Engleby

by Sebastian Faulks

  The eyebrow.

  ‘They say that someone is most intensely present just after they have left.’

  ‘Someone you love?’ said Dr Sen.

  ‘Not a word I use.’

  ‘Ever?’ Despite herself. ‘Have you never loved someone?’

  ‘From what I understand, love is something that ceases to exist if you stop feeling it.’

  The eyebrow again.

  ‘“My love died.” You’ve heard people say that, haven’t you? With sincerity and self-regard. “Love” is a force or value by which most people would claim to regulate their lives. Yet if you stop feeling it, then it no longer exists.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s like fear or envy. One day you feel jealous of someone else; another day, for no discernible reason, you just don’t. Sometimes you’re frightened in a car; other times with the same driver, you aren’t. “Love” is like that. You feel it, you don’t feel it. Nothing wrong with that. But surely that makes it too unstable to be given a privileged position in life – let alone used as a foundation.’

  ‘To what have you given a privileged position in your life?’

  This was quite a good question.

  ‘Accuracy,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Integrity of fact.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  I smiled. ‘You’re thinking that sounds a little “cold”? Well, I certainly don’t think you could say in retrospect that my life has been . . . What’s a phrase you might enjoy? I know, I know. You couldn’t say that I’ve been “on the side of life”.’

  Dr Sen didn’t answer.

  ‘No one would describe my story as “life-affirming”, would they?’

  I laughed, but she didn’t.

  ‘No. And I suppose if I haven’t been on the “side of life” I must have been on the other side.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  The side of death, obviously. I didn’t say that, though, because I didn’t want to freak her out. But I thought about it after the consultation was over. I haven’t really been on any ‘side’ in my life, and maybe that’s part of the difficulty. Perhaps I should just pick a cause, as people pick a football team, not because it ‘is’ the best, but just because it gives them something to believe in, like a dummy or an idol.

  On the other hand, to do such a thing knowingly, to admit to the self-deception, would be like giving up on any idea of integrity.

  In the dining room, my heart lifted when I saw Mark sitting alone by the window. I grabbed a tray full of death-swill and went to join him.

  ‘Ah, Wilson,’ he said. ‘Pull up a chair.’

  Mike, Toilet, Groucho, Irish Mike, Mike (!), Prufrock, Michèle, M.K. Watson . . . Wilson!

  Mark has this fantasy in which the people in Longdale are characters from Dad’s Army, which often seems to be showing on television. Johnnie Johnston is dotty Corporal Jones. Dr Vidushi Sen is Private Pike (‘stupid boy . . .’) Creepy Frank Usborne is the vicar. Gerry, really just because he looks a bit like him, has to be Mr Mainwaring. Mark himself is the verger and is always annoying Frank Usborne by calling him ‘your reverence’. And Mark cast me, to my great delight, as fey, superior Sergeant Wilson.

  It has been Mark’s obsession, brewed now for nine months or more, to contrive a set of circumstances in which Dr Sen (Pike) is compelled to refer to me as ‘Uncle Arthur’. He has gone so far as to write a one-act play for Christmas, currently being scrutinised by the ‘entertainments committee’ (sounds like Stalag Luft II, I know), in which the line is uttered. I’ve agreed to play ‘Arthur’ and he’s done everything he can to make it inevitable that the part of Lakshmi, the 32-year-old Indian heroine, can be taken only by Dr Sen.

  We await the outcome of the committee’s deliberations with intense excitement.

  One thing I ought perhaps to clear up. Am I in fact homosexual? I remember hearing the American sage Gore Vidal on the radio. In his humorous bass baritone he assured his listeners: ‘There are no such things as homosexual or heterosexual people, only homosexual or heterosexual acts.’

  It sounded wise. By that criterion, I must be straight, since I’ve never known any homosexual ‘acts’. Though to be frank, I suppose I haven’t seen much girl action either.

  And Jennifer? What was sexually going on there? There’s a belief you find in some biographers of the upmarket kind that knowing whether two people once spent the night together is the Rosetta Stone for understanding their ‘characters’. If Lytton Strachey’s semen once found its way onto Maynard Keynes’s waistcoat, their belief runs, then the stories of literature and economics are altered. I think not.

