I suppose.’
‘I asked her to supper on Friday. Can you make it?’
‘Of course,’ said Alix. ‘I’ll see you then.’
Esther, having thus fulfilled her obligations to her friends, forgot them both instantly, and returned her attention to a volume called The Vegetation of Medieval Europe and a German monograph on Sodoma; works which she was reading and annotating by her own interleaved system, a system which had evolved from her inability to concentrate fully on any one topic for more than ten minutes. It had thrown up some very challenging cross references in its time, and she was at the moment pursuing a connection between the nature of quattrocento pigmentation, and lichenology as a method of dating the antiquity of landscape: a gratifyingly pointless and therefore pure pursuit, which enabled her mind to wander in the direction of Italy and to hover about the abstraction of a particular shade of green-blue which she had noted in many a painted Italian scene as well as in the lichens of ancient English woodland. A pale, delicate, hard, metallic, heavenly, shocking, suggestive green-blue. It tinted dry artistic Italian cypress trees and the undersides of vine leaves, it lived on the damp bark of English oaks and thorns. It expressed both distance and presence: it was both of the background and of the sharpest proximity. An enigmatic colour, speaking of metaphysical correspondences. Signifying nothing but the search for itself. But an essential shade. Italian farmers claimed that some of its modern manifestations were inspired by pesticide, but pesticide would not account for the hue of those ravishing little sprigged seaweed trees on the Tuscan hillsides in the frescoes at Monte Oliveto. Sodoma and Signorelli. Badgers and magpies featured also in those frescoes, and frequented the hillsides to this day. So that vegetable blue also must then as now have had a natural home? Esther Breuer made a note to order Oxenholme’s monograph on Signorelli, and read on, waiting for some little current to leap from one open page to the other, from one lobe of the brain to the other, and to ignite a new twig of meaning, to fill a small new cell of the storehouse of her erudition. She was content with twigs and cells, or so it seemed. Sometimes, when accused of eccentricity or indeed perversity of vision, she would claim that all knowledge must always be omnipresent in all things, and that one could startle oneself into seeing the whole by tweaking unexpectedly at a surprised corner of the great mantle. At other times she conceded that her interests were pointless but harmless. I am not ambitious, I do not seek answers to large questions, she would say. This would baffle her friends and her students who had the impression that she was engaged in some vas if imprecise enterprise. No, I prefer precision, Esther would say. They did not know how to take it.
Jane Austen recommended three or four families in the Country Village as the thing to work on when planning a novel. Esther Breuer might well have been expected to approve this advice, with its implication that depth rather than breadth is of importance, and intimate knowledge of a corner more valuable than a sketchy acquaintance with the globe. In fact, perversely, Esther Breuer disliked the only Jane Austen novel she had ever read (which was, perversely, Sense and Sensibility) and frequently boasts of her inability to tackle the others. ‘Too English for me,’ she will sometimes add, in her impeccably English middle-class intellectual’s voice.
