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Privately, Letty was not so generous. The subject of Professor Leblanc had become a sticking point between her and Victoire, who was hurt and astounded by Letty’s lack of sympathy, while Letty thought Victoire was being too sensitive about it all.
‘She’s brought this on herself,’ she complained to Robin. ‘She could make this so much easier if she’d just do the research – I mean, no one’s done a third-year project in Haitian Creole, there’s barely even a Grammatica. She could be the very first!’
There was no debating with Letty when she was in these moods – it was obvious she only wanted an audience to vent to – but Robin tried anyway. ‘Suppose it means more to her than you realize.’
‘But it doesn’t. I know it doesn’t! She’s not the slightest bit religious; I mean, she’s civilized—’
He whistled. ‘That’s a loaded word, Letty.’
‘You know what I mean,’ she huffed. ‘She’s not Haitian. She’s French. And I just don’t see why she has to be so difficult.’
Halfway into Michaelmas, Letty and Victoire were hardly talking to each other. They always came to class several minutes apart, and Robin wondered if it took skill to space out their departures so that they never crossed paths on the long walk down.
The girls were not the only ones suffering fractures. The atmosphere of those days was oppressive. Something had seemed to break between them all – no, break was perhaps too strong a word, for they still clung to each other with the force of people who had no one else. But their bond had twisted in a decidedly hurtful direction. They still spent nearly all their waking moments together, but they dreaded each other’s company. Everything was an unintended slight or deliberate offence – if Robin complained about Sanskrit, it was insensitive to the fact that Professor Harding kept insisting Sanskrit was one of Ramy’s languages when it wasn’t; if Ramy was pleased he and Professor Harding had finally agreed on a research direction, it was a callous remark to Victoire, who had got nowhere with Professor Leblanc. They used to find solace in their solidarity, but now they saw each other only as reminders of their own misery.
The worst, from Robin’s perspective, was that something had changed suddenly and mysteriously between Letty and Ramy. Their interactions were as heated as ever – Ramy never ceased to make fun, and Letty never ceased to flare up in response. But now Letty’s rejoinders had acquired an oddly victimized tone. She snapped at the smallest, often intangible slights. Ramy in return had got more cruel and more snide in a way that was hard to describe. Robin didn’t know what to do about this, nor did he have the faintest clue what it was all about, other than that it gave him strange pangs in his chest whenever he watched these exchanges happen.
‘She’s just being Letty,’ said Ramy when pressed about it. ‘She wants attention, and she thinks throwing a tantrum is the way to get it.’
‘Did you do something to upset her?’ Robin asked.
‘Other than generally exist? I don’t think so.’ Ramy seemed bored by the subject. ‘Suppose we get on with this translation? Everything’s all right, Birdie, I promise.’
But things were decidedly not all right. Things were in fact very weird. Ramy and Letty seemed unable to stand each other, and at the same time, they gravitated around each other; they could not speak normally without fiercely opposing each other in a way that made them the protagonists of the conversation. If Ramy wanted coffee, Letty wanted tea; if Ramy thought that a painting on the wall was pretty, then Letty suddenly had twelve reasons why it exemplified the worst of the Royal Academy’s adherence to artistic conventionalism.
Robin found it unbearable. One night, during a fitful burst of sleep, he had a sudden and violent fantasy of pushing Letty into the Cherwell. When he awoke he searched himself for any hint of guilt, but could find none; the thought of Letty drenched and sputtering brought just as much vicious satisfaction in the sober light of day.
There was at least the distraction of their third-year apprenticeships, for which they would each assist a faculty member in their silver-working duties throughout the term. ‘Theory comes from the Greek theoria, meaning a sight or spectacle, whose root also gives us the word theatre.’ So Professor Playfair expounded before he sent them off with their respective supervisors. ‘But it is not enough to merely watch the operations. You must get your hands dirty. You must understand how the metal sings.’
