The Banker's Niece 37: Anoraks and wellies

1977

‘Sometimes’, said Jane to her friend and housemate Heather, ‘I wonder if there are only two sorts of men at university: anoraks and wellies.’

    Jane had met Heather the year before when living next to her in one of the university ‘flats’ – twelve bedrooms sharing a bathroom and kitchen. These were considered by the university authorities as the next step on the road to independence after ‘Hall’ in your first year when your meals were provided and, if you were female, the warden kept an eye on your morals. The flats were self-catering and unsupervised but still – like Hall - with separate buildings for women and men.

    Now she and Heather had moved from the campus and shared a house with three male students – Mike, Pete and Gordon. This was unusual as the students tended to stay living with their own sex but, in spite of this and in spite of what the university authorities might think, the world hadn’t ended. Maybe it helped that the boys were friends of friends looking for somewhere to live and neither Jane nor Heather had had a close relationship with any of them before they moved in together.

    Had had. Things might have altered slightly since then – but Heather didn’t know about that, or at least Jane hoped she didn’t.

    They were having a glass of sour white wine each in the university’s Exe bar which they’d got to know in their second year as it was only a short walk from the flats. Now they had to climb on their bicycles and pedal across the city to reach it but that was OK. Like the flats, and unlike the Dart bar in one of the university’s original nineteenth-century buildings, the Exe bar and its building were only a few years old. This meant plenty of space, good lavatories and lots of students to watch.

    Except for those who lounged on the floor in a rectangular depression known as the Heffalump Trap, people sat on metal armchairs around metal coffee tables. The night sky loomed through floor-to-ceiling windows along one side, the room’s white-brick walls doing nothing to offset their chill. People streamed past. Lavatories doors clanged. The din of voices rose and fell. It was a bit like being in Victoria Station, thought Jane, but at least you felt you were in the middle of something, that something was happening. It was probably an illusion.

    ‘Nothing wrong with wellies,’ said Heather.

    Jane gave her a small smile. It was their height that had drawn them together, Heather being if anything taller even than Jane, but Jane couldn’t confide in her like she’d confided in Fee.

    ‘Wellies’ for example – the posh students who could afford cars and so lived in cottages outside the city and proclaimed as much with their footwear, and who all knew each other from before, and who stood around in large groups talking loudly without caring in whose way they were or who they were annoying – were a subject on which she and Heather had had to agree to differ. For some reason which Jane couldn’t fathom, and even though Heather was intelligent and rational enough to be pursuing a degree in law, her dearest wish appeared to be to marry some landed twit. Perhaps, coming from ‘nouveau-riche’ Surrey, as Jane’s mother would have put it, she’d never (unlike Jane) come into close contact with the breed.

    Another subject they didn’t discuss was Jane’s past, in particular her two years in London. Heather was ‘saving herself’ for her lord, or duke, or marquis, or earl, or even her lowly sir, and closed off whenever Jane tried to talk about what had happened to her. It depressed her, Heather said. She didn’t want to know about it.

    It was hard sometimes being two years older than almost every other undergraduate.

The day after Jane lost her virginity she cried all the way to work on the tube. All the other passengers avoided looking at her, hiding behind their books and their newspapers, and no one said a word.

    She arrived at the bank with red swollen eyes and Alan gave her a funny look. Kelvin wasn’t in yet, thank goodness, and she and Alan started to talk – about rape for some extraordinary reason.

    ‘I think there’s psychological rape as well as physical rape, don’t you?’ she said, astonishing herself and not at all sure where the idea came from. It seemed to reach her mouth without going through her brain. She wasn’t even sure what she meant by it.

    Alan stiffened as if shocked.

    ‘Yes,’ he replied.

    Kelvin swept in half an hour late and went straight up to Jane, bending over her desk and asphyxiating her with tobacco fumes.

    ‘Sylvia and I had a filthy row last night,’ he whispered, ‘and I wanted you to know that if ever we split up you’ll be the first person I come to.’

    She gave in her notice that morning and left the bank at the end of the week.

    She decided she had to leave London as well and her mother drove up to help her clear her belongings from the house in Fulham.

    For the next few months she lived at home, working as a temporary secretary at small local organisations to which she bicycled. The work was excruciatingly boring and often she wondered what would become of her, but not enough to contemplate returning to London. Anything was better than that.

    Her parents left her alone thankfully – perhaps they guessed that something had happened – but sadly Ollie was in America for a year before going to Cambridge so she and Bunty had to roam the Downs without him.

    One day in March as she sorted through the chaos of papers in her desk she came across a letter from her French teacher at school. ‘Very sorry to hear you’re not going to university,’ said the letter. ‘If you ever change your mind, do get in touch. I would be happy to help.’

    Yes! she thought. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll go to university. She had enough money saved to finance at least the first year and after that she’d see what happened.

    She attended interviews at several institutions but the place she liked best – it was friendly and pretty and far enough away – was the University of Devon, and she started there in the autumn.
    That was two years ago, and now here she was at the beginning of her third and final year.

         

‘Quick,’ squealed Heather, crouching over the table. ‘Put your head down. He’s here again.’

    Jane dutifully propped her elbow on the table and rested her head on her hand, all the while watching out of the corner of her eye.

    A tall figure in a long black cloak flashed past, coming to a halt on a lone chair in a far corner.

    ‘I don’t know why you bother hiding,’ she replied. ‘He never talks to anyone.’

    ‘I know,’ said Heather, her voice muffled by her arms, ‘but I sometimes get the impression he’s looking this way.’

    ‘And does that matter?’ asked Jane.

    ‘Of course it matters,’ expostulated Heather. ‘He’s a loony. Anyone can see that.’

    When they left half an hour later, Jane noticed that the man was still there, motionless in his corner, with the hood of his cloak pulled over his face, like Strider in Lord of the Rings.

Back at the house she went up to see Gordon in his room under the eaves. He was at his desk, papers spread out before him.

    Everything about him was brown, she thought: his hair, his eyes, his jumper, his trousers and his socks – and she would know about those as he left them on once when they were having sex. It was a fitting colour she supposed for someone who studied wildlife.

    Yes, he was a scientist - and almost an anorak, one of those lost male souls conversant only with facts and whose idea of a night out was a visit to the Exe House television room.

    ‘Women marry for security,’ he’d announced to her one day, as if he were an expert.

    ‘Where’s your maternal instinct,’ he’d exclaimed another time when Jane admitted that she didn’t want children, as if all women were the same.

    Still, at least he wasn’t a wellie and, being a postgraduate, he was older and more intelligent than most, only those with the best results being able to proceed to the next stage. Sometimes she even enjoyed his company. 

    ‘Janey,’ he smiled looking up. ‘I was hoping I’d see you.’

    She tried to look encouraging.

    ‘There’s a departmental disco tomorrow night’, he said, ‘and I wondered if you’d like to come.’

    ‘OK,’ she said.

    It would make a change.

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