EXCERPT

PROOF

Philippa Fawcett

Cambridge

Wednesday, May 14, 1890

9 am.

Quiet, and the clock. Somewhere a runny nose, a restless foot. A warm morning outside, only a few stray beams of light making their way in.

1. Prove that the locus of the middle points of parallel chords of a parabola is a straight line.

Philippa, in the back row: white dress, hair up, poised in the room like a strange moth. She observed the ray of light where it fell in perfect lines as if through a church window. The instant she’d opened the paper a quiet ecstasy had come over her, a startling awareness of her own body—the pores of her skin, the hair on her arms, her blood fizzing. She had hoped for it, but of course one could never be certain it would come, this over-aliveness. In this moment the examination hall and the men bent over their papers diminished to a flat photograph, became pinned in place and faded. She was the only real thing.

Time slowed; the clock swallowed its own motion, struggled feebly. She felt if she tried she could have made it run backwards.

Her pen had dried. She dipped it again, lazily.

***

Lunch, taken in silence in hall. The clatter of voices from outside, their own exams finished. Geoffrey Bennett—athletic, lovely, in a rare loss of temper—can’t they shut up? Philippa tried not to laugh, had an impulse to tuck an arm through his as she had done when they were studying together as children in London, that strange euphoria still sweeping her along.

***

2 pm.

2. A man insures his life on Jan 1 for £1000 by the payment of £20. 15s. 0d at the time, and annually on Jan 1 throughout his life...

She had tried to explain the sensation to Freddie. Freddie, resolutely practical, a radical in her men’s-cut coat, had not understood.

“It’s like skating,” Philippa said, and thought of holding her father’s warm hand as they flew across the ice—he trusting her completely, blind since that ill-fated shooting adventure in his twenties. His own father had been aiming for a pigeon.

Her father had been a magnificent sportsman even so, swimming long hours, riding with his man out through the fields, skating all winter. She always wanted to know what he felt, and leading him on through the frozen fens she closed her own eyes tight. It was the double-dare of it, the wind and ice and the racing dark and his strong, large hand. My little eyes, he said each time when they came in. She never confessed.

When he died—sudden and feverish six years ago—she’d gone down to the river and stepped into the cold November water. She’d floated, closed her eyes until it all pooled into darkness.

“No more swimming, darling,” her mother said as they packed her bags for Newnham. Philippa understood. She left her skates and swimming costume at home, put on better dresses, did her hair. She didn’t really mind; these were minor inconveniences.

***

5 pm.

Freddie, waiting for her outside under the magnolias in spring golden hour, noted the quiet joy and was relieved. They went out together back to the brick and silence of Newnham. With her hand on Philippa’s elbow Freddie steered her away from the eyes of matrons and girls. The test, the test. Since its inception the college had been waiting for something like Philippa. There was a betting pool out worth hundreds, maybe thousands—would she, could she, best Bennett? A woman’s brain, so unsuited to the rigour of mathematics, to the olympic stamina of six days’ examination? Especially a woman like Philippa, floating now through the garden as if she’d been waylaid by the exam on her way to tea. Do you think— the murmurs went. There she is. Almost disappointed, these eyes, landing on her delicate face and patient ordinariness.

Philippa was not, Freddie thought with some fondness, precisely pretty. If it had not been for that expensive light fabric and well-swept hair, she would have been boyish.

Philippa stopped to examine a lily. But of course she must know how they all looked. And so even this—adjusting the ribbon of her dress, drifting on up through the quad, under the pagoda, smiling over her shoulder to Freddie—this too was a calculation, however unconscious. She was beloved; she was the object of fascination. Coy and lovely they went upstairs.