I’m astonished that I have any friends from Cambridge. I was a dilatory worker, a shocking shirker of essays and supervisions, and I did not understand that it was perfectly possible to say no at any stage of the transaction should you be invited out by a member of the opposite sex. I had a powerfully developed sense of my own repulsive ness that cannot have been helped by the fashion for platform shoes that coincided with these years. Thus, when I did leave F6, I was six and a half feet high and, in some senses, quite unstable. There were three dons at Girton whom I feared and respected, though they might not have guessed it: Jill Mann for Chaucer, who spotted me at once for a coaster; Gillian Beer, who has, despite it all, become a friend; and Lady Radzinowicz, who, with her dachsund Pretzel, taught me Milton and Spenser. I was so nervous about leaving F6 and actually getting on to the missile-launcher bus for central Cambridge, that I attended relatively few lectures, though I developed a fondness for Professor J.A.W. Bennett who must have been about twelve hundred years old by then. It was also compulsory, for reasons of cool as well as literary curiosity, to attend the lectures of the poet J.H. Prynne. I adored watching him take words to bits.
One day a vision entered the lecture theatre. Of course I had seen beauties before and there were even two at Girton, but this was different. She was attired in a coat of a red fox and it was clear that her electrical and crackling head of hair weighed more than her etiolated and fashionably attired body, from her Manolo Blahnik boots to her Joseph jeans and her Sonia Rykiel jersey (I was a Vogue reader and could do the semiotics). We had a catwalk model among us and she was one big cat: Tamasin Day-Lewis.
Tamasin was at King’s, a college full of interesting people who were not Girtonians. They included descendants of old Bloomsbury, precociously brilliant philosophers, a girl who lived with a man who had already sired children, and my beloved friend Rupert Christiansen, who allowed himself four minutes off work between breakfast and lunch and five in the afternoon for the ingestion of a cheese scone. Every vacation Rupert worked in the Arts Council bookshop in Sackville Street. He had one, orange needlecord, suit. Rupert is colour blind. He saved up every penny to go and stand in the gods at Covent Garden.
It says much for Rupert that he took me out to see the ballet La Bayadère. After three days’ thought I dressed for this occasion in eight-inch cork platforms, white tights, a wraparound white cheesecloth skirt, a scarf tied across my by now ultra-skinny chest and an enticing new bubble perm inspired by the film of The Great Gatsby with Mia Farrow and Robert Redford. Rupert is a good six foot two and he weathered this fearful first date to become my daily correspondent, my test of decency, my measure of honour.
It was during Prelims that I realised that I could speak in tongues, or rather that I could do so if drunk enough and if the drink were whisky. Today I do not drink at all or I would be dead, and when people ask, ‘Do you miss anything about drinking?’ I can with perfect truth say no. But I do miss the smell of those island malts, that are nothing more or less than the smells of the islands themselves, of sea, of kelp, of heather, of peat, of wrack, of mist, of slow, slow burning.
I gave a party at the end of Cambridge, for my twenty-first birthday, for the friends I had somehow made. I sent out invitations on which I had drawn a bough with golden apples. The words written below invited each recipient to help me take my golden bow. The house in which the party took place belonged to none other than my present landlord, to whom, that first time, I was a lousy lodger, borrowing his tank tops, sending telegrams via his phone bill and continually introducing cats into the ménage. I remember Peggotty and Portnoy, who was a Siamese and therefore always complaining. In this may be glimpsed something of the golden character of Niall Hobhouse, who was Anthony Appiah’s cousin. To my twenty-first birthday party, the golden bow, I wore a jumpsuit made of paper that I had sprayed gold, and gold cowboy boots. I had not neglected to spray my hair gold.
For some reason, just as the party got going, Katie told me to cook some crumpets. She talks so quickly that I frequently mishear. I have before now jumped out of a boat when she was just telling me to ‘go about’. I set to with the crumpets and continued being my entertaining self, welcoming my friends and no doubt swigging along. For the record, Katie tells me that she was in Singapore on this occasion; so memory casts its dramas.
The grill began to send out little flames. I bent to attend to it. There was a thick smell of burning hair. The paint with which I had sprayed my hair and dungarees was gold car paint, highly flammable. I rushed upstairs dressed in flames, a zip, underwear and cowboy boots, drenched myself in the bath and returned later to my own party re-attired in some no doubt fearful ensemble, maybe even the £2.99 pink rubber dress from Sex on the King’s Road.
At the party was my very quiet friend Amschel Rothschild. He wore a navy blue velvet suit, an expression of amusement on his face, one that might have been painted by El Greco, and a cymbidium from his hothouse in his buttonhole. He had neatly sprayed the orchid gold.
But for him, who took me out of Cambridge for the last weeks before Finals and set me to my books as you might set an animal to exercise, I should have had no kind of a degree, let alone the pleasure of discovering what it means really to work at a subject and how that pleasure has no end. While it may be solitary, it is, at its best, love and sight, or, rather, vision. A love in which there is no doubt that you wish to do the best you can, not for your own but for its sake. Amschel died far too young and I shall miss him till I die. So I owe him my ‘good’ degree and many more degrees of gratitude.
LENS II: Chapter 5
In the summer of 1976, there was a heat that dried the green out of England. It was possible to faint away when you stood up. Water was rationed. There was even, I believe, a Minister for Water, or perhaps he was a Minister for Drought. During that summer, I fainted on a train that was crossing Suffolk and woke up with words branded on my arm in sunburn: Second-Class. I had seldom travelled far; after all, England was quite far away from my first home in Edinburgh and Colonsay was in itself both domestic and utterly exotic. There had been Holland, Italy, Switzerland; nowhere outwith Europe.
Amschel had at the time the use of his parents’ house in St James’s on Barbados. The house was reminiscent of Caribbean life as it’s not often advertised, a life of conversation, books and ideas. Amschel invited Tamasin and me to stay at the house and then to travel with him to Cape Cod to join his sister Emma.
Two days before travelling on this, to me, unimaginably complicated journey, I was on the tube on my way to work at Vogue. A nice young man called Simon Crow greeted me. I was standing; it was a crowded carriage. Simon was sitting down. He asked me what I was up to and I said that I was going on an aeroplane to Barbados and America. Simon was in the Foreign Office and knew his stuff, clearly.
‘Have you got a passport and a visa?’ he asked, still half asleep.
I had neither, but I did have a pair of pink stripy lounging trousers I’d sewn that I considered very suitable for Caribbean nights.
Simon Crow, who I think was at Oxford while I was at Cambridge, got me a passport in one day and stood in line to get me a visa. The sort of man you need in diplomacy.
The reader may not believe the following story. Or rather, it could not happen now, as old people say. Two days before my first wedding, my husband-to-be asked if I had a passport in my married name, since our honeymoon destination might require one. I really don’t know whether I quailed within while looking noncommittal or if I confessed. What I did do was telephone the Passport Office in Petty France. The telephone was answered in those times by a person. I blurted out my story in all its idiotic detaiclass="underline"