When I told them I would be sitting the final entrance test in four weeks’ time, and asked to be relieved of household duties till then, my father took me aside for a talking. The last time that happened, I had been ten, scared and sullen, locked in the storeroom of the greengrocer for filching his oranges. The fear of my father’s belt had hung over the whole encounter, though he never used it.
Well, I was eighteen now, too big and too fast to be hit, whatever my mother might say. He took me through to the parlor, reserved for receiving the priest, the landlord, and our Savior should he chance to drop by. Lately, I’d been using it as a quiet place to study.
“Your mother had you marked out for the priesthood,” he began, “and now you do this to us.”
It was feeble, and he knew it. “The Lord has other plans for me,” I said.
“Why engineering, then? Nothing good ever came of it.”
“It was a noble profession once, Father. I want to make it noble again.”
“Noble, is it? Then how do you explain that terrible business with the nave of St Dominic’s, or those hare-brained gas lamps, or that Mr. Deutschendorf and his ‘suspension bridge’? And he was a Professor at this very college you insist on attending!”
“Ah, but that’s the point, Father. Those projects failed because they were designed for yesterday’s conditions. When you were a boy, did things move around as much as they do now?”
“No,” he allowed, “they generally stayed where they were.”
“Exactly! And that’s because there weren’t so many of us then, and we lived in villages, not in cities. As long as they didn’t come under focused attack, even flimsy structures were perfectly safe. But now there’s so many of us that any concentration of thoughts can send iron and stone and even wood breaking free and wandering away.” That Miss Quigley could do all this and more on her own, I kept to myself.
“Meaning I have to pay good money to you and your sisters to think our house into shape.”
I privately disputed his definition of “good money,” but now wasn’t the time to argue the point. He was rising to my lure.
“That’s right. So what are we going to do? Go back to living in thatch and wattle?” He made a face at that.
“This is the old way, Dad”—I held up Mundine’s Principles—”and this is the new way”—Lyman and Parker’s Engineering in the Age of Uncertainty. “I want to make the new way work.”
“And how much do you suppose I’ll have to pay for all this?”
“Not much at all!” I answered gaily. And then we got down to business.
* * * *
I passed the final entrance test with a mark or two to spare, and between Father and Mother and Auntie Eileen who’d always doted on me, my family came up with the money for the first year. “You’ll have to engineer yourself a job after that,” they said.
Inside those imposing walls, the College was unimpressive: a warren of low, flat, narrow-windowed buildings. “It doesn’t pay to build high around students,” I was told.
The first term was torture, a crash course in mathematics and physics and chemistry. Did I really need to know the melting point of sulfur or the value of the Dietrich coefficient? Well, the latter was used in the calculation of animate field flux in inorganic materials, so I guess I did at that.
In between my studies, my duties at home, and my occasional opportunities to escape for a pint and a chat with my fellow students, I tried to find Miss Quigley, which was still the only name I knew her by. She looked no older than me, so I expected to find her somewhere among the first-year classes, but nobody knew anything of her. I glimpsed a couple of women with blonde hair, but both were Saxon exchange students who didn’t spare me a second glance.
It was a week before the end of term, and I was struggling with Professor Carr’s theories about magnetism, when I saw her: just a glimpse, hurrying out of one building and into another, with a couple of burly men by her side. I followed, and was met at the door by one of the men, who pointed to the sign that said NO ADMITTANCE.
“That girl went in,” I said.
“EXCEPT ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS,” he added.
There was plainly no budging him. An exhaustive study of the timetable showed there were no teaching rooms in that building, yet neither was it listed as a research facility. All the windows were locked, all the doors boarded over.
So what about the building she had come from? That was a bit more promising: it contained dormitories for women from country areas and foreign parts who were attending the College. I knew a man who boasted considerable knowledge of such women.
Dan Travis was as thin as a rake and acted like one. He claimed to be a magnet to the ladies, and if even half his stories were true, he was right. There had to be some explanation for how a man could eat so much and stay so thin. I bought him lunch and got him talking about the charms of girls from Saxony.
“By then I knew she wanted it, so I slipped my hand…” Yes, yes, Dan. Spare me the detailed description and concentrate on the interesting bit: how you got into her room.
Oh. You didn’t make it back to her room. There was an alleyway. How romantic.
But Dan wasn’t done with this flaxen-haired goddess, and eventually his urges drove him to test the fearsome security of the women’s dorms.
“And do you know, I just walked right in? And there she was, waiting for me, with her legs—”
“You just walked right in?”
“That’s right! These are big girls, after all”—I leered on cue—”and what they do after hours is their business.”
Let me make it clear at once that what happened next wasn’t my fault. I was shaking like Mrs. Ormond’s railing at the prospect of actually going in there and looking for Miss Quigley, and even worse, talking to her if I found her, so I spent a couple of hours in the pub watching my classmates play silly games with the tables. By the time I lurched to my feet, squared my shoulders, and set off, I had thrown a skinful of bravado over the black pit of anxiety.
As Dan said, getting into the dormitory involved nothing more than knocking on the door. I was taken straight to her room, but she wasn’t there. Margrethe, one of her roommates, was. “With a boyfriend no doubt Kate is outing,” she told me. God forbid Margrethe was any acquaintance of Dan’s, for she looked me up and down and said I was a fine-looking fellow, and why didn’t I tell her all my troublings? Which I did.
Now dormitory wasn’t really the word. The women slept four to a room, but they had an arrangement that ensured a gentleman caller could be entertained in private. And I was here to see Kate—a much sweeter sound than Miss Quigley—but she was out with her boyfriend, damn him for all eternity, and Margrethe was friendly, and warm, and sitting on her bed with her arm brushing mine.
And I found that when I leaned over and kissed her she put her arms around me, and we sank back on the bed, and her flesh was like cream, cool and deep. I came in seconds, then I came in minutes, then we both came in what felt like hours.
“Roommates coming back to roomen will,” she told me in her endearingly mangled English. I kissed her deeply, found something to wipe myself, pulled on my clothes—God, did I need a shower—kissed her again, and stumbled towards the door.
To be met by Kate Quigley, coming the other way, with no sign of the alleged boyfriend. She raised an eyebrow, smiled, and said, “I see you’ve met Margrethe.”
“I—er—” I said, and fled down the hallway, pursued by the faint sound of laughter. I had a good idea what they were laughing about. It comes of having sisters.
* * * *
Until I had my brain wave, my three years of study were a time of disillusionment. When I walked through the College gates for the first time, I had two great desires: to find Kate, and to find a way to build the great, airy structures I saw in my mind’s eye. I found Kate, or rather she found me; that was my fortune and misfortune both. And my years of study had put paid to those idle dreams of construction.
Why are our cities built of wood, not stone? Because stone, never having been alive, has no resistance to the press of our thoughts, and one stone jogged out of place can cause a whole building to come tumbling down. Build in stone, and you need to employ a small army just to think your building firmly in place. Build in wood, and as long as you’re not subjected to a concerted attack, or some freak of nature walking by, you will probably be all right. And yet our winters are cold, and the fire bell peals like the crack of doom across our cities.