“The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.”

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

On my first September day at my women’s residence at Bristol University I picked up the telephone in the corridor outside my perfect little room with the bay window and the little sink and the gas fire you could put a kettle on. I dialled John’s number and slid in the coins (this was not the era of smart phones). When a voice I didn’t recognise said, ‘Yes?’ I asked brightly for John. The short silence was disconcerting, the news that he’d died two months ago even more disconcerting. I didn’t need to be told he’d killed himself. I could see it all too clearly: a noose hung from the wooden beam that ran across the ceiling of his bedroom.

Less than a year previously I’d lain on his bed and stared up at that beam, waiting for him to come in and make love to me. Instead, he perched on the edge of the bed and held my hand and said, ‘You don’t want me. You don’t want this, believe me.’ My eyes smarted but I did not ask him what he meant because it was obvious he was filled with a sorrow not intended for my sixteen-year-old ears. Instead I put my arms around his slender thirty-five-year old body, a body I was uncertain I desired. I was certain, however, that I wanted him to desire me, this man who I met at Greek Summer School in Cheltenham, a man who drove his racing green MG3 wildly down the narrow roads near the town, a man well-known for his plays and books of poetry. He had advised me to come to this particular university because he’d introduce me to his actor friends, his artist friends, his film maker friends; he’d take me to the opening of plays, to poetry readings. He’d start my life, my real life. I could put aside my greasy Irish Ardara socks and greasy Donegal sweaters and my superior brother and my mother who judged me for being more interested in dangly earrings than the apartheid movement. I could wash the peat smoke from my hair and step onto a glittering stage where men with angled jawlines and experienced eyes put one hand lightly on my thigh, the other on the steering wheel and said: ‘When you are ready I’d like to get to know you more intimately.’ A stage where there would be no more boys with oniony body odour and fingers snagging my bra and inserting clumsy tongues into my mouth.

When I imagined life at university, lovers weren’t actually uppermost in my mind. Instead a glow of excitement filled my chest as I fantasised about evenings lolling about on antique cushions discussing Euripides, discussions that would go on well into the night, discussions filled with laughter and camaraderie and glasses of fine champagne. I imagined days spent deep in thought wandering hallowed halls and enchanted gardens, intimate conversations in ancient pubs drinking warm beer or eating scrambled eggs and bitter marmalade in bustling cafés with worldy students and even more worldly professors. Scenes you might find in a Merchant Ivory film or the TV show Brideshead Revisited (in fact, John looked a little like Jeremy Irons).

So far the show wasn’t starting well.

‘Oh,’ I said when the voice I didn’t recognise had finished telling me the news. ‘Oh.’ What else is there to say when you hear someone has died? I’m so sorry. No, that’s what the voice on the other side said. ‘I’m so sorry to have to have been the one to tell you this. That you heard it like this. I’m so sorry.’ The voice didn’t even know who I was. Who was he? One of John’s actor/poet/film maker friends I was supposed to have been introduced to? The door to my new life?

I put the phone down and returned to my now not so perfect little room and I unpacked my Ardara socks and my Donegal sweaters and stacked them in the chest with creaky drawers that wouldn’t close unless I shoved them with my foot and I filled the kettle and put it on the gas fire and stared out the bay window.

I should have asked John why he was so unhappy. I should have done more than write that stupid note that was all about me and nothing about him. I’m so sorry I’m not what you wanted, I know I’m all over the place these days, so excited and terrified really of everything, I know my life will be so extraordinary and I just need time and then I’ll be ready, I’ll be what you want, I promise, I promise with all my heart blah blah blah.

I balled my fists into my thighs. Were they too fat? John once told me he’d not slept with a woman because her ankles were too thick. 

In Cheltenham he’d told me he wanted to sleep with me but when I came to stay at his house for my university interview he didn’t want that anymore. I should have said yes the first time he asked rather than that stupid silence as we hurtled into the round red sun until he did a U-turn over the island in the middle of the motorway to get back to Cheltenham. I’d shrieked with laughter, ‘You can’t do that,’ I’d said and he’d looked at me and winked, ‘Watch me,’ he said and did it again.

And now it was too late. I could see my future drip away into the afternoon dying behind the window. Grey clouds thickened until that’s all there was, grey, grey, grey.

