I didn’t like to step on more than one contiguous stone in any direction, which meant I often moved like the knight in chess. It probably looked a little weird if anyone was watching, but I don’t think anyone was. I don’t think people noticed me much. I had a kind of musical monologue that went with crossing these stones. It’s similar to the one I use for going up stairs. They grew out of the little tunes I hummed as I walked around the corridors of the hospital or my old school. It’s a means of focus; stops me taking in too much at once. I find it hard enough to get what I need from what I can take in. Overloading only makes it worse. I’m pretty sick of the tunes, to be honest—always the same few notes, day after day, year after year. But there you go. It’s just repetitive, it’s not the end of the world. Worse things happen at sea, as my aunt would always tell me.
My aunt was full of these aphorisms that seemed to make her happy. The longest way round is the shortest way home. These things are sent to try us. If a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing well. A place for everything and everything in its place. The same platitudes, over and over. Some of them flat out contradicted some of the others and she didn’t seem to notice. Comparisons are odious, but then Be a thoroughbred, not a pit pony. Several had a ring of Ye Olde, which apparently lent them an air of gravitas in her opinion. Don’t spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar. Ne’er cast a clout ’til May be out.
My aunt’s happiness was simple. At least it seemed to come simply to her, in situations I could never conceive of as being appropriate to such a feeling. Her sayings were family lore. Just not my family. I mean she wasn’t really my aunt. She liked me to call her that, and I didn’t care what I called her, so that was fine. She’d preface all her sayings with “As my grandmother used to say…” as if the lineage itself was the point. Perhaps it was. Perhaps her grandmother was happy like her.
My own maternal grandmother is a frozen woman on a mantelpiece who never smiles, who will never smile. I have inherited several of these mantelpiece women, frozen in their own little moments. Little clicks. Just like how your own present, your now, becomes frozen as soon as you think of it. Try it. Notice it existing. Click. I’m told my grandmother worked for the Secret Service during World War Two but was never allowed to say a word about what she actually did. Then after the war ended she was never a happy woman. She became obsessed with the cleanliness of her house. Beds had to be made every morning—and we’re not talking duvets here but old-fashioned sheets and blankets, with hospital corners as a baseline standard—and she would inspect them. A single wrinkle meant failure. It got worse over time, until visitors were not permitted to stand too close to her windows in case they got steamed up. She would follow people around with a towel just in case.
I was almost all the way across the stones when Gin saw me and called my name. I was too close to pretend not to hear, so I looked up and she came over, smiling. I noticed and made myself smile back because that’s what you’re supposed to do.
“What’s up?” she said.
I found this confusing; there was nothing wrong with me.
Fortunately she didn’t wait for a reply but carried on, lowering her voice.
“Looks like we’re meeting next week,” she said, looking around with a furtive glance that struck me as only half play-acting. “You know—conversazione. Friday at eight. The Bainbridge Room in Queens’. You’re coming, right?”
—
I asked at the Queens’ Porters’ Lodge for directions to the Bainbridge Room. It was tucked away behind the OCR, with a grand wooden door below an imposing stone arch. For a moment I was baffled that a student society would be able to book out a room with such a door for its meetings, but then I remembered Gin had told me it wasn’t just students. Junior Research Fellows, and even a couple of more senior Fellows from Queens’ and Caius, were members too. I’d forgotten to eat dinner first, and I knew there would be wine at the meeting, which would play havoc with my stomach for the entire night and probably trip a nasty headache. But that would just have to be. I debated for a minute whether to knock. Wouldn’t that be too much like going in to a supervision? I decided on plausible deniability: a quick tap while depressing the heavy tab of the brass handle, then I swung the door open without waiting for a reply.
The walls of this room were gorgeously panelled in dark oak, the high plaster ceiling bordered by intricately moulded cornices. Gilt-framed portraits of old white men in black and scarlet academic regalia hung on each wall, and beneath the grandest of the frames an open fire burned in an enormous iron grate. The fire was surrounded by five armchairs, upholstered in maroon paisley. These formed part of a semicircle, with the ad hoc addition of three dining chairs, evidently taken from the grand table that occupied most of the room.
Years later, I would watch the Harry Potter films and laugh with something like relief at their depictions of an ancient magical school for witches and wizards, no more disorienting or unworldly than rooms like this were to my barely-adult self. All of the old Cambridge colleges were full of spaces like this, so that I was sometimes unsure
