Outside, Oxford smells dizzily of the sour gas of its overstretched drains on this warm late afternoon, and is busier than ever with people up from London, people in from the suburbs, people down from the country. Everything about the city seems hectic and overstuffed today. The wares of the shops are tumbling out into the street, the pubs are bustling, pigeons are pecking at pools of sick, there’s a queue for pink-iced “Midsummer’s Eve Cakes” outside Boffins Bakery at Carfax, and everywhere there are too many cars.
I pause for a pint of Hall’s Gold Medal as I pass the Bear. The back bar, which used to resound to the click of dominoes and the splat of spittle on sawdust, has been carpeted and is filled with the shrieking of female voices. “We’re getting tiddled,” one of them explains. I sup my beer and knock back a couple of tablets, sitting close enough to the juke-box to listen to the songs I’ve put my penny in for over this jolly racket. April Showers. Mad About The Boy. Waiting For Nowhere… But today, their easy sentiment is lost on me. People meet, they fall in love, they marry, they have children: then their lives are wrenched apart because of some accident of birth or history. They disappear, and no one even seems to notice. Even I—I just sit here and drink my beer and nurse my pains and my self-pity when I should be standing on the table and yelling. What, I wonder, has happened to the world? Events used to go so predictably. Britain makes a treaty with Germany; France makes one with Spain. Portugal secures independence from Castile; Henry the Navigator pushes down to explore the coast of North Africa; envious Spain joins in; soon, the world is circumnavigated, America discovered. Cause and effect. But now, history consists of random twists and turns. A tiny earthquake in Bogota causes a gas leak in Ealing. The assassination of an Archduke in some obscure Balkan city brings about a World War.
The music ends and I stumble outside. The air feels stuffy this evening as my heart starts to pound and cold needles stab at my chest and hands. I shake out a third dose of tablets from my bakelite box and swallow them dry. When a 159 bus slows and stops beside me along New Road, I climb aboard it on impulse, drawn by its purposeful thrum, the stale scent of cigarette smoke and summer bodies, the fact that it will take me to somewhere that isn’t Oxford.
I share my journey down the Eynsham Road on this Midsummer’s Eve with two middle-aged chain-smoking Spanish tourists. They squeak and point at this and that from their seats on the top deck; fairy candles glowing from windows, sprigs of rowan over doors, the start of Midsummer bonfires in the parks, lamp-lit picnics, children sleeping out in tents in their front gardens. A Bus Inspector gets on at Botley and comes wandering along the aisles with a swaying sailor’s gate, asking to see passes and identity cards, enquiring about the purpose of our journeys: an old English custom that the Spaniards greet with excitement, although I’m sure it’s much the same for them at home under Franco. I tell him that I’m simply passing the time, and feel absurdly grateful when he nods and moves on.
By Adderly, the bus is empty and I head into evening across the village green through rolls of bonfire smoke. A promising-looking path of trodden grass runs across a field where the cattle stare at me in amazement, then come chuffing up with their long eager faces, their wet noses. I clamber over a barbed-wire topped gate where a wooden footpath sign points through a high expanse of thistles. Scratched, lost, tired, I finally reach a brick wall at the end of an alarmingly dark wood, pushing through ferns and foxgloves until I come to a door, once green, dotted with medieval-looking iron studs. When I give the iron handle a shove, the door creaks open.
Beyond, there is a wide lawn—more of a parkland, really—mottled with horse chestnuts that have had their undersides neatly nibbled flat by deer. A long redbrick house with many tall spiral chimneys glows orange in the sunset beside the long shadows of marquees, deckchairs, awnings. A scatter of croquet players look up from their game and give me a cheery wave.
I find a deckchair and sit down to catch my breath as white doves clatter over the topiary yews and gathering rows of Rovers, Jaguars, Bristols, and perky little MGs with their windscreens down, sweep in around the house’s moat of gravel, threading headlights into a golden mesh as men and women emerge fresh-minted in their evening clothes and the sky turns an ever-deeper blue. Lanterns are set out by the dark-suited servants and their flames flash in the windows and lick the twirl of limbs as sleeves are rolled up, ties discarded, music pulses and the people begin to dance. A knife of pain digs into my left shoulder. Nobody seems surprised to see me here. I take another tablet.
