Elizabeth Edmondson - Voyage of Innocence

‘Later this afternoon.’

‘That’s all right, but don’t make it too late.’

‘Name, miss?’ the porter asked the American girl.

‘Fitzpatrick.’

He brought out a stub of chalk and scrawled her name and the word Grace on the trunk. He called out to a colleague standing nearby, ‘Joe, this is for one of the hen houses. Grace.’

Claudia pushed Miss Fitzpatrick towards the car, which was causing something of a traffic jam. ‘Hop in, before a policeman arrives to harangue Jenks.’

Vee got in after them, knocking her shin against a strangely-shaped black case.

‘I’m sorry, that’s in the way,’ the American said, leaning down to move it.

‘What on earth is it?’ asked Vee.

‘My French horn. Why did that guy back there say my trunk was for one of the hen houses?’ said Miss Fitzpatrick.

‘It must be what they call the women’s colleges,’ Claudia said. ‘A lot of people haven’t got used to having women at the university.’

Miss Fitzpatrick held out a hand. She was wearing exquisite kid gloves, Vee noticed. ‘I’m Lavender Fitzpatrick, only I get called Lally.’

‘If you say Lavender, no one will call you anything else,’ Claudia said. ‘I’m Claudia Vere, and this is my cousin Verity Trenchard. Known as Vee.’

‘I prefer Lally. It’ll make me feel more at home. Say, how did you know I was going to Grace? Are you freshmen there, too?’

‘Intuition,’ said Claudia. ‘One of my more useful talents. I think they call us Freshers at Oxford, at least they do the men. Where are you from, what are you reading?’

Lally looked puzzled, Vee could see she was about to reach into her bag for a book or magazine.

‘She means, what are you studying?’ Vee said.

‘Oh, what course am I taking? English Language and Literature. And I’m from Chicago.’

‘Where the gangsters are?’ Vee asked.

‘Yes, but we try to avoid them as much as possible. What are you taking … reading, I mean?’

‘Modern Languages,’ Vee said. ‘French as my main language.’

‘I’m reading Greats,’ Claudia said. ‘Greek and Latin. It’s a four-year course, you see, so more annoying to my family.’

‘Annoying?’ Lally said.

‘Even now, my dear brother is stamping up and down in his ancestral hall, incensed that I’ve made it to the university. He doesn’t approve of education for women.’

‘My father isn’t too keen on the idea, either,’ said Lally.

‘And Vee’s grandfather, who rules the roost in her family, will never forgive me for turning my back on being a debutante and coming to Oxford. You see, he’d planned for Vee to do the season with me. Only when it turned out I was coming here, he more or less had to let Vee come too.’

Lally laughed. ‘My grandmother was at Oxford, she was one of the first girls at Grace College, back in the nineties. So she wanted me to come, and so did I, and in the end Pa agreed, although he still thinks a good American women’s college would have been much better. We had quite a few arguments about it, before Grandma and I got our way.’

Vee’s own battle had been such a bitter one, she’d imagined, for no good reason, that other people didn’t have to fight so hard for what they wanted. Yet here were Claudia and Lally agreeing that their families didn’t want them to be at Oxford.

‘I may switch to another school, though,’ Claudia was saying. ‘Greats is hard work.’

Vee was looking out of the window. There was a clarity to the air that day, a clarity that she later came to realize was unusual in Oxford. Perhaps it was in her eyes, and not outside at all, but everything seemed sharply delineated: the cobbled streets, the newspaper vendor on a corner shouting out the headlines, a college servant in a bowler hat stepping through the wide open doors of an ancient college.

The motor drew up in front of the arched gateway into Grace College, causing various vans and cars to brake abruptly and a man pushing a handcart to call out a few unsavoury epithets as Jenks got out of the car and came round to open the rear door.

The lodge was chilly and brightly lit. A gnome of a man stood behind a polished wooden counter as the three of them came in. He flicked his eyes up from the ledger in front of him. Names? Trenchard, Vere, Fitzpatrick. He made three careful ticks on a list and turned round to where a row of keys hung on numbered hooks. ‘Quite a coincidence you arriving together, since your rooms are next to one another. Sign here, please, Miss Trenchard. Now you, Miss Fitzpatrick. Miss Vere.’

Claudia took the book and signed it with a flourish. ‘It’s Lady Claudia, actually. Where do we go?’

That earned her a sharp look and a sniff. ‘A scout will show you to your rooms. Do you have any luggage with you? Big luggage. A trunk, for instance, I have no record of any trunk under your name, Miss Fitzpatrick,’ he said, emphasizing the ‘miss’.

‘It’s coming up from the station.’

‘It makes more work for us when you young ladies don’t send your boxes and trunks on in advance.’

‘That would be difficult, since it came across the Atlantic on the boat with me.’

‘Young ladies from abroad always cause problems for us.’

They started with Claudia’s room, number seventy-three, on the second floor. Lally was seventy-four, just across the corridor, and Vee was seventy-five, next door to Claudia.

Claudia unlocked the varnished wooden door. A card with her name on it was already slotted into a little brass holder: Lady Claudia Vere. She opened the door and Vee and Lally peered past her into the room. Claudia put down her crocodile handbag on the top of the bookcase, edged round the trunk that took up most of the available space in the centre of the room and surveyed her new domain.

A narrow bed, a small chest of drawers, a wardrobe, and a desk made up the furniture. There was a tiny grate in the fireplace in one corner, with a gas ring set beside it on green tiles.

‘I’d call this a cell, myself. Lord knows how I’ll fit everything in.’ She turned to the scout who had come with them to show them the way. ‘Are all the rooms this size?’

‘First years are put in the smaller rooms, miss.’

‘Are your rooms the same?’ she said to Vee and Lally. She bounded across the corridor to inspect them. ‘Yes, they are.’

‘Kind of cosy,’ said Lally.

‘Kind of cramped,’ said Claudia.

Vee didn’t care. ‘They can put me in a broom cupboard, if they like. I’m here. And that’s a miracle, and nothing can spoil it.’

Claudia was dangling her keys on one finger. ‘The scout’s vanished,’ she said, irritated. ‘Where do we ring for her?’

‘I don’t think we do,’ Vee said.

‘I need her to unpack my trunk.’

There was a pause, and then Lally said, ‘I’m not sure it works like that. I guess we do our own unpacking.’

Claudia stared at her. ‘How? Bowler packed it for me, it’ll take me hours to get everything out, and then what do I do with it?’

‘Bowler?’ Vee said.

‘My maid.’

‘Didn’t you unpack your trunk at school?’

‘No, of course not. Matron and the school maids saw to all that.’

‘We had to do our own at Yorkshire Ladies’.’

‘Pass over those keys,’ said Lally, kneeling beside the trunk. ‘Vee and I will show you what to do.’

Vee would never forget the first night in hall, for Freshers’ Dinner. It was a handsome panelled room with the high table for the dons set on a raised area at one end and three long tables in the main part of the hall for the undergraduates.

The noise of all those women’s voices startled Lally; Claudia and Vee were used to it.