The Summer Isles

by Ian R. MacLeod

  I was aware by then of the various bus stops and bushes which the lonely men of Lichfield would sometimes frequent. But I also knew about police entrapment, the shaming articles in the Lichfield Mercury that were so often followed by the suicide of those named, the long prison terms, and the beating and truncheon-buggerings that generally accompanied a night in the cells. I feared the loss of my life and my job, but I was also possessed by a deep erotic longing. Of course, I could have tried to honour Francis’s memory by seeking someone I cared about and might eventually have learned to love. Instead, as the twenties progressed from the time of the £500 haddock and wheelbarrow money into Churchill’s empty pontificating, I became a regular weekend visitor to London.

  There, under the County Fire Office arches at Piccadilly, in the urinals at Victoria and South Kensington Stations, in small side streets like Falconbury Mews, and sometimes beneath the summer skies on Hampstead Heath, I would consent to suck off some merchant sailor—or, if there happened to be a gang of them, more likely be repeatedly and painfully buggered. But the bruises and the indignities seemed a necessary part of the process. From Francis, I had taken the turn that many inverts take once love has failed them, which is to remove the holy power from sex by making it a means of humiliation, parody, loss of self, comedy, degradation.

  Thus I spent my middle years. Once, wandering near midnight in an area of East End dockland houses that the police had long given up policing, I crossed the scattered cobbles towards the gaslit clamour of an end-of-terrace pub. The place stank of men and sweat, of cheap beer and piss. Immediately, I felt at home. Just half an hour before, I had been on all fours on a fire-blackened wasteground, half-choking as a fist twisted the back of my collar and a voice hissed fucking queer Jesus God you fucking queer bastards you make me fucking fucking sick whilst, unlubricated, he forced himself into me. It was called the Cottage Spring, and was one of those pubs where people who barely knew each other could congregate and yell. Dry-throated, I made my way towards the bar, but then had to give up as I was pushed and shouldered. There was a sense, I realised, that something was about to happen. A general clearing of throats, a falling of relative silence. It seemed likely to me that some local housewife was about to step onto a couple of pushed-together tables, remove her clothing and do whatever else was expected of her in return for cash in a pint pot. I still hadn’t realised then that there were political pubs, and that the Cottage Spring was a Fascist one.

  Those were restless, anxious nights in the East End. By then, the Poles, White Russians and Lithuanian Jews who’d come to settle here in the War’s aftermath had fled their burnt-out houses. Yet, so obsessed was I with my own sexual pursuits that I hadn’t realised the many other kinds of risk I was taking by wandering these areas. And I was slow to detect, in this humming crowded pub, the palpable air of violence. One man stood up on a table, raised his hands and attempted to speak, then was dragged down and buried in a rain of blows. Someone with a smashed and bleeding nose pushed past me.

  I had stumbled into the vortex of something very dangerous. No one had noticed me when I came in—I was already ragged enough to look the part—but I was sure that they would notice me now if I tried to leave. There was a stir at the pub’s far corner at the end of some oddly light and careless snatch of song: a perceptible shifting of mood. I glanced at the man nearest me and saw that his lips were moving along with those of many others. A whispered name, barely audible at first, but slowly shaping, becoming clearer, was filling the air. He clambered up on the bar, then, did this man they were all calling for. He stood above all the grubby crudely shaved necks in a frayed shirt that was too big for him, a leather waistcoat that was losing its stitching, a pair of moleskin trousers and a thick miner’s belt. His face looked pale and his hands were stained with mud or blood, yet he managed to keep an easy dignity as he balanced there with the dusty rows of glasses stacked behind him. He raised his arms and smiled as he looked down, stilling us. Although he had changed much in the fifteen years since I had last seen him, it was that smile that finally made me certain. I was sure that this man—this John Arthur they were calling for—was in fact Francis Eveleigh.

  But this wasn’t my Francis, I knew that about him straight away, too. He’d changed in all the ways that men do as they get older (although he still looked achingly young). There were fine lines around his eyes. His mouth was thinner. Grey was already frosting his hair. But he’d also changed more fundamentally—it was as if something about him had been lost, or perhaps added or replaced. To this day, I’m still not sure what it is.

