Chapter Text
Oxford is exactly as dreadful as everyone promised and twice as fond of reminding me that I ought to be grateful.
I arrived three days ago, though it feels nearer a fortnight, and have already been informed—by my tutor, by two solemn young men with opinions far too large for their faces, and by my mother’s letter waiting patiently upon my desk—that this is the hour in which I am meant to become serious.
I am to apply myself. I am to remember my name. I am, apparently, to cease being a disappointment by Michaelmas.
You will be pleased to know that I am failing admirably on all counts.
The place itself is handsome in a severe, self-satisfied way, as though it knows it has produced a great many men and expects the rest of us to apologise for not being them yet. The halls echo terribly, which makes even the smallest mistake sound like a moral failing, and the bells ring with such authority that I half expect them to begin issuing instructions of their own. (If they do, I shall ignore them out of spite.)
My rooms are tolerable. Cold, of course, and smelling faintly of old books and ambition, but there is a window, and from it I can see the river when I lean far enough to the left. (I have already been warned against this, which naturally means I shall continue.)
There is a young man down the corridor who insists on declaiming Latin an inappropriate hours. I am considering pushing him into the river as an educational exercise.
Do you see? Already Oxford is improving me.
My mother writes with great concern for my studies, and greater concern for my reputation, which she treats as a delicate object likely to shatter if I look at it too closely. She reminds me—gently, but often—that I am a Cunningham, that this is Oxford, and that the world will be watching.
I wonder who exactly she imagines has the time. Certainly not I.
She wishes me to apply myself to history and philosophy, to cultivate discipline, to remember that cleverness without restraint is merely noise—and I have promised her that I shall be excellent.
Admittedly, I have not specified when.
I have already learned two important things, none of which appear in the prospectus (which is either dishonest or optimistic, I am not yet certain which).
One is that bedtime is treated here as a moral suggestion rather than a rule, provided one looks sufficiently scholarly while breaking it—book in hand, lamp lit, brow furrowed, striding through the halls as though one has been seized by a dangerous thought and simply could not be expected to put it aside for the sake of sleep. I suspect this is how half the traditions here began: someone doing something inadvisable very confidently and being admired for it.
The other is that there is a porter who knows my face already, which I take as a personal failure of stealth, though in my defence he appears to know everyone’s face and to disapprove of most of them. He watches the doors as though expecting trouble to develop a conscience and confess, and he has informed me on my first evening, with great seriousness, that the gates close at ten. I returned at ten-past.
We regarded one another for a long moment, each silently deciding what sort of person the other was, and parted with mutual disappointment and a warning that sounded less like a rule and more like a challenge. I have not yet decided which of us won, and I have yet to ask him his name. Perhaps I shall do so when he stops scrutinizing me whenever I walk past.
All of which, I suppose, should have prepared me for my tutor’s attentions.
He is not an unpleasant man, but he is quite a peeved one. And he asked me, in a voice reserved for important matters and disappointing sons on our very first meeting, mind, what I hoped to achieve this term.
I said “survival,” which he did not write down.
He asked again, slowly, as though the question might improve upon repetition, or I might suddenly become someone with a sensible answer prepared. I considered saying “escape,” or “nothing irreversible,” but settled for silence, which he also declined to record.
He sighed in a way that suggested he had met my sort before and that none of us had ended well—men who mistake cleverness for immunity and youth for an argument. I found this irritating.
Having failed to provide him with an ambition, I was instead provided with a syllabus.
I am meant to read an alarming number of books immediately, many of them heavy enough to cause injury if dropped. I have been attending to this duty in spirit rather than in practice. Thus far I have read only the notices about the books, the introductions to the introductions, and one marginal note written by someone who was clearly furious about something in 1773. This seems a reasonable beginning, and my tutor seems none the wiser to my deviation of his instructions.
I must also speak of the food, because to remain silent on the subject would be dishonest.
It is plentiful in a technical sense and appears at regular intervals, which I am told should be enough, but it has all the warmth and imagination of an obligation fulfilled resentfully. Everything is either boiled into submission or served in a state of cautious apology, as though it knows it could have been better and chose not to be; the bread is heavy, the meat is suspicious, and the vegetables have wilted far beyond their natural color.
And so I eat because I must; because I am hungry, and because there is nothing else to be done about it, but never because I am pleased. Should I survive this term, it will not be due to the nourishment provided. If I do not, you may tell my mother that I was defeated not by study, nor by vice, nor even by Oxford itself, but by the potatoes.
I miss home more than I expected, though I will deny this if asked. I miss the sound of the house in the morning, the way it wakes slowly, I miss Miss Thomson's cooking (although make no mention of this to her for she will no doubt have more lessons for you on how to season the perfect fish to my tastes) and I miss having someone about who knows when I am sulking and refuses to be impressed by it.
I find myself thinking of you at odd moments—when I am meant to be listening, or praying, or doing something sensible—and it occurs to me that Oxford is very full of people and still entirely lacking in you, my best and only friend, which feels like an oversight on its part.
You must write and tell me everything.
Tell me who has been unbearable and who has been foolish, whether the roses have survived my absence and whether you are behaving yourself (though I know the answer to that, and it is far too well). If you do not write soon, I shall be forced to imagine your life without me, and I do not trust myself to be fair about it.
I promise, in return, to send you regular reports of my moral decay and academic negligence. It seems only right that someone should be informed.
Give my regards to the house, and keep a little mischief for me until I return. Oxford may yet succeed in polishing me into something respectable, but I doubt it—and I should hate to think you were robbed of your favourite disappointment.
Yours, impatiently and without improvement,
Percy.