Paper Cuts

by Stephen Bernard

  Freddy turned to me one day and kissed me. It was something I had not expected. It ruined all other experiences for me. I have never felt anything like it. That shock of rudely dyed blonde boyish hair and the beautiful face beneath it was something to know, intimately.

  Now Freddy is the marquess of Tagus, on the long, stately progression to the duchy of Wiltshire and death. His youth has gone, but not his electric presence. I have not seen him in twenty years, except in Tatler, where he keeps the better sort happy with their happy lots. What it is to be born to rule! There was never any doubt in our young minds that Freddy had nothing but the best before him, or to doubt that he deserved it.

  I remember the light that day, coming insistently through the dusty air into the oak-panelled room. It was hollowing out a space in the chilled air, the fridgidation of a place in which there has never been a need for heat, never been a lack of all that is necessary to live a full life. There is a riotousness about privilege, an intensity of belonging which all students of the House need to feel and which they feel long after they have departed those groves of academe. To be a House man – as members of Christ Church are called – is to be born to all that is good and right in the world. It is a sense of belonging which I have never felt.

  *

  Then there is Hardy:

  The boy strained his eyes also; yet neither could he see the far-off city. He descended from the barn, and abandoning Christminster with the versatility of his age he walked along the ridge-track, looking for any natural objects of interest that might lie in the banks thereabout. When he repassed the barn to go back to Marygreen he observed that the ladder was still in its place, but that the men had finished their day’s work and gone away.

  It was waning towards evening; there was still a faint mist, but it had cleared a little except in the damper tracts of subjacent country and along the river-courses. He thought again of Christminster, and wished, since he had come two or three miles from his aunt’s house on purpose, that he could have seen for once this attractive city of which he had been told. But even if he waited here it was hardly likely that the air would clear before night. Yet he was loth to leave the spot, for the northern expanse became lost to view on retreating towards the village only a few hundred yards.

  He ascended the ladder to have one more look at the point the men had designated, and perched himself on the highest rung, overlying the tiles. He might not be able to come so far as this for many days. Perhaps if he prayed, the wish to see Christminster might be forwarded. People said that, if you prayed, things sometimes came to you, even though they sometimes did not … turning on the ladder Jude knelt on the third rung, where, resting against those above it, he prayed that the mist might rise.

  He then seated himself again, and waited. In the course of ten or fifteen minutes the thinning mist dissolved altogether from the northern horizon, as it had already done elsewhere, and about a quarter of an hour before the time of sunset the westward clouds parted, the sun’s position being partially uncovered, and the beams streaming out in visible lines between two bars of slaty cloud. The boy immediately looked back in the old direction.

  Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape, points of light like the topaz gleamed. The air increased in transparency with the lapse of minutes, till the topaz points showed themselves to be the vanes, windows, wet roof slates, and other shining spots upon the spires, domes, freestone-work, and varied outlines that were faintly revealed. It was Christminster, unquestionably; either directly seen, or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere.

  The spectator gazed on and on till the windows and vanes lost their shine, going out almost suddenly like extinguished candles. The vague city became veiled in mist. Turning to the west, he saw that the sun had disappeared. The foreground of the scene had grown funereally dark, and near objects put on the hues and shapes of chimaeras.

  He anxiously descended the ladder, and started homewards at a run, trying not to think of giants, Herne the Hunter, Apollyon lying in wait for Christian, or of the captain with the bleeding hole in his forehead and the corpses round him that remutinied every night on board the bewitched ship. He knew that he had grown out of belief in these horrors, yet he was glad when he saw the church tower and the lights in the cottage windows, even though this was not the home of his birth, and his great-aunt did not care much about him.

  Inside and round about that old woman’s ‘shop’ window, with its twenty-four little panes set in lead-work, the glass of some of them oxidized with age, so that you could hardly see the poor penny articles exhibited within, and forming part of a stock which a strong man could have carried, Jude had his outer being for some long tideless time. But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.

  Through the solid barrier of cold cretaceous upland to the northward he was always beholding a gorgeous city—the fancied place he had likened to the new Jerusalem, though there was perhaps more of the painter’s imagination and less of the diamond merchant’s in his dreams thereof than in those of the Apocalyptic writer. And the city acquired a tangibility, a permanence, a hold on his life, mainly from the one nucleus of fact that the man for whose knowledge and purposes he had so much reverence was actually living there; not only so, but living among the more thoughtful and mentally shining ones therein.

  In sad wet seasons, though he knew it must rain at Christminster too, he could hardly believe that it rained so drearily there. Whenever he could get away from the confines of the hamlet for an hour or two, which was not often, he would steal off to the Brown House on the hill and strain his eyes persistently; sometimes to be rewarded by the sight of a dome or spire, at other times by a little smoke, which in his estimate had some of the mysticism of incense.

  Then the day came when it suddenly occurred to him that if he ascended to the point of view after dark, or possibly went a mile or two further, he would see the night lights of the city. It would be necessary to come back alone, but even that consideration did not deter him, for he could throw a little manliness into his mood, no doubt.

