The group is arguing about a piece of dialogue from Northanger Abbey. Ollie lets them go on for far too long, as usual, and is not even definitely listening. At this moment the group isn’t even supposed to be discussing this passage, but should be finding instances of metafiction in the text. Helen, dreadlocked, dungareed, bisexual, argumentative, thinks it’s highly insulting that Henry Tilney tells Catherine Morland what flowers she should like, and finds him, and in fact the whole novel, highly condescending. Grant, the big-chested American scholarship student, says that in his opinion Henry is trying to liberate Catherine, and other women, by getting them to see beyond the simply domestic. Helen thinks women don’t need liberating by annoying toffs, thank you very much. And so on.
Bryony doesn’t join in. She simply reads the lines again. ‘But now you love a hyacinth. So much the better. You have gained a new source of enjoyment, and it is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible. Besides, a taste for flowers is always desirable in your sex, as a means of getting you out of doors, and tempting you to more frequent exercise than you would otherwise take. And though the love of a hyacinth may be rather domestic, who can tell, the sentiment once raised, but you may in time come to love a rose?’ Bryony sighs. Who wouldn’t fall in love with a man who teased you as gently and sweetly as that? Who wouldn’t fall in love with a man who could see such different things in a hyacinth and a rose? Henry Tilney knows that loving a hyacinth and loving a rose are two entirely different things. He’s really talking about two different seasons, not just the indoors and the outdoors. He’s really talking about darkness and light and . . .
But Bryony would rather die than join in one of these discussions. Sometimes she imagines herself saying something, and it’s like when you give yourself vertigo by imagining falling off something very high. Everything fizzes up – her heart, her legs and, for some reason, embarrassingly, even her sexual organs – and in a way it’s almost enjoyable because she knows that this is a private fantasy, like throwing herself off a cliff, or sleeping with Ollie, and she would never do anything about it. Bryony tells herself that she doesn’t really want to sleep with Ollie. It’s just because he’s her seminar leader. She always wants to sleep with anyone in authority; it’s fine. She never does it. Although of course they did sleep together once, a long time ago, when she and James had a bad patch and before Ollie and Clem were together. Long before the children, or anything that really mattered. But no one knows about that, and it could never happen again. She’s too fat, for one thing. And he’s married to Clem.
And of course there’s still James. James knows the difference between a hyacinth and a rose. James would understand this passage. For a moment, Bryony aches for him, his too-sweet curries and the way he stirs his penis into her as if she were just another concoction bubbling in one of his cast-iron pans – not that he puts his penis in the pans of course – and how that is also too-sweet, as if he’d once read that this is the way women really like it and does it to please her. Bryony can’t bear to tell him that she hates it, that she wishes he would just pin her down on the bed and fuck her like a real man. Would Ollie fuck her like a real man? Unlikely. He’d probably do that stirring thing now too. Clem probably likes it. Does Henry Tilney fuck Catherine Morland like a real man? Now there’s a seminar discussion. Bryony thinks that he would. He wouldn’t be too dominant though; he would simply be assertive, although possibly a little brisk. And as for Darcy . . . To be properly fucked by a real man you’d need Darcy who, to be honest, would probably go down on you as well. First, of course. In his damp shirt. Oh . . .
Bryony stays behind after everyone else has gone. She stays behind most weeks to ask Ollie something or other, even if it’s just how Clem is. She hasn’t seen Clem much lately and is worried about her. Is she working too hard? But Ollie never says much. Ollie doesn’t even acknowledge her until all the other students have left the room. Even then, it can take a few seconds to get his attention. He is often busy rolling a cigarette, or checking his email – or whatever it is he does – on his phone. And then he’s always in such a hurry to get away.
‘Of course, next week I won’t be here, so . . .’ she begins.
Ollie puts his iPhone into the inside pocket of his soft brown leather briefcase. The screen of the phone is cracked, and has been since the beginning of term. Sometimes when Ollie gives them some activity to do he sits there looking at things on it with no expression on his face at all. Bryony has wondered why he doesn’t get his screen repaired. Surely he’d have had it insured? Or maybe he likes it like that.
‘Do the reading anyway, if you can,’ he says. ‘I think you’ll enjoy it.’
How can Ollie have any idea of what she enjoys or doesn’t enjoy now? She never says anything in class, and hasn’t taken up her supposedly compulsory tutorial. She and James haven’t socialised – well, not properly – with Clem and Ollie for quite a long time. Everyone’s just so busy. Bryony enjoys – just about – standing in a classroom like this with Ollie, with nothing between her and the door, knowing she can leave at any time. The idea of sitting in a room with him for fifteen minutes? No. What if she blushed? What if she broke his chair? What if she suddenly said something like ‘Can I see your penis?’ instead of what she actually meant to say? Not that she wants to see his penis (again); it is smallish, mushroom-coloured and rather crooked, but . . .
‘Will the class still be going ahead?’
‘What, without you and your insightful contributions?’
Bryony blushes. ‘No, of course I didn’t mean . . .’
‘Well, I’m not going to the funeral, so . . .’
‘Oh. OK. Well . . .’
He sighs and looks up from his briefcase. ‘I did offer. But Clem doesn’t need me to come. Turns out I’m good for buying flowers for Grandmother Beatrix’s Grand Arrival, but not required at the funeral itself.’ He smiles wanly. ‘I never said that, of course. I realise – as I’ve been reminded – that if I had normal reading weeks like everyone else this wouldn’t have been a problem. But then again, reading weeks are supposed to be for reading, not going to funerals.’ At the University of Canterbury, where Ollie works, and the University of Central London, where Clem works, it is usual to have reading weeks in the middle and at the end of the autumn and spring terms. But this term Ollie decided to cancel the one in Week 24 so that his students could discuss eighteenth-century philosophy in the light of Derrida. Bryony isn’t that sorry to be missing it. She has tried to read Derrida before. It’s very interesting, of course, and who doesn’t love Derrida? But it takes her around an hour to read a paragraph and by the time she gets to the end of it she’s forgotten what was at the beginning and sort of wants to go to bed. When Jane Austen says something clever, everyone – or almost everyone – can understand it, even after a few glasses of wine. Why can’t Derrida be more like Jane Austen?
More pertinently: why is Ollie confiding in Bryony? It frightens her. He frightens her, with his slightly cold eyes and the new flashes of silver electrifying his hair and his stubble. He and Clem are both greying stylishly of course. Despite now living in Canterbury, they both still go to their old hairdresser in Shoreditch who gives them jagged, asymmetrical cuts that somehow emphasise their wisdom, rather than their age. Bryony is sure that Clem still books all Ollie’s hair appointments. She probably pays for them too.
‘I’d