  I didn’t wave my arms and cry out, Here, Francis, it’s me, Griff. Your long-lost lover! I didn’t even try to meet his eyes. Instead, I backed slowly towards a large pillar at the far end of the bar as others pushed forward to get nearer him. I hid myself from his gaze.

  They called themselves Saint George’s Men then. Earlier that night they had clearly been involved in some kind of street battle, hence the nail-studded clubs and the spiked banners that leaned by the door. But the whole thing, whilst not perhaps a defeat, had clearly been unsatisfactory. They were still revved up, full of blood and passion.

  When Francis—when John Arthur—climbed up onto that bar and smiled and raised his hands and began to speak in that changed soft Yorkshire accent of his, I already sensed many of the feelings that this whole nation was to become familiar with in the years to come. A kind of open-mouthed yearning, an almost sexual need for reassurance, love, comfort that you sensed only this one man could ever bring. After the confusions and disappointments of their lives, these poor and jobless men were desperate to be told that, yes, it was all quite simple. Alone, without compromise, as nothing more than what they already were, they could seize power. They could change history.

  He’s refined his technique in all the years since, has John Arthur, and I was in no state on that particular night to absorb much of what he said. Nevertheless, his performance was essentially the same as those he’s done since outside 10 Downing Street, from the steps of New Buckingham Palace and on the nation’s television screens. That initial pause. The sharing, self-mocking smile that tells us that he still doesn’t understand why it has to be him. Then a mild joke and a few more gentle comments. At this point, the crowd is relaxing, smiling back at him; at the Cottage Spring, there even began a background murmuring, so that he had to lift his hands again to still them. By then, you’re expecting the whole speech to be nothing more than a calming chat, but suddenly, one of the anecdotes will twist around to some moment of national humiliation. Perhaps the forced scuttling of the fleet at Scarpa Flow in 1919, the refusal of MacDonald’s petition to join the League of Nations, or Ireland. There was always Ireland. John Arthur, more clearly in control now, will gaze sadly at his audience. Truly, his eyes say, if only we could only laugh and play like innocent children… If history could go on without us… But there is work to be done…

  He speaks more in sorrow than in anger, leaving the abuse and the moronic philosophy to his underlings. When his voice rises, it is imperceptible because it always lies in the wake of the passion of his audience. He seems so calm, in fact, so reluctant, that you find yourself filled with a kind of longing, pleading from your heart for him to take this burden from you, to save you and make you whole. You are urging him on.

  Exactly what was said on that night matters anyway as little as his recent speeches at the Olympics, or when he bade farewell to Fordingham’s gloriously ill-fated Everest Expedition. All I know is that, despite my shock and fear, I was moved in the way that good popular music sometimes moves me. And that, when John Arthur had finished speaking and had stepped down from the bar with that characteristic head-movement of his, the mood inside the Cottage Spring had changed. Instead of wanting to burn down the local Shamrock Club or Synagogue—if there were any left in the East End by then—or literally beat the shit out of some poor sodomite, the men had had their violence exorcised. They were happy to drift into the darkness towards wha
tever passed for their homes. For many years, I suppose, I have clung to that image of John Arthur as the queller rather than the creator of violence. It’s part of what has kept me sane.

  I found myself momentarily rooted behind my pillar in this sudden thinning of the crowd. Francis was laughing and at ease beside the bar on which he’d been standing, his hand resting on the shoulder of a plumper, slightly older man who is now our Deputy Prime Minister, George Arkwright, and talking also to his then second-in-command Peter Harrison, who was executed for treason in 1938. He fixed them with that ever-shifting grey gaze of his, and I was surprised, as he stood there, to see just how thin he still was, and to realise how much I still longed to hold him. For some reason, with that extra unnamed sense of being watched that some people have, he suddenly cast his eyes across the fallen tables and chairs in my direction.

