The significance of this never crossed Robin’s mind until one night he stumbled upon Bill Jameson in the common room, scratching numbers onto a sheet of scrap paper with a wretched look on his face.
‘This month’s battels,’ he explained to Robin. ‘I’ve overspent what they sent me from home – I keep coming up short.’
The numbers on the paper astonished Robin; he had never imagined Oxford tuition could be so expensive.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.
‘I’ve got a few things I can pawn to make up the difference until next month. Or I’ll pass on a few meals until then.’ Jameson glanced up. He looked desperately uncomfortable. ‘I say, and I do hate to ask, but do you think—’
‘Of course,’ Robin said hastily. ‘How much do you need?’
‘I wouldn’t, but the costs this term – they’re charging us to dissect corpses for Anatomy, I really—’
‘Don’t mention it.’ Robin reached into his pocket, pulled out his purse, and began counting out coins. He felt awfully pretentious as he did this – he’d just retrieved his stipend from the bursar that morning, and he hoped Jameson did not think he always walked around with such a stuffed purse. ‘Would that cover meals, at least?’
‘You’re an angel, Swift. I’ll pay you back first thing next month.’ Jameson sighed and shook his head. ‘Babel. They take care of you, don’t they?’
They did. Not only was Babel very rich, it was also respected. Theirs was by far the most prestigious faculty at Oxford. It was Babel that new undergraduates bragged about when showing their visiting relatives around campus. It was a Babel student who invariably won Oxford’s yearly Chancellor’s Prize, given to the best composition of Latin verse, as well as the Kennicott Hebrew Scholarship. It was Babel undergraduates who were invited to special receptions* with the politicians, aristocrats, and the unimaginably wealthy who made up the lobby clientele. Once it was rumoured that Princess Victoria herself would be in attendance at the faculty’s annual garden party; this turned out to be false, but she did give them a new marble fountain which was installed on the green a week later, and which Professor Playfair enchanted to shoot high, glistening arcs of water at all hours of the day.
By the middle of Hilary term, like every Babel cohort before them, Robin, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty had absorbed the insufferable superiority of scholars who knew they had the run of campus. They took much amusement in how visiting scholars, who either condescended to or ignored them in hall, started fawning and shaking their hands when they revealed they studied translation. They dropped mention of how they had access to the Senior Common Room, which was both very nice and inaccessible to other undergraduates, though in truth they rarely spent much time there, as it was difficult to have a plain conversation when an ancient, wrinkled don sat snoring in the corner.
Victoire and Letty, who now understood that the presence of women at Oxford was more of an open secret than an outright taboo, began slowly growing out their hair. One day Letty even appeared in hall for dinner wearing a skirt instead of trousers. The Univ boys whispered and pointed, but the staff said nothing, and she was served her three courses and wine without incident.
But there were also significant ways in which they did not belong. No one would serve Ramy at any of their favourite pubs if he was the first to arrive. Letty and Victoire could not take books out of the library without a male student present to vouch for them. Victoire was assumed by shopkeepers to be Letty or Robin’s maid. Porters regularly asked all four of them if they could please not step on the green for it was off limits, while the other boys trampled over the so-called delicate grass all around them.
What’s more, it took them all several months to learn to speak like Oxfordians. Oxford English was different from London English, and was developed largely by the undergraduate tendency to corrupt and abbreviate just about everything. Magdalene was pronounced maudlin; by the same token, St Aldate’s had become St Old’s. The Magna Vacatio became the Long Vacation became the Long. New College became New; St Edmund’s became Teddy. It took months before Robin was used to uttering ‘Univ’ when he meant ‘University College’. A spread was a party with a sizable number of guests; a pidge was short for pigeonhole, which in turn meant one of the wooden cubbies where their post was sorted.
Fluency also entailed a whole host of social rules and unspoken conventions that Robin feared he might never fully grasp. None of them could quite understand the particular etiquette of calling cards, for instance, or how it was that one wormed oneself into the social ecosystem of the college in the first place, or how the many distinct but overlapping tiers of said ecosystem worked.* They were always hearing rumours of wild parties, nights at the pub spinning out of control, secret society meetings, and teas where so-and-so had been devastatingly rude to his tutor or where so-and-so had insulted someone else’s sister, but they never witnessed these events in person.
‘How is it we don’t get invited to wine parties?’ Ramy asked. ‘We’re delightful.’
‘You don’t drink wine,’ Victoire pointed out.
‘Well, I’d like to appreciate the ambience—’
‘It’s because you don’t throw any wine parties yourself,’ said Letty. ‘It’s a give-and-take economy. Have either of you ever delivered a calling card?’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a calling card,’ said Robin. ‘Is there an art to it?’
‘Oh, they’re easy enough,’ said Ramy. ‘To Pendennis, Esq., Infernal beast, I will give you lashings of booze tonight. Confound you, your enemy, Mirza. No?’
‘Very civil.’ Letty snorted. ‘Small wonder you aren’t college royalty.’
They were decidedly not college royalty. Not even the white Babblers in the years above them were college royalty, for Babel kept them all too busy with coursework to enjoy a social life. That label could only describe a second year at Univ named Elton Pendennis and his friends. They were all gentlemen-commoners, which meant they’d paid higher fees to the university to avoid entrance examinations and to enjoy the privileges of fellows of the college. They sat at high table in hall, they lodged in apartments far nicer than the Magpie Lane dormitories, and they played snooker in the Senior Common Room whenever they liked. They enjoyed hunting, tennis, and billiards at the weekends and headed to London by coach every month for dinner parties and balls. They never did their shopping on High Street; all the newest fashions and cigars and accessories were brought straight from London to their quarters by salesmen who did not even bother quoting prices.
Letty, who’d grown up around boys like Pendennis, made him and his friends the target of a running stream of vituperation. ‘Rich boys studying on their father’s money. I bet they’ve never cracked open a textbook in their lives. I don’t know why Elton thinks he’s so handsome. Those lips are girlish; he shouldn’t pout so. Those double-breasted purple jackets look ridiculous. And I don’t know why he keeps telling everyone that he has an understanding with Clara Lilly. I know Clara and she’s as good as engaged to the Woolcotts’ oldest boy...’
Still, Robin could not help but envy those boys – those born into this world, who uttered its codes as native speakers. When he saw Elton Pendennis and his crowd strolling and laughing across the green, he couldn’t help but imagine, just for a moment, what it might be like to be a part of that circle. He wanted Pendennis’s life, not so much for its material pleasures – the wine, the cigars, the clothes, the dinners – but for what it represented: the assurance that one would always be welcome in England. If he could only attain Pendennis’s fluency, or at least an imitation of it, then he, too, would blend into the tapestry of this idyllic campus life. And he would no longer be the foreigner, second-guessing his pronunciation at every turn, but a native whose belonging could not possibly be questioned or revoked.
It was a great shock when one night Robin found a card made of embossed stationery waiting in his pidge. It read:
Robin Swift—
Would appreciate the pleasure of your company for drinks next Friday – seven o’clock if you like to be there at the start or any reasonable time thereafter we are not fussy.
It was signed, in a very impressive calligraphy that took Robin a moment to decipher, Elton Pendennis.
‘I think you’re making a rather big deal of this,’ said Ramy when Robin showed them the card. ‘Don’t tell me you’ll actually go.’