  From the evidence of her diary, Jennifer was having some difficulty with Robin Wilson over what she called ‘sex, lack of’. My guess is that she had had a physical affair with him but was trying to move it on to more of a ‘good friends’ thing. Girls were always doing this at that age, because they found themselves out of their depth and wanted to get back to safety. Or perhaps she just went off him.

  And who was this mysterious ‘simon’ from whom (‘sob’) there was no letter in her pigeonhole? We’ll never know, and my guess is that if Jen were alive today she might not even remember. And what of the boy from Downing and the boy from King’s quoted in the newspaper as having been her lovers? Maybe one did, perhaps both, maybe neither. Most likely is that the newspaper reporter made it up. Any quotation in any paper in which the speaker is not named is valueless (because it could be made up without legal repercussions); and in the tabloids these unattributed ‘quotes’ are generally just invented.

  It certainly doesn’t matter whether Jennifer slept with one boy or many or none unless those actions had a significant bearing on her life, development or happiness. Clearly they didn’t.

  With the passage of time, all such actions or lack of them, appear less significant. And anyway, since the cells in our body die and are renewed, replaced by different ones, we do in a literal sense become different individuals. The connection I have to the boy I once was is now so fragile that it requires an act of conscious ‘faith’ to maintain that we are in any significant sense the same person.

  At a certain remove, when passion and circumstance have died or altered beyond recall, our past selves are no more than characters in a fictional tale, like dead, half-forgotten Emmy and Anna and Lucy and all the other girls in Dr Freud’s short stories.

  In that light you can now perhaps see how hard I’m struggling to keep Jennifer alive.

  There are some days in Longdale when I see it as the reincarnation of the old men’s poorhouse that I used to see as a child in Reading – with its teatime gaslamps, stone corridors and dripping windows occasionally washed by the bending headlamps of passing Humbers and Wolseleys in the evening rain. I know that my infant foreboding has been fulfilled and that I will be housed forever in an English institution that has escaped the release of time passing or of death.

  On other days, it is merely an extension of Chatfield, and I encounter McCain in the toilets, Batley in the gardens and Francis on his way to the assault course. Hello, Francis, you again. No, I never did escape, and I see that you didn’t either.

  Yet if I try hard enough I can remember another institution, too: the old men’s almshouses by the stream. The men wore caps and collarless striped shirts with woollen waistcoats; they all had Woodbines stuck, unburning, to the lower lip. The flowerbeds were a fire of wallflowers and dahlias. When the men hoed them, the metal made a distinctive sound as it struck a stone or scraped over the dry earth. I remember one called Ted, a veteran of Passchendaele, who leaned on his hoe and talked to me. He smelt of tobacco and breadcrumbs and old man’s sweat. His face was crossed with small lines, deep in the brown skin, and many of his teeth were missing. He took me into his almshouse, the front room dark and cold despite the summer outside. His wireless was playing a Test Match commentary by Rex Alston and John Arlott, only names to me, but probably something more to him. He gave me lemon squash in a d
irty glass and a Custard Cream biscuit. On the kitchen shelf he had rows of empty jam jars and topless fish tins in which were screws, nails and bits of cut string. He had a tabby cat called Susan who dozed in his chair beneath the antimacassar. The almshouses were single-storey brick with leaded windows and tile roofs. I remember thinking that there must be many places like this in England and I envied him his small house. I thought I’d like to be old, like Ted, and pass my days hoeing the beds, smoking Woodbine and listening to the cricket on the wireless. It was something to do with him and his past, that I felt we’d lost somewhere, when I was on the main street of Lymington all those years ago. Can you ever know what it’s like to be another man, what we’ve missed or what died with them?

  Don’t feel sorry for me. Whatever you do, don’t feel sorry for me.

  I don’t, so why should you?

  I do not need your pity. I showed that girl none when I killed her.

  Please, whatever you do, don’t ‘forgive’ me. Don’t ask for ‘closure’ or ‘release’ for me because it’s not really me you’d be asking for, but yourselves: granting me forgiveness would free you from your own anguish at what I did; it would be a way of putting me out of your mind.