  There was nothing for me to do. I just stood there beside that pillar with my hands in the pockets of my grubby coat, looking like the aging mess I knew I was. For a fractional moment, without even time enough for the expression to travel down to the mouth of his lovely, ever-animated face, John Arthur’s eyes bore the trace of a smile, a shade of what could only be recognition. Then he looked away.

  I pass my days in Penrhos Park, floating through sun and history, dizzy with heatstroke and gallons of sweetly-deceptive Kentish wine, circled by the drone of insects, bicycling children, Cumbernald’s whirring cine camera, the roaring, lion-hearted sun. We drive out once to take a picnic amid the ruins of Chepstow Castle, and wandering the town’s streets in search of some present to give the Cumbernalds in place of the money for my upkeep that they keep insisting on refusing, it’s a surprise to see the people going about clothed here. But they’re really not wearing very much after this long summer. Skirts are getting shorter. Slips are showing. The men are redly bare-chested and intriguingly tattooed like Indian braves. The young children look happiest of all as they scatter past the many bookshops, smeared with chocolate, gleefully naked.

  Each night, I read Enid Blyton to Christine and Barbara as they thrash about in their hot beds. We pretend we’re The Famous Five, and argue about who wants to be George and Tim the dog and where the secret passage might be. On Sunday morning, everyone goes down to the on-site church, which turns out to be the lovingly-restored remnant of a now-vanished village with tubby pillars, crusaders in the crypt, herringbone Norman arches and a deliciously obscene Grinning Jenny amid the gargoyles. Voices and the odours of damp stone and lilies fill the air as the people come casually, the women without hats, the men in shorts, and giggling children scamper along the aisles. The woman I saw on the beach by the lake is still breastfeeding her baby. It’s all so timeless, so cherishably ordinary.

  I’m counting the few days of my stay here like a child at Christmas, wishing them longer, wishing away all that must come after. On the last evening, after the bats had replaced the swallows in the deep air and we’d drunk more than ever of the cloudy wine, Eric Cumbernald tries to prod me into saying more about my relationship with John Arthur. Eileen watches on, picking at the ball of her foot. Conscious that I’m getting a chance to earn my keep, I do my best to re-embroider the story that I must have told him before into something believable and attractive. The school. The pit wheels. The quiet lad at the back of the class with his arm raised… For once, I find the tale oddly moving. I wish it were true. Then, perhaps, everything else would be different.

  “Why do you think he’s chosen now, Geoffrey,” Cumbernald wonders, “to see you again?”

  “It’s his fiftieth birthday,” I say. In reality—if there was such a reality—Francis Eveleigh would only be forty six. And his birthday was on the 8th of September, not conveniently on Trafalgar Day. I can remember buying him an embarrassingly over-generous pen and pencil set when he was 19. “Fifty’s about the age when people start to look back at their life. It’s probably the same even for him…”

  Cumbernald nods. Eileen scratches her calf. The trees rustle. I knew John Arthur, and they seem a little bit in awe of me.

  “But it’s not as if…”

  I pause, wondering. For the life of me, I can’t understand why Francis has chosen this particular day when so much else—fireworks displays, street parties, hilltop bonfires and marches up the Mall—will be going on. One of his famous impromptu visits, a gentle knock on the door of my college rooms, would have been so much more in keeping with the myth of John Arthur.

  “It’s not as if I’ll be seeing him for long…”

  I’m there on the itinerary his senior civil servants have sent me amid a list of fifteen other names. Six o-clock, the Gardens, 10 Downing Street, PM meets and greets… Minor dignitaries, unsung party workers. Despite everything else, despite what I’m planning to do, I can’t pretend that it didn’t hurt to be lumped in with all those nobodies.

  “Well…” Cumbernald lights a cigarette, then offers one to Eileen and me with the little coals already glowing. In the thickening darkness, we look like three animated glow worms. “All of us will be with you, Brook. That moment when you and John Arthur shake hands…”

  Eggs and Bacon, Eggs and Bacon…

  Back from Penrhos Park, to Oxford. This time, both Christine and Barbara manage to be copiously sick in the back of the Daimler. Soggy-sleeved, not far off vomiting myself, I leave the Cumbernalds outside the college arch as they mop up their car and their children.

