Exposure Read Online Free Page A

is Rozzy. Rozzy, this is Al.' They had not had a chance to shake hands before Philip was introducing her to someone else a few places along.
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    Alistair thought she was the shiniest, cleanest-looking person he had ever seen. How did a person get that clean and shining? You had to come that way, he thought. There was a dinginess about him you could never scrub off. He stared at the incredible symmetry of her curls. A lot of the girls he had passed on the way had flowers, ribbonish things, but she just had the shining dark curls. It was almost intimidating, so resolute was its simplicity. She was like a haiku, he thought—he had been reading some that afternoon with his tea. He would have liked to be able to pay her a compliment, but he had no idea what it was appropriate to say. When he arrived at Oxford, it had taken him only a few days to abandon his own voice for Philip's public-school one. He still found quite often, though, that he did not know what to say in the new voice.
    He had felt increasingly insecure throughout the week—as he had each year—watching the college transformed into a playground of coloured lights, balloons and white marquees. He knew where he was with his books in his hand, walking back across the quad from a tutorial with Philip, patiently explaining whatever his friend hadn't understood. They were a good pair: Philip did the frivolity and Alistair did the more academically confident sarcasm, and together they believed in nothing at all. Philip relied on Alistair for help with his essays and in their first term began to take him out for lunch or dinner to say thank you. Soon Alistair helped with all Philip's essays and Philip paid for all Alistair's meals.
    But now, in Philip's spare dinner jacket, aware that the sleeves were too long and that he did not know how to dance, oddly chastised by the irreproachable prettiness of this girl Philip had not even bothered to mention, Alistair wished he could just go back to his room. But he would have felt like a failure. This was the first ball he had come to—he had earned enough in the last holidays to buy himself a ticket and he had been determined not to leave Oxford without having been to a single one, no matter how awkward and unprepared he felt.
    Philip handed him a glass of champagne. 'Drink up,' he said. He knocked back his own glass in one and Alistair felt panicky. Recklessness frightened him—because life took so much thought, so much control.
    When Philip died in his early fifties, essentially of alcoholism, Alistair remembered those gestures of his, each one arriving in his mind like a drum beat. It was a strange funeral, full of flamboy-antly dressed homosexual men with tragic faces. At the last minute Philip's partner had felt unable to do the reading and Alistair was asked to do it instead. He had felt frightened in case anyone imagined he was gay, too—and ashamed that this was how he thought when his old friend had died. There had been genuine love between them, even if they had drifted apart as Philip's lifestyle became less and less conventional and Alistair's more and more so. Philip always complimented Alistair on his clothes—and Alistair silently appreciated the depth of compassion from which this sprang. Philip had come to understand him in the early Rosalind days and he was someone who never judged or forgot the importance of what he had learnt about a person.
    It had been Philip who suggested it in the first place: 'Why don't you ask her if she wants to be shown round?'
    'Shown round?'
    'Yes.'
    'Is that OK?'
    'What d'you mean?'
    'I mean, wouldn't she think it was forward or something?'
    'She's not as prim as she looks—I
hope.
Her mum's a scream anyway. She must have inherited
some
of it.' Philip elbowed Alistair in the ribs but he couldn't maintain the joke, faced with Alistair's frightened expression. 'It's perfectly acceptable to ask a girl something like that,' he said.
    'Really?'
    Rosalind