Acquired Tastes (8 page)

It was a theme she could normally warm to, but now, as she sat with her fountain poised above her note pad, Alicia could get no further than the first sentence, and that wasn't even hers, it was written by Henry James. The motion of the intercity train on which she was travelling did not help. Nor did the thought as she checked her watch yet again, that she had barely three minutes to change platforms at Birmingham New Street if she was going to catch her connection to Heartlands. Missing it would mean a nearly two hour wait and, even if she made the connection, it would be a slow journey. Heartlands was on an unprofitable country line which, for most of the day, was grudgingly served by elderly, two-carriage trains, long past their retirement date, which chugged slowly round a circuitous route, stopping at every small town. If she had travelled back the following day as she had planned, her journey would have been swifter and altogether less stressful as she would have been able to catch one of the four non-stop fast trains that operated on week days as an allowance to the few commuters who lived in Heartlands.

The long train journey was one of the reasons Alicia's trips to London were becoming less frequent. Alicia liked visiting London, but she found the traffic and the crowds increasingly disorientating. Quite a few of the other academics at Heartlands kept flats in London, but Alicia did not feel she could justify this expenditure. Anyway, she liked staying at the graduate and professional women's club to which she belonged. Its shabby yet genteel premises were situated in a quiet street in Bloomsbury, and it offered single rooms with basin and shared bathroom, and several comfortable, chintzy club rooms where she could almost disappear into the enormous armchairs and read undisturbed, or pass a comfortable hour or two in conversation with the other women who made the club their base. Like Alicia, most of them were academics.

Unfortunately, the low cost of membership had meant that the club was becoming rather more shabby than genteel, and efforts to cut down on the staff rather than raise the membership fees, had resulted in a down-and-out living in the basement for nearly six weeks before he was discovered. As a result of this unfortunate incident, the members had been offered a choice: either a quadrupling of fees or allowing the management to let rooms at hotel rates to foreign tourists. The vote had been for foreign tourists, as long as they were female. The idea of men staying in their exclusively feminine preserve was anathema; in fact nobody would probably have minded too much if the unwelcome occupant of the basement had been a woman, but the idea of a man living in the building had been enough to cause at least two of the more elderly members to resign.

Alicia had continued to stay at the club despite the admittance of tourists, who were mainly foreign students anxious to soak up the atmosphere of Bloomsbury. But the atmosphere had indubitably changed. The polite murmur of voices had been replaced by much louder and brasher accents, and she was not sure how much longer she would keep up her membership.

But the club did have one very great advantage; it was within walking distance of the British Museum. If there was only one reason to live in London, for Alicia it would have been to be able to use the Reading Room in the British Museum every day.

Every time she went there, she felt the serried ranks of the ghosts of great academics and writers who had once worked there, looking over her shoulder, urging her on to academic excellence like celestial cheerleaders. Alicia knew it was just a silly fancy on her part, but somehow she felt that any article or paper that she wrote there had the blessing of the Reading Room ghosts bestowed upon it. So it had been in those hallowed surrounds that she promised herself she would begin, if not complete, her paper on the significance of food in the nineteenth-century novel.

It was a pleasure she had been reserving for the beginning of the summer vacation in four weeks' time. She had intended to combine it with some of the few other treats that London offered, like taking tea at Fortnum and Mason's, spending a leisurely afternoon in the Victoria and Albert Museum and revelling in the enchantments of Liberty's fabric department. She also hoped to see Vanessa. Their friendship now seemed to consist mainly of her leaving messages on Vanessa's answer machine. Her repeated invitations to Vanessa to come to Heartlands invariably invoked the reply that Vanessa was 'snowed under', so the only way she could get to see her was to come to London.

