We Had It So Good Read Online Free PDF Page B

blonde with her hair shorn like a lamb’s was outfitted in skirts with rips in them, exposing a slash of cerise petticoat, while the redhead was a pre-Raphaelite painting: a tangle of tawny hair and ankle-length green velvet robe.
    Soon, all over Oxford, girls appeared in ripped skirts and shocking-pink petticoats, and cascades of hennaed hair fell across the pages of books in the Bodleian Library.
    But beyond the involuntary turn of his head at a sight so bizarre, even in California, Stephen had paid no attention for he was not part of a crowd which asked who people were and where they had come from. He assumed that everyone, like him, came from nowhere and was a nobody. They were just two weird girls, part of the ongoing pageant of Oxford life, for you could find at Oxford men in cricket whites self-consciously carrying teddy bears, girls with monocles and cigarette holders, guys with Old Etonian accents wearing donkey jackets (a serge fabric with plastic patches on the shoulders, usually seen on hod carriers). Who cared?
    The girls were part of that parade, and now they were next door, moving about behind the party walls, their voices inaudible. They rode bicycles and hauled the heavy machines in to their tiny hall. In the evenings, Stephen could hear the sound of bath taps and imagined them sliding, naked, into the tub; this picture sustained him for many nights alone on his mattress, though usually he thought about his last girlfriend but one, Polly. He remembered the time they drove down to the Mexican border and stared across it, to unknown lands. He had been that close to asking her to marry him but had come to his senses. It must have been her French perfume that had half-crazed him.
    He was sitting in the garden under a tree smoking a joint. Next door the two girls were having a dolls’ tea party with cups and saucers and finger sandwiches laid out on the weedy grass. He heard cries of raucous laughter and the lower murmurings of another voice and a tabby cat that mewed on the fence, an empire, he thought, of fleas and other sneeze-making contaminants. He was allergic to cat fur and pollen and spent as little time in the garden as hecould, especially during hay fever season, but the warmth of the day, the need to feel sun on his face after the endless English spring of low cloud and tepid temperatures—the relentless averageness of English life—compelled him outdoors.
    A joint toward late afternoon relaxed him, and he had begun to take an intellectual interest in the hallucinogens, LSD and peyote, which you could still buy legally at a horticultural shop on the Banbury Road. Once he’d got to the bottom of them he would probably take a trip, but he liked to be sure, to know exactly what he was ingesting, the chemical properties, the toxicity.
    The mild summer sun made him drowsy. Along the street someone was playing the Doors, and closer, the girls’ voices rose and fell, bees moved with determination toward the lavender bush, and a worm made its way unheeded across the obstacle of his bare foot.
    A head appeared above the fence. “Hey, man. Do you have a stash, can you bring it over?”
    It wasn’t a girl but a guy with blond curls, blond muttonchop whiskers, an Afghan waistcoat and, yet to be revealed, pink bell-bottoms and suede desert boots.
    Stephen stood up unsteadily and walked to the fence.
    â€œHello, I’m Ivan. I’m just visiting the girls.”
    He could see them in the garden with their cups and saucers, teapot, jug of milk, a tray. The two girls lounged around on the grass, the redhead in the long green velvet dress lay back with her head on the lap of the blonde.
    â€œStephen. Hi.”
    â€œI’m Balliol. Grace and Andrea are St. Anne’s.”
    â€œWadham. I’m a Rhodes Scholar.”
    â€œDo you know Clinton of Univ?”
    â€œYes, we met on the ship coming over.”
    â€œExcellent, so we might as well have been formally