Esther, Liz and Alix, who in Jane Austen’s day would never have met at all, met in Cambridge in 1952. Just before Christmas, when they were up for interview from their respective schools. Alix was applying to read English Literature, Liz to read Natural Sciences (with a view to medicine) and Esther to read Modern Languages. This should have safely prevented any rapport between them, but did not. There were, it is true, many awkwardnesses in their first communications, for none of them was much used to speaking to strangers, but this lack of practice was balanced by a strong desire on the part of all three of them to enter upon a new life in which speaking to strangers was possible. Otherwise, each had separately recognized, the future was circumscribed. Somehow, haltingly, over dinner in Hall (chicken, leeks and tinned spaghetti, a mixture delicious to each after years of post-war whale meat and school meals) they lurched into conversation, having found themselves for no good reason sitting together: Liz and Alix discovered that both came from Yorkshire, and that neither played lacrosse, nor had ever seen it being played, and Esther joined the discussion by volunteering that she had herself managed to avoid playing netball for the past three years on the grounds that she was too small. ‘I said I was unfairly handicapped, and they let me do extra Latin instead,’ she said. The fact that both Liz and Alix seemed to accept that extra Latin might be preferable to netball indicated that further interchange might be possible, and they continued to talk, through the fruit tart and custard, of the nature of intellectual and physical education, of matter and spirit, of Descartes (brought up by Esther), of T. S. Eliot (brought up by Alix) and of schizophrenia (brought up by Liz). The matter was abstract, for none of them knew anything other than abstractions, and the tone lofty. It was what they had expected of University, but had not hoped so soon to find. Esther, at the end of the meal, expressed her satisfaction with her new companions by inviting them to go with her to visit a friend already attending the college, an Old Girl of her school. They accepted with alacrity the prospect of a glimpse of the world inside, and all three of them went along dark portrait-hung corridors and up panelled staircases to the room of one Flora Piercy, a second year History student of considerable sophistication, who offered them a glass of wine. Had they known how rare such a commodity was in a woman’s college at that date, they might have been even more astonished, but in a sense, looking round Flora’s room, with its bright scatter cushions and Picasso prints and posters for plays at the ADC, with its invitations on the mantelpiece, with its gas fire and clutter of old shoes, with its romantic piles of what looked like lecture notes and essays, with its candle in a pewter stick and its wilting rose in a vase, they were beyond astonishment. The glass of wine went quickly to each head, for Alix’s family was teetotal, and Liz’s alcohol consumption to that date comprised perhaps three glasses of brown sherry and one (celebrating her A levels with her teacher) of Liebfraumilch: Esther seemed better connected with drink as with friends, but even she became confiding under the mild influence. They shared their dreams and aspirations, encouraged by the benevolent, admonitory, tutelary spirit of ample broad-faced Flora. ‘I would like,’ said Liz Ablewhite, after midnight, staring into the white flaming chalky cracked pitted flaring columns of the gas fire, ‘to make sense of things. To understand.’ By things, she meant herself. Or she thought she meant herself. ‘I would like,’ said Alix, ‘to change things.’ By things, she did not mean herself. Or thought she did not mean herself. ‘You reach too high,’ said Esther. ‘I wish to acquire interesting information. That is all.’
Liz, at that time, was pale and fair and thin, a colourless creature, unmade-up, drooping and slightly stooping, ill-complexioned, cardiganed, dull, yet glowing with a greenish pallor that compelled attention. Alix was mousy, square faced, healthy of complexion, and, even then, extraordinarily pleasant of expression, with a pleasantness that was at times radiant, and almost always irrefutable: she was wearing, as girls who had them did for their Oxbridge interviews in those days, a two-piece middle-aged suit of an oatmeal mix, with square shoulders and a straight skirt. Esther was small, neat, brown of skin, smooth, tidy, even (almost) elegant, yet somehow at the same time pugnacious of aspect, subversive, aggressive, commanding, Napoleonic of manner. She was wearing a severe school uniform, olive green, from an expensive private school. It looked ironic, satiric, suggestive on her small frame.
Flora Piercy was wearing black velvet trousers, and a large white cable-knit sweater. Her eyelids were painted blue with a blue greasy paste called eye-shadow. Alix bought some the next day, on her free half day in Cambridge before she took the Bletchley route to her Oxford interview (for she was a clever girl, Alix) – but she never dared to apply it, save in the privacy of her own room, until she went to Cambridge herself as a bona fide student the following autumn.
Liz, Alix and Esther all obtained places at the college of their choice, in Cambridge, and there were reunited, to gossip there and elsewhere over subsequent decades of their fortuitous friendship. They lost touch for some time with Flora, their first presiding deity, but even she was to reappear in another context, another life.
Liz Ablewhite was offered, and graciously accepted, the Alethea Ward Scholarship in Natural Sciences (an annual college award specifically designated by Dr Ward, 1853–1935, for female students of medicine from the County of Yorkshire, her own home county), the goal towards