The Accidental Woman Read Free Page B

intervened, the clouds.
    This was typical of the ways in which Maria and her family would spend their evenings, at this period.

2. The World of Meaningful Looks
    When Maria came to look back on her days at Oxford, which, to her credit, she did very seldom, it seemed to her that it had all taken place in bright sunshine. We can safely assume, I think, that this was in reality not the case, but then who said our concern was with reality, or hers, for that matter. If Maria’s memories were of an Oxford bathed in sunlight, we might as well respect them, except perhaps for parts of the third chapter, where the mood will be rather more autumnal. All this is just to give you an idea of how things are likely to turn out. It was in any case autumn by the time she got there, bright blue autumn, and Maria’s college, we won’t name names, looked very pretty, even to her. She found that she was required to share a room, or rather a set of rooms, with a girl called Charlotte. She would have preferred to have a room to herself. That first evening, they sat together by the fire, and talked long into the night. This gave rise to a spontaneous and mutual antipathy.
    ‘My friends call me Charlie,’ Charlotte said. ‘What do your friends call you?’
    ‘Maria.’
    Eventually the conversation came to a halting conclusion. There was a long silence, which Charlotte was the first to infringe.
    ‘Do you believe, Maria,’ she said, ‘that there is a certain sort of silence between people, where no words are necessary, and which signals not the end but the start of understanding?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Maria, and added to herself, This isn’t it.
    ‘Do you believe, Maria,’ said Charlotte, after a few more minutes, ‘that there is a kind of look which passes between people, and which can speak more than a thousand words and yet still leave so much unsaid?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Maria, looking away.
    ‘So much is spoken when people look at one another. Looks are so meaningful. Do you know what I intend to study at Oxford, Maria?’
    ‘Chinese?’
    ‘I mean apart from that. People. One can learn so much about people from the way they look at one another. And do you know what? I shall teach you, Maria. I shall teach you how to study people, and how to learn, from their looks, from their smiles, from what they say to each other and what they leave unsaid. We shall study these things together.’
    This, Maria soon realized, was Charlotte’s way of admitting that she was morbidly addicted to gossip.
    A few weeks passed, as weeks do, try as you may. Maria and Charlotte began to make friends, in and out of college. But Charlotte made considerably more friends than Maria did. Maria did not find it easy to make friends. Also she found friendship a difficult phenomenon to grasp, conceptually. For instance, she was friendly for a while with a girl called Louise, but their friendship did not last long, and while it lasted it was a lukewarm affair, so lukewarm that friendship is frankly too strong a word for it. Maria and Louise attended lectures together, and seminars together, and were united by the similarity of their tastes in literature, in particular their indifference towards the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, their lack of enthusiasm for the poems of Robert Henryson, and their loathing of the writings of Thomas Malory. (All the same, Maria sometimes felt, in private moments, that Louise’s indifference was only skin deep.) Sometimes, after a seminar, or a lecture, Louise would accompany Maria back to her rooms, and there they would sit, and talk, and perhaps eat, and then Louise would go, and Maria would find herself thinking, So what? And occasionally, Maria would be walking past Louise’s college, and would think to herself, This is where Louise lives, and, having nothing better to do, having nothing to do at all most of the time, she would visit her. Then they would talk, and sit, and perhaps drink, until the time came for Maria to get up and