The colleges on the banks of the Cam were more beautiful than she had ever imagined, and more bewildering. She smiled at Frederick, but the smile cost her. “It’s existed for more than five hundred years, and it’s based on an assumption that those who were about to be initiated were those in the know, while those who are uninitiated should remain so. Do you understand?”
Frederick nodded. “Despite propaganda to the contrary, we do have a class structure in America,” he said.
“Well,” Camilla continued, “colleges each had their specialities, and their names, which are often pronounced totally differently from the way they’re spelled. There’s Magdalene, pronounced ‘Maudlin’ (and spelled without the final e at Oxford). There’s Peterborough, which was a college, but the only one that was never called a college.” She paused. “I humiliated myself by asking for it incorrectly. Anyroad, interview times and places were posted, but I had no idea where, and there seemed no central desk, no registrar’s office to inquire of, so I completely missed my first appointment when I discovered the listings on a board in a sequestered quadrangle.” Camilla winced, recalling how her mother, horrified, began to yell at her—which certainly hadn’t helped Camilla’s composure. She had only found the history don, a mild, pleasant man, as he was leaving. He took pity on her in her dishevelment and humiliation and graciously suggested they reschedule the appointment for later in the day. But his only available hour conflicted with her other interview. “I was just naive,” she explained to Frederick. “I should have told him how much I wanted to see him, how I hoped to read history, but all I managed was, ‘Well, you see, I am seeing the classics don then.’ He looked at the crimpolene, and I babbled, ‘I haven’t decided whether to do history or classics. I suppose I’D do classics in the end.’”
“So what happened then?” Frederick asked, as if it mattered.
“He told me, ‘Then it’s all come out right,’ and wandered off, a bit bemused, his black gown flapping in the spring breeze.”
Camilla smiled at Frederick, but it cost her. She’d only realized the ghastliness of her mistake after her interview with the two supercilious classics dons, who eyed her with an unconcealed coldness that was as good as a poster announcing they knew she was NOKD—Not Our Kind, Dear. Under their merciless interrogation Camilla had wilted quickly, knowing too late that as a female, a Catholic, and a tongue-tied, badly dressed upstart from the working class she had as much chance of winning their approval as she did winning the Olympic decathlon.
All of this she explained to Frederick, whose long face lengthened and whose deep red-brown eyes darkened in sympathy. “What happened then?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I wasn’t offered a place at Cambridge.”
“So, what did you do?”
“Well, I deeply disappointed Sister Agnus. And I proved my mother’s thesis right when she said that Cambridge wasn’t the place for the likes of us.” Camilla took another sip of wine and then tried a bite of her meal. But she’d lost her appetite. She put her fork down. Even now, years later, the experience was raw.
Frederick reached his hand across the table and patted hers just for a moment, very gently. “I mean,” he said, “what did you do about school?”
“Well, I did well in my A levels. Well enough for Sister Agnus to put me in for a full scholarship at Marymount. It’s a Catholic girls’ college in New York City, and she knew one of the deans. I did my undergraduate work there and then my graduate work at Columbia.”
“So you lived in New York,” Frederick said.
“Yes, for a long time.”
“And those are fine schools.”
“Yes. Marymount might have been stronger—there were a lot of spoiled rich girls there—but the faculty was kind to me. And Columbia was top-drawer.”
“Still, it wasn’t Cambridge.”
“No, it wasn’t.” She looked over at him, into those red-brown eyes. Somehow they seemed to understand a great deal about pain. Had he experienced so much? It didn’t seem possible. After all, he was a wealthy, young American man with a devoted mother and a good education. Once again, Camilla wondered if he was gay: If that was the burden he carried, it gave him an insight into the burdens of others.
“It wasn’t Cambridge,” she repeated. “Cambridge was my last chance to find a place where I fit in among my own kind. I might have found a niche among other bright scholarship students. You know, all the other smart ones who didn’t fit in at home. And then I would have gone down to London and been a part of that world. But it didn’t work out. So, instead, I was a poor Brit in New York, a scholarship student among debutantes. Then, in graduate school, I was a woman among men, and an expatriate to boot. I had no connections, no way to get any. I was passed over for all the good jobs.”
“Then what?”
Camilla shrugged. “Here I’m just a foreigner. I can’t go back to Birmingham, and I’m not sure where to go next.”
Frederick waited, as if he understood her feelings. “So you wrote a book,” he coaxed. She nodded. “And now what?” he asked.
Camilla thought of Gianfranco. She sighed. “I don’t know,” she told him truthfully and raised her glass of wine to her lips.
“Well, I think it’s obvious. I think you have to send your book to my sister.”
“I’m not sure about that,” she said.
“Yes,” he told her. “My sister in New York. Remember? She’s an editor with Davis & Dash. And it sounds as if she would like your book. Of course, there are no guarantees. But what have you got to lose?”
What indeed, Camilla thought. Would he send the book as a quid pro quo, a payment for future services rendered? He certainly didn’t seem that type. Camilla looked at him, this very plain American who had entered her life, made no demands, and seemed to offer so much. What did he expect of her? What could she deliver? “I couldn’t,” she said, “I really couldn’t.”
“Sure you could,” he told her. “You’d be silly not to.”
“But I always thought I’d publish it in England. After all, I’m English.”
“Yeah, but it’s a book about Americans, and you’ve lived in America. And I know an American editor. I promise you, if I had a sister who was editing in London, I would send it to her. But since I don’t, you’ll have to live with this.”
Camilla laughed. “All right,” she said. “I guess I will live with it.”
Each publishing season seems to bring us another photogenic female author trying to get funky with pulp fiction.
—James Wolcott
Susann waited while the driver stepped out of the limo and opened the door for her. She had a lot to do today, and the phone call from Kim had been upsetting. Not that Kim had sounded high or even hostile. Actually, her daughter had sounded unusually calm. But was it the calm before the storm? Susann had agreed to meet Kim for tea at the New York Palace, and then she was off to Alf’s office to wrap up some final details, now that her new book was handed in.
Susann stepped out of the limousine and gave her best smile to Ralph, her driver when she was in New York. She walked through the elaborate gate and the hotel courtyard where the eight poplar trees were perennially wrapped in tiny white Christmas lights. She entered the hotel and turned right, walking up