with her, Ernest, James and Peter, I saw this as proof my mother had been right, but also, at the same time, a challenge to the gods of fate to see if my father would be right as well. I did test them privately on this, when I used the communal telephone in the hallway. Mum got one version of the story: I had met a lovely group of people, very posh but not bad posh, and I was having a good time discussing my interests with them, most of which they shared, and we had nice outings and food together (‘The Wimpy! I know, so strange, but really fun’) and I thought there might be something of a romance blossoming between one of the boys, James, and me. That last bit was pure exaggeration. My feelings for James had grown more intense by the day, to the point where I had started to pull out a couple of strands of my hair to take away my nerves each time I went somewhere I knew he would be. Not enough for there to be bald spots on my head. Just one or two. I found it helped. But I didn’t tell Mum that part.
Dad, on the other hand, received a different version of Holly’s Time at Oxford University. He was told that I’d sort of befriended a group of posh people I didn’t think he would like. I didn’t like them much either, but I was focusing mostly on my studies and they were good for me to sound ideas off. No, I wouldn’t be bringing any of them home over the Christmas holidays, he didn’t have to worry about that. Boyfriend? No, there wasn’t anything much like that on the horizon. Maybe a boy I liked, but it wasn’t anything worth mentioning.
Some people might have found the way I approached occasional phone calls home to my parents odd, but it worked for me. Each conversation was crafted so it lasted long enough to make the call worth the money but not so long as to bore any of the parties involved. The details that would most impress Mum were emphasised and the parts that would least appeal to Dad were played down or excised completely. All in all, I did a pretty good job of giving each of them what they wanted.
So when I found myself going on my third outing as part of ‘The Ally Club’, as I continued to call it in my head, I found I was judging conversations and how people reacted to me through the dual perspective of my parents. Or, rather, through my own filtering mechanism, deciding how I would relay the event to each of them if I were to call them when I returned home (which I wouldn’t be doing, since I had phoned them only four days previously).
We were going to Blackwells, in Broad Street. I knew it was a famous bookshop – I had been there with my parents when we’d looked round the university and read the little plaque on the wall saying it had been opened in 1879 – but I still nodded and seemed interested when Ernest told me this. He was frequently doing this; treating me as if I needed the world explaining to me (and not even just the posh aspects of the world; sometimes things as mundane, though curiously unmanly, as how best to get stains off clothes). I usually just smiled and nodded and said the right things. I’d always been good at doing that. And that’s why I quite enjoyed occasionally doing the complete opposite and challenging what people said. A lot of pleasure could be derived from being the mouse that roared.
Ally and I had arranged to get a milkshake from a small café before meeting the boys at the bookshop. The purpose of the visit was to stock up on reading material for the Christmas holidays. Over their school breaks, Ernest and James had always held a competition: which of the two could read the most pieces of literature. They had devised a points-based scoring system, too. Five points per book under six hundred pages. Ten points per book over six hundred. Two points would be deducted if the book had been written after the turn of the century, with the exception of those that had won either the Booker or the Pulitzer, or were by authors who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Five points would also be deducted from the total amount if the participant failed to include a ‘reasonable spread’ of genres, periods of writing and nationalities. Ally gave me a thorough explanation of all this on our way to buy the milkshakes and while we drank them. ‘Apparently the teachers at Eton egged them on, rather. Kept recommending books they should add to their lists. They like competition, Etonians. They’d turn everything into a game if they could. God, they even turn masturbating into a competitive sport.’
I realised I’d pulled a face at the word ‘masturbating’ but Ally seemed spurred on by it. I got the feeling she’d come to like shocking me. ‘Oh yes, apparently they all stand around in a circle with a biscuit on a table in the middle. Then they pump away at themselves and the first person to spill his seed, so to speak, is the winner. The last person is, well …’
‘Well, what?’
‘The loser.’
I grimaced. ‘And what happens to the biscuit?’ I said, thinking I could probably guess the answer.
‘The loser has to eat it.’
‘That doesn’t sound very appetising.’
Ally chuckled. ‘I don’t think it’s meant to be. Just a bit of fun, I’m sure.’
‘Can’t you get AIDS that way?’
She tilted her head to one side and took a sip of her milkshake, apparently considering this. ‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure, to be honest. I doubt it. Otherwise I think most MPs would be on their deathbeds!’
She laughed loudly at her own joke.
‘So, do you know which books they’ll be picking this time?’ I said, keen to get the conversation away from boys consuming their own, and others’, semen.
‘Well, they have a bit of trouble now, since they’ve read so much already, so there’s naturally a bit of double-dipping. They haven’t really found a way to control that side of things, so they just try to make sure their lists are made up of a healthy majority of titles they haven’t read before, and the ones they have they aren’t supposed to have read for a good few years.’
The book lover in me liked the sound of this, although I knew I wouldn’t be able to compete with Ernest and James in a million years. They both seemed to swallow literature, or inhale it like a long drag on a cigarette, relishing it as they went. I read for pleasure, first and foremost, whereas they seemed to see it primarily as a form of self-nourishment.
‘Do you ever join in?’ I asked.
‘Christ, no. I wouldn’t be able to keep up. It would be a humiliation.’
Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Ally with a book, or even properly studying. Perhaps she was one of those people who just sailed through coursework and exams without ever really having to try. There had been a couple of girls in my school like that. I’d envied them greatly.
We tried to enter Blackwells, but didn’t get very far. A young bookseller, in the midst of neatly arranging copies of a Stephen King novel on a small table, looked up and told us we’d need to finish our milkshakes before we came any further. Ally rolled her eyes at him and for a minute I wondered if she’d ignore him and just march in, but to my relief she stepped back outside. A few minutes later, having discarded our empty milkshake cups in a wastepaper basket the bookseller had helpfully offered us, we walked purposefully, with me following Ally’s lead, through the store towards the back. It was a vast shop, and went further back than I remembered. We found the section marked ‘Classics’ pretty quickly. I noticed it was divided up into ‘English Literature’, ‘World Classics’ and ‘Modern Classics’. Each one was full of a vast array of volumes, most of them sporting the black or light-turquoise spines that characterised a sizeable chunk of Penguin’s publishing output. There were hefty, more academic volumes of famous novels mixed in too, no doubt containing annotations, guides to the text, essays, lists of further reading and various other extras. I was about to start perusing the shelves properly when Ally tugged at my arm.
‘Come on, round here.’
She steered me around the corner of one of the shelves towards a small alcove with a table and set of armchairs. Ernest and James sat side by side on one of them, the former lounging back, his head buried in an extremely large book which I recognised as The Count of Monte Cristo. James, on the other hand, was leaning forward, running an index finger down what appeared to be a long list, written in a leather-bound exercise book.
‘Ding dong merrily, my little Christmas readers!’