Chapter 9: Before

BEFORE

“Hannah Jones, I presume.” The professor sitting in front of her swung round in his rotating chair and held out a hand. He was younger than Hannah had expected, with dark hair swept casually across his brow in a style that reminded her of someone, though she couldn’t quite place who—Byron, perhaps, or a young Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Definitely a minor romantic poet. The white silk scarf tucked into his tweed jacket only added to the look. “Dr. Horatio Myers. I will be taking you for Victorian Literature this term, and then we will be covering some of the early twentieth-century material in Hilary and Trinity terms. Did you receive the reading list I sent through?”

“I did,” Hannah said. It had been intimidating, to say the least—with a strong intimation that if she didn’t at least start on the reading over the summer break, she was unlikely to keep up during term time. “Thanks,” she added belatedly. “I’m sorry I’m late, I went to the wrong place.”

“Ah.” Dr. Myers shuffled some papers in front of him and smiled at her. “Stairwell seven, yes? Those are my rooms. And very nice rooms they are too, but rather small, so the college was kind enough to give me a separate office for tutorials. It’s a little bit tucked away, I know.”

“Just a bit,” Hannah said with a laugh. She was still finding her way in the labyrinthine passages and back offices of Pelham. “I actually had to ask a porter for directions.”

“I hope he was helpful,” Dr. Myers said dryly. “The porters can be a little bit jobsworth about that sort of thing.”

“Oh, no, he was very helpful,” Hannah said. “He brought me right here. To the door in fact. I’m not sure I would have found it otherwise.”

“Good, good,” Dr. Myers said, though Hannah had the impression that he had moved on to other things. “Well, as you know, we’ll be meeting weekly for these tutorial sessions alongside your lectures, and they will be a chance for us to really drill down into your understanding of the subject. You will normally have a tutorial partner, but I like to begin with a one-to-one, to really allow us to get to know each other. Who are you, Hannah Jones? What do you want from Oxford? Tell me about the real you.”

He leaned forward towards her, steepling his fingers, looking at her seriously over the tops of his horn-rimmed glasses.

Hannah was taken aback.

Who was she? What did that mean? She already felt increasingly that she was a different person here from the one she had been at home. Different from the girl who sang unselfconsciously along with ABBA on the car journey up here with her mother. Different from the geeky student she had been at school in Dodsworth. Different even from the person who had walked through that stone archway on the very first day.

Only deep inside herself was she the same—in the private, inner Hannah that she didn’t show to anyone—the Hannah who rolled her eyes at April’s excesses and secretly enjoyed films like Clueless and Legally Blonde. The Hannah who thought D. H. Lawrence was unreadable and pretentious. The Hannah who bit off her split ends and ate peanut butter out of the jar and did all of the myriad other strange and unadmirable things that people did in the privacy of their own company.

“I—I’m not sure what you want to know,” she said slowly, and then, as Dr. Myers only looked at her over his glasses, “I… I’m an only child. My parents are divorced. But amicably. I don’t see my dad much at the moment, he lives in Norfolk with his new wife. My mum teaches A-level physics. I come from a town on the south coast called Dodsworth—you won’t know it, it’s a—” She gave a deprecating laugh, trying to find the right adjective for Dodsworth. “It’s not a hellhole or anything, it’s just really boring. It’s got nothing going for it, really, no culture; even the library closed down last year.” She stopped, trying to think of what else to say. What could she possibly tell him that he would be interested in—about her bog-standard comprehensive school with its used textbooks and peeling paint and total lack of any kind of character or history or record of academic excellence? Nothing about Dodsworth or her education there was likely to impress a man who had sat opposite students from the best private schools in the country.

She felt again the crushing sense of imposter syndrome she had experienced when she first walked through the gate at Pelham for her interview—trying not to think of the thousands of other students who were applying for the same place as hers, eighteen-year-olds just like her, but ones who came from storied institutions and famous families, and who walked confidently into Pelham with the air of already belonging here—while she was still trying to convince herself of that fact even as she knocked on the door of the interview room.

But hard on the heels of that came a flicker of something—not anger, exactly, but something close. So what if she went to a state school. So what if Dodsworth had no culture and no history. Didn’t that make her leap to Oxford more impressive? She had been accepted here after all, when many of those confident, shiny-haired students who had strode past her on the first day had not.

She sat up straighter.