She had telephoned a week ago and left a message announcing her intention to visit London in a month's time in the hope that such long notice of her intended visit would mean that she would get into one of the 'windows' in Vanessa's permanently busy diary. Much to her surprise, Vanessa returned the call the next day and suggested lunch the following week and Alicia had agreed. There was something in the tone of Vanessa’s voice when she replied that everything was wonderful that suggested otherwise, added to that, Vanessa never usually returned her calls so promptly. It was only intuition, but Alicia had the feeling that something was wrong, so even though it was a very difficult time of the year to rearrange her timetable, she had managed to take a couple of days off in order to go to London. Even after all this time they were still best friends and what were best friends for if not to support each other in times of trouble?

Other people found it difficult to understand their friendship but not Alicia. Vanessa could have chosen anyone she wanted as a friend at St Aloysius, but instead of one of the other popular pretty girls, she had picked Alicia, and Alicia would always be grateful to her for that.

Alicia could still remember the utter misery she felt on arriving at St Aloysius that first day. She had wanted to cling to her father and beg him to take her home, but her father did not like displays of emotion. According to him they were a sign of character weakness.

Her father, Bill, had an uncertain temper at the best of times and Alicia, and her mother Eileen, had long since learned to avoid provoking it, but the days leading up to Alicia's departure for boarding school had been very tense as, at the same time, the regiment was preparing to leave for a tour of duty in Singapore. Foreign postings were unsettling for his men and their families, and her father made it clear that he had no intention of dealing with indiscipline at home as well as on the base, so, at least when he was around, Alicia and her mother had fought to keep their feelings under control.

But every so often, Alicia would enter a room and find her mother looking lost among the chaos of packing cases, her shoulders shaking and tears streaming silently down her face. Alicia tried to comfort her, telling her that she really wanted to go to boarding school and that she would write every day, but there was something about her mother's mute sorrow that seemed beyond comfort.

Alicia's father had found them clinging to each other on one such occasion, and ordered them not to make an exhibition of themselves. When Alicia's mother had continued to weep, he lost his temper. If it hadn't been for that damned priest with whom her mother spent so much time, he raged, Alicia would not be going away to a convent.

Alicia was shocked by his words, even though she knew her mother's devout Catholicism was a constant source of irritation to her father. His religion was the army which allowed no time for something he considered to be women's superstitious nonsense. But the angrier he grew, the more Eileen turned to her religion for comfort. It was the only thing that gave her the strength to survive the rigours of married life she told Alicia, and survive them she must, for marriage was the cross women had to bear.

Her parents had not always been unhappy. Alicia could remember a time when her mother sang around the house and her father had been as quick to laugh as he had been to lose his temper. Then, just before Alicia's fifth birthday, her mother went into hospital for a while. When she came home, she moved into a separate bedroom and never moved back. Her mother and father had become strangers in the same house after that. Alicia had never known quite what happened. She had come to suspect her mother may have had a hysterectomy; however her mother refused to talk about what she called 'those things', even to this day.

Alicia had been a solitary child. She was shy and found it difficult to make friends, a situation made worse by her father discouraging her from playing with the children of those ranked either below or above him. So on that first day at boarding school, when Vanessa introduced herself and then bade Alicia to follow her, Alicia felt like an orphan who had been adopted. She would have followed Vanessa to the ends of the earth.

If anything, Alicia's admiration and hero-worship of Vanessa had grown with the passing years. Vanessa was everything she secretly longed to be, but never dared, and though it was silly and rather adolescent, Alicia had always felt that just by being Vanessa's friend, a little of Vanessa's glamour rubbed off on her.

Perhaps her admiration was the reason why, even though they were both mature women, when she was with Vanessa she still felt like an awkward eleven-year-old schoolgirl, mused Alicia, sucking the end of her pen. After all, she was a respected scholar and had even gained a quiet reputation as a feminist spokesperson among some of the women undergraduates because of her championing of little-known nineteenth-century women novelists. However, it was not a reputation with which she was altogether happy. Alicia disliked what she saw as the stridency of some other women scholars who sought to imbue nineteenth-century women novelists with a feminist prescience they could not possibly have possessed, and by so doing, reinterpreted the past in the light of present-day concerns. Alicia liked to view them as creatures of their time.