The kettle shrilled, making me jump but there was no time for tea, I was due to meet my fellow undergraduates, those fellow Classics afficionados who’d chat deep into the night with me. I dragged on my least oily jumper and my red jeans and headed for the lecture hall listed on the Welcome Week pages. The sight presented to me as I opened the massive door did not bode well. Rows of pimply boys in tight shirts and girls in sensible shoes. ‘Oxbridge rejects,’ someone behind me snickered. I turned, thinking, ah, here’s a possible friend, but no, they were striding off to some other meet and greet, Drama, probably.

I’d ring Chris. It wouldn’t be quite the same as John but Chris was also a poet and he also wanted me. I’d met them both at the Summer School, they were the two oldest participants, but I was used to having adults as friends, home-schooled—self-schooled, that I was. Chris had watched me and John with bemusement, and the three of us struck up a friendship of sorts. It was Chris I hung out with when John wasn’t available.

So sad, so beautiful, Chris had told me in his gentle American drawl. Actually, he’d written it in Ancient Greek on the back of a card with a watercolour of a ghostly woman riding a ghostly horse and slipped it inside my notebook.

‘I’m not sad,’ I’d said, ‘why do you think I’m sad?’ He just looked at me with his soupy blue eyes and mess of blonde curls and his slightly smelly, slightly feminine cardigan his aunt had knitted.

I hadn’t paid him much attention at first. There was something gnomish about him as if he lived under a dank mushroom. I wasn’t interested. But now that John was out of the picture cards with horses on them and a message in Ancient Greek from a man who had a PhD in Mathematics and who wrote verse in Iambic pentameter was interesting. Fortuitously—or perhaps not so fortuitously—he only lived a couple of hours away.

‘I’m happy you called,’ he said on the phone. ‘I’ll take you to tea and crumpets.’

‘John’s killed himself,’ I said.

‘I know,’ he said after a moment. ‘I heard. I’m sorry.’

So everyone knew but me. I was nothing but a dust mote in the life of John MacKendrick, famous playwright, famous poet. What the hell had I expected?

‘Tomorrow?’ I said. ‘There’s a fair with all the extracurricular activities we can do. Sports. Debating clubs et cetera.’

‘Sounds like a full day. Perhaps the weekend is better?’

‘I don’t want to do extracurricular activities. I hate sports. I hate debating.’

‘OK. I’ll pick you up at three?’

Chris was, at least, kind. And he made me laugh. He was a genius, quite literally. He didn’t tell me this but the subject of IQs did come up when I was describing to him how no one expected me to be bright, it all came as rather of a shock when I decided to study Classical Studies for O level and passed this and the others with straight As, all self-taught because I refused to go to yet another school. I’d been to seven already, in three different countries. (That’s another story.)    

‘But,’ I said, ‘when I was at school in Johannesburg, they gave everyone an IQ test and after the teacher had told everyone who’d came first—some dreamy girl with white blonde hair who always stared out the window—she looked at me and raised her eyebrows and said with a smile, Sandra, you have quite surprised us all.’

‘I think my brother has a very high IQ,’ I wittered on to Chris. ‘A hundred and fifty or something ridiculous. It’s why my mother had to spend all her money sending him to Winchester College. It’s not my fault she’s poor. It’s his fault. She didn’t have to pay anything for my schooling and she wears earrings too so it’s not as if she doesn’t care about looking nice just because she marched with the Black Sash, I mean what’s she doing now about any of that stuff? She just goes to work at the Community Centre and comes home and writes long messages to me about how I need to pull up my socks and stop being so horrible to her and it’s about time I got over the fact that my father died.’

Why was I telling him this? I picked up a crumpet and bit into it. Butter squirted onto my one and only pretty top, a red sateen thing I’d found at Oxfam in Belfast for 50p. I’d stolen the 50p from my mother’s purse. I’d also stolen a pair of black velvet gloves from the shop, gloves that were now folded on the table beside my plate, although it was only September and warm enough to wear a T-shirt.

Chris took my hand and stroked the back of it.

‘After I’d sat my Ancient Greek A level I walked outside and a building blew up right in front of me,’ I said just to change the subject. It had only been a controlled detonation by the British Army but I didn’t plan to tell him this. I hadn’t known until afterwards, standing there as bricks and mortar and concrete and glass and wood tumbled inwards, a perfect fall, a neat pile, dust rising up like icing sugar.

