Into Temptation (Spoils of Time 03) (10 page)

She had had a wonderful first two years at Oxford; she was reading English, was expected to get a First and had already expressed, to the great delight of her grandmother, a desire to join Lyttons. She was very much one of Celia’s favourites; she resembled her physically, with her dark, rather dramatic beauty, she was hugely ambitious – and she was also a fine and fearless horsewoman.

Women were still in a minority at Oxford; anyone half attractive rode through their time there on a wave of heady popularity. Had Elspeth been less committed, less serious about her future, she could have been seriously distracted by the social life; as it was she had worked extremely hard, and, what was more, enjoyed doing so. She also had the inestimable gift of an almost photographic memory; exams were consequently not the nightmare for her that they were for so many of her peers.

So far her social life had been predictable; several romances, a few of them serious, with the kind of boys she was familiar with, bright, well-mannered public-school boys. She was still a virgin and had not yet felt the desire to cease being one strongly enough to undergo the risks. Not just of pregnancy, but of being known as cheap, ‘easy’, a tart. You had to be very much in love, very, very sure that the feeling was reciprocated, to take more than the most faltering step down that road.

There were of course a few very bohemian girls at Oxford who bedhopped seriously and tended to sneer at their more conventional sisters; but Elspeth had decided at the outset of her time there that she was not going to be one of them. Apart from anything else, you risked being sent down and what moment of sexual rapture could be worth that?

Keir Brown was one of the new breed of student; he was from a grammar school, he had no money and he spoke with quite a strong Scottish accent. He had made no attempt to modify the accent and for that Elspeth admired him; most of the grammar-school boys tried to adopt an Oxford accent, but it never quite came off, and everyone recognised it for what it was. There was a fairly brutish element among the establishment which made a point of mocking such boys; it required courage to face them down.

She had not been very much aware of Keir Brown during her first two years. Initially, he had kept a fairly low profile and had then become very involved with a girl a year below him who had suddenly left the university. It was rumoured she had been pregnant, but the official reason was that she had simply never settled to university life.

Keir was two years older than most of his peers, having done his National Service before going to Oxford; it had given him a selfconfidence that many of the grammar-school boys lacked, and enabled him to cope better with the Oxford snobbery.

And this term he had clearly set his sights on Elspeth. And she was quite determined to resist him.

As she walked out of the room, she managed to drop one of her files; papers went everywhere.

‘Damn,’ she hissed through the silence; several people looked up, frowned, a friend moved to help her pick them up.

Flushed and flustered she finally moved out of the building and into the street.

‘Here,’ said a voice, holding out a small clutch of papers, ‘you left these.’ It was Keir; he was still not smiling, still those dark-brown eyes were looking at her in that slightly contemptuous way. Just the same, there seemed no harm in saying thank you.

‘That’s all right,’ he said and turned away. She was just thinking how extremely oddly mannered he was when he looked back.

‘Would you like to go for a coffee?’ he said.

Slightly to her own irritation, Elspeth heard herself saying she would.

Lucas had expected to be miserable at school; he had expected to feel homesick – though getting away from Geordie MacColl would certainly be some kind of recompense for that – he had even expected the kind of bullying and sexual unpleasantness he had heard about but never experienced at day school. What he had not expected was to feel totally disorientated.

From the first moment when he was shown to his dormitory – a bleak, cold room with six beds in it, which clearly afforded absolutely no privacy to anyone – he had felt he had no real idea where he was or what he was supposed to be doing.

It got worse: supper that night, in the huge dining room, with its long tables and horrible food, assumed the proportions of a nightmare. And then at bedtime, lying in the hard, lumpy bed, with its thin bedclothes, being told to be quiet, that lights were going out, as if he was a small child, rather than fifteen years old (at a time when at home he would have settled down to hours of reading); being woken in the morning – woken by a bell rung loudly somewhere in the corridor, dressing in the freezing cold and following the other boys (none of whom seemed remotely agreeable or interesting) down to a breakfast, which was as disgusting as it was inadequate; and then into Assembly in the Great Hall with its high, high ceiling and glass rotunda, where he felt the great mass of boys almost like a physical pressure against him, and so into lessons, where he had expected to shine, but found himself bewildered by new teachers, different approaches – through all this he felt absolutely confused. Confused and cold and angry.

