Chapter 2
I had been amazed, several months earlier, to be offered a place in the Institute's vaunted graduate program. Art history as an academic discipline had, after all, been born at the Courtauld. "Only twenty-five applicants are admitted each year from a pool of more than a thousand," I'd been crisply informed during my alumni interview in Nashville that spring by a pallid, bow-tied young man who had received a master's degree from the Courtauld three years earlier.
Considering these odds, I had resolved to put London out of my thoughts; but when the acceptance letter arrived a month later I shut myself in my dorm room and sat wide-eyed on my rumpled bed, my pulse racing with unaccustomed joy.
But just a couple of days after arriving in London, during the week-long interval before classes started, I experienced a sharp pang of displacement, a stab of homesickness so sudden it left me breathless. The student accommodation the Institute had arranged for me near Regents Park was dingy and uninviting, and London's blinkered gray boulevards filled me with an almost existential dread. I spent my days wandering around Marylebone in a twist of uncertainty. My life-changing relocation felt like nothing more than a signal lapse in judgment. My thoughts drifted homeward, to my mother's reproach when I'd told her I was planning to move to England. "You don't need to run away from me," she had said. "I'm not chasing you." But she was; and her neediness had caused me to trade the banal discontent of my former life for this much sharper pain.
When registration day finally arrived I hurried down Baker Street to Portman Square with a sense of nervous relief, almost absurdly grateful that the time had come to immerse myself in my work. But from the moment I pushed through the imposing front door of the Institute my doubts resurfaced. A squat, balding porter ensconced in a glass booth by the door greeted me brusquely. "The registrar is with another student at the moment," the man replied offhandedly when I told him the purpose of my visit. "Take a seat. She'll be down when she's free."
I perched awkwardly on a varnished wooden bench near the door and cast my eyes around the exquisite neoclassical foyer. The moon-faced clock high up in the marble wall above the fireplace ticked self-importantly; the rock-crystal chandelier glistened with disdain. The room's brittle elegance felt like a rebuke. How could I ever have imagined that I belonged in such a place?
After several painful minutes a welcome commotion erupted from the direction of the front door when a tall young woman carrying two enormous shopping bags crashed into the foyer. Her short blonde hair was artfully disheveled, and she wore a russet-colored bomber jacket, a frilly dress, and riding boots. "Good god, Mr. Sykes, you're finally back!" she intoned huskily to the porter, who favored her with a wintry smile.
"I wasn't gone that long, miss," Mr. Sykes said.
"Not long! Only six weeks. You must be wildly overpaid to take such long holidays. And where were you off to this time?" Her manner was teasing though almost unpleasantly boisterous.
"It was five weeks," he chided. "And we were in Spain."
She ran her hand through her messy hair. "I must say it's horribly unfair for you to be tanning your hide in Marbella while I'm slaving away in drizzly old London." She turned in my general direction. "I mean, does that sound right to you?"
I hardly knew how to respond. "He looks very rested," I ventured, turning to Mr. Sykes.
"Of course you would say that. Men always have each other's backs, don't they?"
I laughed nervously, doubting that Mr. Sykes and I were ever likely to expend much energy defending one another. Still, I exchanged a wry glance with the inscrutable, gnome-like porter as the girl plopped down next to me on the bench. "Are you new?" she asked.
"First day," I said, ready to match her chummy directness.
"He's come to register," Mr. Sykes interjected glumly. "Miss Scott is running late as usual."
"Oh god," the girl said, "you could be here till the Second Coming. I'm Clare Ludgate, by the way," she continued, poking out her hand. She was handsome rather than beautiful, with a strong jaw and a long, slightly off-kilter nose. Her eyes were china blue, with enormously dilated pupils. I wondered if she was on something. I shook her hand and introduced myself.
"First year?" she asked.
I wasn't sure whether to be flattered or insulted. "Actually I'm a grad student."
"Good lord, you must have been a child prodigy."
I smiled uneasily. "Not really."
"Thank heavens this is my last year as a lowly undergraduate," she rambled on.
I calculated that she was probably around twenty, to my twenty-two. "Have you enjoyed it?"
"Oh yes, I suppose," she said dismissively. "On a bad day the whole thing strikes me as a bit stuffy and pointless, but actually I've learned quite a lot."
"I can't believe I'm here," I said, glad finally to have someone to talk to, feeling happier now than I had in weeks. "When I finished at Vanderbilt I assumed I'd end up at Chapel Hill or someplace closer to home."
She took out a cigarette and lit it with a practiced little flourish. It wasn't clear if she'd taken in a word I'd said. "Where do you come from?" she asked, blowing a plume of smoke just to the left of my face.
There was a bristling movement from the other side of the foyer. "Miss Ludgate, I'm sure you're aware that smoking is strictly forbidden inside the Institute," Mr. Sykes said with some force.
Clare regarded the cigarette in her hand with astonishment. "Oh fuck me," she said laughingly. "I completely forgot. Well, I'll just finish it if you don't mind. This brand is rather dear." Clearly she was used to having her own way.
"I'm sorry, but I do mind," Mr. Sykes said indignantly. "Please take it outside. Now."
Rolling her eyes, Clare pressed the lit end of the cigarette together with her fingertips, extinguishing it. She then tucked away the stub in an interior pocket of her tiny straw handbag. "I'm sorry, darling," she said to me, "but I'm afraid I've completely forgotten what I was saying." She waggled her head back and forth as though hoping to dislodge the errant thought. "Ah yes, where do you hail from?"
"Nashville," I said, wondering if all English girls were as inquisitive as this one.
"Oh my, a rebel boy," Clare said in a very poor approximation of an American southern accent. "How did your parents feel about you moving so far away?"
I glanced away. "There's only my mother, I lost touch with my father years ago. And she wasn't particularly thrilled, but she'll get over it."
She rewarded me with a knowing look. “Hmm, families can be tricky; I know a thing or two about that. Any siblings?"
"Nope. I had a little brother but he died." She flashed me a look of concern, but I was more than ready to deflect the spotlight from myself. “What about you?”