Grievance. Marguerite Alexander

this very minute, to the certain knowledge of their friends, sitting side by side in the library, preparing to dazzle the rest of them in the afternoon’s Irish-literature class.

      ‘You must admit, they make a lovely couple,’ Annie says. ‘Like the hero and heroine of a novel who are destined to come together at the end because no one else will quite do.’

      ‘When you see them together, she kind of brings out the Irish in him,’ Pete says. ‘I’ve never noticed before, but there’s something about him of the young Yeats, when he was a mere broth of a boy. A touch of the aesthete.’

      ‘Surely Nick isn’t Irish too,’ says Phoebe. Although she started off at the picnic in high spirits, she’s grown sullen as the conversation has turned to their absent friends. Now she sounds despondent, as though yet another way of excluding her has been devised.

      ‘Some generations back,’ says Pete. ‘I’m glad to say he has the grace not to brag about it. As far as I know, he’s never even been there.’

      ‘So what’s the current state of affairs?’ asks Annie. ‘Have they – like – got it together yet?’ She asks the question because it’s likely to engage Phoebe.

      ‘Not under my roof,’ says Pete, who shares with Nick, although Annie spends much of her time at their flat, retreating every so often in simulated outrage at the smell of dirty socks and takeaway curry and the evenings given over to football on the television.

      ‘Nor mine,’ says Phoebe, who lives with Nora. Although she’s been dying for the information that Pete has just given her, pride – or the unwillingness to admit that she feels excluded from Nick and Nora’s confidence – has stopped her asking. Her face lightens as she bites into a large slice of cheesecake.

      ‘It’s as I thought, then,’ says Pete. ‘A meeting of minds. When they’re both distinguished scholars, they’ll make little jokes in the footnotes of their learned volumes that nobody else will understand.’

      ‘That’s how I imagine Steve’s married life to be, assuming he has one,’ says Annie. ‘No small-talk, with bouts of intellectual sparring for relaxation. You just can’t see him watching television, or going down to Homebase, like my Dad, for a few planks of wood and some screws.’

      ‘I can’t see him living in the kind of house that needs DIY,’ says Pete, ‘no disrespect to your Dad. I see him in a loft or warehouse conversion, with an amazing view over London. Very minimalist, but with loads of books and periodicals, a state-of-the-art espresso machine to keep him fuelled while he’s burning the midnight oil and just one marvellous picture – Matisse, or one of those guys.’

      ‘He’s a university professor, not a corporate lawyer,’ says Annie. ‘You’re confusing him with your own fantasies, although you don’t seem to be doing much to bring them about. You could make a start with your laundry.’

      Pete and Annie’s amiable domestic bickering, which suggests already established routines and the continuing conversation of a shared life, excludes Phoebe more effectively than public displays of affection. When her anger finally explodes, however, it’s directed against Steve.

      ‘What is it with everyone and Steve? You’d think, to hear everyone talk, that he was, like, a god, but I totally fail to see it. I can’t see the point of one single thing that he’s made us read this term, and if you want my opinion, he’s just showing off because he knows all about these books that nobody else has even heard of.’

      Pete keeps his face averted while Phoebe’s speaking so that she doesn’t see the here-we-go-again look that he can’t suppress, but Annie, who watches her with motherly attention, sees the crumbs of cheesecake in her hair and the way the tip of her nose has reddened in the cold and feels sorry for her.

      ‘It is a bit of a slog,’ Annie says. She’s actually enjoying the course, but understands Phoebe’s need to be soothed and stroked and to have her feelings acknowledged. ‘It will get better later, once he’s established the historical context.’

      Phoebe is not soothed. The very word ‘history’ suggests to her a tyranny of fact over imagination, and as for ‘context’, she wouldn’t care if she never heard the word again. But since she doesn’t know how to get these points across, is beginning to lose the confidence in her own opinions that she has always taken for granted, she directs her rage instead at their book of the week, Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent.

      ‘As far as I’m concerned, I’ve spent the best part of a day reading the ramblings of someone I’d run a mile to avoid in real life – some old servant guy who tells stories about his masters getting drunk and falling over as though we’re meant to find them hysterically funny but leave me cold.’

      ‘A very neat summary of the plot, if I might say so, Phoebe,’ says Pete. ‘I’d be surprised if anybody can better that.’

      ‘Oh, Nora will, you wait and see. She’ll know exactly why it’s important and how it fits into the “historical context”. And you know something? She behaves as though she doesn’t have one at all. Don’t you think that’s a bit hypocritical?’

      ‘It’s frustrating,’ Annie says, diplomatically deterring to Phoebe’s point of view before weighing it against alternatives. ‘You do feel you can only get so far with her before you meet a barrier. But I don’t think she’s secretive by nature, so she must have her reasons.’

      ‘I’m with Phoebe on this one,’ Pete says. ‘I think we’ve all been a bit too soft on young Nora. She looks so fragile that you’re afraid to press her too hard in case a crack opens up down the middle, but it can’t be good for her to keep everything bottled up. My mum wouldn’t approve. “Better out than in” has always been her policy.’

      ‘And you’re a living monument to it,’ says Annie.

      Phoebe’s mood is immediately transformed. Noisily she sucks smears of cheesecake off her fingers, lets the remains of the picnic slip from her lap on to the ground, stands up and runs to the nearest pile of fallen leaves. Scooping up an armful, she says, ‘Let’s have a leaf fight.’

      

      More than half-way through the class, Steve finds that most of the group are still preoccupied with Thady, the old servant who provoked such outrage in Phoebe. Usually so insistent on structured argument, he is for once allowing the class free rein. Like Phoebe, who is no more likely to regard him as a kindred spirit than he would her, he is feeling aggrieved and rejected, outside a charmed circle to which he had assumed he had free access. This morning he suffered a bitter disappointment, which he finds difficult to assimilate, let alone accept. Raw and wounded, he has had to rely on ingrained professionalism to get him through the day; and now, noticing the time, he rouses himself to explain the concept of the unreliable narrator and its relevance to the text.

      ‘He’s a servant commenting on the behaviour of his masters. Now this in itself, I should have thought, indicates some kind of political dimension to the story, but we can take that further and observe that some of the Rackrents in this family saga spend as much time in Bath, a fashionable watering-place dedicated to pleasure, as they do in Ireland, where they pay little attention to their duties as landlords and let their estate go to rack and ruin. Yet they are central to the story, while Thady, the native Irish steward, is a bystander. That, it seems to me, is emblematic of the condition of the Irish throughout the colonial period.’

      In addition to his other worries, he’s been brooding on changes in the seating arrangements. Students generally are remarkably territorial, sticking rigidly throughout the course to the places taken in the first session. But this afternoon, for the first time, Phoebe is no longer with Nora, by the window, but seated between Pete and Annie, in a quasi-family group, with Phoebe, the child, flanked by her parents. Since she appears to have a light dusting of leaves on her hair and at the cuffs of her sweater, as though she’s been rolling on the grass, the analogy isn’t that far-fetched. What a handful for her adoptive parents. Nora, meanwhile, is in her usual place, but with Nick beside her. Although they haven’t, as far as he has observed, exchanged a word