Voyage of Innocence

ONE

Vee hadn’t seen Claudia for five or six years. In those days, her cousin had been a fair, chubby, awkward creature with a mouthful of ironwork and protuberant pug-dog eyes – although those were of an intense and dazzling blue that caused pangs of envy in Vee’s breast. In comparison, she felt that her own almost black eyes, an inheritance from her French grandmother, were dull and commonplace.

Vee’s train from York had got into Oxford railway station half an hour ago, and she had crossed from the up platform to the other side, to wait for the train from London. The down platform at three o’clock on that bright October afternoon was almost deserted. A porter leaned against his trolley, squinting into the slanting sunlight as he watched for the arrival of the 1.49 express from London. The station cat was sunning itself in feline abandon on the meagre flowerbed at the end of the platform. A passenger in a trilby and a green mackintosh waited beside a battered suitcase.

She walked along the platform to the chocolate machine and put in a penny for a Nestlé bar. She unwrapped it, took a bite, then put the remains of the chocolate into her coat pocket. She wasn’t hungry. What she was, she realized, feeling the butterflies in her tummy, was nervous. Nervous about coming to Oxford, nervous about meeting new people, nervous about the work, fearing that everyone else would turn out to be much cleverer than she was. They, and her tutors, would despise such stupidity and wonder how she had ever managed to get a place at the university.

And what a miracle it seemed that she was here at all, after the flat refusal of her grandfather to let her go to university. It was thanks to Claudia that she was here, it was Claudia who had announced to her own astonished and disapproving family that no, she wasn’t going to become a debutante, she wasn’t going to stay in London and do the season.

The day that the letter from Aunt Lettice breaking this piece of news came had been a red-letter day for Vee, if a wretched disappointment for her parents.

‘I don’t know what your grandfather will say,’ her father said,

Vee knew exactly what he would say, and she didn’t care. If she weren’t going to London, then, she said, she’d just have to hang around at home. No, thank you, Mummy, no Swiss finishing school for her, she’d feel out of place with all those rich girls.

‘You must speak to your father,’ Mrs Trenchard said to her husband. ‘Perhaps, in the circumstances, a year or two at university …’

He must let me go, Vee said to herself. She went to the Minster and knelt and prayed and prayed, feeling that it was somehow wrong to pray so desperately for oneself, but if God didn’t help her, who would?

‘In the end, she should do what she wants,’ she overheard her mother say to her father. ‘It isn’t as if she were a beauty, or had any special talent. A season would have done her good, she might have caught some young man’s eye, but I can’t ask Lettice to present her if Claudia isn’t going to be a debutante. We both have daughters who are a disappointment to us. Only Lettice is fortunate, she has the other girls.’

Daisy hung in the air.

Vee didn’t care about her mother’s dismissal of her looks and gifts. Let them think there was no better alternative. Claudia wrote to her. ‘What a lark that we both want to do the same thing. I’ve talked Mummy round, so it’s going to be all right, I can go. And I should think that once your old snob of a grandfather knows you can’t do the season, he’ll have to let you go to Oxford.’

Not without a tremendous argument and more dreadful scenes, he hadn’t. In the end, he washed his hands of her, furious that his daughter-in-law’s grand connections should have come to nothing. ‘She’d better stay in York with you, Anne, there’ll be dances and so on here. You must know everybody who matters.’

‘I think you’d better go to Oxford,’ her mother said to her.

‘I can’t. I can’t afford it on my allowance. Not the fees and everything.’

‘I’ll pay.’

‘You?’

‘I have a little money of my own. And don’t feel you have to come back home for all the holidays,’ she went on. ‘You young people like to spend time abroad. Or with your friends. Like Hugh does.’

‘Hugh has a generous allowance.’

‘I’m sure Grandfather will come round in the end. Now he knows the season isn’t a possibility. After all, most of the young men who go to all the London parties and dances are at one of the universities. You’ll meet plenty of eligible men at Oxford, I’m sure.’ She paused, searching for words. ‘I gather Claudia is very smart and extravagant. When your grandfather finds out, he won’t want you to be short of money and not be able to keep up with her.’

Which seemed pretty unlikely to Vee, since smart and Yorkshire school and Deanery hardly went together.

‘Of course, he won’t give you as much as he gives Hugh, young men are always more expensive at university.’

Her mother agreed to pay her first term’s fees, and Hugh made Daddy give her a small allowance.

‘Mummy’s right,’ he said. ‘Grandfather will see sense in the end. If Oxford’s OK for Claudia, why should it be so wrong for Vee? I’ll drop a few hints when next I see him.’

Vee was too warm in her thick winter coat. When she’d left York that morning there had been frost on the tracks, and she was grateful for her wool coat and gloves and scarf. Now they seemed out of place and uncomfortable.

