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  Once I asked Marina what she thought of that line about Milton.

  ‘Unhelpful,’ she said. ‘Irresponsible, in fact.’

  I agreed that it would be better to think of an actual argument – but what?

  ‘Paradise Lost is about someone struggling to come to terms with their sexuality in an oppressively homophobic environment,’ she added bluntly. ‘Lucifer rejects the heteronormative values pressed upon him by society – aka God, embodied by Adam and Eve – and is subsequently dealt the punishment of expulsion. He has to go and face his demons.’

  ‘Literally demons,’ I said.

  ‘Then he starts complaining about the decor of hell and saying stuff like: “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” It’s obvious – high camp. Put that.’

  Her argument was always a bit off, but I found her conviction refreshing. The fact that she had so much confidence meant she could speak freely about any number of topics. She didn’t get tangled up in questions of political correctness or historical accuracy, as I did – she just charged on. And even if I wasn’t always sure that what she said was appropriate, or (when you unpacked it) made sense, there was something comforting about being close to someone who scoffed at the very notion of self-doubt. It made me believe that I, too, would one day have an opinion about something.

  Looking back now, I think it was this self-conviction which caused Marina to be disliked by other people at Northam. There was something cold and uncompromising about her. It put them off, especially other girls.

  Did Marina notice this? I think so. Did she mind? Unclear. She had a way of speaking to people that indicated she found them tedious, yes – but at the same time she always seemed to be seeking them out. When we went out to clubs or bars, she would always make some excuse to introduce herself to strangers. She would saunter over and ask for a lighter, or hang next to them with a sultry, bored expression on her face, waiting for a moment to sarcastically chip into their conversations.

  I was so convinced by her self-confidence back then that I didn’t consider that this might be a sign of loneliness. In fact, I interpreted it as a personal insult. Her behaviour made me suspicious, paranoid even, like she was looking for an opportunity to get away from me.

  iii.

  I can’t keep putting it off.

  The way I’ve written everything here, it makes it seem as though Marina dominated my first term at Northam. It is true that my memory of that time, like so many other things, is now clogged up with thoughts of her. I find it hard to picture any events where she wasn’t there – I can’t even clearly remember the moments where I was alone. But the truth is that there is another side to it. There were other things that happened. The other events, the events with the professor … I should address those.

  In my initial glimpse of Marina with the professor, I’d recognized for the first time that there was something stagey about him. It wasn’t that he was lecherous exactly, but his authoritative persona, as someone who knew everything and whose self-confidence was unshakeable, struck me as unconvincing. I had seen him once without the mask on. Now, in the times I’d seen him since, it always seemed like he was trying to prove himself, like he was attempting to perform a part that he wasn’t at all suited to. Many people were like that at Northam – but the professor was the worst offender.

  Or the second worst.

  When I walked around campus, I’d sometimes see the professor with Henry. Their heads would be buried together in conversation in the café, locking eyes, nodding seriously. At other times they would exchange papers at the end of a lecture in an underhand fashion – Henry would slip the sheets sideways onto the lectern and give a perfunctory nod. It was like he thought he was on a mission for MI5 and not at ‘Renaissance Rhetoric’ in northern England. Once, when our first year seminar overran by ten minutes, Henry opened the door without knocking and ducked his head in. He looked panicked when he saw his mistake, muttering: ‘Wrong room.’ But I saw him go back in afterwards, when he thought no one could see him.

  I heard from Marina that Henry was getting a head start on his dissertation. This was the cause of their clandestine meetings, she explained. She said that he was seeking advice from the professor about which areas of research might propel his chances of getting into Cambridge or Yale for a PhD. Early tuition was frowned upon, and since he was only a second year, it made sense for them to keep it hushed up.

  ‘To be honest though I don’t know why Henry bothers,’ Marina said to me. ‘It’s not that big a deal what kind of work you do anyway. References are what really matter. Professor Montgomery will pull strings to get him where he wants to go.’

  This I found hard to believe. Then I remembered Marina’s scholarship.

  The professor’s favouritism made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like the way Marina spoke about it either: she simultaneously criticized the ‘nepotistic structures’ of university, but was clearly complicit in it, in the fact she wanted to keep her scholarship. It hurt my head to think about this, so I tried not to.

  Instead I deflected my dissatisfaction onto Henry and the professor. Conspiracy theories about them raced through my mind. One day I put one of them to Marina.

  ‘Do you think …?’

  ‘Do I think what?’

  ‘Henry and Montgomery …’ I said. I waggled my eyebrows, attempting to appear breezy and flippant.

  ‘Nah,’ Marina retorted, somewhat irritably. ‘For one thing, he’s definitely into girls.’

  ‘Who, Henry?’

  ‘God knows about him.’

  ‘Then Montgomery?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s got a wife but … to be honest, there are always other women. He was always accompanied by a “friend” to events, even when I was a kid. There would always be something dangling off his arm.’

  This seemed to me so unlikely that I recoiled.

  ‘Ew,’ I said. ‘Who would … where did he even find them?’