  And what would I do with such phoney gestures? What good would they do me?

  Jen’s mother didn’t forgive me. On the contrary, she wrote to me in the harshest terms expressing a wish that I would ‘rot in hell’. Perhaps we’re already there – not just me, but all of us, stuck in this absurd existence with its non sequitur, shaggy-dog death ending.

  These days I doubt whether I’m the creature Julian Exley described (though of course I remain grateful for the diagnosis that steered me to Longdale not Strangeways). For one thing, he said I had no empathy or feeling for other people, but that isn’t really true, is it? I tried to imagine the lives of those girls in their remote Victorian college, having tea. I took an interest in my father’s war and in Julie, rather less in Mum. And when I went to Jen’s house, I really worked at picturing the thoughts and feelings of her mother. And Margaret, Charlotte, Stellings, Dr Turner, Dr Sen a little bit, Gerry, Mark, Jeffrey Archer, Ralph Richardson, Julian Exley himself . . . I’ve felt something for all of them.

  And even in the damaged person Exley described there was a consistency of character and behaviour that I failed to recognise. It wasn’t just that it wasn’t me; it was that it wasn’t feasibly human. It was an intricate and enjoyable piece of reasoning, like a Freudian case history, and about as scientific.

  I enjoyed reading it. He nailed the moment I killed Jennifer and fully explained it. Defended narcissism in the face of intolerable threat to the self. His explanation was logical, all right; its problem was that it wasn’t true.

  My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It’s that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Bananas don’t do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that’s different – the special Homo sapiens bit – is faulty. It doesn’t work. Sorry about that.

  Last Friday I was given a quite exceptional treat, and one that, if news of it reached the newspapers, would cause an outrage. So don’t tell.

  I was allowed out of the hospital grounds. Yes, Schizo Scribbler, Fen Beast was At Large. Two nurses, Tony, an elderly Lancastrian with spectacles, and a burly charge nurse called John, walked me down into the village of Upper Rookley.

  To begin with, I was alarmed by the cars and the people. I held tight to Tony’s arm. He talked to me in a soothing way, ‘Don’t worry, Mike. We’ll make sure you come to no harm. Steady now.’

  It was the first time I’d seen a pavement or a shop for more than eighteen years. I looked at the sane people going about their business like termites in a mound.

  We went into a shop so that John could buy some cigarettes. I somehow expected that I’d know the man behind the counter, but he was a stranger and I wondered what he was doing there.

  There were cars parked all along the side of the street as well as going up and down the road. Upper Rookley was slightly bigger than I remembered, but I suppose when I was fifteen I had only looked at the pavement. What was I thinking in those days? At what brute level of awareness was I functioning?

  After a time, I became more confident and let go of Tony’s arm. I asked if I could walk ahead without them flanking me like gaolers, and Tony said yes. They knew me well enough.

  I threw back my head and breathed in normal life: the chemist, the electrical goods shop, the gabled pub with a sort of white blackboard, if you see what I mean, advertising Thai food.

  ‘Are there many Thai families in Rookley nowadays?’ I asked Tony, and he explained, suppressing a smile, that it was just a pub fad.

  We passed the back gate into Chatfield and walked on up the high street. We went past the tobacconist’s whose supplier’s van I used to rob and came to where I thought the record shop had been, where I had spent my saved or stolen money.

  ‘Was there a record shop here?’ I asked Tony.

  ‘Yes. It’s still here,’ he said. ‘Just a bit further on.’

  And so it was. It still sold records, too, a few anyway, though mostly CDs, videos and computer games.

  We went inside and I sniffed a bit, to reorientate myself after all these years. I turned by instinct to the side wall where the deep wooden bins had been, where I spent so many hours flipping through the sleeves, stopping now and then to pull one out and flick it over. A Song for Me by Family with Roger Chapman on vocals and John ‘Poli’ Palmer on vibes; Split by the Groundhogs; Stonedhenge by Ten Years After; Songs for a Tailor by Jack Bruce.

