with their heating and students were obliged to post shillings into their gas meters to light their hopelessly inadequate gas fires. Vi’s grant covered only part of her fees and living expenses and the money was not made up by her father. Rather than ask for what she suspected would not be forthcoming, Vi scrimped and did without extra food and heat in her room and consequently was always catching cold.
But the physical chill was not the worst of it. She missed her school friends, who, if they had gone to university, had gone to jollier-sounding places like Sussex or Newcastle. Her best friend, Annie Packer, had not gone to university at all. To Vi’s admiration, and some envy, Annie had been taken on as a trainee buyer at Marshall and Snelgrove. The job suited Annie who had aspirations to become a model. She was also unusually informed about Marshall and Snelgrove’s stock since she had been in the way of supplementing her school wardrobe by regular shoplifting from their dress department.
As a new undergraduate Vi did what she believed was expected of her: she bought a bike at the police auction, though she never got round to collecting it from the bike shop to which she took it for repairs; she joined societies and made a few, not very congenial, friends. In the first term, she went out with a boy from Selwyn called Derek, who was a member of the English History Society. They hadn’t much to say to each other and Vi found Derek’s sexual advances, at a late night showing of La Dolce Vita, annoying rather than enticing. She auditioned for a production of Topol, where she was cast in a minor role, which was subsequently cut when the show ran overtime. After that, she joined a dull Sunday choir and drank dutifully with the others at the pub. But she found the whole experience of being away from home confusing and missed Annie, who was sharing a flat in Earls Court with three high-spirited Australians from Adelaide.
There was a tap at the door and a beaming Renato came through to the balcony. ‘Mrs Hetheringon, I bring…’ He proudly presented on a salver half a grapefruit, cut into efficient segments.
‘Thank you, Renato.’
‘You finish the rest of your breakfast? I take away this tray?’
‘Please.’
Deftly shouldering the tray with one hand, Renato produced from his pocket a token.
‘Free offer to use the spa. It is meant only for Decks Thirteen and Fourteen but my friend there he give me some and so I say, This for Mrs Hetherington.’
‘Thank you, Renato. That is very kind.’
‘You like the spa, Mrs Hetherington. Very good for ladies.’
‘I am sure I shall like it.’
‘Very peaceful. Let me know when to do your room, Mrs Hetherington.’
‘Thank you, Renato, I shall.’
‘Remember, put the notice on the door.’
‘I will try to remember.’
A postcard from Annie, a hand-tinted sepia print of the Eiffel Tower, coloured like marzipan, was stuck into a page of the notebook. The aged brown sellotape peeled away easily. Having a ball, the card read. Fab frocks this year. Skirts knickers-high.
Vi had followed Annie’s advice and chopped her own skirts so short that she was unable to go home for fear of her father’s retorts. There was a blurred photograph of her wearing one, with Annie looking like Mary Quant with bobbed hair and black tights (probably nicked).
There was another tap at the door. ‘Mrs Hetherington, it’s me.’ Renato, with a brand new idea. ‘I forget to say. If you have any laundry or dry cleaning it must go before twelve o’clock.’
‘Thank you, Renato.’
‘You know where the laundry bag is?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘In the bottom drawer. Two bags: one, blue, for laundry, the white one for dry cleaning.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You like I take it now?’
Vi threw in the towel. ‘I do have some cleaning. I’ll sort it out. And why not do the room now, Renato?’
Vi, reaching the stairs, found that she had picked up the token to the spa. Well, why not? It was free. She returned to her room and interrupted Renato happily hoovering with the TV on.
‘I’m getting my swimming things, Renato. I’m going to follow your advice and try the spa.’
‘Madam, look, the quickstep. You do this easy.’
She was just being issued with a gown, a locker key and a towel by a glamorous Indian girl in a white overall when Jen showed up.
‘Hi there, Vi. Have you got a free token?’
‘Yes.’
‘Me too.’
‘Oh.’
‘Our steward told us that no one is joining, too pricey, so they’re giving out these to tempt us in.’
So much for Renato’s special favours. Vi undressed and got into her bathing costume, which no longer seemed to fit in any of the right places.
‘God, I wish I had your figure, Vi.’
‘I think you look a treat,’ Vi said, meaning it. Jen in a bikini patterned with vivid sunflowers was a tall, bronzed Amazon.
‘“She wore an itsy bitsy, teeny weeny, yellow polka dot bikini” I don’t think,’ Jen said. ‘Come on, let’s take the plunge.’
The ‘spa’ was a small swimming bath filled with warm saline water and fitted with a variety of pumping devices set at various levels to massage different parts of the body. Vi tried all the massages in turn, swam twice round the pool and then discovered, at the far end, an underwater couch, made out of metal bars through which the water surged.
Lying with the warm water gently thrashing her back, Vi’s feelings towards Renato relented. This was the second adventure he had sent her on and, like the dancing, it had turned out to be fun. She lay back, with the water kneading her shoulder blades, thinking about Edwin.
Edwin’s seminars on poetry, attended by first- and second-year students in preparation for Part I of the University Tripos exams, were held in his rooms at Corpus Christi, above the sundial in Old Court, where the young firebrand Christopher Marlowe once lodged. Seminars were often taught by postgraduates such as Edwin, engaged in writing doctoral theses and usually woefully behind in their schedules and thus short of funds. Vi had gone to Edwin’s seminars, as she did to every university class, in a state of debilitating anxiety of which she was hardly aware since any condition suffered long enough becomes normal. Squashed up against other students, on a sofa shiny with use, in aged rooms whose walls, where visible between crammed bookcases, were yellowed with years of coal fires and nicotine, she made no attempt to contribute to the discussions. Convinced as she was of the meagreness of her understanding and her own insignificance, the whole business of being there at all had become a condition of chronic dread. She had nothing to say that would not sound, she knew, ridiculously unsophisticated.
Each week, Edwin handed round copies of xeroxed poems for the class to analyse. At the very last seminar of the spring term, to her astonishment she recognised one. It had been a favourite of Miss Arnold’s who, still alight with the zeal of the novice, had given the poem to her sixth form to read over a half term.
Vi was the only one in the class who had read the poem closely, if at all—and really more for what it might reveal about her teacher than for any improving mental exercise. One verse in particular had caught her attention.
When love with one another so Interinanimates two souls, That abler soul which thence doth flow, Defects of loneliness controls.
The