should not become involved. And that was that.
“Well, thanks,” I said. It seemed to me that I’d learned nothing at all.
But when I presented my few scraps of information and we turned them over, Malcolm was able to come up with a credible history.
“Look, suppose you come out of a respectable county family in Dorset. High Church and middle-middle class; that’d be right, wouldn’t it?”
“Mrs. Nicholson married up,” Mom Pollard confirmed.
“Right, and you have all the secure sort of rules, curfews, decent dress, the lot. Say she’s never been on a vacation except a couple of weeks in Penzance with her folks. So she gets a scholarship out of the local grammar school, and comes up to study SPS at the great ivory tower, first time she’s been away from home. What happens? A lot of peer-group pressure to smoke pot and sleep around, maybe LSD, and she’s got digs on her own with nobody to check whether she’s in or out. She’s thrown into a whole social thing with no bounds on her freedom at all, and on top of that some snot-nosed junior philosophy don whips Jesus out from under her in the first term. You know there’s nothing they like better than demolishing Christianity.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s very like what happened to me, though. I had a history teacher that chewed Martin Luther up into little pieces my freshman year, and it rocked me all right, but it didn’t do that to me.” Even as I said this I remembered what it had done instead; I wasn’t so much robbed of Martin Luther as converted to Jay Mellon.
“You could take it and she couldn’t,” Malcolm shrugged. “Doesn’t that make sense?”
It turned out eventually that his guess was accurate in every particular, except that for Frances no mere event could be relevant to her state. “Rot is me,” she said. “Void is me. If I could set causes to it, it would go away.”
But a damp spring and the beginning of an indifferent summer passed before she began saying such things to me. They passed piecemeal, in the absence of significant truce or significant skirmish at home. The part of my life I looked forward to was the four hours between Frances’s departure from East Anglian and my own, but it could also be said that the salutary effects of St. Margaret’s had filtered through to Eastley Village—that Oliver, Jill and I were better behaved than we used to be; we had learned our manners.
Some periods were clearly positive—when the strawberries came in, the sightseeing weekend we spent in Edinburgh—and at such times I had a tendency to say things of the Oliver-couldn’t-we-start-over sort, and Oliver to reply with things of the I-don’t-know-what-you-mean sort, and although these exchanges had an animus mundi familiarity about them, as being fundamental to the male-female experience, still I could not for the life of me decide whether Oliver-male in such situations really did not know what I-female was talking about or simply didn’t want to talk about it.
Other periods were hostile in a more or less open way, especially when Oliver mocked my friends in Design Print. If he had occasion to mention Dillis, she was always “little Dillis.” He took to calling Malcolm “your friend Malcolm,” and later, “your dear queer friend.” He also began to suggest, quite without foundation, that the house and garden were not so well kept as when I was at home to oversee their maintenance. In particular, Mrs. Coombe was neglecting to dust the skirtings, and I had better have a word with her about it. I said coolly that Mrs. Coombe had never dusted the skirtings, in the second place she was old and found it hard to stoop, and in the third place I had never pretended to be capable of handling servants. If he wanted the servants handled he would have to look after it himself. Having taken this militant stand, I took a dustcloth and wiped the skirtings one night when he wasn’t home.
Meanwhile (for a good part of my childhood I
“Well, thanks,” I said. It seemed to me that I’d learned nothing at all.
But when I presented my few scraps of information and we turned them over, Malcolm was able to come up with a credible history.
“Look, suppose you come out of a respectable county family in Dorset. High Church and middle-middle class; that’d be right, wouldn’t it?”
“Mrs. Nicholson married up,” Mom Pollard confirmed.
“Right, and you have all the secure sort of rules, curfews, decent dress, the lot. Say she’s never been on a vacation except a couple of weeks in Penzance with her folks. So she gets a scholarship out of the local grammar school, and comes up to study SPS at the great ivory tower, first time she’s been away from home. What happens? A lot of peer-group pressure to smoke pot and sleep around, maybe LSD, and she’s got digs on her own with nobody to check whether she’s in or out. She’s thrown into a whole social thing with no bounds on her freedom at all, and on top of that some snot-nosed junior philosophy don whips Jesus out from under her in the first term. You know there’s nothing they like better than demolishing Christianity.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s very like what happened to me, though. I had a history teacher that chewed Martin Luther up into little pieces my freshman year, and it rocked me all right, but it didn’t do that to me.” Even as I said this I remembered what it had done instead; I wasn’t so much robbed of Martin Luther as converted to Jay Mellon.
“You could take it and she couldn’t,” Malcolm shrugged. “Doesn’t that make sense?”
It turned out eventually that his guess was accurate in every particular, except that for Frances no mere event could be relevant to her state. “Rot is me,” she said. “Void is me. If I could set causes to it, it would go away.”
But a damp spring and the beginning of an indifferent summer passed before she began saying such things to me. They passed piecemeal, in the absence of significant truce or significant skirmish at home. The part of my life I looked forward to was the four hours between Frances’s departure from East Anglian and my own, but it could also be said that the salutary effects of St. Margaret’s had filtered through to Eastley Village—that Oliver, Jill and I were better behaved than we used to be; we had learned our manners.
Some periods were clearly positive—when the strawberries came in, the sightseeing weekend we spent in Edinburgh—and at such times I had a tendency to say things of the Oliver-couldn’t-we-start-over sort, and Oliver to reply with things of the I-don’t-know-what-you-mean sort, and although these exchanges had an animus mundi familiarity about them, as being fundamental to the male-female experience, still I could not for the life of me decide whether Oliver-male in such situations really did not know what I-female was talking about or simply didn’t want to talk about it.
Other periods were hostile in a more or less open way, especially when Oliver mocked my friends in Design Print. If he had occasion to mention Dillis, she was always “little Dillis.” He took to calling Malcolm “your friend Malcolm,” and later, “your dear queer friend.” He also began to suggest, quite without foundation, that the house and garden were not so well kept as when I was at home to oversee their maintenance. In particular, Mrs. Coombe was neglecting to dust the skirtings, and I had better have a word with her about it. I said coolly that Mrs. Coombe had never dusted the skirtings, in the second place she was old and found it hard to stoop, and in the third place I had never pretended to be capable of handling servants. If he wanted the servants handled he would have to look after it himself. Having taken this militant stand, I took a dustcloth and wiped the skirtings one night when he wasn’t home.
Meanwhile (for a good part of my childhood I
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