Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

‘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.’

Ramy disappeared into the crowd. Robin sat atop his ladder and pretended to work. Privately, he was grateful for the job. It was humiliating to wear servant’s blacks while his fellow students danced around him, yes, but it was at least a gentler way to ease into the frenzy of the night. He liked being hidden safely in the corner with something to do with his hands; this way the ball was not quite so overwhelming. And he truly liked discovering what ingenious silver match-pairs Babel had provided for the ball. One, certainly devised by Professor Lovell, paired the Chinese four-word idiom 百卉千葩 with the English translation ‘a hundred plants and thousand flowers’. The connotation of the Chinese original, which invoked rich, dazzling, and myriad colours, made the roses redder, the blooming violets larger and more vibrant.

‘No oysters,’ said Ramy. ‘But I brought you some of these truffle things, I don’t know what they are exactly but people kept snagging them off plates.’ He passed a chocolate truffle up the ladder and popped the other one in his mouth. ‘Oh – ugh. Never mind. Don’t eat that.’

‘I wonder what it is?’ Robin held the truffle up to his eyes. ‘Is this pale mushy part supposed to be cheese?’

‘I shudder to think what else it could be,’ said Ramy.

‘You know,’ said Robin, ‘there’s a Chinese character, xiǎn,^* which can mean “rare, fresh, and tasty”. But it can also mean “meagre and scanty”.’

Ramy spat the truffle into a napkin. ‘Your point?’

‘Sometimes rare and expensive things are worse.’

‘Don’t tell the English that, it’ll shatter their entire sense of taste.’ Ramy glanced out over the crowd. ‘Oh, look who’s arrived.’

Letty pushed her way through the throng towards them, tugging Victoire along behind her.

‘You’re – goodness.’ Robin hurried down the ladder. ‘You’re incredible.’