‘Look! Look!’ said Nicola, leafing through her glossy programme, ‘they’ve got a hypnotist and a graphologist and a fortune-teller and a masseur and an ABBA tribute band!’
She jumped up and down in excitement, careless of her high heels, and Mark joined in, the two of them holding hands and jumping in circles. In the corner of the quad, a young man was already vomiting, but the night had barely begun.
We walked through Front Quad, where the mariachis were playing a set the programme called ‘Latin rhythms’.
‘Come on,’ said Mark. ‘Come and dance.’
Nicola blushed and stared at him, as if uncertain whether he could really mean it.
‘Come on,’ he said again, tugging at her hand. ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re rubbish. I’m a fantastic dancer.’
She raised her eyebrows and grinned.
‘I’m not rubbish. I bet you’re more rubbish than me.’
‘Oh, is that so?’
Holding hands, they raced to the edge of the dance floor, where Mark placed Nicola facing us, resting his head momentarily on her shoulder to give us a broad wink. She, seeing our faces, looked round to find him gurning and half-pushed him off.
He slipped his arm around her waist, pressed his stomach against the small of her back and began to sway gently. She giggled and reached her arm down as if to pull his away, but his fingers caught hers and, rolling her eyes and laughing, she too began to circle her hips loosely. He nudged her forward and she spun lightly, away from him and then back, their hands together at her waist, a smile on her lips, a frown of concentration at his brow. He spun her away again and then, as he pulled her back, caught her other hand and arranged her into a ballroom stance, her hand resting on his shoulder. He whispered something into her ear and then they were moving slowly towards the centre of the dance floor. His hips were swaying and he pulled her closer and she laughed sweetly and leaned in to him. He was a good dancer, it was clear; he encouraged her, nudged her into position, moved her without bullying. Two couples passed in front of them and when they parted again I saw that her eyes were closed, her head on his chest.
Simon, I noticed, was watching them with a frown.
‘D’you fancy a dance, Si?’ said Franny.
He looked thoughtfully at the dance floor and then at Franny.
‘Maybe later,’ he said. ‘Anyone want some punch?’
We shook our heads.
‘Back in a minute, then.’
After he had moved away, Franny said quietly, ‘We are utterly sure Nicola knows Mark’s gay, aren’t we?’
‘You were there,’ said Jess. ‘She knows.’
‘Then I suppose,’ said Franny, ‘we just wonder whether Mark knows.’
And she moved off, following Simon.
By the candyfloss stand in Garden Quad, my shoulder was shaken by a man whose face I had to take a moment to resolve into recognition.
‘James!’ he said. ‘How the hell are you? Well? This is my girlfriend, Denise. Denise, this is James Stieff — fucking awesome physicist, top bloke.’
It was Kendall. He looked so much happier than when I had last seen him that he seemed entirely changed. Gone was the pallid, sickly air. Gone was the tea-scent. He seemed to have grown as well, put another inch or two on to himself, or perhaps it was simply that he stood more firmly. His girlfriend was lusciously plump and beautiful, poured into her dress to the point of appetizing overflow.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Hars got us a ticket, Hars Daswani?’ he said, as music started to play on the stage behind us. ‘Thought I’d come back and see how the old place’s doing. How are you, mate?’
‘I’m … yeah, I’m good. How’s Manchester?’
‘Oh yeah, God …’ Did I imagine a catch in his voice? ‘Yeah, it’s great. It’s not —’ he looked around the quad at the thousands of silver fairy lights winking like stars among the ivy — ‘it’s not all this, you know. But it’s good.’
He sounded momentarily unconvinced. Denise caught my eye and beamed.
‘Come on.’ She wrapped herself around his arm. ‘It’s too bloody cold when we’re not dancing!’
Kendall smiled at me apologetically. I watched them go and wondered if he knew what he’d escaped, or if he still pined for the quads and rooms lined with ancient books.
We always value things that are hard to get, regardless of their intrinsic worth.
Jess and I walked through the ball mostly arm in arm. I danced a little, but could not continue for long; the cold made my knee ache. She understood. We tried to get in to see the graphologist but the queues were too long, and the hypnotist forgot his patter halfway through when his victims started giggling. The booze was plentiful, though. At one point I thought I spotted Mark and Nicola in the crowds around the fortune-teller’s tent, but could not reach them.
At 5.30 a.m. the sun had not yet risen but the breakfast muffins and steaming dishes of scrambled eggs and trays of smoked salmon began to emerge from the kitchens and we called ourselves ‘survivors’.
At the trestle tables, Jess and I found Franny, her hair wild, her dress slightly askew.
‘Have you seen Mark?’ she said, struggling to manage plate and champagne glass and cigarette at once. ‘Si’s been looking for Nic for an hour.’
Jess and I shook our heads.
‘They can’t have left, can they?’ said Jess, and I thought nervously of where Mark might have taken her, of what escapades he might have suggested.
‘I expect they’ll turn up,’ I said, helping myself to a ladleful of buttery eggs.
*
When the sun was fully up, we went to look for them. We looked in the massage room, where a girl was crying noisily. We looked in the fortune-teller’s booth, where a man was slumped by a neat puddle of vomit. We looked in the long dining hall, where Ball Committee members were already patrolling with black rubbish bags and weary expressions. We found them at last beneath one of the arched alcoves in the undercroft, where the noise from the last remaining dance floor above was muffled to a fuzzy pulse of sound, a rapid muted heartbeat. They were nestled close together, Nicola’s head resting on Mark’s lap, using his folded jacket as a pillow. Her legs were curled under her, the millefeuille layers of her white petticoats surrounding her like sea-foam. He was leaning back against the interior wall of the alcove, one hand protectively around her shoulders, the other stroking her hair. She was asleep and looked so young, so much younger than when awake, her profile as calm as a child’s. She was breathing softly and Mark’s head was tipped back. But as we approached, Mark looked up, smiled and raised one finger to his lips. And although we knew it was time to leave, we stood back, for a moment, and were silent.
13 Third Year
Soon after that, Oxford was over. It was the work that did it, first of all. The growling chasm of finals towards which we were being swept. Mark, probably driven by a dread of what his family would say if he failed, began spending up to ten hours a day in the library. Jess resigned from the orchestra and Franny became so obsessive in her work timetable that she even started noting down how long she’d spent in the bathroom and added that on to the end of her working day. This is Oxford: it need not be all or nothing, but it lends itself to that way of thinking.
And we began to spiral apart, slowly at first so we did not have to acknowledge what was happening. Franny took to spending part of her week back in college. Simon spent several weekends on recruitment retreats in Surrey or Hampshire, where he participated in group exercises, was interviewed and tested and asked to build a kayak using only three car tyres and a selection of rubber bands. Soon he triumphantly presented us with a letter confirming that, from the end of August, he would be employed by a well-known firm of management consultants. Jess and I spent a similarly fraught few days in London. She auditioned and was offered a position with a prestigious orchestra. I, less grandly, was accepted on to a PGCE course. One night over dinner at the house Emmanuella announced that she would be working as a TV-journalist in Madrid from the autumn, and we all toasted our success in good red wine.