‘You absorb too much popular culture,’ Marina said to me once. ‘That’s your problem. You see a story in everything. You’ve got so much wasted mental energy. Life isn’t a novel, Eva. We’re not in The Secret fucking History.’
This made me laugh so much that I started choking.
November 2013
i.
It was about halfway through the term when Marina managed to switch back to English. This seismic shift was mentioned to me suddenly, almost as an aside – in such a way that I didn’t spend much time investigating the causes. That seems funny to me now. From what I remember, the solution appeared to have had something to do with Charlton. Charlton was a prestigious ‘college’ in the US where her father worked in some vague overseeing capacity. She had written to the administrators there explaining her situation, and they had – allegedly – offered her the opportunity to transfer. Once Northam got wind of it, they had mysteriously done a U-turn, throwing the professor’s counterarguments out the window.
The professor no longer objected to Marina’s presence in the room. He didn’t huff and puff or send her away when we came to his seminar. He didn’t even send her to the back of the room. Instead he largely ignored her. Fortunately for me, we were even allowed to sit side-by-side, as we were now, listening to him talk.
‘I hope you’ve all brought the Oxford edition as instructed,’ he said tartly. ‘The Cambridge edition is, frankly, an insult to academic publishing and a detriment to Marlowe’s legacy. As if it’s not enough that he died in a pointless duel. Four hundred years later he also has amateurs butchering the text.’
After smiling indulgently at his own joke, the professor walked over to the blind and pulled it up swiftly. A striped rectangle of light fell over his face. I watched it diminish, gradually, as he walked back to his armchair and sat down again. The leather squeaked under his tweed.
‘Turn to Act III.’
I often thought that the professor’s office looked like a cartoon version of the real thing. Bookshelves full of dusty tomes lined every wall. Armchairs hunched around a well-worn coffee table; old paperweights and stacks of crinkled A4 covered every surface. Apart from a flattened laptop in the corner – which honestly looked like a prop – there was no modern technology in there, and the lighting was so dim that it was hard to see the letters on a page. Surely this atmosphere couldn’t espouse anything productive? Surely he couldn’t be reading all those books and writing all those papers in here on his own? Once Marina joked to me that if you tapped on a book on the shelf, it opened up into a backroom full of strippers and porn films.
Now the professor scratched his inner thigh, shunted his crotch forward in his chair and began to speak. A copy of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus lay on his lap.
‘Before we begin,’ he said, ‘it’s important to note that the name of the protagonist is for all intents and purposes pronounced four-stuss, not fow-stuss.’
Marina and I exchanged glances.
‘There is a wealth of evidence to support this, before any of you attempt to disagree,’ his eyes flashed in our direction, ‘starting with the assonance in the first scene: “the form of Faustus’ fortunes good or bad”. There is also the spelling in Henslowe’s diary: “f-o-r-s-t-u-s”. “Fow-stuss” is a modern corruption dating from Goethe.’
Marina’s mouth began to twitch. We had been out the night before – with Henry and his housemate Robin. Marina found Robin hard to deal with because he didn’t find her funny. She had done a very good impression of the professor – spreading her legs and coughing and hacking – which had made me laugh a lot. Henry had laughed too. He’d even taken a video on his phone, which Marina had told him to delete – but Robin remained stony-faced. At this slight, Marina disappeared, and when she’d returned an hour later she looked completely out of it, muttering angsty hateful things about Henry and the professor and saying that she felt sick. I had taken her home, nursed her, scooped vomit out of her hair and wiped her face with a cool cloth.
‘Faustus is not Marlowe’s finest play, but it is unquestionably his most celebrated, and most frequently adapted. I’m sure you’re all familiar with Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and …’
Now Marina was tetchy. When she was hungover she found other people impossibly irritating, and this irritability clouded her judgement. She would interrupt in a trembling shrill voice and make a point that didn’t tarry at all with the conversation. Sensing this coming, I felt prematurely annoyed at her.
Marina and I were sat together in the middle of the study, right in the eyeline of the professor. She stank of alcohol sweat. I could see her fringe smeared across her forehead. She was nibbling her thumbs. It was clear that she was waiting for the professor to slip-up, to say something outrageous or unreasonable which she could contradict.
But he carried on, in silky tones: ‘Faustus is a highly conflicted character, and it is indeed a highly conflicted play …’
She was getting agitated, definitely. Lightly I kicked her – a signal of discouragement. She returned it with a scowl.
‘Caught between farcical comedy, and the deepest kind of torment: confronting your own mortality. Marlowe’s atheism is a much-debated question, of course, after he was framed by Thomas Kyd, and it is a much-debated play …’
Marina had now begun to loudly nibble the corner of her pen. She tapped it against the front of her teeth. A second went past and then, having received no response, she began scratching the nib against the plastic tabletop. It made a light, barely perceptible but nevertheless distracting sound, which caused the professor to stop mid-sentence.
‘Marina,’ he said.
Marina carried on scratching, her head tilted slightly.
‘Marina,’ the professor repeated. ‘Is there anything you’d like to get off your chest?’
Marina stopped. She lifted her head up and glared at him.
‘Well?’ he said.
She cleared her throat, paused.
‘I was wondering why you were using the A-text,’ she said eventually. ‘There are two versions of Faustus. Why did you set us the shorter version?’
This was a bit weird, to be fair. The professor stared back at her, a vaguely amused expression on his face.
‘I was working around to that,’ he shot back. He licked his fingertips and then turned a few pages in his folder. ‘The notes pertaining to the A-text are here in front of me. Would you like me to read them now?’
There was an awkward silence.
Marina looked down at her desk. ‘No I’m all right, thanks.’
The professor turned back to the class and opened his mouth to speak – but then, at that moment, Marina suddenly let out an enormous, theatrical yawn, an interruption so immature and melodramatic that the professor stopped himself. Everyone else stopped what they were doing too: writing, typing, tapping, texting – and looked up.
The professor looked startled.
‘Will you please just—’ he began, but before he had time to finish, Marina had stood up, packed all her things into her bag and abruptly stridden out of the room.
I watched the unwashed wave of blonde hair skittling down her back, her silhouette disappearing into the hallway.
The door slammed behind her.
***