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“Nuh-uh, you’re wrong.”
By the second week, the remainder of Bron’s belongings had been delivered, and the boxes were unpacked. The clothes hung neatly in the vast cupboard space, and his books lined the shelves and empty windowsill. Three weeks in, and Greenwood hadstarted to leave a somewhat marked impression upon him: a tendency to opt for his wine- or emerald-colored velvet blouses in the evenings, for these, his most opulent pieces (designer finds purchased at a bargain), complimented the wood-paneled walls most perfectly, and the Edwardses always dressed well for dinner. Through the day, he leaned toward swishier layers: a long skirt, frilly blouses with a lettuce-edged neck, and a cardigan. Simple clothing in drab colors—dark blues, gray, black—that gave him a sense of movement as he wandered the house’s many rooms. Something a governess might wear in the twenty-first century. However, he was soon ready to make his excuses to get away, claiming the need to post a letter to a friend, though no one batted an eye at his departure. For his first outing, he chose an understated set of pieces, matched with a mustard shawl to keep his neck warm.
He ventured into town with great eagerness, allowing himself to haunt the cobbled streets and explore the courts and quadrangles of the University City. Here he was, wandering through a place he’d only seen depicted through media, architecture made true by a perfectly angled camera shot, or inked and printed into existence. He took a selfie on the King’s Parade outside the big college, geotagged it “King’s College, Cambridge,” and uploaded it to his social media, where few people followed him.
No beadle barred his entry as he tailgated another student through the door cut into the larger wooden door, but hewassurprised to find the big sandwich sign that stood outside it, detailing opening times and ticket prices. He was saddened, even disgruntled by this; he’d certainly never seen such signs depicted in the movies that were filmed here. Now the beadle was a faceless sign who made a profit off the tourists, who dotted the city with maps pressed to their faces, and who exchanged their tickets for entry into places they couldn’t otherwise access. When he thought of the extortionate tuition fees it cost to study, and the lengths he’d had to go through to stand even a chance of his application being accepted, he concluded that perhaps being astudent here was just a more embellished variety of a ticket. Adult (eighteen years or older) admission: nine pounds. Student tuition (excluding accommodation) home rate: nine thousand two hundred and fifty pounds a year. International … too much for his mind to wrap around.
But admittedly, the grand structures he’d envisioned had a hundred more spires than these did before him, and he struggled to find a high dome from which the old city could be encompassed. Afterward, he walked the length of the Huntingdon Road, eager to find that point where the crests of the rotundas would paint a hilly sprawl on the landscape, where the troughs were spiked by chapels of the oldest stone, and the pinnacle spire of the city would catch the rays of the sun as it dipped below the rim of the world at the end of a September day, whether in 1919 or now. But so far it hadn’t mapped out as magnificently as he’d hoped, and he wondered if Greenwood’s splendor played a part in his disappointment of the city, or if Oxbridge was only a reality of the imaginary. Truly a city of … what was the phrase?Aquatint.
When he reached Girton College, he was charmed by the immediate difference in the buildings’ color; the Victorian red brick somehow more welcoming than the vastness of the grounds of St. John’s, the creamy champagne of Peterhouse and Clare, or the gate that barred him from Gonville & Caius. He hadn’t seen much of Girton before; the period dramas were not so fond of this place (maybe it was something about the way red brick caught on camera?), but it was precisely how he had imagined it to be upon first reading about this very Girton mentioned in the pages of Virginia Woolf’sA Room of One’s Own.
Standing outside the building, Bron felt a sudden surge of pride for the past, pride for women and the fiction they were able to produce. Women who, like him, defied their expected gender roles, usurped the patriarchal system. These were the footsteps he imagined himself walking in too: to not feel like a man, to not be a woman, to exist as a symbol of society’s tensions.
Returning to the manor that afternoon, he walked straight into the library to find Ada draped across the carpeted floor with a large number of envelopes fanned out before her like a double rainbow. She brought each to her mouth and licked them shut while Mr. Edwards sat at his desk and cradled his phone between his head and shoulder.
“Who knew I liked the taste of envelope adhesive? Oh, there you are, Bron!”
Madame Clarence sat in the armchair, sewing, and paid particularly close attention to Bron, sizing him up. He pretended not to notice, but felt suddenly very conscious of his body movement.
“I need the most impressive balloons imaginable, ma’am,” blared Mr. Edwards on the phone. “Five hundred of them. I’m throwing a ball, you see.”
Bron crouched on the floor by Ada and helped her seal the thick manila envelopes, the house’s crest stamped on the back. “What’s going on?” he whispered between licks. “What ball?”
“Oh, we’re throwing a party for Darcy’s birthday. He’s usually on holiday and difficult to get hold of. Never with us! Age is a sensitive subject with him, you see, so he likes to think he can escape it, doesn’t he, Papa?” Ada threw her head back for confirmation, but Mr. Edwards was negotiating the parameters of inflating so many balloons. “Make it a thousand balloons, Papa—oh, and don’t forget to ask about the ice sculpture. Anyway, Darcy will be twenty-nine soon, and he’s coming back for it. We can’t not do anything. Twenty-nine is basically thirty, right? And thirty is a big birthday. I texted him to make sure he was really coming, and he actually responded to say that he was! Quite late that evening, he said. Not to wait up. But we must do something special, and Papa let me decide, and so … it is … a ball!”
