enclosed on the other three sides by medieval buildings belonging to the Dean and Chapter, and by the castle.
The streets were narrow and cobbled, but a wide, sunny footpath ran along the riverbank around the promontory.
There, students and members of the university walked and picnicked and watched the boats.
There were even punts, though the current was too strong for the most part.
Beyond the Bailey, the city spread out to the west and south in more ordinary industrial fashion, with streets of red-brick terraced housing climbing the hill towards the railway station.
There, gangs of barefoot children played in the streets, and the men all worked in the nearby coal mines, and coughed.
Town and gown, side by side but worlds apart.
Every time Toby felt glad to be on the more rarefied side, it came with a hefty measure of guilt.
Whenever he was happy to belong to a world of libraries and learning, where his bed was made for him and he could spend his leisure time rowing, he hated himself a bit more.
He felt like a traitor. It was all so very far from Hallewell – but that was exactly what he’d wanted.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Tom said. ‘What should you have done – stayed at home forever? Followed your father’s footsteps into the army, or the teaching of farmers’ children? I mean no slight in that.’
‘I know you don’t,’ Toby said.
They were walking towards the market square after lunch, to check the latest second-hand stock at the bookshop. Toby went along for the fun of it; he only ever borrowed books. He pulled his coat tight around himself, hands deep in his pockets, still not used to the bite of the northern wind.
‘I don’t know, exactly,’ he said. ‘But I can’t bear the eager parvenus you meet here: middling sorts who start affecting the vowels and the . . . ennui of the nobs. No offence.’
‘None taken.’ Tom grinned. ‘Personally, I don’t suffer from ennui. And I don’t think anybody could mistake you for one of that sort. Everyone knows you’re here to actually learn, not to kill time and make connections. So why feel guilty?’
‘Because I . . . I don’t miss it. I don’t miss home.’
Toby wasn’t sure that this was the point, exactly, but it was what sprang to mind.
‘What, not even a little?’ Tom sounded faintly outraged.
Toby shrugged. ‘Well, perhaps my mother’s cooking.’
It was true – the fresh vegetables from the garden, all the herbs, and the wonderful puddings. The food in Hatfield Hall was of the standard institutional variety: fatty cuts of meat with vegetables so stewed they lost all identity; steamed puddings with shamefully thin custard.
‘Heavens, me too!’ Tom said with a laugh. ‘Not that Mama ever cooked.’
‘Of course not. Let me guess – you have a cook, named “Cook”?’
‘Doesn’t everybody?’
Toby pulled a face. ‘Nob.’
‘Speaking of nobs – you are coming tonight, yes? To Franke-Grosvenor’s wine party?’
‘You don’t need me there. He sounds a terrible boor.’
‘Campbell Franke-Grosvenor? Not a bit of it! He’s a damned good egg – not in the least bit snooty, I give you my word.’
‘You think everyone’s a “damned good egg”, Womersley.’
‘I do, I do. But then, most of them are, and it gives the ones who aren’t something to live up to. Come along, do – you can’t study all the time. What does the guidebook say?’ he teased.
‘That there should be some holidays entirely free from work,’ Toby conceded.
‘There, then. I’ll knock you up at eight.’
The truth about Toby’s lack of homesickness was that when he thought about Hallewell, it gave him an empty feeling; a sudden washing out of everything inside him, like someone had pulled the plug.
So he did his best not to think about it at all.
It had happened involuntarily in a collections exam, once – Latin elegiacs, and the poetry they were given to translate was, by chance, a piece of Tennyson: Howe’er it be, it seems to me, / ’Tis only noble to be good.
/ Kind hearts are more than coronets, / And simple faith than Norman blood.
Toby had read it with his scalp crawling, to be dragged so unexpectedly back to Hallewell, and to Theo.
He’d had to shut his eyes and sit entirely still for two terrifying minutes, certain he was going to be sick.
Campbell Franke-Grosvenor was a Castleman, and once they’d signed in at the porter’s lodge they had to climb a horrible number of steps up to his digs in the keep.
It was standing room only, jammed with people all talking over one another, and reeked of the large wheel of Stilton that had been plonked on a side table with a silver scoop stuck in it.
Tom was absorbed into the crowd at once, slapping backs here and there, delighted with it all.
Toby gulped his first glass of wine with unseemly haste, and it got easier after that.