  Time was pressing very hard on me. Things before my eyes were there and not there. I asked to leave.

  We went to the top of the street and into a café, where they bought tea and cake. It was clear to me that Tony and John wanted to prolong their outing as long as possible. They chatted and smoked and drank tea in a natural, friendly way.

  Eventually, I couldn’t stand it any more and I said, ‘Do you mind if we go back?’

  Last night I lay in my room at the top of one of the old Victorian buildings. These days I have a good, long view down the hill and over the village to the school and the woods beyond. I can almost see the playing fields from which Baynes was returning late that afternoon.

  In between, in the foreground as I look down, is the tall perimeter wall of Longdale with grey brick and rolled barbed wire.

  And as I lie here in the dusk, I suppose that I am evidently (and I have chosen that word carefully, for its denotation, connotations and all the ripples in between) bonkers.

  I have a world in my mind, in the inexhaustible repertoire of my memory. I can recall at will, note-perfect, from the reams I have stored there.

  As the electrical self-deceit of human consciousness ebbs and fires at random through my brain, there are long hours when I don’t know if I’m alive or not.

  Sometimes I see myself as one of those magi of the guitar – Rory Gallagher, D. Gilmour, Jeff Beck or Jan Akkerman. I stand in the spotlight and take a solo.

  I build the choruses and sequences in any order I choose.

  I improvise; I make the familiar seem new; I reinvent, recast and bring to life.

  So where’s it coming from, this feeling, this funny low euphoria? A little bit from the town, I think. I do love the dirty brick of the miniature terraces and the mist from the river and the cold mornings, even now in May. And then the sudden huge vista of a great courtyard of King’s or Trin or Queens’, when everything that’s been pinched, and puritanical and cold and grudging and sixpence-in-the-gas-meter is suddenly swept away by the power and scale of those buildings, with their towers and crenellations and squandered empty spaces, built by men who knew that they’d calculated the mechanical laws of time and distance and there was therefore no need whatever to build small.

  It’s teatime on Friday in November. The road is lit by the lamps of bicycles; cars pass at their peril, slowly, because the pe
dalling girls, some frizzy and stout, some slight and eager, the girls with their lights front and rear, are the queens of the highway.

  Back from games, the girls are flushed; their faces are red from the Ural wind. Red Russian wind from communist mountains, from the giant Soviet factories. Jennifer is running down the corridor, lively with the sense of her good fortune. They’re having tea now in Anne’s room, which has a gas ring. Molly comes in with cake she bought in town: a sponge cake with cherries. They sit on chairs and floors and beds. There isn’t much room, but there’s music on Anne’s cheap record player: a balladeer, a minstrel, shock-haired with a guitar – afternoon songs for girls in jeans with coloured silk scarves knotted or held with silver woggles from Morocco.

  There’s a tortoiseshell cat who lives opposite and he’s half adopted us. I pull back the curtain and see him on the roof, stretching in the thin early sun. I love the jumble of small slate roofs on the brick terraced cottages. I lie watching for a few minutes while an ‘inane disc jockey’ (Dad) babbles on the radio. Then I put on socks, slippers, sweater and coat and go down to the kitchen, and, while the kettle’s on, open the back door to the cat and call him in. He tumbles off the roof of the shed and comes shyly to the step where (if lucky) he gets a saucer of milk and a stroke.

  Jennifer sat back against the wooden settle in a slightly defensive posture; she wore a floral print skirt. I could see her bare legs. She had a sharp patella that gave a fetching inverted-triangle shape to the knee. She was smoking a cigarette and trying not to laugh, but her eyes looked concerned and vulnerable as Robin’s low voice went urgently on.

  She is alive, God damn it, she is alive. She looks so poised, with that womanly concern beginning to override the girlish humour. I will always remember that balanced woman/girl expression in her face. She was twenty-one.

  They left. She was so absorbed by what Robin was saying that she forgot to say goodbye either to me or to her friend Malini who was at the other end of the room. She went through the door, hoisting her brown leather shoulder bag up, the hem of the skirt fluttering for a second as she tripped down the step onto the cobbles.