  ‘Everywhere,’ she said.

  ‘But where?’

  ‘Everywhere, Eva. That’s how it works. He just … some people are like that. Women get desperate when they’re older.’

  ‘Does his wife know?’

  ‘No idea.’

  I would try to push the conversation a little further then, try to dig a little bit more about the circumstances in which Marina and Montgomery knew each other, what he’d been like at those parties and out of office hours, but she would never dwell on the topic for long. It was fair, I guess, because I was so needy in my questioning.

  ‘You absorb too much popular culture,’ Marina said to me once. ‘That’s your problem. You see a story in everything. You’ve got so much wasted mental energy. Life isn’t a novel, Eva. We’re not in The Secret fucking History.’

  This made me laugh so much that I started choking.

  CHAPTER THREE

  November 2013

  i.

  It was about halfway through the term when Marina managed to switch back to English. This seismic shift was mentioned to me suddenly, almost as an aside – in such a way that I didn’t spend much time investigating the causes. That seems funny to me now. From what I remember, the solution appeared to have had something to do with Charlton. Charlton was a prestigious ‘college’ in the US where her father worked in some vague overseeing capacity. She had written to the administrators there explaining her situation, and they had – allegedly – offered her the opportunity to transfer. Once Northam got wind of it, they had mysteriously done a U-turn, throwing the professor’s counterarguments out the window.

  The professor no longer objected to Marina’s presence in the room. He didn’t huff and puff or send her away when we came to his seminar. He didn’t even send her to the back of the room. Instead he largely ignored her. Fortunately for me, we were even allowed to sit side-by-side, as we were now, listening to him talk.

  ‘I hope you’ve all brought the Oxford edition as instructed,’ he said tartly. ‘The Cambridge edition is, frankl
y, an insult to academic publishing and a detriment to Marlowe’s legacy. As if it’s not enough that he died in a pointless duel. Four hundred years later he also has amateurs butchering the text.’

  After smiling indulgently at his own joke, the professor walked over to the blind and pulled it up swiftly. A striped rectangle of light fell over his face. I watched it diminish, gradually, as he walked back to his armchair and sat down again. The leather squeaked under his tweed.

  ‘Turn to Act III.’

  I often thought that the professor’s office looked like a cartoon version of the real thing. Bookshelves full of dusty tomes lined every wall. Armchairs hunched around a well-worn coffee table; old paperweights and stacks of crinkled A4 covered every surface. Apart from a flattened laptop in the corner – which honestly looked like a prop – there was no modern technology in there, and the lighting was so dim that it was hard to see the letters on a page. Surely this atmosphere couldn’t espouse anything productive? Surely he couldn’t be reading all those books and writing all those papers in here on his own? Once Marina joked to me that if you tapped on a book on the shelf, it opened up into a backroom full of strippers and porn films.

  Now the professor scratched his inner thigh, shunted his crotch forward in his chair and began to speak. A copy of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus lay on his lap.

  ‘Before we begin,’ he said, ‘it’s important to note that the name of the protagonist is for all intents and purposes pronounced four-stuss, not fow-stuss.’

  Marina and I exchanged glances.

  ‘There is a wealth of evidence to support this, before any of you attempt to disagree,’ his eyes flashed in our direction, ‘starting with the assonance in the first scene: “the form of Faustus’ fortunes good or bad”. There is also the spelling in Henslowe’s diary: “f-o-r-s-t-u-s”. “Fow-stuss” is a modern corruption dating from Goethe.’

  Marina’s mouth began to twitch. We had been out the night before – with Henry and his housemate Robin. Marina found Robin hard to deal with because he didn’t find her funny. She had done a very good impression of the professor – spreading her legs and coughing and hacking – which had made me laugh a lot. Henry had laughed too. He’d even taken a video on his phone, which Marina had told him to delete – but Robin remained stony-faced. At this slight, Marina disappeared, and when she’d returned an hour later she looked completely out of it, muttering angsty hateful things about Henry and the professor and saying that she felt sick. I had taken her home, nursed her, scooped vomit out of her hair and wiped her face with a cool cloth.

  ‘Faustus is not Marlowe’s finest play, but it is unquestionably his most celebrated, and most frequently adapted. I’m sure you’re all familiar with Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and …’

  Now Marina was tetchy. When she was hungover she found other people impossibly irritating, and this irritability clouded her judgement. She would interrupt in a trembling shrill voice and make a point that didn’t tarry at all with the conversation. Sensing this coming, I felt prematurely annoyed at her.

  Marina and I were sat together in the middle of the study, right in the eyeline of the professor. She stank of alcohol sweat. I could see her fringe smeared across her forehead. She was nibbling her thumbs. It was clear that she was waiting for the professor to slip-up, to say something outrageous or unreasonable which she could contradict.

  But he carried on, in silky tones: ‘Faustus is a highly conflicted character, and it is indeed a highly conflicted play …’

  She was getting agitated, definitely. Lightly I kicked her – a signal of discouragement. She returned it with a scowl.