A bell clanged, and the signal at the far end of the platform clattered down. The porter stood up and straightened his cap. More porters began to trundle their trolleys across the line. Even the station cat woke up and flicked her tail round herself.

The track hummed, then Vee heard the train, the shrill sound of a whistle, a cloud of smoke in the distance. With a roar and a grinding of brakes, the engine was alongside her, then past, coming to a snorting, squealing halt almost at the end of the platform.

Gone was the tranquil peace of a few minutes before. Heads appeared at windows all along the train, doors were flung open, people poured on to the platform.

She felt a sudden panic. Would she recognize Claudia – or would Claudia recognize her? When they last saw one another, they’d been schoolgirls, clumsy and at that awkward age, neither children nor adults. Pupae, in fact. Had Claudia turned into a radiant butterfly, or a dreary moth? Had she grown much? She’d been shorter than Vee then, and Vee had always been small for her age.

Her eyes darted here and there among the faces in the sea of humanity. Youthful humanity, she noticed, which lifted her spirits; young men and women of her own age. More men than women, which she supposed was only natural – inevitable, if they had parents and a grandfather like hers. The men were casually dressed in tweeds and flannels, and had an astonishing array of bags and suitcases and golf clubs hung over shoulders and held in masculine hands. They greeted one another with loud good humour and waves and claps on the back. A group of them clustered around the luggage van as bicycles were wheeled down the ramp.

However would she find Claudia in this throng? She heard a shriek in her ear and whipped around to come face to face with her cousin.

It was as well Vee hadn’t changed that much in the intervening years, for she would never have recognized her. How could this willowy, exquisitely groomed creature be her dumpy, toothy cousin? Her smile was immaculate now, and those blue eyes were huge and ravishing.

‘Good gracious,’ Vee said. ‘I’d never have known you.’

‘Well, I’d have known you, with that discontented look on your face and that air that northerners have when they come south.’

‘Air? What do you mean?’

‘Oh, a tinge of hay bales and beer and clogs, you know.’ Claudia glanced down at Vee’s overnight case. ‘Is this all you’ve got? What a mêlée! Are they all university people?’

‘My trunk came on ahead. I was looking out for you, I never saw you get off the train.’

‘I wasn’t on it. I came in the motor car, I had too much luggage to come on the train.’

‘I didn’t have any choice. Can you imagine anyone offering to drive me from York?’

‘Doesn’t Hugh have a car?’

‘He can’t even drive.’

Claudia glanced up and down the platform. ‘You didn’t travel down together on the train, though, not unless he’s got the gift of invisibility.’

‘He came up last week. Some work to catch up on, he said, but I think he just wanted to get away from the Deanery.’

‘Could be an advantage having a brother up at the same time as you. He’ll have heaps of men friends for you to meet.’

That made Vee laugh. ‘You’ll get to meet all the men you want, I feel sure.’

‘No, it’s going to be like a convent, being at a women’s college, don’t you think so? We go this way, the car’s over at the other side of the station. Oh, Vee, aren’t you happy? Aren’t you just brimming over with being here?’

Vee thought about it as they went up the steps and across the footbridge. ‘I don’t feel it’s real yet.’

‘I know what you mean. Pinch yourself, and you’ll wake up in the usual old bed. I’ve been saying to myself all the way here, I’ve made it, I’ve done it, it’s happening, and nobody can stop me now.’

They went down the steps to the other platform, and out on the north side, where a gleaming motorcar was waiting, a liveried chauffeur in attendance. Vee had forgotten just how rich her Vere cousins were.

‘Do you remember Jenks?’ Claudia said with a wave of her hand towards the chauffeur. ‘My ally, aren’t you Jenks?’ and she gave him an enormous wink before pushing Vee into the car.

Vee sat down on the sumptuous leather seat and stared at Claudia, who had produced a ridiculously long cigarette holder and was fixing a cigarette into it. ‘I shan’t offer you one, coz, because I know that coming as you do from the Deanery, you won’t touch drink or tobacco.’

‘I do smoke, as it happens, and I’d love a cigarette.’

‘We’ll have to get you a holder, nothing less chic than stubs with lipstick all over them.’

‘I’m not wearing any lipstick.’

‘That’s too obvious, but you’ll have to start. I’m not going to become known as the one with the dowdy cousin, I assure you.’

The car purred down to the Botley Road and turned under the railway bridge. The main entrance to the station was thronged with students and taxis and porters and luggage.

‘Stop, Jenks,’ Claudia said suddenly, and even before the car halted, she had the door open and was hurtling through the crowd towards the taxi rank.

What was she up to? Vee dived out of the car after her cousin, who had gone up to where an astonishingly beautiful girl was standing amid a helpful crowd of young men.