In practice this meant a lot of unpaid donkey work. To Robin’s disappointment, the apprentices spent very little time on the eighth floor, where all the exciting research happened. Instead, three times a week, he accompanied Professor Chakravarti on trips around Oxford, helping with silver-work installation and upkeep. He learned how to polish silver until it shone (oxidation and tarnishing greatly dampened the match-pair effect), how to choose between different sizes of engraving styluses to painstakingly restore an inscription to its original clarity, and how to deftly slide the bars in and out of their specially welded fixtures. It was too bad that Griffin had gone underground, he thought, for his apprenticeship gave him almost unrestricted access to the tower’s tools and raw materials. He wouldn’t have had to let thieves in at midnight. Amidst whole drawers of engraving equipment and absent-minded professors who wouldn’t have noticed a thing, he could have plucked whatever he liked from the tower at will.
‘How often do you have to do this?’ he asked.
‘Oh, it never ends,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘It’s how we make all our money, you see. The bars fetch a high price, but it’s the upkeep that’s the real grift. The workload is a bit harder on myself and Richard, though, since there are so few Sinologists.’
That afternoon they were doing a house call on an estate in Wolvercote, where a silver-work installation in the back garden had ceased to function despite a twelve-month warranty. They’d had some trouble getting through the front gate – the housekeeper seemed unconvinced they were Babel scholars, and rather suspicious that they were here to rob the place – but after supplying various proofs of identification, including the recitations of many Latin graces, they were at last invited in.
‘Happens about twice a month,’ Professor Chakravarti told Robin, though he looked quite put off. ‘You get used to it. They don’t give Richard half the trouble.’*
The housekeeper led them through the estate to a very lush, pretty garden with a burbling, serpentine stream and several large rocks arranged at random. It was designed in the Chinese style, they were informed, which had become very popular in that era after William Chambers’s Oriental landscaping designs were shown for the first time in Kew Gardens. Robin could not recall ever seeing anything like this in Canton, but he nodded along appreciatively until the housekeeper had gone.
‘Well, the problem here’s obvious.’ Professor Chakravarti pushed some shrubbery aside to reveal the fence corner where the silver-work was installed. ‘They’ve been pushing a cart back and forth over the bar. It’s rubbed the engraving half off. That’s their own fault – this won’t qualify under the warranty.’
He let Robin extract it from its fixture, then turned the bar around to show him the inscription. On one side: garden; on the other, the character ?, which could mean a landscape garden, but more generally evoked a place for private withdrawal, to retreat from the world, with connotations of ritual purification, cleansing, alms-giving, and Daoist acts of repentance.
‘The idea is to make their gardens nicer and quieter than the hubbub of Oxford allows. Keeps out the riffraff. The effect is quite subtle, if we’re being honest; we didn’t do all that much testing, but there’s really no limit to what the wealthy will throw money at.’ Professor Chakravarti whittled at the bar as he spoke. ‘Hm. We’ll see if that’ll do the trick.’
He let Robin reinstall the bar, then bent down to check his work. Satisfied, he stood and brushed his hands on his trousers. ‘Would you like to activate it?’
‘I just – what, say the words?’ Robin had seen the professors do the same many times, though he couldn’t imagine it was all that easy. Then again, he recalled, the wúxíng bar had worked for him on the first try.
‘Well, it’s a particular kind of mental state. You do speak the words, but more importantly, you hold two meanings in your head at once. You exist in both linguistic worlds simultaneously, and you imagine traversing them. Does that make sense?’
‘I – I think so, sir.’ Robin frowned at the bar. ‘That’s really all it takes?’
‘Oh, no, I’m being careless. There are some good mental heuristics you’ll learn during your fourth year, and some theory seminars you’ll have to sit through, but when it comes down to it, it’s about the feeling.’ Professor Chakravarti seemed rather bored; Robin got the impression he was still very irritated by this household and wanted to be away as quickly as possible. ‘Go on.’
‘Well – all right.’ Robin placed his hand on the bar. ‘Zhai. Garden.’
