Notes from an Exhibition Read Online Free Page B

holding her, and walked on. ‘Tell me about you,’ she said. ‘I need a bulletin from the real world.’
    And in trying to honour her request he realized afresh how unreal the world of the university had become to him. They walked on and he told her about Smollett and his fears that he had picked the wrong MPhil topic but wouldbe thought a lightweight if he asked to change it now. He told her about continually feeling an impostor among adults and she was shocked to discover he was only months younger than her. ‘It’s the lack of experience,’ he said, which made her laugh without crying. He told her about the Quakers and being raised by his grandfather and about being Cornish.
    ‘Is there more light there?’ she asked.
    ‘Much. Even when the weather’s bad you can always see lots of sky. And variety in the sky. It feels odd here, having no horizons.’
    ‘It’s like being at the bottom of a weedy pond,’ she snapped. ‘That’s why everyone here does those fucking watercolours.’
    They walked on in silence for five minutes then she said, ‘This is my street,’ and led the way down one of the sad, low terraces that bordered the canal.
    ‘It’s nice,’ he said automatically.
    ‘It’s miserable,’ she corrected him. ‘Though there’s a wild little garden, which is good. When the sun shines. If the sun shines.’
    ‘Are you going to be all right, Rachel?’
    ‘Nope,’ she said and smiled at him wanly. ‘There’s nothing you can do for me, Antony. I can’t be saved.’
    ‘Can I see you again?’
    ‘Same time next week,’ she said. ‘How’s about that? Another Renaissance genius, another walk home in the drizzle. Maybe I can watch you drink a cup of tea beforehand? This is my house.’ She stopped on the side of the street that didn’t back on to the canal, by an especially pinched-looking house. He still wasn’t used to so much brick everywhere.
    ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘All right. Your bag.’
    He handed her back her shapeless satchel and must have looked especially needy or hangdog because she gave him a rapid hug and said quickly into his ear, ‘I could drag you in and get you drunk on cheap wine and my record collection but it would make me feel like an old hooker and I’d hate you for it.’ She pulled away and felt for her latchkey in her bag. ‘You’re a good, clean Quaker,’ she said. ‘You believe in truth and the little bit of God in all of us but I’m a miserable, hooked-on-sin Presbyterian and I’d be nothing but bad for you. Go back to the light, little boy and I’ll see you for Piero next week.’
    She let herself in and he was alone in the drizzly street except for an enormous cat trying to fish something out from a deep crack in the pavement.
    He should have been wretched. She had rejected him, as much for youth and perceived goodness as for lack of experience. She had belittled him and treated him like a sort of provincial English eunuch who would never catch up with or understand her. But as he pedalled home to the institutional reassurances of dinner in hall and a long, lonely evening in the college library stacks with an article on Georgian pamphleteers, he swung between happiness at being taken into her confidence and the qualified promise of her friendship and excitement at being initiated into a world previously closed to him.
    This euphoria lasted all week. He worked hard, wrote a long, reassuring letter to his grandfather and miraculously found Smollett funny again. The week seemed to fly along and by the evening of the next lecture he was determined to impress her as less immature than she
    thought him. He had read up on Piero della Francesca for a start and had found her secondhand copies of the first two volumes of Dorothy Sayers’ translation of Dante. He had met a few refugees from hard-line religions and had decided that her throwaway references to their faith differences and her slightly over-dramatized sense of her moral waywardness made her the ideal