The Bellwether Revivals (2 page)

In the vestibule, the air seemed colder, sharper. Darkness had settled fully over the city and Oscar could feel that familiar, constricting tiredness returning to his shoulders. He turned his collar to the night. It was then, as the crowd dispersed in front of him, that he saw her in the shadows, leaning against the grey stones of the chapel.

She was reading an old paperback, tilting the pages into the second-hand light of the vestibule with one hand, and cradling a clove cigarette between the fingers of the other. Her reading glasses were too big for her face—square with rounded corners, like large projector slides. After a moment, she glanced up from her book and smiled.

‘One thing I know about church,’ she said, ‘is to learn where the exits are. It’s like being on a plane. Have to get out in an emergency.’ Her accent was genteel, proper, the stuff of elocution lessons; but there was also something uncertain about the way she
spoke, as if she was trying hard to rough up the edges of her sentences (she had dropped the ‘g’ of ‘being’ and it sounded strange).

‘I’ll try to remember that for next time,’ Oscar said.

‘Oh, I don’t think you’ll be coming back in a hurry. Too much Jeremiah, not enough choir. Am I right?’

He shrugged. ‘Something like that.’

‘Well, I can hardly blame you. They were almost perfect tonight, weren’t they? The choir, I mean.’ She offered him her cigarette pack and he shook his head. ‘Sometimes the beaters aren’t concentrating and their timing suffers, but tonight they were really with it.’

‘Yeah, I thought so too.’

As Oscar stepped closer, she studied him with a quick motion of her eyes. He wondered if she would see the same things in his face that he saw in the bathroom mirror every morning—those straight, innocuous features that might just pass for handsome, the beginner-slope nose that water streamed down when it rained, that narrow jaw he’d inherited from his mother. He hoped that she could see past his workclothes: the faded leather jacket he wore over his nursing uniform, and the trainers he’d put through the washing machine so many times they were clean but somehow grey.

‘Are you sure you don’t want a cigarette? I hate smoking on my own, it’s so depressing.’ She lifted the paperback and examined its cover. ‘What about Descartes? We could smoke
him
. There’s enough material here to roll a good cheroot.’ She snapped the book shut before he could answer. ‘Yes, you’re probably right. Descartes would be a bit dry, wouldn’t he? Much too heavy on the stomach …’ There was a moment of silence. She drew on her clove again. ‘So do you have a name?’

‘Oscar,’ he said.

‘Os-car. That’s nice.’ She spoke his name out into the night, pondering it, as if she could see it scrolling across the sky, on a banner pulled by an aeroplane. ‘Well, Oscar, don’t take this the
wrong way or anything, but church doesn’t really seem like your scene. I was watching you in there—you didn’t know a bloody word of any of the hymns.’

‘Was it that obvious?’

‘Oh, it’s not a bad thing. I’m not exactly St Francis of Assisi myself.’

‘To be honest, I just sort of stumbled in. Something about the music, the sound of the organ. I can’t quite explain it.’

‘That’s my excuse, too.’ She breathed out another whorl from the side of her mouth. ‘My brother’s the organ scholar. That was him playing tonight. I’m just a tag-along.’

‘Really?’

‘
Really
. It’s not the kind of thing I’d bother to lie about.’

‘Well, he plays that thing better than anyone I’ve ever heard. You can tell him from me.’

‘Oh, he doesn’t need any more positive reinforcement,’ she said, laughing at the thought. ‘His head’s going to swell up like a bloody zeppelin when I tell him you only came inside for the music. He’ll take all the credit for that. I love my brother dearly, but I’m afraid the humility gene passed him by.’

Oscar smiled. He could see the Gatehouse beyond her shoulder, yellowed by the desklamps in the porters’ lodge, and she was almost outlined by the glow. ‘I suppose you’re a postgrad,’ she said, flitting her eyes towards him again. ‘I can tell postgrads from fifty paces. You’re all baggy leather and comfortable shoes.’

‘Sorry to disappoint you.’

‘Alright, okay then—a post-doc. My radar’s off.’

‘I’m not any kind of student,’ he said.

‘You mean, you don’t go here
at all
?’ It was as if she’d never met anyone from beyond the hallowed grounds. ‘But you look so—’

‘So what?’

‘Serious.’

He didn’t know if this was a compliment or an accusation.

