the day they had just spent together. Both sensed a need to leave the subject alone for a while. Instead, May wanted to know about Julian’s life in Oxford. She had glimpsed that beautiful city once from the window of a coach, she told him, and longed to visit it again properly. Julian told her how his father had taught at the university, how instead of sending him to sleep Matthew Arnold’s dreaming spires had woken his mind and how long hours in the Bodleian library raced by as he read everything he could lay his hands on. Locke and Berkeley and other writers May had never heard of seemed to be speaking directly to him, he said, although he couldn’t get on with Kant. And for that matter he was having a hard time getting on with his flatmate.
“Rupert is a member of a club called the Bullingdon,” he told May. “God alone knows what they all get up to except drink and eat and demolish as much precious property as possible. About ten years ago club members smashed up nearly five hundred windows in Peckwater Quad at Christ Church. They are a bunch of vacuous, spoiled, snobbish, stupid idiots,” he said, suddenly furious. “And what’s more, their current hero is Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader, one of the most wrong-headed men in Britain. God knows where it is all going to lead.”
“Why on earth do you share a flat with Rupert?” May wanted to know.
“I sort of fell into it,” Julian admitted. “The truth is I am annoyed with myself for not having ended the arrangement. Too late now, though. But that’s my trouble. I say I will do things and I mean it when I say it, but then the motivation slips away. But I do rate his parents. Especially her. Poor Joan. She worries so much about Rupert. She deplores all that right-wing talk.”
Julian changed the subject.
“Tell me about you,” he said to May. “What sort of place did you grow up in? What do the West Indies look like? I know nothing about that part of the world.”
May needed no more prompting. She began to tell Julian of the monkeys who hung from their stringy arms in the trees around the plantation, waiting for the right moment to sneak a banana from the lunch table. She spoke of the rustling sound made by the wind that whispered its way up and down the green swaying sugarcane. She told of the brilliance of the new growth of the cane, the colour of crushed peas, and described the way she would peel the waxy skin from the stalks and suck out the sweet sticky juice. She spoke of the markets held in village squares, where the country people would come, balancing baskets on their heads packed high and tight with shiny avocadoes, olive- and coral-coloured mangoes, lemons still attached to their leafy branches, shiny green peppers and crescent-moon-shaped chillies. And without mentioning her mother, or the accident, May told him about the island’s deserted beaches, which lay below cliffs lined with scrawny hawthorn trees, bent almost double by years of storms that had tried to dislodge them from their precarious footholds. Finally, when she began to describe the sea itself, in all its mesmeric, ceaseless, churning, dangerous, deep blue beauty she fell silent, floored by the power of her memories.
When May came to the end, her eyes shining as bright as seawater, Julian gazed at her.
“Thank you,” he said, eventually. “That was so lovely. You are lovely.”
Julian and May had stayed on in Wigan for two more days and when the time came to leave Julian had learned something, but not the lesson he had been expecting. Instead of the mixture of detached, analytical pity that he had anticipated as the legacy of his visit to the North, he was instead conscious of something more elusive, more humbling and more valuable. He felt chastised by his self-importance.
During the long drive back Julian struggled to work out how he should respond to the preceding days. Something of his old confused thinking returned as he tightroped between a sequence of intellectual and emotional choices. Maybe he could volunteer to teach at a local school once his exams were out of the way, to which May had ventured, “Well now, that is an idea.”
“Education is everything,” he said, adding in a lighter voice, “perhaps we should bring the king back with us on our next trip?” Between them, he suggested,