Page 80 of Babel

Chapter Fourteen

All we to-night are dreaming, —

To smile and sigh, to love and change:

Oh, in our heart’s recesses,

We dress in fancies quite as strange

WINTHROP MACKWORTH PRAED, ‘The Fancy Ball’

And then they were free. Not for long – they had the summer off, and then they would repeat all the miseries they’d just endured, with twice the agony, during their fourth-year exams. But September felt so far away. It was only May, and the whole summer lay before them. It felt now as if they had all the time in the world to do nothing but be happy, if they could just remember how.

Every three years University College held a commemoration ball. These balls were the pinnacle of Oxford social life; they were a chance for colleges to show off their lovely grounds and prodigious wine cellars, for the richer colleges to flaunt their endowments, and for the poorer colleges to try to claw their way up the ladder of prestige. Balls let colleges fling all their excess wealth that they didn’t, for some reason, allocate to students in need at a grand occasion for their wealthy alumni, the financial justification being that wealth attracted wealth, and there was no better way to solicit donations for hall renovations than showing the old boys a good time. And what a very good time it was. Colleges competed each year to break records for sheer indulgence and spectacle. The wine flowed all night, the music never stopped, and those who danced into the early hours could expect breakfast brought round on silver trays when the sun came up.

Letty insisted they all purchase tickets. ‘It’s exactly what we need. We deserve some indulgence after that nightmare. You’ll come with me to London, Victoire, we’ll go to be fitted for gowns—’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Victoire.

‘Why? We have the money. And you’d look dazzling in emerald, or perhaps a white silk—’

‘Those tailors are not going to dress me,’ said Victoire. ‘And the only way they’ll let me into the shop is if I pretend to be your maid.’

Letty was shaken, but only for a moment. Robin saw her hastily rearrange her features into a forced smile. Letty was relieved to be back in Victoire’s good graces, he knew, and she’d do anything to stay there. ‘That’s all right, you can make do with one of mine. You’re a bit taller, but I can let out the hem. And I’ve got so much jewellery to lend you – I can write back to Brighton and see if they’ll send me some of Mama’s old things. She had all these lovely pins – I’d love to see what I can do with your hair—’

‘I don’t think you understand,’ Victoire said, quietly but firmly. ‘I really don’t want—’

‘Please, darling, it’ll be no fun without you. I’ll buy your ticket.’

‘Oh,’ said Victoire, ‘please, I don’t want to owe you—’

‘You can buy ours,’ said Ramy.

Letty rolled her eyes at him. ‘Buy your own.’

‘Dunno, Letty. Three pounds? That’s quite pricey.’

‘Work one of the silver shifts,’ Letty said. ‘They’re only for an hour.’

‘Birdie doesn’t like crowded spaces,’ said Ramy.

‘I don’t,’ Robin said gamely. ‘Get too nervous. Can’t breathe.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Letty scoffed. ‘Balls are wonderful. You’ve never seen anything like it. Lincoln brought me as his date to one at Balliol – oh, the whole place was transformed. I saw stage acts that you can’t even see in London. And they’re only once every three years; we won’t be undergraduates next time. I’d give anything to feel that way again.’

They cast each other helpless looks. The dead brother settled the conversation. Letty knew it, and was not afraid to invoke him.

So Robin and Ramy signed up to work the ball. University College had devised a labour-for-entry scheme for students too poor to afford the ticket price, and Babel students were particularly lucky here, for instead of catering drinks or taking coats, they could work what were called ‘silver shifts’. This did not take much work other than periodically checking that the bars commissioned to enhance the decorations, lights, and music hadn’t been removed or slipped out of their temporary installations, but the colleges did not seem to know this, and Babel had no good reason to inform them.

On the day of the ball, Robin and Ramy shoved their frock coats and waistcoats into canvas bags and walked past the ticket lines curling around the corner to the kitchen entrance at the back of the college.

University College had outdone itself. It exhausted the eye; there was too much to take in at once – oysters on enormous pyramids of ice; long tables bearing all kinds of sweet cakes, biscuits, and tarts; champagne flutes going round on precariously balanced plates; and floating fairy lights that pulsed through an array of colours. Stages had been erected overnight in every quad of the college, upon which a variety of harpists, players, and pianists performed. An opera singer, it was rumoured, had been brought in from Italy to perform in hall; every now and then, Robin thought he could hear her higher notes piercing through the din. Acrobats cavorted on the green, twisting up and down long silken sheets and spinning silver rings around their wrists and ankles. They were dressed in vaguely foreign garb. Robin scrutinized their faces, wondering where they were from. It was the oddest thing: their eyes and lips were made up in an exaggeratedly Oriental fashion, yet beneath the paint they seemed as if they could have been plucked off the streets of London.

‘So much for Anglican principles,’ Ramy said. ‘This is a proper bacchanalia.’

‘You think they’ll run out of oysters?’ Robin asked. He’d never tried them before; they apparently upset Professor Lovell’s stomach, so Mrs Piper never bought them. The gloopy meat and shiny shells looked both disgusting and very enticing. ‘I just want to know how they taste.’

‘I’ll go and grab one for you,’ said Ramy. ‘Those lights are about to slip, by the way, you should – there you go.’