How had this happened to him, to Lucas Lieberman, so clever that he had won a scholarship to Westminster, so confident that on his first day there he had felt not a shred of nervousness, so musically accomplished that he was given a trial for the string section of the school orchestra in his first term, so arrogantly mature that he had become, after his two years there, the member of a small but intensely intellectual little clique that people fought to be allowed to join? How had he become a helpless, incompetent creature, his brain as numbed by the cold as the rest of him, shunned by his peers, mocked by his seniors, already beaten twice by the prefect he fagged for, for forgetting to light his fire and acquire bread for his toast? What was he doing out here on this freezing October morning, wearing nothing but shorts and singlet, doing some form of PE, a punishment inflicted by the senior boys on the juniors, his throbbing arms above his head as he jumped up and down? Where was the music his mother had promised him, the art, the culture? Lost somewhere in this nightmare; this nightmare of hearty games, absurd rivalry, vicious hostility.

Of course the place itself was ravishing, and its beauty was the one single source of comfort to him, impossible to ignore. And he could have done better, he knew, could have made friends, but he was not prepared to, not prepared to lower his standards by taking part in conversations about things he cared nothing about, not prepared to try, even to pretend to try, to be good at games, not prepared to tell smutty jokes, to sing filthy songs, to admire the school heroes – mostly great oafs playing rugby – not prepared to suck up to the masters. It was a tradition that you sat next to them in turn at supper and made polite conversation: if his housemaster thought he was going to try to be agreeable to him when only four hours earlier he had been beating him, then he was very much mistaken.

His first experience of being beaten had shocked Lucas more than he would have believed possible; the humiliation, the attack on his body by someone he despised, the pain of the first blow even through his trousers, the continuing assault of five more – the desperate struggle not to cry out or to cry, and then walking out of the room, head held high, past the queue of boys waiting for similar punishment – it was all such an assault on his psyche that the physical pain, the bruises which developed, were as nothing.

He was beaten constantly; his personal disorganisation grew with his misery and he was constantly late for lessons, for games, for meals, for assembly, garnering so many defaulters that they added up with horrifying speed to beatings. He was insolent to the masters too; there was only one man he admired intellectually, the history master, and he only taught the senior boys.

Lucas slept badly, worrying over the events of the day and then was tired the next day, increasing his inefficiency. Terrified of his own tendency to sleepwalk – he had often in Montpelier Street woken to find himself in a different room – and of getting lost in the cold darkness of the great house, he at first tied his foot to the post of his bed with his tie, but one of the boys discovered it and told the others. They mocked him so ruthlessly for being a baby that he gave it up and lay awake for hours, worrying instead.

He was unlucky in that he had been placed in a dormitory of rather hearty boys, whose parents lived in the country and who boasted endlessly about how much shooting land their fathers had got, and how they were going to roger the girls at the next hunt ball; there were other, more civilised boys, interested in the things he was, even in his year, but he so quickly gained a reputation for arrogance and unfriendliness that nobody bothered with him.

What he longed for was time on his own: time to think, to read, to cry even, cry for his mother, for the house in London that from here looked so warm and so happy, for the school he had loved, for the friends he had lost. But there was none; the only place was the lavatory and even there time was short, people banging on the door telling you to buck up and asking if you were having a wank.

The older boys, the house captains and prefects who could have made his life better, all disliked him for his insolence, for his refusal to buckle down to the school traditions, and tormented him further, putting him on extra duties, giving him almost unearned defaulters; by the end of the first half term, life seemed to have become a long weary cold procession from one wretched day and place to the next.