‘Oh Sandra,’ Chris said. ‘Oh Sandra. So sad, beautiful.’

I giggled and pulled my hand away.

While Chris wasn’t exactly a bright spot during my first terms at university, he was at least a change from the pimply boys and girls in sensible shoes and what proved to be exceedingly boring lectures. It seemed teaching ability was not considered a necessity. Most of the lecturers arrived late, mumbled incoherently from densely typed pages, and left early. Meanwhile the girls in sensible shoes scribbled denser notes and the boys in tight shirts flicked chewing gum at each other or worse. They eyed my red jeans, but the girls studiously avoided any contact which was fine by me. While my new life may not be unfolding as planned, at least I had a PhD for a boyfriend, wasn’t this something? A potential doorway?

It was, but not to a room I’d recommend.

On our third date I realised the toothache that punctured my jaw, my cheek, spreading up and around and behind my eye, was entirely brought on by proximity to Chris. As soon as he left, driving his little prefabricated sports car home to his ivy-strangled cottage in deepest Cornwall, the pain would magically disappear, returning approximately one hour before our next date.

Still I let him fuck me on my single bed in my almost perfect room with the bay window and the sink and the gas fireplace on which I boiled a kettle for our tea afterwards. He was gentle and appreciative in spite of my breasts’ infinite failings, breasts that a boy had once called grapefruits and I’d known then for sure they were as horrible as I’d thought. Not because they were like grapefruits, but because they were so not like grapefruits in every possible way.

Chris had a freckled, hairy back and skin that felt not quite adult. He smelled of wet wool. He did not know any actors or film makers and so introduced me to none. Instead, he introduced me to his aunt who also lived in the ivy-strangled cottage in Cornwall where the damp and mildew had so taken up residence I couldn’t tell where the wet spot from his ejaculations ceased and the damp sheet began. Even the mirrors were indelibly stained with green, making it impossible to check if my mascara had run. I stopped bothering to put it on since the air itself was so foggy no one could see, least of all Chris’s sweet but rheumy eyed aunt and by then I realised making myself attractive for Chris himself was counterproductive.

When the pain became unbearable I knew I had to do something. I could barely talk for pain, now spiralling over my scalp and down to the top of my spine.

Chris rubbed my neck, my shoulders, trying to help but the pain spread down into the small of my back.

‘So sad, so beautiful,’ he said and I nearly hit him.

I put off ending the relationship because Chris helped me with my Ancient Greek. By now, by A Level, in fact, I’d been winging it. I’d started winging everything since my first year at university covered the Romans and I didn’t give a fuck about the Romans. I just wanted to re-read Mary Renault and fantasise about being Alexander’s lover, Hephaestion or the Persian boy. Better the Persian boy, there was something scheming and crafty about him, while Hephaestion was all goodness, upright and true, qualities I neither had nor wanted.

Chris wrote poetry on more cards with more women on horses and posted them to me during the week. I tried to be pleased. I showed them to Anne, the girl in the room next door who occasionally invited me to a nearby ice-cream parlour to complain about her Christian roommate who wore twin sets and a string of pearls and kept trying to persuade her to join the Christian Club.

I liked Anne. ‘I don’t give a shit I’m not beautiful,’ she had told me when we first met. ‘But I like having beautiful women friends.’

And then, one day—apropos of nothing, or perhaps it was the fact I stopped trying to make sounds, or move at all really, I just studied the crack in the plaster on the wall beside the bed—Chris said, ‘You don’t really want to do this, do you? We don’t have to, you know, it’s alright.’

He didn’t sound upset. He might’ve been declining folding laundry in the optative mood.

I rolled out from underneath him. ‘No, no,’ it’s fine. It’s just this toothache.’ I mopped between my legs with my knickers and set the kettle on the gas stove. I was glad I’d bought ginger biscuits for tea. At least it was something I could give him that he liked.

We sat on my single bed and crunched the biscuits and sipped the tea as the sky outside the window turned from drab to drabber. Soon it would be time for him to go, no men were allowed in the rooms at night. Or was it ever? I couldn’t remember. I’d let one of the less-pimply boys in my class climb in through that window. At least he didn’t expect to sleep with me, he knew he was unsleepable with. He’d flopped on the floor like a collapsed carpet and told me he’d bought me a chaise longue. I believed him, his father was a merchant banker and his mother ran a national charity and they lived in Marlow where I’d once been taken, shown off, but no one was there, just the endless rooms and a quiet, frightening gloom.