Bron had yet to meet this son and brother so often spoken about, and wondered if he would be invited to this ball. He really hoped he wouldn’t be; what wouldhedo at a party? And the last few weeks of getting to know Ada and Mr. Edwards had prettymuch drained him of social interactions. Here was an opportunity to recharge, a night off.
“I hope you enjoy your ball, Ada. I’ll be sure to peek out the bedroom door.”
“You will not peek!” She stood up suddenly. “You are coming, aren’t you? I mean, you are invited, you know. Of course you’re invited. Anyone and everyone with a pulse is invited!”
A night off it wasn’t to be. And he was suddenly conscious that he wouldn’t have anything appropriate to wear. More than this, he wasn’t sure what he’d beexpectedto wear. He felt the temperature rise within him.
“I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
“You won’t be intruding. Darcy doesn’t have many friends here, just like me and you! Papa and I wrote out all these invitations—most are to strangers. See? Like this one to Mr. Fortescue from Searle Street; he fixed our washing machine once. Or that horrible old man who sells those awful ceramic dishes from India—what’s his name?”
“Hindes, dear. Christopher Hindes,” said Mr. Edwards, having hung up the phone. “Not horrible, mind you, but a bit of a scammer. Duped me into buying bricks of Marlborough Gold years ago for almost double the price.”
“See, they’re all rotten—they’ll just grab my cheeks and tell me to run along like a good little girl. But it’s a night to have fun, an occasion to dress up, and Daddy, well …” She turned to her father. “He likes the food and drink. Daddy, please tell Bron to come. Please?”
Mr. Edwards was scribbling away at a piece of paper, his face so close to the table that Bron thought he could have been analyzing the properties of a speck of dust and writing down his findings.
“Bron, please attend my son’s birthday party,” he said.
“Say yes or I’ll have you fired!” Ada said, leaping into his arms so suddenly he almost didn’t catch her. They tumbled onto the floor.
“Alright, alright,” he said, laughing and thinking how he’d gone from feeling so alone in the world to being so welcomed, almost manipulated into attending a stranger’s birthday party. “Okay. You win. I’ll come.”
“Yes!” she screamed, pumping the air with her fist, a sign of victory.
On the morning of the party, the house was infiltrated by every service imaginable. The catering company were in the beginnings of building a sushi stand in the middle of the foyer, while the young man interning at the Botanic Garden had arrived to prune the shrubs, only to declare them cultivated enough, and so helped the gatekeeper erect a gazebo and marquees in the garden to extend the courtyard into the paths approaching the orchard. Men leaned from ladders, fitting a net to the ceiling to fill it with a multitude of inflated balloons. Bron found Ada perched on a stool in the kitchen, legs swinging as her face turned blue, blowing up yet more balloons. He helped her bring them to the foyer, where they passed them along to the men who held the net aloft. They made quite the assembly line, continuing until the net was filled with colorful blues and reds and yellows that shone when the spotlight switched on.
At midday, Bron was asked to pick up a few bits for the party that Ada declared had been overlooked: party poppers for the grand entrance, birthday candles, and the numerals two and nine to be added to the top of the cake. Once he’d obtained these, Bron spent the remaining hours navigating the city, the great flâneur (or flâneuse) that he was, lingering in the crannies of forgotten places where the limestone was a pallid pink, looking up at unlit gas lamps, black pillars that rose into the sky. He strolled past the café windows and the swivel racks of photographs, the Cambridge University jumpers, the fudge and the tea. Down the Senate House Passage, where a hundred years ago men rioted and threw eggs over the vote on women’s’ right to take degrees, and over the bridge whereBron found signage—again!—barring his entry into Trinity College. Students, students everywhere! FourPM, and some already in gowns, ready for the college meal; others probably rushing toward one of their many societies; and the rowers in their rowing kits, pumped for another workout on the water. Bodies rushing toward the river, toward their colleges, the splendor and newness of the place forever wearing itself on their faces.
A group of them, having just emerged from the college, stood in a circle outside. The girls listened to one charismatic boy, and he too was captivated by his voice. It wasn’t what he said, but the way he said it: with an intoxicating smile, glinting teeth, and a sweep of the hand through his buttery-blond hair. Words that rolled off the tongue, the poshest of accents, pressed and perfectly ironed out, like the branded fleece sweater he wore over his shirt, compelling his audience in the way he spoke of his gap year in Africa, which he’d spent riding elephants. The girls’ responses varied: some of them were charmed, bodies angling toward him, though one girl’s cigarette bounced in her mouth as she alerted him to the fact that elephants weren’t actually good at bearing loads, that carrying humans every day leads to spinal injuries, and that it was a very poor way to spend his time. This caused him to change the route of the conversation, to asking what they all thought of their classes.
Edging toward the college entrance, Bron overheard two of the girls whispering and then laughing: “Doesn’t he juststinkof money?”
