Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

The student in question, Dexter Hoffman, was known to me, since he would stay talking over coffee and cigarettes when everyone else had gone. At last I would simply tell him to go. He was impervious to hints, but oddly docile when given a clear directive.

Hoff was reading philosophy, though our discussions were not philosophical in any obvious sense. Dexter (always known as ‘Hoff’) was known as a conversationalist, meaning that he paid only the slightest attention to what anyone else said, just enough to turn the talk back to the rut of his preference when it deviated.

Hoff was a college character whose foibles were much discussed. He filed his collection of albums by an esoteric system which remained mysterious in its details even when the general principle became known. The record at the extreme left was Love’s Forever Changes , while the one at the other extreme was An Electric Storm by White Noise, a group known only to Hoff, or so it seemed.

Privileged guests would be challenged to put the record on Hoff’s turntable back where it belonged in the ranking. It was considered a triumph to be only ten places off. The criterion was ‘heaviness’, a quality which obsessed the student population but had never before been systematically considered. The Vietnam War was heavy , Blind Faith were heavy , the prospect of getting a job and joining an oppressive Establishment was undeniably heavy , but no one before Hoff had even attempted to rank them comparatively.

It wasn’t clear if he was serious about this, or making one of his jokes. Since he rarely laughed at other people’s jokes, and never at his own, it was hard to tell. About his albums he seemed to be serious. Forever Changes earned its place by being ‘deep’ but not heavy. An Electric Storm , on the other hand, was absolute heaviness, a sort of Kelvin zero. As he put it, ‘If you listen to the last track late at night and you’ve smoked some shit , you can think that it’s you that’s dying.’ And this was not a dreadful warning but a recommendation.

Our conversations, though, were about sex. He was a ladies’ man of some obsessiveness, though his preferred term was ‘girls’. He was always smuggling girls into his room at night and sneaking them out again in the morning. He strongly opposed co-education (technically, co-residence), and thought it would never come to pass in Downing.

From his philandererer’s perspective, co-residence would take all the excitement out of his conquests. As he explained it to me, ‘If you can just click with the girl in the next room, well — where’s the challenge in that?’ It was a question of sportsmanship. When the grouse moor is right next to the gun room then there’s nothing to brag about in bagging a huge tally.

If there had been women on the premises, he would still insist on hunting abroad, on principle. Well, partly on principle — it was also a lot easier to stop girls hanging around after he lost interest if they didn’t live there in the first place.

I did wonder whether Hoff was really the womanising sensation he claimed, but his word was broadly accepted on the matter. Some dissidents suggested that girls took their clothes off just to get him to stop talking, though others questioned whether even such a drastic measure would necessarily shut him up. ‘They expect me to try it on,’ he would say. ‘They’d never forgive me if I didn’t. They’d take it personally.’ He took his rôle very seriously, though I didn’t think it was strictly necessary for the smooth running of the town, or even the nurses’ hostel.

He had a strange hairstyle, though it was probably more of a refusal to have a hairstyle. His hair was naturally frizzy, and he both let it grow and tamed it with a savage parting, so that the ensemble looked like a cottage loaf which has risen unevenly. Of course women often like an element of helplessness in men, but I doubt if that was part of the plan.

Basilisk of the bedroom

Most of our conversations were about women’s thoughts and feelings, which might seem an unlikely interest for a womaniser. But think about it: at a conference of safe-breakers the subject of discussion wouldn’t be money, bullion and booty but rather tumblers, alarms and time-locks. In the same way Hoff was preöccupied with women’s emotions and ideas — everything he had to get past before the marvellous mechanism swung open at last, and he glimpsed the ingots of shining pleasure stacked high on the shelves.

Hoff had an elaborate typology of women (girls). There were virgins, there were half-virgins and according to him there were some girls who had never been virgins at all. There were Clean Dirty Girls and Dirty Clean Girls (his particular pets), but there were no Dirty Dirty Girls. He explained: the Dirty Dirty Girl, the girl who matched a man in appetite and even outstripped him, was no more than a legend or fabulous beast, the unicorn of sex.

Charm played no part in his technique. He stunned women with a bolt of indifference, and after that he could do what he liked with them. According to Hoff, there was nothing a girl found more reassuring in a man than absolute unreliability. But it did have to be absolute. Mere dithering wasn’t enough. She had to be able to count on his unreliability, and there Hoff had never been a disappointment. I don’t know whether all women fitted this pattern, or the ones who interested him.

There are other fabulous beasts than unicorns, of course, and I began to wonder if the Dirty Dirty Girl, if she ever actually turned up with her cornucopia of desires, might not be the sort who turns men to stone, basilisk of the bedroom. If Hoff ever met her, would he tell us about it? Would he be allowed to keep the power of speech after that encounter?

I was fascinated to be having such technical discussions with an unashamed sexual predator, of a breed that was coming to be labelled the Male Chauvinist Pig, which didn’t die out but certainly changed its spots, finding new ways of presenting bad behaviour.

I noticed how clean Hoff was, on the occasions when he carried me, still talking, to the lavatory (where he would raise his voice a little so as to be sure of reaching me in my stall). He was at least as clean as Alan Linton, but while Alan would certainly have given his armpits priority Hoff paid attention also to fingernails and (most likely) toes. Perhaps his secret was nothing more than the combination of low morals and good hygiene — hardly the secret of life or anything else, though admittedly unusual in that place and at that time. It was, additionally, a combination which might attract those fabled Addenbrookes nurses.

Hoff was a philosopher as a matter of academic fact, but economics loomed more largely in his daily life. He ate only the statutory minimum of meals in Hall, but liked company while he ate, so he would call in on me in A6. I don’t know if he was rich or poor, but he was certainly thrifty to the point of madness. His diet was carefully calculated, made up not of the cheapest foods in absolute terms but the ones which met his body’s needs most efficiently. Everything was calculated down to the last penny-calorie.

He had established to his own satisfaction that tinned cod’s roe represented the best investment in terms of protein. He called it prole caviar , and would eat it straight from the tin so as to save on washing up. The proteinous beige-pink slab in the tin, or the lump of it in his spoon, had the visual texture of soft wet brick and a faint meaty smell.

I didn’t mention that I had been to a school where actual posh caviar was delivered at intervals, thanks to the Queen Mother’s interest and bounty, and later fed to pigs. I had started to clam up about my past. Every little incident seemed to need so much explaining, and I could hardly keep trotting out the whole saga. No one at Cambridge was curious about how I had got there anyway. I might just as well have been some sort of life-form cooked up in the Cavendish Laboratory and stored in A6 Kenny to await testing.