“I was the only person in my year at school to apply for Oxford. I’m the first person in my family to come here too. In fact, my dad doesn’t even have a degree—he’s a builder who left education when he was sixteen. I didn’t volunteer to feed underprivileged kids in my gap year or spend my summer digging wells—I spent my summer working in a supermarket. As you may have guessed, I don’t always feel like I fit in here. But I’m determined to prove I belong.”

Dr. Myers said nothing for a long moment. But then he sat back in his chair and began clapping, slowly but steadily.

“Bravo, Hannah Jones,” he said at last. “Bravo. I think we’re going to get along very well, you and I. Very well indeed.”

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AT THE END OF THEhour-long tutorial Hannah felt a strange mixture of drained and elated. Dr. Myers had taken her painstakingly back through her A-level syllabus and then gotten her to itemize the further reading she’d done in her own time, drawing out her opinions on everyone from Jane Austen to Benjamin Zephaniah.

As the tutorial drew to a close, she had the sensation of having undergone a pummeling mental workout as tiring as anything in the school gym.

“Until next week, then,” Dr. Myers said with a smile. “And when you come back, I’d like you to give me a thousand words on the role of social anxiety in any of these novels. There’s a list of books and essays you may find helpful on the reverse.” He handed her a piece of paper, and Hannah glanced down at it, and then turned it over to read the other side. She had read all the novels cited, but none of the critical theory essays listed on the back of the page. She had no idea how she was supposed to find the time to do all of the further reading between now and next week, but she could worry about that later.

“Well, goodbye, Hannah Jones,” Dr. Myers said. “Fare thee well, and we shall meet in a sennite.”

Hannah nodded and turned for the door. When she let herself out into the corridor, the porter who had helped her find Dr. Myers’s room was still there, leaning against a wall. It was the man she had met on her first day—not the grandfatherly one, the other, the one who had given her the keys.

“Got the right room this time?”

Hannah nodded, suppressing her puzzlement. Had he been outside for the whole tutorial?

“Yes, thanks. I don’t think I would have found it without your help.”

“All in a day’s work.” His voice was just as off-kilter as it had been before, high and reedy in comparison to his stocky, six-foot frame. It sounded as though it belonged to a much smaller, frailer man. “Where are you off to now, then?”

“Um…” Hannah hadn’t really thought about it. “I don’t know. The library I guess.” She glanced at the list of books Dr. Myers had handed her.

The porter nodded.

“This way, then.”

“Oh!” Hannah flushed, realizing that he intended to take her. “No, I mean, I know where it is. Honestly. You don’t need to walk me.”

“Can’t have the students getting lost on my watch,” the porter said, and Hannah found herself flushing again, her cheeks hot. She felt annoyed—angry at her own stupid embarrassment, but also at this porter for being so weird and patronizing, and for not taking the hint that she didn’t need his help. Was he really going to accompany her all the way to the library? Why?

“I don’t need you to walk me,” she said again, but the words sounded feeble and hollow, particularly as she had no choice but to follow him down the stairs from Dr. Myers’s room, there being no other exit.

In the end it seemed easier just to let him tag along however strange she felt, being escorted across the quad and through the cloisters by a fifty-something man in a porter’s uniform. When they got to the door of the library she said goodbye with some relief, silently vowing to leave by a different exit. Thank goodness there were several.

“Thank you. Honestly, you didn’t have to.”

“My pleasure,” the porter said. He put out a hand. “John Neville. You need anything at all, you just ask for me.”

“Okay,” Hannah said. She took his hand in spite of a twinge of reluctance. It was cold and soft and a little damp, like touching raw bread dough. “Thanks.”

He held her grip just a little too long. When at last he let go, she tried to walk with dignity into the library, rather than fleeing unceremoniously. But when she got up to the first floor she could not stop herself going to a window overlooking the cloisters to check if he was still there.

To her relief he was not—he was walking away, across the lawns, back to the Porters’ Lodge, and Hannah returned to the vaulted reading room with a sigh of relief.

For the next few hours, she was kept busy, tracking down books and navigating the library’s unfamiliar shelving system. But something about the encounter had shaken her, and as she sat down at the polished oak desk, the books piled up around her, it came back to her—the sensation of his cold, soft fingers on hers, and the sound of his reedy voice in her ears.

She was being silly. He was probably just a lonely middle-aged man with no talent for taking a graceful brush-off. But one thing was for sure: she had absolutely no intention of asking John Neville for help, ever again.