She was nodding gently, and saying, “Ears, ears,” which meant “Yes, yes.”
Then it plopped out of her, like a heavy turd in a deep toilet bowl. “The thing is, Victoria, you know that if you complain about this it will go badly for everyone. For you too. It could even be bad for your career, if people were to think of you as a troublemaker. That sort of thing gets about, you know? You’d be taking such a big risk. And over…what? It’s nothing rarely.”
She meant “really.”
Her voice was soft and sweet. Barely there, like finely milled icing sugar. My lips went cold and I stopped talking. I’d made a mistake. I had no mentors. A couple of weeks later, Bell gave a small talk in the department library about postgraduate study, at which she assured us all that there was no racism or sexism in the Academy anymore. It wasn’t like when she was a young woman.
I met a few more Professor Bells later in my life. Perhaps it’s my imagination, but I thought their eyes all had that same intangible, terrible quality.
For pity’s sake I wish she’d shut up. What is the fucking point of it, going on and on and on. I don’t believe half of it’s even true. She contradicts herself and goes in circles. Maybe I am the point. Oh god, what if that’s it, the meaning of my life, to sit here and listen to the little shit talking and talking and talking. If only she would just disappear. Then maybe I could as well.
Part Two Worms
But when I came to man’s estate
Chapter Five
After the Bell incident, I suddenly felt that Cambridge was not a world where we could say what we meant. But I already knew it, really. Why else did we write in ciphers, speak in hypotheticals, scrawl drivel on toilet doors? Nonsense has always served this role in times of crisis. Weird echoes of the half-familiar that mean nothing—at least, nothing that could ever be pinned on anyone. The absurd is a cry of pain for when our symbols are overloaded, collapsing. The last thing left.
That’s why the Nazis tried to ban it, you know. “Degenerate art.” They exhibited it in “the insanity room” with a notice: In the paintings and drawings of this chamber of horrors there is no telling what was in the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or the pencil. History is a stuck record on this one: Jewish artists are crazy, queer people are crazy, women are crazy, ex-girlfriends are super crazy, our enemies are crazy, and crazy people are our enemies.
That was my conclusion, anyway, but I never spoke a word about it out loud. Except during Humberton’s digressions, such extracurricular thinking was strongly discouraged. By the time we graduated, the best of us, the elite, the top of the class, would be writing very sane and sensible prose. We would forget how to read the nonsense codes, and that there was once a reason we needed them. We would call this training. Discipline.
If women are crazy it’s because they contain multitudes, which is because they have to. And then they have to learn how to keep most of them tucked away most of the time. On the flip side, men aren’t allowed to. Maybe that’s why I’d never thought marrying a man would be a good idea. If I’d been allowed a few at a time, that might have worked. I don’t know. With women, it’s different. All their lives they’re being flattened down in one dimension, so they get spread out in others. Kaleidoscopic. You know how if you unfold a cube, you get six squares? One woman in her time plays many parts, although in her case they do not appear in a specified order. They might be folded together, like a little chorus of supporting characters, all singing for their lives.
Or spread too thin, spun to rags and tatters. Go read a Plato dialogue, and then look at the fragments we have left of Sappho. One person’s manuscripts so terribly important to preserve, the other’s left to rot away. Full of holes, now. All that blank space on the page. What’s left of Sappho is mostly nonsense. And yet what nonsense. Maybe I could have married Deb if I’d thought of it soon enough.
But by the time I’d figured out things like that, Deb was gone.
—
Deb went missing at the end of April. The Easter term had just begun: the exam term. The crunch.
The last time I saw Deb was at Humberton’s lecture. We sat up at the front together as usual, scribbling commentary to each other in the margins of our lecture notes, and when it was over we walked out of the room, arm in arm, chatting and laughing.
“Bumberton’s on good form today!” Deb said.
“You always think he’s on good form,” I told her. “You think he’s the Platonic Form of good form. You lurve his good form.”
She squished my arm and giggled. “I have to go to Big Bad Brain’s lecture now.”
Big Bad Brain was our nickname for Professor Bairn, whose parents had made the baffling decision
