Once again, if her personality had had more bounce and gusto that invitation might have been a firmer one. But to see her pathetic confusion and distress beneath the still chirpy, still as-if-immaculate surface. I think, all the same, that when I opened my eyes to the bubbling big boy inches from my lips, I really should have said: ‘Morning, beautiful.’ And seeing it half an hour later, matted with make-up, I really should have cried: ‘Oh look. You haven’t got a spot on your nose!’ And, that evening, when Rachel announced: ‘The curse is upon me* (misquoting The Lady of Shalott’), my answer should really have been: ‘Surprise surprise. Listen, you’ve got it in italics right across your conk.’
(Geoffrey, by the way, once claimed that – second of course to crapping – there was no more intense emotional experience than having your blackheads squeezed by the one you loved. There you go again.)
At Kensington Town Hall, packed down on my desk like a Rugby forward, I had a sequence of (mild) identity crises, a trio of Sir Herberts staring dubiously over my shoulder, handwriting changed beyond recognition in the course of each paragraph. When I looked at the clock I thought: Rachel, Rachel; or alternatively: Who am I ? Just who, the hell, am I?
The Practical Criticism paper. I explicated a Donne sonnet and paid uncomprehending lip-service to a beefy dirge by someone called John Skelton. There was a D. H. Lawrence essay on how passionate and truthful D. H. Lawrence was: a characteristic piece of small-cocked doggerel which I treated with characteristic knowingness. Finally, I belaboured one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sleazier lyrics, implying (a last-minute reread made clear) that it was high time we burned all extant editions of the little fag’s poetry; emendations took the form of replacing some of the ‘ands’ with ‘buts’, and of changing the odd ‘moreover’ to ‘however’.
I took a chance on the general English Literature paper, writing for three hours on Blake alone in an attempt to get the erratic-but-oh-so-brilliant ticket. Risky, I know; but my reading was there in bold parentheses: the almost unread Prophetic Books, Milton, Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Yeats, Eliot, and, yes, Kafka. ‘I like it, I like it,’ the dons whispered in my ear.
Throughout, I stabilized myself with lots of examsmanship, in order to depress my fellow-candidates. I would laugh out loud on my first glance at the questions, trot up happily for more paper with only half an hour gone, drift through the crowd afterwards murmuring phrases like ‘… a breeze … candy from a baby … I romped home … bloody pushover…’
Owing to some professorial caprice, the last paper required from the student a two-hour essay on a single word. There was a choice of three: Spring, Memory, and Experience. I took the last. The Bible, The Pardoner’s Tale, Hamlet-Lear-Timon, Milton again, Blake again, Housman, Hardy, Highway, closing, in semi-delirium, with the exhortation that son of man had fucking better start loving one another, or die.
When I surfaced, dragged along in a tide of fat-legged girls and torpid Pakistanis, cancelled out by fifteen hours of words and months of confused aspiration, born frowning and blinking into the vivid street, there – round-eyed, white-smocked and spotless – was Rachel. I kissed her for a whole minute as the crowd fell apart about us. We went away to the Park in a handicapped shuffle, arms everywhere, to lie in freak autumn weather on cold grass beneath heavy overcoats. In our ears the chant of tired birds who dumbly thought it was summer again, shouting children, and – if we were lucky – the whirr of a pervert’s cine-camera. In our noses the smell of trees, soil, and our bodies. O my youth.
Five evenings later, my diary says, the evening before her ‘parents’ were due back from France, Rachel ran down the stairs and into my room.
‘Guess what ?’ she said.
‘What.’ The Oxford University candidate was to be seen in T-shirt and khaki strides, his nasal blackheads hovering above the Evening Standard’s entertainments guide. I was picking a film for us to see. A going-away treat.
‘Jenny’s going to have the baby!’