‘Are you for Grace?’ Claudia asked.

‘Why, yes, as it happens, but how …’ She spoke with an accent. American, Vee thought.

‘Is this your luggage?’ Claudia was asking.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘We can’t take the trunk, but that doesn’t matter.’ Claudia beckoned to a porter. ‘This trunk needs to be delivered.’

‘Of course, miss. Where to?’

‘Grace College. When will that be?’

‘Later this afternoon.’

‘That’s all right, but don’t make it too late.’

‘Name, miss?’ the porter asked the American girl.

‘Fitzpatrick.’

He brought out a stub of chalk and scrawled her name and the word Grace on the trunk. He called out to a colleague standing nearby, ‘Joe, this is for one of the hen houses. Grace.’

Claudia pushed Miss Fitzpatrick towards the car, which was causing something of a traffic jam. ‘Hop in, before a policeman arrives to harangue Jenks.’

Vee got in after them, knocking her shin against a strangely-shaped black case.

‘I’m sorry, that’s in the way,’ the American said, leaning down to move it.

‘What on earth is it?’ asked Vee.

‘My French horn. Why did that guy back there say my trunk was for one of the hen houses?’ said Miss Fitzpatrick.

‘It must be what they call the women’s colleges,’ Claudia said. ‘A lot of people haven’t got used to having women at the university.’

Miss Fitzpatrick held out a hand. She was wearing exquisite kid gloves, Vee noticed. ‘I’m Lavender Fitzpatrick, only I get called Lally.’

‘If you say Lavender, no one will call you anything else,’ Claudia said. ‘I’m Claudia Vere, and this is my cousin Verity Trenchard. Known as Vee.’

‘I prefer Lally. It’ll make me feel more at home. Say, how did you know I was going to Grace? Are you freshmen there, too?’

‘Intuition,’ said Claudia. ‘One of my more useful talents. I think they call us Freshers at Oxford, at least they do the men. Where are you from, what are you reading?’

Lally looked puzzled, Vee could see she was about to reach into her bag for a book or magazine.

‘She means, what are you studying?’ Vee said.

‘Oh, what course am I taking? English Language and Literature. And I’m from Chicago.’

‘Where the gangsters are?’ Vee asked.

‘Yes, but we try to avoid them as much as possible. What are you taking … reading, I mean?’

‘Modern Languages,’ Vee said. ‘French as my main language.’

‘I’m reading Greats,’ Claudia said. ‘Greek and Latin. It’s a four-year course, you see, so more annoying to my family.’

‘Annoying?’ Lally said.

‘Even now, my dear brother is stamping up and down in his ancestral hall, incensed that I’ve made it to the university. He doesn’t approve of education for women.’

‘My father isn’t too keen on the idea, either,’ said Lally.

‘And Vee’s grandfather, who rules the roost in her family, will never forgive me for turning my back on being a debutante and coming to Oxford. You see, he’d planned for Vee to do the season with me. Only when it turned out I was coming here, he more or less had to let Vee come too.’

Lally laughed. ‘My grandmother was at Oxford, she was one of the first girls at Grace College, back in the nineties. So she wanted me to come, and so did I, and in the end Pa agreed, although he still thinks a good American women’s college would have been much better. We had quite a few arguments about it, before Grandma and I got our way.’

Vee’s own battle had been such a bitter one, she’d imagined, for no good reason, that other people didn’t have to fight so hard for what they wanted. Yet here were Claudia and Lally agreeing that their families didn’t want them to be at Oxford.

‘I may switch to another school, though,’ Claudia was saying. ‘Greats is hard work.’

Vee was looking out of the window. There was a clarity to the air that day, a clarity that she later came to realize was unusual in Oxford. Perhaps it was in her eyes, and not outside at all, but everything seemed sharply delineated: the cobbled streets, the newspaper vendor on a corner shouting out the headlines, a college servant in a bowler hat stepping through the wide open doors of an ancient college.

The motor drew up in front of the arched gateway into Grace College, causing various vans and cars to brake abruptly and a man pushing a handcart to call out a few unsavoury epithets as Jenks got out of the car and came round to open the rear door.

The lodge was chilly and brightly lit. A gnome of a man stood behind a polished wooden counter as the three of them came in. He flicked his eyes up from the ledger in front of him. Names? Trenchard, Vere, Fitzpatrick. He made three careful ticks on a list and turned round to where a row of keys hung on numbered hooks. ‘Quite a coincidence you arriving together, since your rooms are next to one another. Sign here, please, Miss Trenchard. Now you, Miss Fitzpatrick. Miss Vere.’

Claudia took the book and signed it with a flourish. ‘It’s Lady Claudia, actually. Where do we go?’