‘Next week, same time, then?’ Chris said, as if he were a dentist making an appointment. I’d already seen a dentist, a man with yellow fingernails who’d told me nothing was wrong with my teeth, it was all in my head and I’d said, ‘Of course it’s in my head, I can barely think for the pain in my head!’

He’d given me a prescription for Codeine and told me not to take too many because it would stop things ‘Down there.’

‘I won’t be able to have sex?’ I said hopefully.

The man reddened. ‘Your back passage,’ he said and the assistant ushered me out and whispered, ‘He means you’ll get constipated.’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ I said, ‘That’s the least of my worries.’

I did eventually break up with Chris, and the moment I did my toothache ceased. You might think this a good thing but it meant I had more time for visits to the ice-cream parlour with Anne. After one particularly indulgent session I decided to relieve the pressure in my stomach by sticking my fingers down my throat. Up it all came, so very easily. I barely needed fingers. And so, by the end of my first year at university I’d finally opened the door to a new life. A new life of eating whatever I wanted and throwing it up shortly afterwards, at first once a week, and then twice a week, and then almost every day. I spent my grant money on the kinds of food best for vomiting: anything that didn’t require chewing. Lardy cakes, sliced white Hovis, knickerbocker glories, those buttered crumpets.

And then I met Robert. Why warning lights weren’t blinding me I do not know. He was another so-called genius, the youngest man to ever be admitted to Cambridge. Yet another poet, and also an alcoholic. A man who was neither gentle, nor kind, but by then the glow of excitement in my chest was long gone, replaced as it was by a crushing resignation. There were no evenings lolling about on antique cushions discussing Euripides, no days spent deep in thought wandering hallowed halls and enchanted gardens, and certainly no intimate conversations in ancient pubs and bustling cafés with worldy students and even more worldly professors. It was clear to me my life was no longer a Merchant Ivory film and there were no more doors to open, so I stuck it out with a man who didn’t hesitate to announce how much he despised himself for falling in love with me. Was I in love with him? I doubt it. Love had no place in my life by then.

By my final year I’d moved out of my little room at the women’s residence into a bachelor apartment where I did little more than eat and throw up, interspersed with weekends in London watching Robert drink himself to further depths of verbal cruelty. I went to no lectures, no seminars, without comment by my professors who assumed by then it wasn’t necessary and I was studiously studying all by myself.

And then came a day in a black cab when a different door opened, just a crack, but enough to let me slip through. I’d been called up for an interview to study ancient gardens for an MA. I was totally uninterested in ancient gardens, totally uninterested in anything by then other than where to eat and throw up. It had been Robert’s idea. When I told him about the interview, he sat grim and silent until he could no longer contain his rage. ‘You?’ he spat. Actually, he punched the seat of the cab making the cab driver screech to a halt and kick us out. As we trudged through the not-so-ancient Kensington Gardens Robert kept up his tirade. I lacked a single interesting brain cell, not to mention my body, getting fatter by the day and who’d want to have sex with that? I failed to mention he was quite happy to have sex with that, I failed to say anything until I took the train back to Bristol and picked up the telephone and told him it was over. ‘I’ll kill myself,’ he shouted and I heard something smash, his mother’s Ming vase no doubt but I hung up and dialled another number, a woman in the year ahead of me who’d discovered I was bulimic and told me if I ever needed help, to call her.

‘There’s a spare room here,’ she said through my sobs. I moved in, and with her help and by the skin of my teeth I passed my exams. I did not go on to study an MA in ancient gardens. I knew by then that my life would never be a Merchant Ivory film. I needed a different kind of education, one which had nothing to do with hallowed halls and enchanted gardens, nothing to do with poets and geniuses. Instead I took a weekend workshop in Mime, and discovered for the first time in three years that joy—for me, at least—had little to do with lolling about on antique cushions discussing Euripides, and even less to do with being attractive to men with angled jawlines and experienced eyes.

Perhaps my real life was something not to fantasise about, but rather to simply live.