She glanced out of the window. Another five minutes and the train would be in New Street. She put her unfinished article into her briefcase. Another reason she was unable to concentrate was that she was excited that at last she was going to have a chance to show Vanessa a little more of her world. Barely an hour after they parted company following lunch, a message from Vanessa managed to find her in the Reading Room. She immediately called Vanessa back.

'Vanessa, is there something wrong? Your message said it was urgent. I was worried.'

'No sweetie, there's no problem. I just thought I might come and stay with you for a couple of days. I feel like getting out of town and having a change of scenery, so I thought it might be a chance to also take a look at that Angus fellow's research you were talking about.'

'Fergus,' Alicia had corrected her gently. 'That would be wonderful. When can you come? Next week would be good for me as I've got a busy …'

'I'll be there tomorrow. That won't be a problem for you, will it?'

'No, of course not,' Alicia lied, thinking longingly of the visits to Liberty's and Fortnum and Mason's that she would now have to forgo.

'See you tomorrow then. Oh, and Alicia … please don't mention to whatever his name is why I'm coming. Let's keep it between us, okay?'

'Oh, but why? I'm sure Fergus would …' Alicia began, but Vanessa had already put the receiver down.

The train drew into New Street and Alicia retrieved her unused overnight case from the luggage rack. It was the height of the evening rush-hour, and everybody seemed to be going in the opposite direction to her. She felt like a salmon fighting its way upstream. Buffeted by the flood of humanity, she clutched her bags and fought her way across the concourse, apologising to everyone who cannoned into her.

She breathlessly reached her platform just as they were closing the barriers, but a cheerful black guard winked, let her through and then waited until she scrambled aboard before blowing his whistle.

The carriage was crowded and Alicia was forced to stand for the first part of the journey. Two women were occupying a three-person seat, with their shopping piled proprietorially high between them. Alicia considered asking them to move it, but when she caught one of the women's eyes - the look in it forbade such a request.

Eventually the carriage emptied, and Alicia sank thankfully into a window seat. She abandoned all ideas of doing any more work on her paper, and gazed instead at the passing countryside.

It undulated gently between rivers and dry stone walls and villages of low, honey-coloured stone cottages. It never failed to delight her, and on days like these, calm her mind.

It had been love at first sight, fifteen years before, when she came to Heartlands to be interviewed for a research post. It was late autumn, and the countryside had been cloaked in russet and gold, filtered through a soft October mist.

The first glimpse of the town was always heart-stopping. Perched on a hill above the River Hart, it rose up like a many-tiered wedding cake from the thickly-wooded river banks to its crowning decoration: the university.

The river meandered in a large loop, enclosing the town on three sides, so that it was almost an island and protecting it from the urban sprawl that had ruined so many other towns. The town remained an almost perfectly-preserved monument to the Victorian age where Austen or Trollope would have still felt at home.

Its nineteenth-century founders, prosperous from the profits of iron and cotton mills, had prided themselves on their piety as well as their industry. In rendering unto God his due they had endowed the town with an extravagant number of church spires for a population that, both in size and in outlook, was determinedly moderate. These now reflected the rays of the late afternoon sun back to the heavens.

But perhaps the true nature of its liberal-minded Victorian burghers was displayed by the cathedrals to learning which they had endowed with the profits of Empire in order that their sons and daughters would not have to go to Oxford or Cambridge, and in doing so, along with an education, acquire the dissolute habits of the upper classes.

According to taste, the university was either a gothic masterpiece or a monstrosity. Embellished with every architectural conceit known to the Victorians, it had been built around a green which was laid out with ornamental paths connecting the different buildings. Only five years before, there had been a fiercely fought battle over whether the nineteenth-century rule that banned anyone from walking on the grass should at last be revoked. It was the only open green space in the town and many of the younger, more radical members of staff, felt that it was elitist that townspeople, students and visitors alike should not be able to enjoy it on warm summer days.