Jilly Cooper: Harriet

To my niece Amelia Sallit with love

It started to snow as Harriet was writing the last paragraph. Looking up she saw the flakes tumbling out of a sullen, pewter-grey sky, swirling and chasing each other, drifting into the branched arms of the trees. With a yelp of excitement she put down her pen and ran to the window. The flakes were small and compact. It was going to settle. Now they were belting down, and suddenly the towers of Oxford were encapsulated in a flurry of white flakes, as though someone had violently shaken a snow scene in a glass ball.

She went back to her essay, copying out the last two sentences with a flourish, then she wrote her name at the top of the first page: Harriet Poole, carefully closing up the Os, because she’d read somewhere that it was a sign of weak character to leave them open.

She had got up at six to finish her essay, having spent all week re-writing it. Anything to avoid the humiliation of last week’s tutorial. Her tutor, Theo Dutton, who chain-smoked and showed no mercy, was famous for his blistering invective. When she had finished reading out last week’s essay he had asked her three questions which entirely exposed the shallowness of her argument, then, tearing up the pages with long nicotined fingers, had dropped them disdainfully into the waste paper basket.

‘That was junk,’ he had said in his dry, precise voice, ‘you merely copied out other people’s ideas with varying degrees of accuracy. Read Shakespeare rather than books about Shakespeare. Look into your heart and write. You’re trying too hard; relax; enjoy what you read or dislike it, but don’t deaden it on paper.’

Her eyes had filled with tears. She had worked very hard. ‘You’re too sensitive, Harriet,’ he had said, ‘we’ll have to raise your threshold of pain, won’t we? A large dose of bullying each week until you build up an immunity.’

His hard, yellow eyes gleamed through his spectacles. He was smiling, but she wasn’t sure if he was fooling or not. He always made her feel faintly sexy, but uneasy at the same time.

‘Now,’ he had said briskly, ‘for next week, write an essay on which of Shakespeare’s characters would be best in bed and why.’

Harriet flushed scarlet.

‘But I can’t. .’ she began, then bit her lip.

‘Can’t write from experience? Use your imagination then. Shakespeare didn’t know what it was like to be a black general or a Danish prince, did he?’

‘Hamlet wouldn’t have been much good,’ said Harriet. ‘He’d have talked too much, and never made up his mind to, until it was too late and one had gone off the boil.’

Theo had given a bark of laughter.

‘That’s more like it. Write something I might enjoy reading.’

Well, there was her essay, and it had taken her all week. She had read nothing but Shakespeare, and thought about nothing but sex. And she felt light-headed from exhaustion, a sense of achievement and the snow outside.

She was also starving. No-one was up. The landlady and her husband liked to lie in on Saturday. Downstairs among the letters scattered on the floor lay one from her boyfriend, Geoffrey. Reading it, she wandered into the kitchen, her jeans, too long when she wasn’t wearing heels, swishing on the linoleum.

‘Dear Harriet,’ wrote Geoffrey, on office writing paper, ‘I am really fed up. I can’t get down this weekend, but I must finish this report and hand it in to the MD on Monday.’

Then followed a lot of waffle about pressure of work, grabbing every opportunity in the present economic climate, and doing it for both their sakes.

‘So pleased you have finally gone on the pill,’ he ended up. (Harriet had a vision of herself poised like a ballerina on a tiny capsule.) ‘I’m so fed up with being parked outside your bedroom every night like flowers in a hospital. I want you so much darling, I know I can make you happy. I’ll be down next weekend, early Friday night. Meanwhile keep yourself on ice. Hugs and kisses and other things, love Geoffrey.’

Harriet felt a great wave of relief, then felt guilty. One really shouldn’t contemplate losing one’s virginity to someone one felt relieved one wasn’t going to see. Virginity should be lost gloriously. Geoffrey wasn’t glorious, just solid and very, very persistent.

Now that he wasn’t coming down, she could lapse a bit, and not bother about dieting until Monday. She opened a tin of baked beans and put a slice of toast under the grill. After her tutorial with Theo, she could go to the library and get out a couple of trashy novels — she deserved a break after all that Shakespeare — and later go to the new Robert Redford film, and see it round twice, and eat a whole bar of Crunchie, and perhaps an ice-cream too. The weekend stretched out like the snow beginning to cover the lawn.

After eating every baked bean she felt fat, and decided to wash her hair in Theo Dutton’s honour. There was no shower in the bathroom. It was either a question of scalding your head under the hot tap or freezing under the cold, which was much colder because of the snow.

As she alternately froze and scalded she pondered once more the problem of her virginity. All her friends were sleeping with their boyfriends, and she suspected that if she’d really fancied Geoffrey she’d have succumbed to him months ago. If Robert Redford, for example, came to Oxford in a play and bumped into her outside the theatre or met her at a party, she’d be his in a trice. She was conscious of so much love welling up inside her. If only she were beautiful and not so shy, she might attract some beautiful man to give it to. She couldn’t be bothered putting conditioner on her hair after she’d washed it. Theo wasn’t that attractive.

Dripping, she went into her room. Her papers and books were scattered all over the floor. She wished she were one of those people who could transform a room into a home with a few feminine touches. But she loved her room, messy as it was, and even if she didn’t have a great love in her life, the days at Oxford had their own happiness. Theo Dutton, when he wasn’t being vile, calling her his star pupil to another don who’d dropped in to borrow a book, a muddled feeling she had of the importance of intellectual things, music, writing books herself, being reviewed one dizzy day in the Times Literary Supplement , ‘Miss Harriet Poole in her first novel shows sensitivity and remarkable maturity.’

The snow was covering the lawn and the red roofs now. Two children, shrieking with delight, were scraping it off the top of a car to make a snowball. On the ledge of the window lay a moth. Harriet picked it up — she had read somewhere that human hands burnt insects’ feet like hot coals. It was too cold to put it outside. Running out of the room, she parked it gently in her landlady’s maidenhair fern on the landing. At least it would have something to eat. She spent so much time worrying about dogs being put out on the motorway, and horses being sent to the slaughter house, and children in orphanages. What on earth was she going to do when something really terrible happened to her — like one of her parents dying?

The snow had now nearly hidden a cluster of snowdrops that had courageously sprung out of the dark earth. Snow on snow, thought Harriet; perhaps she should write a poem about it. Crouching in front of the gas fire she got out a pen and began to scribble.

An hour later her hair was dry and she realized she was going to be late. She pulled on a red sweater because it brought some colour to her sallow cheeks, red tights and a grey skirt, which bagged slightly. She must get some new clothes, but her grant never went far enough.