And for it all, Lucas thought, he had Geordie MacColl to blame; his hatred of him grew and grew like some vicious brooding creature. One day, one day he would get his revenge; that thought was one of the few things which kept him going in his misery.

‘So are you going to ask me to this party, then?’

Keir’s eyes on Elspeth were probing, half contemptuous, half amused as usual; she met them coolly.

‘If you want me to, I will. I just don’t think it’s a good idea, that’s all.’

‘And why not? Do you not think I’ll fit in with your grand family and friends? Are you ashamed of me?’

‘I am absolutely not ashamed of you. You know that. And I think you could fit in if you wanted to. If you’d make the – the effort. I’m just not sure that you would.’

‘Well, thank you for that.’

‘Oh Keir, don’t be so awkward. You know perfectly well being social is not exactly your thing. And while I wouldn’t specially mind if you stood in a corner sulking all evening, because someone had said something to upset you, my parents would. It would be – unfair to all of you. Perhaps.’

‘Perhaps. Any other reasons?’

‘Yes. There will be the full roll call of Lyttons there. My grandmother, the absolute head of the family, I know you’d like her and she would like you, but she is an appalling snob and as for her new husband, Lord Arden – well, I don’t see that one, Keir. My mother and her twin sister are pretty strong medicine, talk in riddles all the time, never stop fooling around and talking and flirting with everyone. My brothers – the older ones – are what you’d call public-school poofs. I mean I love them, but I don’t think they’d become your best friends. The person I’d like best in the world for you to meet, Sebastian Brooke, the writer you know, won’t be there.’

‘Why not?’

‘He and my grandmother have had the most fearful falling out. I can’t tell you why, let’s just say family politics. And then there’s Giles Lytton, my mother’s brother, dreadfully dreary, he’d get you into a corner and bore on about the war all evening, and his wife Helena is worse. She behaves like she’s the Queen Mother. Honestly, they’re a desperate lot. Some of them are nice, my cousin Noni is heavenly—’

‘Heavenly, Elspeth? In what way? Does she have wings?’

‘Keir,’ said Elspeth tartly, ‘I don’t comment on your accent and correct your turns of phrase. I don’t see what right you have to comment on mine.’

She had discovered quite early on that, like all bullies – and he was a fearsome intellectual bully – he responded to being stood up to.

They had moved quite swiftly from the coffee bar to a drink in the Turl, to a meal at the Vicky Arms; from walks along the river to cosy smoky evenings in pubs; from slightly awkward chat to long, deep conversations, taking in a lot of personal history and philosophy; from standing rather self-consciously clear of each other to holding hands and kissing, and from kissing to a journey far further along the road towards full sexual experience than Elspeth would ever have imagined.

‘It’s no use, Keir,’ she said, pushing his hand away as it embarked on its tirelessly hopeful journey into the country between her stocking tops and her thighs, ‘I’m not going to do it, and that’s all there is to it.’

‘Oh God,’ he said rolling on to his back, staring up at the ceiling, lighting a cigarette (they were in his room at Wadham, risky even at lunch time but less so than hers). ‘This bloody virginal rubbish. Just exactly what are you saving yourself for, Elspeth?’

‘Love,’ she said very seriously. ‘Love and the man I probably want to spend the rest of my life with.’

‘I thought you rich girls were more unconventional than that.’

‘Some of us are. I’m not. Sorry.’

‘Mummy told you it was wrong, did she?’

‘Not wrong, stupid. Dangerous. And I agree with her. OK?’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Look, if it’s getting pregnant you’re scared of, I can make sure you don’t.’

‘Oh yes? An awful lot of girls have heard that one. Girls who’ve then had to get married or have back-street abortions or—’

‘Girls who sleep with ignorant wankers who don’t know what they’re doing.’

‘Don’t Keir. I’m not going to.’

‘Oh have it your own way,’ he said and stood up, glaring down at her, then slammed out of the room; she lay there for a while on his bed, then finished the paper cup of appalling cold red wine he had poured her and left. She didn’t care if that was the last time she saw him; she really didn’t.