  The project was duly executed. It was not late when he arrived at the place of outlook, only just after dusk, but a black north-east sky, accompanied by a wind from the same quarter, made the occasion dark enough. He was rewarded; but what he saw was not the lamps in rows, as he had half expected. No individual light was visible, only a halo or glow-fog over-arching the place against the black heavens behind it, making the light and the city seem distant but a mile or so.

  He had heard that breezes travelled at the rate of ten miles an hour, and the fact now came into his mind. He parted his lips as he faced the north-east, and drew in the wind as if it were a sweet liquor.

  ‘You,’ he said, addressing the breeze caressingly ‘were in Christminster city between one and two hours ago, floating along the streets, pulling round the weather-cocks […] and now you are here, breathed by me—you, the very same.’

  Suddenly there came along this wind something towards him—a message from the place—from some soul residing there, it seemed. Surely it was the sound of bells, the voice of the city, faint and musical, calling to him, ‘We are happy here!’

  I know that. Have felt that cool, expectant, welcome, welcoming, begotten air from Christminster.

  *

  In that second year at Christ Church, I attempted suicide again. The roundabout turned too quickly for me and I fell off, back to Sussex and into the arms of my family. That is where I belong. On my final day, as the storm, correctly for the moment, clapped out its thunderous rage above the college, I walked with my father across the quad where I first realized what Oxford would mean to me. I looked up. In each window through the darkening rain I could see someone had arranged large, simple, white paper letters to spell out

  GOODBYE STEVO BERNARD

  I know we went back to Sussex after that, but I never really ever left Oxford again.

  *

  My twenties were known by my friends as my ‘wilderness
years’ – even while I was living them. They were great fun, but not a time of great illumination. The most important man in my life then was Tom Scott, of whom it was always said with some admiration and justification that he was ‘entering into a grand period in his life’.

  Tom was my tutorial partner at Christ Church and a constant source of wonder. He lived every minute in an expansive way, selling a grand piano here, a picture there, to fund his extravagant lifestyle. It was hard not to be carried away on the wave of enthusiasm and euphoria that followed in his wake wherever he went.

  A slight, puzzled man, astonished by his own capacity to live life well, Tom Scott was also deeply caring and solicitous for the wellbeing of everyone whose life he touched. In him I found a love of the absurd, which would be accompanied by an unironic and unapologetic capability to make the most of things: the quiet pint in the Grenadier in Knightsbridge, then lunch at Green’s in Mayfair, as everywhere else seemed a little less than the sum of its parts. Each of these things and many more added to the vim with which he lived life. It was never dull. Quietly and unsurprisingly, Tom Scott became an accomplished banker, husband and father and, without knowing how, had done what he knew how to do: to live life well.

  Tom covered for my lack of scholarship a lot when we were students at the House. Never being afraid to brazenly elide the discomfort of an unwilling and unaccomplished individual beside him who didn’t quite know why he was there – although Tom did – or how to get out of the situation. Anglo-Saxon seemed to be a second language to Tom, and he knew the joy of Sidney and Spenser, why they were important, and how. It took me many years in his shadow – and what a long shadow he cast over my studies in my thirties – to see that the secret of Tom Scott was he knew the secret to living life, to see what is good in the world and what is bad, and to make it better.

  If only I could convey the joy of Tom Scott. Secretly, I have tried to be him, but I am not him and was not meant to be. His pleasure in the mundane, and in the brilliant, is not something I can share. I can admire, but I cannot make it part of me, of living.

  *

  I am in the American Hospital in Paris (I think). I am unclear as to why I am here, there. Something has gone wrong. A young, assured Jewish-American doctor with a friendly clean-cut face comes up to the bed. Looking like the Upper East Side but dressed like Paris.

  ‘Savez-vous ce qu’il a pris.’ [Do you know what he has taken yet?]

  It is quiet. I look at the clock on the wall of the brilliant white ward, the electric light humming.

  ‘Est-ce qu’il est accompagné?’ [Is there anyone with him?]

  So quiet. A gentle French hum of action and inaction around me in the early hours of a Parisian morning. It smells of medicine and cleanliness in here.

  ‘Right. Let’s have a look at you, young man. Avez-vous son dossier? [Do you have his notes?] What seems to be wrong with you then?’

  This is going to be a long night. Another night, in another country.

  *

  The air is not so chill now as earlier in the morning. I have had my morning coffee, but I took longer over it than I should. I cross over Broad Street from the Weston Wing of the Bodleian to the Clarendon Building and under the august gates of the sixteenth-century Great Court of the Bodleian back into the Library. I must get on. There have been too many distractions today and the editors of the TLS want my copy by the end of it.

  *

  After that, very little for five years. I work in a bookshop, stacking shelves, ordering books for unknowing eyes to read. I do not take much delight in the stock of my trade, but I have a keen awareness that at the heart of literature there is a prostitute muse, bankrupt of all motivation but profit.

  Years pass. I meet Didi Eisner one day. She had not kept in touch with me. Charles Timmins had said that I was ready to return to Oxford and I felt that he was right, but I did not know how to achieve it. I asked Didi Eisner. She answered simply,

  ‘Apply?’

