I charted it all down in my head. The next day, I’d explore the meadow across the river. It would be good to know how long it would take to cross it if one were running flat out (being pursued by wild dogs or similar). I was still setting up a hypothesis in my head when I rounded the corner to my flat and found Watson at my front door, a paper bag in hand.
“He thinks it was Anwen’s foot,” he said.
I snorted. “Good morning to you too.”
Yawning, he held out the bag between us. Inside was an untouched blueberry scone and the crumbs of a second. “Rupert kept me up until dawn. ‘What was Anwen thinking,’ and ‘Anwen said this last year to me in the pub but maybe I misheard her what do you think did she really say “I want to kiss your neck” or maybe my neck had mist on it?’ and ‘God, Jamie, Anwen’s foot felt just like heaven—’”
“He did not,” I said, laughing, and he took my arm as we set off back toward school.
“He came pretty close. Is that what you wanted? For him to need to spill, and for me to be there?”
I nodded. “He couldn’t tell Theo. You’re new, so you have no alliances, and you have a girlfriend, so there’s less chance you want Anwen for yourself. You’re perfect.”
We passed the St. Genesius library, its weathered brick (excellent for climbing) and high stained-glass windows (somewhat less ideal). “Theo made it sound like we’re going to live in there, with all the work we’ll be doing,” Watson said, craning his neck.
“You’re only taking the one course,” I told him. “I’m taking four.”
“Four? I thought you were taking seven.”
“I took on a case,” I said. “That’s three courses in itself. And also the administrators were a bit concerned about when I would sleep. I told them it wouldn’t be an issue, that I had my methods, and then Leander gave me that look as though he was going to send me back to rehab without even tossing my room first, and it seemed far simpler to just keep the chemistry courses, and my poetry tutorial, and be rid of all the rest.”
“Poetry,” Watson said, casting a look at me. “Poetry.”
“There is something wrong with you, if that’s the most concerning part of what I said.”
“You’re not using again,” he said, a statement.
“I’m not.”
We were passing the theater then. Cream brick, several stories, built in the fifteenth century. Watson could tell you more about its eaves and towers, I’m sure. I was counting its windows and wondering how much trouble I’d be in if I had to break one.
“Then my biggest concern,” he was saying, “are the nightmares I’m going to have about all the morgue poems you’re going to write. The murder poems. The I made this poison for you, poor swain poems—”
“I have layers,” I reminded him. “What if all my poems were about my grandmother?”
“You have a grandmother?”
“I didn’t spring whole from the head of Zeus.”
“Scary. Pass.”
“Kittens, then,” I said. We had made it to the steps of my lecture hall. “I could write about kittens. Tulips. My future wedding—”
“Completely terrifying.”
I squeezed his elbow. I adored him. “My lecture is about to start. Can you please sum up, without rhetorical or dramatic flourishes, what you learned from Rupert?”
Out of respect for my methods, he laid it out in a numbered list.
Rupert was attracted to Anwen and had been since he’d taken her suitcases up three stories to her room early last summer.
He had believed, based on fairly conclusive evidence, that she might feel the same way. (Staying up all night talking about television they’d loved as a child; her repeatedly touching his shoulder, his hair, etc.)
Rupert had then introduced Anwen to Theo, and immediately her attentions, and perhaps her affection, shifted targets. Theo did not reciprocate: he was interested in Matilda Wilkes. This didn’t seem to matter to Anwen.
Rupert did not resent Anwen or Theo for this turn of events. Instead, he made himself indispensable to them.
“It doesn’t feel like he’s just been creepily hanging out, waiting for Anwen to love him,” Watson said, “or, like, waiting to push Theo off a cliff, but it also doesn’t not feel like he’s doing those things?” He glanced down at his shoes.
“For the record, I’ve never thought you were creepily hanging out, waiting for me to love you,” I said, as it felt necessary.
Watson did not look back up at me. “Well, I think Rupert’s sort of sad,” he said, “as in pathetic-sad.”
“I have two minutes,” I said, as I literally did not have time for Watson’s unfounded bit of self-flagellation.
He ran a hand through his hair, shifted his bag, glanced up at me.
“No one knows anything about where Anwen’s from,” he said. “Her parents. Her family. Where exactly in Wales, and Rupert thinks that if she didn’t have the accent he wouldn’t even know that much. She avoids the subject totally. But—
“Even though Theo denies it, Rupert thinks he knows her whole story.”
The students were streaming around us now, up and down the long steps to the lecture hall.
“You have biochemistry,” Watson said. He could be quite obvious.
“Yes. And then I’m meeting Anwen at noon at the theater. To run lines.”
“I’ll catch up with you after?” He took a step toward me, then hesitated. “Do we—do I—”
“Oh,” I said, realizing, and threw my arms around his neck. My schoolbag thudded satisfyingly against his jacket; I had forgotten what it was like to touch someone like this—or had I? When had I done it last? “Good-bye, poor swain.”
“I hate you,” he said, his nose in my hair. “Have a good lecture.”
Seven
ONE FEATURE OF MY VERY PARTICULAR UPBRINGING IS that I am able to absorb large amounts of information while my brain loiters somewhere else altogether.
An illustration: my father, at the dinner table, liked to engage my mother in lengthy conversations about horse racing or sea anemones or a vaccine she was developing at her lab, and just as my eyes would unfocus (it didn’t concern me, after all), he would turn and have me recite their words back verbatim. By age seven I was able to do this easily; by age eight, I could do it while thinking about something else.
All of this is to say that I could recite the entirety of my first Oxford biochemistry lecture (thank God, as I had a tutor quizzing me on it the day after next), and still I hadn’t heard a word. I had spent the hour in the small mirrored room in my head, where I examined myself and my motives, as another feature of my upbringing was that, since I was not allowed to have feelings as a child, I continued to have difficulty having feelings as an eighteen-year-old girl.
For instance: Why on earth did Watson touching me make me feel so disordered? I had applied rules to our courtship. Rules were, by definition, orderly. And still I felt too hot, that my skin was too tight. In the past when I’d felt this way I’d played something feverish on my violin and exorcized it from my body.