‘Colin’s the sort of bottom-feeding middle-class leech who likes to pretend he’s got connections because his family knows a mathematics tutor in Cambridge,’ she would say after a visit to Magpie Lane. ‘If he wants to be a solicitor, he could just get an apprenticeship at the Inns of Court, but he’s here because he wants the prestige and connections, only he’s not half charming enough to acquire them. He’s got the personality of a wet towel: damp, and he clings.’
At this point she would do an impression of Colin’s wide-eyed, oversolicitous greetings while the rest of them roared with laughter.
Ramy, Victoire, and Letty – they became the colours of Robin’s life, the only regular contact he had with the world outside his coursework. They needed each other because they had no one else. The older students at Babel were aggressively insular; they were too busy, too intimidatingly brilliant and impressive. Two weeks into the term Letty boldly asked a graduate fellow named Gabriel if she might join the French reading group, but was swiftly rejected with the particular disdain only the French could muster. Robin tried to befriend a Japanese third-year student named Ilse Dejima,* who spoke with a faint Dutch accent. They crossed paths often on their ways in and out of Professor Chakravarti’s office, but the few times he tried to say hello to her she made a face as if he were mud on her boots.
They tried to befriend the second-year cohort, too, a group of five white boys who lived just across the way on Merton Street. But this went south immediately when one of them, Philip Wright, told Robin at a faculty dinner that the first-year cohort was largely international only because of departmental politics. ‘The board of undergraduate studies is always fighting over whether to prioritize European languages, or other... more exotic languages. Chakravarti and Lovell have been making a stink about diversifying the student body for years. They didn’t like that my cohort are all Classicists. I assume they were overcorrecting with you.’
Robin tried to be polite. ‘I’m not sure why that’s such a bad thing.’
‘Well, it’s not a bad thing per se, but it does mean spots taken away from equally qualified candidates who passed the entrance exams.’
‘I didn’t take any entrance exams,’ said Robin.
‘Precisely.’ Philip sniffed, and did not say another word to Robin for the entire evening.
So it was Ramy, Letty, and Victoire who became such constant interlocutors that Robin started seeing Oxford through their eyes. Ramy would adore that purple scarf hanging in the window of Ede & Ravenscroft; Letty would laugh herself silly at the puppy-eyed young man sitting outside Queen’s Lane Coffeehouse with a book of sonnets; Victoire would be so excited that a new batch of scones had just been put out at Vaults & Garden but because she would be stuck in her French tutorial until noon, Robin absolutely had to buy one, wrap it up in his pocket, and save it for her for when class was let out. Even his course readings became more exciting when he began seeing them as source material for cutting observations, complaining or humorous, to be shared later with the group.
They were not without their rifts. They argued endlessly, the way bright young people with well-fed egos and too many opinions do. Robin and Victoire had a long-running debate over the superiority of English versus French literature, wherein both were oddly, fiercely loyal to their adopted countries. Victoire insisted that England’s best theorists could not hold a candle to Voltaire or Diderot, and Robin would have given her the benefit of the doubt if only she didn’t keep scoffing at the translations he took out from the Bodleian on the grounds that ‘They’re nothing compared to the original, you might as well not read it at all.’ Victoire and Letty, though normally quite close, seemed to always get snippy on issues of money and whether Letty truly counted as poor as she claimed to be just because her father had cut her off.* And Letty and Ramy bickered most of all, largely over Ramy’s claim that Letty had never stepped foot in the colonies and therefore shouldn’t opine on the supposed benefits of the British presence in India.
‘I do know a thing or two about India,’ Letty would insist. ‘I’ve read all sorts of essays, I’ve read Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah—’
‘Oh, yes?’ Ramy would ask. ‘The one where India is a lovely Hindu nation, overrun by tyrannical Muslim invaders? That one?’
At which point Letty would always get defensive, sullen, and irritable until the next day. But this was not entirely her fault. Ramy seemed particularly determined to provoke her, to dismantle her every assertion. Proud, proper Letty with her stiff upper lip represented everything Ramy disdained about the English, and Robin suspected Ramy would not be satisfied until he’d got Letty to declare treason against her own country.