  With some trepidation, I applied to Didi Eisner’s new college, Brasenose, and after a series of rigorous selection interviews in which I discussed the internal logic of Sir Thomas Malory and the richness of Derek Walcott’s transcendent Homeric vision, I was fortunate to be accepted.

  Brasenose was to be a blessing to me, a home. I stayed there for ten years, each year piling on restraint and resolution to do better, to be better. Under the watchful eye of Didi Eisner – and the Dean – I lived quietly on biscuits and still water. I challenged myself to be the change I wanted to see, and I changed – boy! how I changed. I grew from a man into a man.

  I began by assuming the worst-case scenario each week: that I would turn up to a tutorial knowing nothing. Everything after that was a bonus, and I lived for the bonuses. Everything that I knew and discovered found a place in my world, and in my heart. Literature was to me not yet the canon, nothing so formal and regulated as that yet existed in my mind. It was rather a gift that kept on giving. There is a richness to the weft of literature that those who find themselves in its fabric appreciate. I discovered the reality of literature, living the life of the mind. I worked hard and my hard work repaid me. Each piece of knowledge began to fall into an orderly place in my thoughts, to make sense of the world as those that write make sense of the world, with reference to everything outside the writing, at once.

  Brasenose College is not like other Oxford colleges, with quad collating upon luscious quad. There is the main sixteenth-century old quad – the quad of Alexander Nowell, built by John Johnson – and then there is the neat little ‘deer park’ with the seventeenth-century library and partly Wren chapel – an early work – abutting it, limpid leaves of an ancient indeterminate tree hovering above. Finally, there is the confident Englishness of new quad by John Jackson – ‘Anglo-Jackson’ – who built the Examination Schools, and behind that the New Building, designed by Powell and Moya.

  It was the quincentenary of Brasenose and I knew how to mark its passing. I knew an artist, Andrew Ingamells, who is without doubt the finest engraver of recent times. I knew that he was creating a new ‘Loggan’, a record of the architecture of all Oxford and Cambridge colleges. I telephoned his publisher and asked if Ingamells would engrave a picture of the college to mark this moment. I would of course be in it, in an understated way.

  My collection of prints of the colleges of which I have been a member is complete, from Beerblock’s Elizabethan woodblock prints to the most recent representations. It gives me great pleasure to have these pictures in my possession, but the pride of my collection is the Ingamells prints. I have appeared in two now – Brasenose and Univ – in my Masters gown, urgently walking to a lecture, and greeting an old friend and patron, Professor Daphne Steele. The view from my study window in these colleges is shown on the prints, so that I can see outside, even though outside is outside. There are the noses of Brasenose and the tortoises and martlets of Univ, standing alert to intruders between the panels of the compositions. I will be glad that when I am dead these images, which I created, will last, a memento of my time in this wonderful, giving place.

  *

  Years pass. Years of hard work and earnest discoveries. I study the letters of Bernard Lintot and find I have something to say about them. Lintot I first discovered because I liked the timbre of his name. The learning, the scholarship came later. I did not know he was ‘Lintot’ then, the publisher of Alexander Pope. He had been a subject for belleletristic biographies before I came across him. I found him his true place in English literature. It was a joy to me.

  I had been puzzling about what to do in my studies. The Arts and Humanities Research Council were paying me to write about the English literary marketplace between the death of Dryden and the arrival of Pope. It was dull work, and I made it dull. I found, for the first time in my life, that scholarship was not the life of the mind, but of constructs and arguments. I wondered what I could find to stimulate and please me and discovered the bookseller Lintot, the publisher of Pope, who ma
de Pope the currency of the eighteenth century. He was my métier.

  *

  It is a fine autumn day, although outside the light is fading. It is my twenty-first birthday. I am at the clinic of Charles Timmins, in Oxford.

  There is a pause in the conversation.

  Finally, ‘Congratulations,’ he says, warmly.

  I am touched, and I thank him. There is a pause between us.

  ‘You are now a statistical anomaly … You are neither addicted to Class A drugs, an alcoholic, nor homeless, nor dead … From now on every day is a blessing.’ He smiles.

  I do not understand his meaning, but he is in a good humour and I thank him anyway.

  Later, when I leave, I pull my light brown, tweed greatcoat closer to me. There is a chill in the air, as I walk back from the clinic into Christminster.

  *

  We are a small, compact family, my mother and sister and I. We do not have much, but we have enough, and we have each other, which is all that we need. My mother, Margaret Bernard, is the cornerstone of our house. Without her we would not hold together. Since my father died there have just been the three of us. It seemed like we would never be entire when he left us, but it was for the best. My father died of a sudden and massive brain haemorrhage on 14 January. The date I write this. He is missed, but not forgotten.

  The day when I told my mother and father about my childhood, my mother lost her faith, her reason for living, and the reason she saw in the world. She could not understand how she had missed the signs. The simple truth is that they were not there.

  When I was a small child my mother had a great trick to play on me.

  ‘What have you done to your sister?’