A girl with the kohled eyes of an Egyptian priestess twirls in front of me bearing a tray of half-risen cakes, on which the words EAT ME have been picked out in raisins. I grab one and take a bite, then another, wondering if I’m going to grow big or small as she skips off, giggling. The music wafting from loudspeakers in the trees is Glen Miller, Duke Ellington. Slick, sophisticated; decadent white-nigger American. A solo clarinet sounds over creamy pillows of trombone and sax, almost too beautiful for words. Me and cheap music.
Stumbling up from my deckchair, my mouth so dry and swollen now that I can barely swallow my next tablet, I grab a passing glass of fizzy English wine and tip it back. Hands brush against me, sequinned handbags flutter and cigarette holders jostle like lances as crimson lips smile in surprise and press close to mine. Here, we are all friends, acquaintances. I slump on a wall beside a lake where a rowing boat floats upturned amid the quivering stars. Time passes as water laps and the trees about me fizz and whisper, speckled with lanterns, stars, all the twinkling fey wonders of this Midsummer Eve.
Wondering about my prospects of getting back to Oxford, I try to focus on my watch. But there’s no one about as I ramble up to the side of the house where ivy looms dark in the moon’s shadow against the high walls and air heavy with the perfume of sea lavender carries the thump of distant music, the crash of broken glass, moans of passion, shrieks of laughter.
I walk across the soft lawns where a few crinkled white balloons float like weary ghosts of Midsummer’s past and a stone lion squats, its mouth smeared with either blood or lipstick. A fox darts between the long hedges, and he and I stare at each other for a moment before we go on about the strange business of our separate lives. The road beyond the house’s open gates is grey, a river of mist, and the sky, which never truly darkened, is brightening already as I walk between long lines of cob-web silvered elms which might lead back towards Oxford.
Soon, all the scents and sounds of morning start to rise, but still I have glance back to the deeper darkness that hangs somewhere along the glimmering road behind me. Once, I even stop and call out, sensing a figure, a shape. In fact, I almost urge it to come.
7
LOADED WITH SHOPPERS, BICYCLES, dogs, and hung-over students going down, the early-evening local train calls at every imaginable halt between Oxford and Rugby. There are stations beside canal bridges. Stations in farmyards. Stations piled with milk churns and mail bags in the middle of pretty nowhere. And posters, posters. Posters of the seaside and posters of the country. Posters of towns. THE LAKE DISTRICT FOR REST AND QUIET IMAGININGS. TAKE THE SUNDAY SPECIAL AND VISIT LAMBOURN DOWNS, where a smiling family are picnicking on a swathe of green as coloured kites dance against a cloudless sky.
Then finally Rugby, where I change platforms and sit on the edge of a handcart until, gun-blue, its streamlined snout oozing steam and the sense of far-away before flashing endless carriages, the Sir Galahad overnight Euston-to-Glasgow pulls in. A porter helps me struggle with my old suitcase as the Tannoy barks incomprehensibly. I find my reserved seat—First Class; G Brooke in copper-plate. This, I tell myself as I settle back and the whole station starts to slide by, must be a good omen. To have back, with all these other memories, my original name.
It’s still early. We are still far south. The less seasoned travellers in this carriage cross and uncross their legs, press fingers to their mouths, pick at the white lace that covers their armrests. I recognise two probable civil servants, a likely academic, the dodd
ery Lord of some Scottish estate, a honeymoon couple—and another couple who pay such little attention to each other that their journey has to be sweetly illicit. At the carriage’s far corner, in an arbour so bedecked with roses that there was hardly a need to mark it Reserved, sit four senior officers of the KSG, the Knights Of Saint George. They steeple their well-manicured hands and talk in low voices. The fact of their power is so strong that it is hard to take in the specific details of their appearance, that one is red-haired and young, that another is bald and sports a moustache. They all somehow just look sleek, plump—seals basking on a sunny shore, washed by the warm waves of the future.