  ‘Caught between farcical comedy, and the deepest kind of torment: confronting your own mortality. Marlowe’s atheism is a much-debated question, of course, after he was framed by Thomas Kyd, and it is a much-debated play …’

  Marina had now begun to loudly nibble the corner of her pen. She tapped it against the front of her teeth. A second went past and then, having received no response, she began scratching the nib against the plastic tabletop. It made a light, barely perceptible but nevertheless distracting sound, which caused the professor to stop mid-sentence.

  ‘Marina,’ he said.

  Marina carried on scratching, her head tilted slightly.

  ‘Marina,’ the professor repeated. ‘Is there anything you’d like to get off your chest?’

  Marina stopped. She lifted her head up and glared at him.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  She cleared her throat, paused.

  ‘I was wondering why you were using the A-text,’ she said eventually. ‘There are two versions of Faustus. Why did you set us the shorter version?’

  This was a bit weird, to be fair. The professor stared back at her, a vaguely amused expression on his face.

  ‘I was working around to that,’ he shot back. He licked his fingertips and then turned a few pages in his folder. ‘The notes pertaining to the A-text are here in front of me. Would you like me to read them now?’

  There was an awkward silence.

  Marina looked down at her desk. ‘No I’m all right, thanks.’

  The professor turned back to the class and opened his mouth to speak – but then, at that moment, Marina suddenly let out an enormous, theatrical yawn, an interruption so immature and melodramatic that the professor stopped himself. Everyone else stopped what they were doing too: writing, typing, tapping, texting – and looked up.

  The professor looked startled.

  ‘Will you please just—’ he began, but before he had time to finish, Marina had stood up, packed all her things into her bag and abruptly stridden out of the room.

  I watched the unwashed wave of blonde hair skittling down her back, her silhouette disappearing into the hallway.

  The door slammed behind her.

  ***

  Thinking about this now, I see that I was naive about Marina at that time. Everyone else accepted that there was something seriously wrong with her. There were rumours about her mental health: rumours I wilfully ignored.

  When she left the seminar that day, I could sense that people were whispering about her. Some of them shook their heads. They widened their eyes at each other. I hate to think what they might have been saying. But at the time I blocked out my ears, so I can’t verify any of it now.

  ***

  The professor’s eyes scanned the crowd and then they fell on me.

  ‘Perhaps you should …’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  I packed up my things and went to the bathroom – the disabled just down the hall. I knew that she’d be in there.

  On opening the door just a crack, I saw the damp grey of the walls, the image of her face reflected in the mirror. She looked awful. Disturbingly so. The expression on her face was entirely unfamiliar. I can’t describe it properly, even now. There was something haunted, something ghostly about it. There isn’t a suitable adjective, it just made her look … dead.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then what was that all about?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Well,’ I paused and wondered how best to put the question to her. ‘I wonder if you should maybe …’

  ‘I should what?’

  ‘You can’t—’

  Her eyes shot towards me. ‘I can’t what?’

  We glared at each other for several moments. The expression on her face had changed – now it was nameable: she looked defensive.

  I wanted to say to her: you can’t expect to be the centre of attention all the time. You can’t throw a tantrum when you’re not given credit that you don’t deserve. But there was something in her look which advised me against it. There was an unspoken regulation in our relationship. I could only speak when she allowed it; when she approved of what I was saying. Although I felt justified, completely in the right — I still couldn’t bring myself to speak against her. In that moment, that regulation between us seemed more important than anything el
se.

  And so I said nothing. I shrugged, looked at the floor and left the room. I walked back to my accommodation block. Alone.

  ii.

  When I was in my room I lay in bed and looked at my laptop. While I scrolled through social media feeds, I thought about our conversation. That led me to click on her profile again. I went straight to her photos, put them in a separate tab, and began to flick through. But this time rather than concentrating on how artsy and beautiful she looked, or how many likes each photo had accrued, I noticed her habits of virtual response.

  One of the things I’d admired about Marina was that she didn’t care about her online status – I loved how she was above it. The way that she ignored her timeline activity but still had loads of tagged pictures, etc, had struck me as classy and aspirational, yes. But there was something else: it fundamentally justified her behaviour towards me. I took her abuse because I accepted that that was who she was. She was mean because she didn’t solicit or give approval. From me or to me. From anyone or to anyone. Online or offline.

  But now I noticed, looking at her online activity more closely, that there was something she did do regularly. She might not have commented, tagged, or uploaded anything. She might not have liked posts. But she did like comments. She only liked the witty comments, made by people whose profiles – I hovered my mouse over the names – were as stylish and elusive as hers. Far from being detached, her profile was carefully monitored. It was not that she was above being vain – she was just vain about seeming vain.

  I closed the lid of my laptop. I went to sleep.

  iii.

  The next day when Marina apologized, I accepted straight away, and we never spoke about the seminar incident again. We went to the same parties, drank in the same groups, and she even still came to my room from time to time. But it was different after that. My perception of her had changed. My behaviour towards her was less encouraging. And rather than look at her as an equal, I started to watch her from a distance, analytically, like I had watched my friends at school.