I didn’t know why a graffiti artist should want to write What’s missing from this picture around the town in perfect lettering. But it was something to do, I supposed, and as such perhaps no better or worse than anything I was doing. When I got back to College and locked my bike to the racks at the front of the Great Gate, the words were there again. Only this time, they were right on the frame of somebody’s bike: the next bike over, directly to the right of the spot I’d chosen for mine. And this didn’t look like graffiti. It was more like a sticker or a transfer. It might have been part of the bike’s original branding.
This time, I didn’t like it.
I stood for a while beside the bike racks to catch my breath, staring up at the gate. The Great Gate is a battlement, a statement in its own right: Here I stand. The College. The College. I change for nobody, for nothing. Time is wasting its energy on me. The two brown-orange brickwork turrets are edged in zigzags of cream stone, with a crenellated parapet running between them as if we needed somewhere for Old Hamlet’s ghost to parade up and down of a winter’s night. Mullioned windows atop a huge, arched double doorway; and another, smaller door beside the Porters’ Lodge for all-day, all-night use. A full coat of arms for Edward III, with small shields for each of his six sons. One of these small shields is a blank, because the poor kid died before he got his arms.
This whole situation is constantly watched over by another Henry VIII, but this one is uglier and more awkward than the posturing Hall Henry. This grey stone Henry holds a gilt orb in one hand and a wooden chair leg in the other. There are stories about what happened to his sword, so many stories that we don’t have to worry about which one is the truth. His face is age-worn, eroded by centuries out in the Cambridge cold. Honestly, he doesn’t look happy up there. Day after day, we all busy in and out under his stone robes, and nobody even bothers to look up and see what he’s got going on underneath them. We don’t care. The only creature I ever saw watching this watchman was Pandemos, the College cat.
My rooms were only a few steps away from him. Because I was a Senior Scholar in my second year, I had much better rooms now than the one in Hermes Court. I was allocated a set—a living room with a separate bedroom attached—on the attic level of Great Court, right beside the Great Gate. The proximity of the Porters’ Lodge meant no loud staircase parties, and that meant slightly better sleep.
According to the porters, the rooms on the floor below me had once been Isaac Newton’s laboratory. Certainly the decrepit gas hobs in the staircase kitchen, with their big brass taps built right into the wall, might have been Newton’s own. And these were its only offering to the aspiring student chef. I lit them with matches, timorously at first, then eventually with blasé abandon. I boiled pasta in an old saucepan my aunt had given me as she packed me off to College, saving myself the extra quid or two it would have cost to be served the same thing or worse in Hall. In cold weather, the tiny kitchen steamed up quickly and I would throw its windows open to the icy air, looking down into Great Court. Watching people scamper back and forth like rats, along the broad, right-angled paths: beautifully cobbled, but paved in the middle for ease of walking. By evening the dawdlers had gone—at this time of day everyone was going somewhere, quick and purposeful, hurrying from lamp to lamp, staircase to staircase, before vanishing into one or another grand arched doorway.
My staircase also had a bathroom, up on my floor, above the kitchen. This was a bare room, just a tub and a sink, tucked in under the sloping eaves. But it meant this sixteenth-century building was still serving out its original purpose. Housing scholars of the College. Not taking a single day off in all those centuries. As if the very continuity of our world depended on it. Maybe it did. The College clock strikes the hour twice, you know. Perhaps it must: once to pass the time, once to let us know the time has passed. Metaphysics and epistemology. Very important not to let them shade into each other, to confuse what is real with what we know. A stopped clock, incidentally, is not “right” twice a day. It’s never right and it’s never wrong. It doesn’t mean anything at all.
I don’t care for baths. My body is unsettling at the best of times and I’d rather have less to do with it than a bath demands. When I was little, I used to inch myself slowly into the bathwater because it was always too hot. It had to start out hot, because as soon as it got cold that was it: there was nothing more in the tank. My aunt was scrupulously stingy with the immersion heater, which meant the hot