‘I mean, you’re practically a fully fledged member of society
already,’ she went on. ‘I bet you pay taxes and everything. How old are you?’ She raised her cigarette to her mouth, left it waiting at her lips. ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s rude to ask that question, but you can’t be much older than I am. Sometimes I can’t imagine what else there is to
do
here besides study.’

‘I’m twenty,’ he said.

‘See, I knew you weren’t much older.’

She was not the sort of girl Oscar had grown up around: the mouthy teens who talked inanely on the back rows of buses and blocked the smoggy corridors of nightclubs on weekends, whose drunken kisses he’d experienced with cold disappointment on dark, windless recs. She had pedigree—that much was clear from her voice—and he liked the way she looked at him, curious not judgemental. There was depth to her, he could tell. A kind of unashamed intelligence.

‘I work at a place called Cedarbrook. It’s a nursing home,’ he told her. ‘But you don’t have to pity me—I know how to read and write and everything.’

‘
Pity
you? Christ, I envy you,’ she said. ‘Cedarbrook. That’s the lovely old building on Queen’s Road, isn’t it? They have all that beautiful wisteria growing on the walls.’

‘Yeah. That’s the place.’

‘Well, anyone who can make wisteria bloom like that every spring deserves a trophy. I walk past that house quite often, just to look at the gardens.’

‘I can’t take any credit for the wisteria. Not my department. But I’ll pass it along.’

She looked down at the scuffed black toecaps of her shoes, rocking on the edges of her feet. ‘This is my little corner of the world. I’m a King’s girl. Medicine, second year, if you can believe it.’

‘Must be hard work.’

‘It’s not too bad really. Not
all
of the time, anyway.’

Oscar could only try to imagine the way she lived. He’d been in
Cambridge long enough to know the hours the students worked, to see them on the other side of library windows late at night, red-eyed, ruffle-haired. But he knew as little about the everyday lives of Cambridge students as they knew about the daily machinations of Cedarbrook. What went on inside the closed-off doorways of the colleges was an enduring mystery to him. He only knew that it was better to be near to these places, to walk by them and imagine what high-minded discussions were unfolding inside, than to be somewhere like home, where every conversation was audible on the high street and the only landmarks were shopping centres.

When he asked for her name, she replied: ‘It’s Iris. Like the genus.’ And he laughed—just a short vent of air from his nose, but enough for her to step back and say, ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Most people would say
like the flower
, that’s all.’

‘Well, I’m not most people. I’m not going to say it’s like the flower when I know perfectly well that it’s a genus. And I’ll tell you something else.’ She broke for a gulp of breath. ‘I know exactly which variety I am.
Iris milifolia
. The hardest one to look after.’

‘But worth the effort, I’m sure.’

She gazed back at him proudly, the lights of the college buildings reflecting in her lenses. Though Oscar could feel the tiredness more than ever now, weighing down his eyelids, he didn’t want to leave. This was where he was meant to be, talking to this strange pretty girl, with her clove and bergamot scent and her copy of Descartes. He wanted to stretch the moment out as far as it would go, tauten it until it broke apart.

‘Listen, this might sound a little, y’know,’ Iris said, letting the sentence drop away. She scratched the side of her arm and glanced at him. ‘It’s just, my chamber group has a recital later this week, out at West Road. If you’re not doing anything on Sunday night, would you like to come? We could really use all the support we can get.’

He didn’t need a second to think about it. ‘Yeah, okay. I’ll be there.’

‘Won’t be hard to get a ticket at the door, believe me,’ she said. Then, for reasons that weren’t clear to him, she laughed out loud.

‘What?’ he said.

‘It’s nothing. It’s just—you’re really going to go, aren’t you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But you don’t even know if we’re any good. I haven’t even told you what instrument I play. I could be the world’s lousiest trombonist, for all you know.’

‘I’m not doing anything else that night. And if your brother’s an organ scholar, you can’t be all that bad.’

‘How inductive of you,’ she said. ‘Do you even know what an organ scholar is?’

‘No, but it sounds important.’