That earned her a sharp look and a sniff. ‘A scout will show you to your rooms. Do you have any luggage with you? Big luggage. A trunk, for instance, I have no record of any trunk under your name, Miss Fitzpatrick,’ he said, emphasizing the ‘miss’.

‘It’s coming up from the station.’

‘It makes more work for us when you young ladies don’t send your boxes and trunks on in advance.’

‘That would be difficult, since it came across the Atlantic on the boat with me.’

‘Young ladies from abroad always cause problems for us.’

They started with Claudia’s room, number seventy-three, on the second floor. Lally was seventy-four, just across the corridor, and Vee was seventy-five, next door to Claudia.

Claudia unlocked the varnished wooden door. A card with her name on it was already slotted into a little brass holder: Lady Claudia Vere. She opened the door and Vee and Lally peered past her into the room. Claudia put down her crocodile handbag on the top of the bookcase, edged round the trunk that took up most of the available space in the centre of the room and surveyed her new domain.

A narrow bed, a small chest of drawers, a wardrobe, and a desk made up the furniture. There was a tiny grate in the fireplace in one corner, with a gas ring set beside it on green tiles.

‘I’d call this a cell, myself. Lord knows how I’ll fit everything in.’ She turned to the scout who had come with them to show them the way. ‘Are all the rooms this size?’

‘First years are put in the smaller rooms, miss.’

‘Are your rooms the same?’ she said to Vee and Lally. She bounded across the corridor to inspect them. ‘Yes, they are.’

‘Kind of cosy,’ said Lally.

‘Kind of cramped,’ said Claudia.

Vee didn’t care. ‘They can put me in a broom cupboard, if they like. I’m here. And that’s a miracle, and nothing can spoil it.’

Claudia was dangling her keys on one finger. ‘The scout’s vanished,’ she said, irritated. ‘Where do we ring for her?’

‘I don’t think we do,’ Vee said.

‘I need her to unpack my trunk.’

There was a pause, and then Lally said, ‘I’m not sure it works like that. I guess we do our own unpacking.’

Claudia stared at her. ‘How? Bowler packed it for me, it’ll take me hours to get everything out, and then what do I do with it?’

‘Bowler?’ Vee said.

‘My maid.’

‘Didn’t you unpack your trunk at school?’

‘No, of course not. Matron and the school maids saw to all that.’

‘We had to do our own at Yorkshire Ladies’.’

‘Pass over those keys,’ said Lally, kneeling beside the trunk. ‘Vee and I will show you what to do.’

TWO

Vee would never forget the first night in hall, for Freshers’ Dinner. It was a handsome panelled room with the high table for the dons set on a raised area at one end and three long tables in the main part of the hall for the undergraduates.

The noise of all those women’s voices startled Lally; Claudia and Vee were used to it.

‘Just like school,’ remarked Claudia, raising her voice to be heard above the din.

A tall girl in a scholar’s gown stood and said a Latin grace, and the maids rushed to and fro serving the food. Claudia said it was dreadful; Vee would have eaten a plate of raw turnips that evening, and not noticed it.

When the plates were cleared away and coffee had been served, a wiry woman, grey hair pulled back in a severe bun, rose from her seat. She waited for the buzz of conversation to die down, and said a few more words in Latin. Then she swept sharp eyes over the assembled undergraduates.

‘The Mistress of Grace,’ Vee’s neighbour hissed in her ear. ‘Dr Margerison, the biologist.’

‘This picture that hangs behind me is a striking portrait of our founder, Dame Eleanor Grace,’ Dr Margerison began.

‘Grim old party,’ Claudia said, sotto voce.

Actually, she looked to Vee as though she had a twinkle in her eye, unlike the rest of the biddies pinned on the wall around the hall. Was that what brains and education did to you, turned you austere and disapproving and thin-lipped? The fact that most of them were dressed in the clothes of the last century didn’t help, of course, high-necked, sombre clothes, or academic dress. Dame Eleanor, in her portrait, appeared to be wearing a pith helmet.

‘Why the camel?’ Lally whispered to Claudia. She shrugged, but Dr Margerison soon enlightened her.

‘Dame Eleanor was a pioneer. She was eminent in her field of Egyptology and all her life had a passion for the education of women. That is why, when she came into a fortune, after the untimely death of her only brother, she used her inheritance to found and endow this college.

‘You who are here today, starting out on a new life as members of this great university, are the cream of your generation. Gifted with intelligence and the capacity for hard work, you have become part of a centuries-old tradition of learning and scholarship.

‘Here at Grace, we expect the young women who come to us to display the same characteristics as our founder: intelligence, diligence, intrepidity, persistence in the face of adversity, combined with a sense of duty, honour and love of country. And to this love of country, we hope that you add love of this university and of this college and that none of you throughout your lives will do anything to bring the institutions that have nourished you into disrepute.