They order first for dinner whilst tablecloths are laid in the dining car next door, and I notice as we clatter over points how the other passengers strain to hear what they have selected from the menu so that they can choose the same themselves. We flash through Bedworth, Nuneaton towards the whole grey mess of eastern Birmingham and then on into the cattle-gazing anonymity of the Midlands countryside.
After sherry, we move cars and sit down to face cutlery that lies clean as a surgeon’s implements. I flap out my napkin—the roaring embroidered GWR loin now holds a Modernist cross in its paws—and I smile at the man opposite me. We have nothing left to say once we have commented on the lovely weather. This, after all, is still Britain. In many ways, little has changed since Francis Eveleigh and I went to Scotland nearly thirty years ago.
I dip my spoon into the gently slopping asparagus soup and break open a bread roll. I smoke a cigarette between courses. We pause at Crewe. The pork is excellent, the roast potatoes are crisp little envelopes of warmth. Even my sense of taste seems to have come back to me. No ash, no dead leaves, and the strawberries for pudding taste exactly like strawberries, the clotted Devon cream is just like clotted Devon cream. Feeling faintly sick, faintly elated, I finish my coffee and Glenlivet as Manchester becomes Bolton and then Preston without any obvious change. I smile to my companion and sway past the tables. Letting down the strap and leaning out of a window between carriages, I can see the train stretching far ahead of me along the bends. The towns become grimmer for a while as the hills grow wilder, before suddenly transforming into pale stone and whitewash where packhorse bridges straddle silver streams in the prickling fairy dust of evening. The waiter taps my shoulder, asking if I would like another Glenlivet. He has it ready on the tray he’s holding, along with iced water in a GWR jug, individually-wrapped GWR chocolate, a GWR matchbox, a choice of GWR cigarettes.
All of this, by my standards, is a wild extravagance. Despite all of John Arthur’s promises, going First Class has not become any cheaper. But, with the decent salary I’m paid, the easy frugality of college life, the money I have put away from the sale of my mother’s house—and the fact that this will be the last holiday I ever take—I can easily afford it.
At ten, passing through the suburbs of Lancaster, I make my way along the gently rocking corridors towards the sleeping carriage. My name is on the door; G. Brooke. Another luxury this, to have booked both the upper and lower bunks in a compartment. To have had some stranger above me—even a First Class one—the breathing weight of him sagging down over my memories, would have been unbearable. We went Second Class all those years ago, did Francis and I, and I wonder as I slide my door shut and run my hands along the brass fittings, the polished marquetry, if these differences will break the precious burden of renewed love that I feel myself carrying. Yet enough is the same—from the bleached smell of the towels, the dire warnings about pulling the communication cord, the whole muffled weight of this hurrying train…
Of course, my money paid for our trip; Francis never had enough of his own. At the time we set out on our holiday together, everything was still a matter of friendship. Not that I didn’t I love him, adore him for his looks, his mind. But this was in 1914, and I was 34 by then already, and Francis was just 19. The whole idea of physical love, cheap sham that I was sure it was, made the thought of such contact unbearable.
Francis, after all, had many female friends back in his left wing set in Lichfield. And they, being no more blind to him than I was, gathered around him after meetings in cooing groups. The talk then was of libertarianism, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Futurism, Lawrence and Proust… Even in Lichfield, and with me elevated by then to the giddy heights of Assistant Junior Master at Friary School and a house-owner by inheritance, everything was supposed to be modern—although there was no capital M to the word then. Watching his group from outside like some explorer encountering a new tribe, I had no idea what most of it meant. Francis seemed to have no special association with any of these women, and he always left the meetings that I found myself attending in the back rooms of pubs and hotels (as the church halls wouldn’t have us) alone. But it was hard to believe, amid all the talk, that he wasn’t privately stroking the breasts and limbs of those lovely creatures.