‘In the college,
yes
. In the real world,
no
.’ She told him that two scholarships were awarded every couple of years at King’s. There was great competition for places amongst undergraduates, and usually a first-year and a third-year were appointed. Her brother was one of the only students in the history of the college to be awarded a scholarship twice. ‘A normal person wouldn’t want all the extra hassle in his final year, but that’s my brother for you. He’s irregular.’ It was the organ scholars’ job to play at the chapel services; they worked on a shift rotation: one week on, one week off. They also assisted the Director of Music in his duties. ‘If the Director can’t make it for some reason, the organ scholar has to conduct the choir. It hardly ever happens, though. Maybe once a year. My brother’s always hoping something horrible will befall the Director, but he’s healthy as an ox.’ She stubbed out her clove on the drainpipe. ‘Anyway, I’ll be very glad to see you on Sunday, if you still want to come.’

‘Are you an organist too?’ he asked.

‘Me? No.
God
, no. I play the cello.’ She gave a little sigh, as if she’d been saddled with an instrument she had no interest in. As if one day in a school music lesson all the triangles and tambourines had been doled out, and her teacher had handed her a hunk of wood and said,
Here, play this until I find you something better
. ‘I haven’t been practising much recently. Not the recital pieces, anyway.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because studying medicine is quite demanding of my time.’

‘Right.’

‘And in my free time I read stuff like this.’ She raised the book. ‘Things my brother tells me I should be reading. I suppose I’m a glutton for punishment that way.
The Passions of the Soul
. Tell me honestly: am I wasting my youth? Should I just be out there getting drunk with the rest of them?’

‘That would be a bigger waste, I think.’

Her face slackened. ‘My problem is, I’m too easily steered off course. Have to be doing several things at once.’

‘You’re a butterfly catcher,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘That’s what my father would call you.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s a kinder phrase than
hyperactive
. He must be more patient than my parents.’

Oscar just nodded, peering at the ground. It was strange to hear someone speaking well of his father, because he rarely thought of him that way. He could only recall the rain-soaked building sites where he spent most of his school holidays, helping to heave plasterboards up narrow flights of stairs, and all the weekends he lost stuffing insulation into wall cavities, filling skips with office debris. He could remember the bitterness of his father’s voice when they used to argue on the job: ‘Go then. Leave me. I’ll do it myself. You’ve always got somewhere better to be, don’t you? A butterfly catcher, that’s what you are.’ This was not patience, Oscar knew, but a resentful kind of endurance.

By the time he turned back to Iris, her attention was elsewhere. She’d noticed something over his shoulder and was gathering herself to leave, fixing her scarf, patting down her coat. The remains of her cigarette lay trodden at her feet. ‘My brother’s here,’ she said. ‘I better go.’

Oscar heard the gentle tinkling of bike spokes, and spun around to see a man in a pinstripe blazer wheeling a shiny Peugeot racer, dynamo lights strobing on the path. His corduroy trousers were turned up at the ankles, and a mass of wavy hair was spilling from the edges of his bike helmet. There was something ungainly about the way his blazer hung on his body—shoulders and elbows still prominent beneath the fabric, like a sheet thrown over an upturned table.

‘Just a sec,’ Iris called to him. She took off her glasses and pushed them into the top pocket of her coat. Without them, her face was more evenly proportioned. ‘Here,’ she said, tossing the Descartes to her brother. ‘Say what you like about French philosophy, but it’s no good when you read it in the dark.’

Her brother caught the book and stuffed it into the back of his trousers. ‘I’m not letting you off the hook that easily. You’re getting it back first thing tomorrow.’ He squinted at Oscar as if appraising an antique. ‘Who’s your friend?’

‘This is Oscar,’ she told him. ‘We’ve been shooting the breeze, as Yin would say.’

‘Oh, yeah? About what?’

‘Religion, flowers—all the big issues.’

‘I see.’

‘Did
you
know the iris is a genus?’ she said.

Her brother lifted an eyebrow. ‘I think I knew that
in utero
.’ Propping the bike-frame against one knee, he leaned to offer his slender hand to Oscar. ‘If we wait for her to introduce us, we’ll be here all night. The name’s Eden.’ His grip was solid and unforgiving. ‘Thanks for keeping her company.’

‘My pleasure,’ Oscar said. He couldn’t quite see Eden’s face—it
was partly drawn over by the shadows of the chapel spires—but he could tell that his skin had the texture of a seashell, smooth yet flawed. ‘Was that really you playing in there? I’ve never heard an organ sound so good.’