AllFreeNovel
Share Us
There was, in fact, no other chair at the table, but Nicky was already pulling one over with a long arm, as if he’d anticipated Toby’s words. Hugo and Jem shifted up. The newcomer hesitated for a second, then walked over.
‘Thank you.’ His voice was deep, with a cultured English accent that took Jem by surprise. That was stupid: of course he would be Eton or Harrow or wherever. They all were.
Toby held out his hand. ‘I’m Toby Feynsham, and these are Nicky Rook, Hugo Morley-Adams, Jeremy Kite. History, English, history, maths.’
‘Aaron Oyede. Medicine.’
‘What a pity it’s not dentistry,’ Nicky said. ‘I was just considering punching someone in the mouth.’
‘I can help if you split your knuckles on his teeth,’ the newcomer said very seriously, and then he smiled. He smiled, Toby and Nicky crowed with laughter, Hugo asked what he would have to drink, and before long they were piling into Hall together at the sound of the dinner bell. Toby, Nicky, Hugo, Aaron, and Jem.
Jem had dreaded the idea of formal Hall, the gowns and grandeur, the tradition and pomp, the terrifyingly alien people. He had pictured himself sitting alone in silence, or perhaps, one glorious day, venturing intelligent remarks about mathematical theorems. He had never dreamed he’d enter his first Hall with interlinked arms as part of a raucous group several beers to the good.
The magnificent interior sobered him up as nothing else could have. Long oaken trestle tables under a majestic vaulted ceiling; dark wood panelling hung with dark oil portraits of unknown greats; flagstones underfoot and voices echoing around him; and then silence as the Master pronounced Latin grace in a sonorous voice. Jem listened with rapt attention, and then promptly forgot to be overawed by the servants and surroundings because he was too busy talking.
When they left Hall, Toby announced that they were going back to his room in Front Quad, steered them there, and uncorked several bottles of wine in a fashion so expert that Jem was seized with a strong desire to learn the skill. He wanted everything about Toby’s rooms for himself. It was a large set, the sitting room offering a table big enough for dinners, decorated with Indian rugs and gilt-framed pictures, photographs of school and of Toby with a striking young woman, several decanters, and morethingsthan Jem had ever seen. His mother had owned four china ornaments that took pride of place on the mantelpiece and were too precious ever to be played with. Toby had porcelain bowls, a brass elephant, some sort of hookah-pipe, a Russian samovar, and any number of decorative objects, just lying casually around.
‘The Old Curiosity Shop itself. What’s this?’ Aaron asked, picking up a knife in a gilt-encrusted scabbard off the table.
‘Watch out,’ Nicky said. ‘That thing is unreasonably sharp. Don’t test?—’
‘Ow!’
‘—it on your finger.’
‘It’s a stiletto, from Sicily,’ Toby said. ‘Our father travelled rather a lot before he married. I use it as a paperknife.’
‘That’s rather a dangerous way to open envelopes,’ Aaron said, sucking the puncture he’d given himself.
‘Yes, but if it turns out to be a bill, I’m ready for it.’
When they finally called it a night, Jem weaved his way back to his bare little room in Old Quad, buoyed by the evening’s events, at least until he was alone in his bed and the gleeful optimism began to fade.
He lay there, unable to sleep, room spinning and stomach heaving, increasingly convinced that he had made an abject fool of himself and that none of his new acquaintances would want to speak to him on the morrow. Why had he thought he could argue about socialist literature with an English student and a millionaire’s son? What must they have thought of him, shouting the odds in his glaringly wrong accent? Had he ruined everything with some stupid remark; had they all been laughing at him; would any of them even talk to him again?
He woke the next morning with a shocking head, to the sound of banging at the door.
He sat up and swung his feet out of bed. It was chilly. He reached for slippers—his bare foot was not a sight he liked anyone to see—and his warm new flannel dressing gown, limped across the uneven floor, and opened the door.
Toby was there, looking what Jem would soon learn to calldisgustingly healthyorloutishly energetic, as Nicky did. At the time, he thought only that he looked wonderful. Glowing.
‘Good morning, Jeremy! Gosh, this is rather a cell, have you not unpacked your things yet?’
Jem didn’t havethings. He hadn’t known he was meant to trick out his room with personal possessions, though that ignorance had just spared him soul-searching about how little he had to bring. ‘I, uh, didn’t come with much,’ he managed.
‘I’ll lend you some pictures. Brought far too many. Now, come on. We’re meeting my sister for breakfast, and we don’t want to be late. Get dressed while I chase Hugo up, and we’ll collect Nicky on the way out.’
‘Isn’t he next door to you?’ Jem asked rather dizzily.
‘My dear chap, Nicky Rook in the morning is a very different beast to Nicky at night, and a rather more dangerous one. You may trust me, after seven years at Win Coll. I poke him with a sharp stick from a distance and leave him to surface in his own sweet time. Come on, hop to it, meet you in the quad in fifteen minutes.’
Jem made it down with two minutes to spare, and then had a ten-minute wait, shivering in the crisp air of a sharp, clear October morning. Old Quad, his home for the year, was the oldest of the four areas that made up StAnselm’s, each of them a courtyard surrounded by buildings that housed staff and students. Front Quad was imposingly Elizabethan and held an impeccable never-to-be-walked-on lawn. Old Quad was low, paved, and gloriously medieval: he suspected it would be freezing in winter. Summoner Quad was three storeys of Georgian elegance looking out onto the formal gardens, while the newest part, Bascomb Quad, was off to one side, a Victorian building far less exciting than any of the others, though it overlooked a rather nice stand of trees.
He was sure that Old Quad was the best and most beautiful, but he was undeniably getting a little bored of the view by the time Toby returned with Hugo in tow. They swept him up and strolled through to Front Quad, where Nicky was resentfully hunched in a startlingly huge dark fur coat of the kind Jem imagined Oscar Wilde wearing.
‘If we must go, we must,’ he said sourly. ‘But you are all ridiculously energetic. Except Jeremy. You look much as I feel, Jeremy. I like you.’
‘Jem, please,’ Jem said. ‘Jeremy makes me feel as if I’m in trouble with my grandmother. Which actually…that coat…’
