Marina was opinionated. Her thoughts were hard-boiled, polished facts with no room for negotiation. I, on the other hand, had only a clutch of half-baked conclusions. I understood ideas, but I had no clue about how to settle on one at any given time – how you might say that something was more true than something else and actually mean it. My thoughts lay in my head in a series of unconnected fragments – like shattered glass – and I couldn’t piece them together to see what the original construction had looked like.
Sometimes I pretended this disconnect didn’t matter, but I knew it did. I didn’t want relativism. I wanted to find a definitive interpretation for everything.
When it came to writing my own essays, my conclusions would always say something admiring about the ‘unreadability of the text’, as though being confusing were a badge of literary merit. I would explain various theories and then wind up making a non-committal comment like: ‘Milton holds up a mirror to the reader’. I knew this was probably a cop out, the verbal equivalent of knowingly tapping the side of my nose – but expressing my ignorance was the closest I could come to saying something true.
Once I asked Marina what she thought of that line about Milton.
‘Unhelpful,’ she said. ‘Irresponsible, in fact.’
I agreed that it would be better to think of an actual argument – but what?
‘Paradise Lost is about someone struggling to come to terms with their sexuality in an oppressively homophobic environment,’ she added bluntly. ‘Lucifer rejects the heteronormative values pressed upon him by society – aka God, embodied by Adam and Eve – and is subsequently dealt the punishment of expulsion. He has to go and face his demons.’
‘Literally demons,’ I said.
‘Then he starts complaining about the decor of hell and saying stuff like: “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” It’s obvious – high camp. Put that.’
Her argument was always a bit off, but I found her conviction refreshing. The fact that she had so much confidence meant she could speak freely about any number of topics. She didn’t get tangled up in questions of political correctness or historical accuracy, as I did – she just charged on. And even if I wasn’t always sure that what she said was appropriate, or (when you unpacked it) made sense, there was something comforting about being close to someone who scoffed at the very notion of self-doubt. It made me believe that I, too, would one day have an opinion about something.
Looking back now, I think it was this self-conviction which caused Marina to be disliked by other people at Northam. There was something cold and uncompromising about her. It put them off, especially other girls.
Did Marina notice this? I think so. Did she mind? Unclear. She had a way of speaking to people that indicated she found them tedious, yes – but at the same time she always seemed to be seeking them out. When we went out to clubs or bars, she would always make some excuse to introduce herself to strangers. She would saunter over and ask for a lighter, or hang next to them with a sultry, bored expression on her face, waiting for a moment to sarcastically chip into their conversations.
I was so convinced by her self-confidence back then that I didn’t consider that this might be a sign of loneliness. In fact, I interpreted it as a personal insult. Her behaviour made me suspicious, paranoid even, like she was looking for an opportunity to get away from me.
iii.
I can’t keep putting it off.
The way I’ve written everything here, it makes it seem as though Marina dominated my first term at Northam. It is true that my memory of that time, like so many other things, is now clogged up with thoughts of her. I find it hard to picture any events where she wasn’t there – I can’t even clearly remember the moments where I was alone. But the truth is that there is another side to it. There were other things that happened. The other events, the events with the professor … I should address those.
In my initial glimpse of Marina with the professor, I’d recognized for the first time that there was something stagey about him. It wasn’t that he was lecherous exactly, but his authoritative persona, as someone who knew everything and whose self-confidence was unshakeable, struck me as unconvincing. I had seen him once without the mask on. Now, in the times I’d seen him since, it always seemed like he was trying to prove himself, like he was attempting to perform a part that he wasn’t at all suited to. Many people were like that at Northam – but the professor was the worst offender.
Or the second worst.
When I walked around campus, I’d sometimes see the professor with Henry. Their heads would be buried together in conversation in the café, locking eyes, nodding seriously. At other times they would exchange papers at the end of a lecture in an underhand fashion – Henry would slip the sheets sideways onto the lectern and give a perfunctory nod. It was like he thought he was on a mission for MI5 and not at ‘Renaissance Rhetoric’ in northern England. Once, when our first year seminar overran by ten minutes, Henry opened the door without knocking and ducked his head in. He looked panicked when he saw his mistake, muttering: ‘Wrong room.’ But I saw him go back in afterwards, when he thought no one could see him.
I heard from Marina that Henry was getting a head start on his dissertation. This was the cause of their clandestine meetings, she explained. She said that he was seeking advice from the professor about which areas of research might propel his chances of getting into Cambridge or Yale for a PhD. Early tuition was frowned upon, and since he was only a second year, it made sense for them to keep it hushed up.
‘To be honest though I don’t know why Henry bothers,’ Marina said to me. ‘It’s not that big a deal what kind of work you do anyway. References are what really matter. Professor Montgomery will pull strings to get him where he wants to go.’
This I found hard to believe. Then I remembered Marina’s scholarship.
The professor’s favouritism made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like the way Marina spoke about it either: she simultaneously criticized the ‘nepotistic structures’ of university, but was clearly complicit in it, in the fact she wanted to keep her scholarship. It hurt my head to think about this, so I tried not to.
Instead I deflected my dissatisfaction onto Henry and the professor. Conspiracy theories about them raced through my mind. One day I put one of them to Marina.
‘Do you think …?’
‘Do I think what?’
‘Henry and Montgomery …’ I said. I waggled my eyebrows, attempting to appear breezy and flippant.
‘Nah,’ Marina retorted, somewhat irritably. ‘For one thing, he’s definitely into girls.’
‘Who, Henry?’
‘God knows about him.’
‘Then Montgomery?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s got a wife but … to be honest, there are always other women. He was always accompanied by a “friend” to events, even when I was a kid. There would always be something dangling off his arm.’
This seemed to me so unlikely that I recoiled.
‘Ew,’ I said. ‘Who would … where did he even find them?’
‘Everywhere,’ she said.
‘But where?’
‘Everywhere, Eva. That’s how it works. He just … some people are like that. Women get desperate when they’re older.’
‘Does his wife know?’
‘No idea.’
I would try to push the conversation a little further