Still, their fights could not really pull them apart. Rather, these arguments only drew them closer together, sharpened their edges, and defined the ways they fitted differently into the puzzle of their cohort. They spent all their time together. On weekends, they sat at a corner table outside the Vaults & Garden café, interrogating Letty on the oddities of English, of which only she was a native speaker. (‘What does corned mean?’ Robin would demand. ‘What is corned beef? What are you all doing to your beef?’* ‘And what is a welcher?’* Victoire would ask, looking up from her latest penny serial. ‘Letitia, please, what in God’s name is a jigger-dubber?’*)
When Ramy complained that the food in hall was so bad that he was visibly dropping weight (this was true; the Univ kitchens, when they weren’t serving the same rotation of tough boiled meat, unsalted roast vegetables, and indistinguishable pottages, put out inexplicable and inedible dishes with names like ‘India Pickle’, ‘Turtle Dressed the West India Way’, and something called ‘China Chilo’, very little of which was halal), they stole into the kitchen and cobbled a dish out of chickpeas, potatoes, and an assortment of spices Ramy had scrounged together from Oxford’s markets. The result was a lumpy scarlet stew so spicy that they all felt like they’d been punched in the nose. Ramy refused to accept defeat; instead, he argued, this was further proof of his grand thesis that there was something fundamentally wrong with the British, since if they’d been able to get their hands on real turmeric and mustard seeds then the dish would have tasted much better.
‘There are Indian restaurants in London,’ Letty objected. ‘You can get curries with rice in Piccadilly—’
‘Only if you want bland mash,’ Ramy scoffed. ‘Finish your chickpeas.’
Letty, sniffling miserably, refused to take another bite. Robin and Victoire stoically kept shovelling spoonfuls into their mouths. Ramy told them they were all cowards – in Calcutta, he claimed, infants could eat ghost peppers without batting an eye. But even he had trouble finishing the fiery-red mass on his plate.
Robin didn’t realize what he had, what he’d been searching for and had finally obtained, until one night halfway through the term when they were all in Victoire’s rooms. Hers were improbably the largest of any of their quarters because none of the other boarders wanted to share with her, which meant not only did she have a bedroom all to herself but also the bathroom and the spacious sitting room where they’d taken to congregating to finish their coursework after the Bodleian closed at nine. That night they were playing cards, not studying, because Professor Craft was in London for a conference, which meant they had the evening off. But the cards were soon forgotten because an intense stench of ripe pears suddenly pervaded the room and none of them could figure out what it was, because they hadn’t been eating pears, and because Victoire swore she didn’t have any stashed away in her room.
Then Victoire was rolling on the ground, both laughing and shrieking because Letty kept screaming, ‘Where is the pear? Where is it, Victoire? Where is the pear?’ Ramy made a joke about the Spanish Inquisition, so Letty, playing along, ordered Victoire to turn out all her coat pockets to prove none of them concealed the core. Victoire obeyed but turned up nothing, which sent them into further shrieks of hysterics. And Robin sat at the table, watching them, smiling as he waited for the card game to resume until he realized that it wouldn’t because they were all laughing too much and, besides, Ramy’s cards were splayed across the floor face-up, so continuing was pointless. Then he blinked, because he’d just registered what this most mundane and extraordinary moment meant – that in the space of several weeks, they had become what he’d never found in Hampstead, what he thought he’d never have again after Canton: a circle of people he loved so fiercely his chest hurt when he thought about them.
A family.
He felt a crush of guilt then for loving them, and Oxford, as much as he did.
He adored it here; he really did. For all the daily slights he suffered, walking through campus delighted him. He simply could not maintain, as Griffin did, an attitude of constant suspicion or rebellion; he could not acquire Griffin’s hatred of this place.
Yet didn’t he have a right to be happy? He had never felt such warmth in his chest until now, had never looked forward to getting up in the morning as he did now. Babel, his friends, and Oxford – they had unlocked a part of him, a place of sunshine and belonging, that he never thought he’d feel again. The world felt less dark.
He was a child starved of affection, which he now had in abundance – and was it so wrong for him to cling to what he had?
He was not ready to commit fully to Hermes. But by God, he would have killed for any of his cohort.
Later, it would amaze Robin that it never seriously crossed his mind to tell any of them about the Hermes Society. After all, by the end of Michaelmas term, he had come to trust them with his life; he had no doubt that if he fell into the frozen Isis, any one of them would have dived in to save him. Yet Griffin and the Hermes Society belonged to bad dreams and shadows; his cohort was sun and warmth and laughter, and he could not imagine bringing those worlds together.
Only once was he ever tempted to say something. At lunch one day, Ramy and Letty were arguing – once again – over the British presence in India. Ramy regarded the occupation of Bengal as an ongoing travesty; Letty thought the British victory at Plassey was more than fair retaliation for what she considered the horrific treatment of hostages by Siraj-ud-daulah, and that the British need never have intervened if the Mughals had not been such terrible rulers.
‘And it’s not as if you have had it all so bad,’ said Letty. ‘There are plenty of Indians in the civil administration, as long as they’re qualified—’
‘Yes, where “qualified” means an elite class that speaks English and acts like toadies to the British,’ said Ramy. ‘We’re not being ruled, we’re being misruled. What’s happening to my country is nothing short of robbery. It’s not open trade; it’s financial bleeding, it’s looting, and sacking. We’ve never needed their help, and they’ve only constructed that narrative out of a misplaced sense of superiority.’