My Animal Life(34)

Her response may not have been scornfully meant, and yet it seared me to the core. ‘Ah yes, ah well, it’s perhaps a little, just a little early to be thinking about that,’ she said. ‘We would normally, ah, look at the performance of undergraduates at, ah, a much later stage, before we invite them to do research.’

I could not sleep that night for reliving the moment. I had been what my father would call conceited. Had I even been what he would call swollen-headed? I lay awake till light scored the heavy curtains and flooded the strange unfriendly room. Why was I here? I felt large and empty. I would never sleep, my shame was too great.

And yet, when I told this story to my husband, he could not understand why I was embarrassed. ‘It was a perfectly ordinary question. Have you really felt ashamed of it all your life?’ The sad answer is, ‘Yes’. The healthy response would probably have been to realise that Oxbridge dons have a way of sounding snotty. Perhaps my unease is also explained by the inchoate sense I had, even then, that this might not be the right path. (I did do a doctorate in the end, and it took me away from my real writing, though the reading — Sterne, Fielding, Thackeray, Woolf, Beckett, Nabokov, Vonnegut — helped me to be a novelist.)

Two or three days later, in the Christmas holidays, a yellow telegram was brought to the door. It went something like this: CONGRATULATIONS STOP OFFER OF MAJOR OPEN CLOTHWORKERS’ SCHOLARSHIP STOP PLEASE ACCEPT WITHIN TWO DAYS STOP SOMERVILLE COLLEGE OXFORD. My mother cried with joy, my father was triumphant. Margaret had done it! Margaret had shown them! All my doubts disappeared at once. It was one of the happiest mornings of my life, whatever I have said about my queasy ego, whatever mixed gifts Oxford would bring me. I held my yellow telegram and sat in the bay window, which was drenched with winter sunlight, listening to the music swelling from the wireless, which played for me, and spoke to me, which would carry me away from my dull modern house, my squabbling family, my little village. Nobody realised I had got away! Perhaps my quiet self is the self that writes, but there’s poetry in success as well; in moments of glory; in watching the successful. They pass down the street, briefly touched with gold, though no one stays in the sun for ever. To ride in triumph through Persepolis … the fate of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. That morning, I thought I saw Persepolis. I swam in the stream of joy from the wireless, ‘M-y-y shi-i-p is coming in … Baby baby, m-y-y sh-i-i-p is coming in …’

Mrs Leavis cannot have entirely despised me, because Cambridge also offered me a place, but I accepted Oxford. I still had two more terms of school to go, and my A- and S-levels to take, though the scholarship was not dependent on them. I could get Cs and Ds if I liked. I was godlike. I was invulnerable.

Many a slip; I nearly fell to my death. I was clever, but of life I still knew absolutely nothing.





ii


That Easter my father led a school party on an exchange visit to St Aigulin in northern France. It was weeks before my A-levels, but I was studying French, and I’d have plenty of time to do revision. I did revision, but I also found I was attractive to the local male population. To them I was not ‘Dobbin’s daughter’, nor that weird brainy girl who went to grammar school. Something marvellous, unprecedented, happened; I was taken up by the local group, the coolest boys, a foursome. My favourite boy was said to be ‘un noble’, Jean de something or other, thin and handsome, but all of them dressed well, in a ’60s way, and rode tiny motorbikes with great style.

I worked for my A-levels every day, in the pretty upstairs room in the village inn where my family stayed, and in the evening, the boys took me out. Which literally meant ‘out’. We walked around, talking, under summer evening skies, and they showed me their bikes, and rode up and down. After that they went to the village hall and practised their music, while I admired them. It was the beginning of the life I wanted, or so I thought, before it all went wrong. They were boys, and I had grown up with boys, my brothers, my father, my family of males. I was learning afresh that I liked them. It was utterly, completely, innocent.

But the minds of fathers of daughters are corrupted by fear, and suppressed desire, and by guilt about these feelings. My father must have seen I was starting to escape, right under his nose, and he could not bear it. He said I could go out, with an 11 pm curfew, but secretly he fumed and fretted. My mother warned me, but I only laughed. Dad had ‘heard the boys talking in the street beneath our window’. My father’s French was ludicrous, breaking down, when he spoke, within a couple of words, into loud, slow English. Nevertheless, he now claimed to understand it. ‘He thinks he heard them saying “Elle est facile,”’ my mother said. Was I hurt, or just contemptuous? Openly contemptuous (though only to my mother), secretly hurt, at a deep level. Mum knew as well as I did that the voice was in his head, the enraging voice saying, ‘She’s easy, she’s anyone’s.’