It was an odd situation, to begin with, that I found myself in. I had never had much interest in current affairs. Now that I was at a respectable school, teaching virtually nothing but proper history, I had allowed almost every other interest in life to drop away. But I still entertained thoughts of writing my book. And, then as now, the task proved easier in the imagining than it did in reality. After many botched attempts, I began to wonder if something else was missing. History, after all, is ever-changing. It must always be viewed from the perspective of the present. And what did I know, in my dusty home, with my bookish celibacy, of such a thing?
I decided to widen my horizons. Cycling, golf, the Doctor Johnson Society, the Town Hall Chess Club—all of these I tried. I even went through a dogged period of walking up the street each evening to share the supposedly convivial warmth of the Bald Buck up by the Tamworth crossroads. But none of this held any real interest for me; and the sudden chilling of atmosphere in the snug each time I set foot in it made me begin to wonder if I truly wasn’t odd—queer, even—in a way that people instantly noticed.
So I settled instead for something that I would never have done if I had still been under the wing of my avowedly Tory mother. I joined the local Fabian Society. I was still as neutral in politics as I imagined myself to have become sexually, yet in my efforts to take myself seriously as a historian, I decided that politics probably lay at the cutting edge of current affairs—and that, if one was to become involved instead of being a mere spectator, it was necessary to back a particular horse. Quite laughably as events turned out, I decided to go with the socialist left.
It was probably a good job that I dipped my toe into the waters of political debate without any high ideals. In the face of batty majors’ wives, social inadequates, gritty rock cakes at ghastly tea mornings, badly-organised day trips, mumbled speeches and endless back-biting, they would soon have been banished. Still, I can see with hindsight that it was an interesting time for British left wing politics—one at which it busily sowing the seeds of its own annihilation.
The younger and generally rowdier element (of which Francis was undoubtedly a member) were busily undermining the cosy nineteenth century libertarianism of William Morris—the Morris, that is, who existed before he was re-invented by Modernism. Francis and his crowd only hung around the fringes of the Fabians so that they could recruit disaffected members for their own newer organisations such as the SDF and the ILP. They believed in strikes, direct action, in attempting to persuade the trades unions, who could generally be bothered only with furthering their own narrow interests, to become openly political. A night in the cells was regarded as a badge of honour, and people who could claim to have helped in the miners strike at Tonypandy, even if they were almost certainly liars, were regarded as secular saints.
It was all naively innocent. Francis worked six days a week behind the counter of the John Menzies bookstall at Lichfield station, lived in digs, lifted his little finger when he drank tea, was secretive about his background, and spoke with a suspiciously upper-class accent. The closest he came to the working classes was in his insi
stence in drinking at the Scales on Market Street—a tanners pub—where the coolness of his welcome made mine at the Bald Buck seem positively effulgent. But at least he had dreams of a better world. His failing, and that of the left wing as a whole, was that he loved to argue, and hated to think that he was in the majority about anything. The only political fight I ever saw break out was between the chairman and the secretary of the same organisation.
Still, I was drawn to Francis and his ilk. I liked their youth, their enthusiasm and, frankly, their good looks. They, in turn, treated me, at 34, as a kind of elder statesman. They deferred to my views, they sought my wisdom on what they saw as the historical perspective. For a few fine months, I could pretend that I was both young and old at the same time.
Francis and I began meeting occasionally after he had finished work at the station bookshop. We would take quiet walks. We would choose neutral ground. There was, when he and I were alone, a lot less of the usual posturing. But soon, the prospect of a war in Europe began to dominate our conversation. Francis, although supposedly a pacifist, was fascinated by the idea of conflict. He was young, after all; defiantly combative. He probably thought that a war was his best chance of becoming one of the common people. He even saw it as the touch-paper for revolution. But I think that the truth is more straightforward. Francis, like so many other young men of his generation, was simply spoiling for a fight.
In a white shirt, his collar loose, he would walk ahead of me as we wandered at evening along misty canal towpaths and across muddy spring fields. His eyes were large and deep and blue. His lips were full. His thick black eyebrows almost met in the middle. His body was slight and bony, yet filled with energy. He grew his hair a little longer than was then fashionable, and I loved to watch, as he walked ahead of me, the soft nest of curls that tapered towards the back of his neck.
The Summer Isles Page 8
