All this news was merely the backdrop to finals, though. They were punishing; the insistent, inescapable mental pressure of Oxford condensed into a single, migraine-like week. Exam after exam after exam, a test of nerve and stamina rather than education or intellect. My exams were earlier than the others’, at the end of March. When I came out of each one, someone in the house would make me tea or soup and say, ‘How was it?’ Meaning ‘Tell us the secret. What is this thing, finals? How is it to be conquered?’
And I did not know how to tell them that it was simply an exam. Like a hundred other exams. Like collections, like penals, like A-levels, like GCSEs, like mocks. For ten days I sat in Exam Schools. I raised my hand if I wanted to go to the bathroom, I tied my papers together using green cord tags with silver ends, I wrote legibly, I showed my workings. The only difference was in the show of the thing: the subfusc and the marble floors and the regulations concerning the holstering of swords.
This external show is meant to impress and terrify, but knowledge acquired at Oxford is no different from knowledge acquired anywhere else. And when the others began their finals, they knew this too.
But finals, for all their hugeness, lasted barely a moment. They were over as soon as they had begun, and then there was only waiting for results, lying in the sun and packing up belongings. We greeted each other with flowers and champagne, and threw flour or glitter on each other’s heads. But the end of finals meant the end of other things as well, and this became increasingly clear.
Jess and I put a deposit down on a rented one-bedroom flat in London. Simon, using money saved from his lucrative summer jobs, got a mortgage and bought a small flat in London, which seemed to us to be the most grown-up thing we’d ever heard of. Mark’s owning a house was one thing; Simon’s persuading a bank to lend him money to buy one was quite another. Franny was accepted to read for a PhD at Cambridge and would be moving into graduate accommodation there. By our last night in the house, we had already reached the point where it took some effort to gather the six of us together.
The last night was a week after our results were announced. There were some surprises — Emmanuella received a lower second, while Simon got an upper second, and none of us could ever account for this except that it seemed often to be how things happened between men and women at Oxford, the men appearing to be marked with slightly surprising leniency, the women with surprising strictness. Franny got her first though, as did Jess. Mark received a bare third but redeemed himself ridiculously by winning a prize for his paper on ‘Religions and Mythology of the Ancient Near East’. There was even a prize-giving where, according to him, he was presented with a leather-bound copy of Cory’s Ancient Fragments by seventeen senior dons, each with a long beard and tattered gown. I got a lower second and was pleasantly surprised my mark was no worse. Other than that, I barely felt anything: no disappointment, no anger. Relief, mostly. Relief that it was over. Anne had been right: Oxford is a race and my race was run. I was no longer limping along behind the pack. It was done.
And after these things, we decided that we would have to have one last night of raucous celebration. We called it ‘the last good night’ later, because although there were other nights when the six of us spent the evening eating and drinking and talking and laughing, they were never quite like that again. I think we knew that this might be the case. That was why Emmanuella told whatever tall, taciturn blond was following her around just then that she had to have the evening off. That was why Franny blew off a night at high table, and Simon rescheduled a meeting with his management consultants, and Mark stayed home from roving.
And it was a good night. Mark ordered in hampers from Fortnum & Mason which Emmanuella scoffed at and made ham hock with split peas without reference to the contents of the hamper. We broke open a bottle of ancient port from the cellars and a wheel of creamy, gooey Stilton. We played card games and Cluedo — which Simon won in the most irritating fashion imaginable, not only guessing the murderer correctly but also telling us what cards we each had in our hands, like some sort of autistic savant. We drank more, we ate more. We played Twister and fell over on top of each other. Mark rolled a spliff and passed it round. Our jokes became funnier, our mood more expansive. I was filled with an immensity of love the like of which I had never felt before — love for the people giggling around the table, for the house with its many rooms which had been so daunting when we first arrived but which had welcomed us so warmly. I looked at the faces of my friends and saw that they were all astonishingly beautiful, and I found myself filled with simple gratitude that I had been allowed to share this time with them and a maudlin sadness too, a nostalgia for the present moment.
What is Oxford? It is like a magician, dazzling viewers with bustle and glitter, misdirecting our attention. What was it for me? Indifferent tuition, uncomfortable accommodation, uninterested pastoral care. It has style: the gowns, cobbled streets, domed libraries and sixteenth-century portraits. It is old and it is beautiful and it is grand. And it is unfair and it is narrow and it is cold. Walking in Oxford, one catches a glimpse through each college doorway, a flash of tended green lawn and ancient courtyards. But the doorways are guarded and the guardians are suspicious and hostile. For people like Mark, everywhere is Oxford: beautiful and ancient. For such people, life is an endless round of Oxfords: the quads and panelled rooms of Eton give way to those of Oxford, then the rooms of the Inner Temple and finally the Lords. For the rest of us, Oxford is an afternoon tour around a stately home: a place of wealth and beauty which, by its velvet ropes and querulous attendants, insists on reminding us that we do not belong. For me, Mark always held the promise that the ropes could be pulled back, that I could gain admittance. The question of how I would then leave did not, at that time, occur to me.
By 5.30 a.m. Emmanuella and Jess were asleep, curled up on Mark’s massive bed. We covered them with a blanket. Simon and Franny claimed they were going to play cards in Simon’s bedroom, although we knew full well what that meant because it was late, and they had been kissing copiously, and Simon’s hand was quite unashamedly stuck down the back of Franny’s jeans. Which left Mark and me on the landing.
He said, ‘D’you fancy a bacon sandwich?’
I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more.
In the kitchen, Mark cut four thick slices off the loaf and set two each on two plates next to the hob. He pulled down a frying pan from the shelf above the sink and set it to warm. I knew better than to offer to help; he had his system.
As he reached for the bacon at the back of the fridge, he said, ‘Do you think we should just kill ourselves?’
‘What?’
‘No, really. I mean, don’t you think we should just get it over with now?’ He was smiling as he crossed the kitchen, bacon in hand. He took a long knife from the drawer and toyed with it, twisting its point on the tip of one finger. ‘We could, you know, hara-kiri, right here in the kitchen.’