  The days flash by. Golden Week nears. The stones and the fields glow with anticipation. The use of garden hosepipes is banned as rivers and reservoirs sink to levels that, as with floods, storms and snowfalls here in Britain, always seem to be the worst since records began. The fountains are turned off in Trafalgar Square, and the British papers froth and lather about all this ghastly sun, this dreadful good weather. At Oxford, the freshers start to gather. They are pale-faced, blinking with shirt-tails out and their collars itchy from name-tags that mothers and aunts have sewn for them. Hard to believe that in a year or two’s time these same people will be eating breakfast at George’s Cafe in lipstick-smeared evening clothes, were I to live to see them.

  The older University hands, us fellows and dons, doctors and vicars, MAs in abstruse subjects, best-selling authors, sexual molesters, busybodies, surreptitious alcoholics, honourary secretaries, athletes and aesthetes, caw and flap at each other from our roosts in our black gowns. The sun still blazes. The dry trees hold resolutely to their leaves. The punts still move and slow, move and slow beneath Magdalene Bridge before getting stuck in the brown mud and dead reeds of the Cherwell’s thinning current.

  A message comes through the Varsity post from Bracken. His handwriting is appalling, but it’s something about us both tying up science and history before he leaves. His mad idea that you can research something so well that no one else will ever look at it quite appeals to me. After all, that’s exactly what J. D. Beazley did for Greek vases when he wasn’t buggering A. E. Houseman. I also receive a J. Arthur Dixon postcard of York Minster from his sister Ursula, although the Censor’s approval stamp half-obscures the tiny writing.

  I resume my occasional traipses to the Radcliffe. New X-rays reveal that the vast cancerous network that runs through my body, whilst not actually shrinking, has stopped growing. It’s still there, still almost certainly lethal. But, to all intents and purposes, the thing’s biding its time. Waiting, just as I am, whilst the days slip by into the maw of history.

  “Couldn’t help noticing, sir,” Christlow says, preparatory to spitting on his cloth and wiping the small mirror above my bookshelves one morning, “that you’ve had an Invitation.” He actually says, Han Hinvitation on the traditional working class assumption that anything posh has an extra h in it.

  “That’s right.” I turn from the A-Z Map of Central London I’ve been studying and glance through the doorway at the lock on my suitcase. My calendar reads Monday September 30th. Which leaves just twenty-four days. “I suppose you noticed the letters up there.”

  “It was in
the college magazine,” he corrects me, in case I should get the idea that he pokes around in my belongings. “Our President’s Michaelmas letter. Doctor Cumbernald says, quite rightly, that we’ll all be very proud of you on that day, sir. And he adds how much he treasures your close friendship with his family.”

  “That’s nice to hear.”

  “Matter of fact,” Christlow continues, still rubbing the glass as if trying to erase his reflection. “I’ll be off down in London myself for the period of the celebrations. In my own minor small capacity. So we may bump into each other…”

  “I’ll certainly keep an eye out,” I say. But London’s a big place.

  “Convenient, really, that you won’t be needing me anyway when I’m not here. Although cover’s all sorted out with Wisbeach.”

  “Of course.”

  He finally puts down his rag. We find ourselves gazing at each other. I’d never realised before how much Christlow looks like Mussolini: Modernism was probably always his destiny. He clears his throat. He’s probably about to ask me why I’m always hanging around now when he’s cleaning my rooms.

  “Sad,” he says, “wasn’t it? I mean that fellow from that new science college. I always like to think we have so much going for ourselves here in this life. So it’s a double shame if you get my meaning.”

  “What fellow?”

  “The one that shot himself. I’m sorry sir. You mayn’t have heard. But it was in yesterday’s Evening News, and I’m sure I brought you up your usual copy…”

  13

  “WALTER NEVER CLEARED THINGS out,” Ursula Bracken says as we crouch on the rag rug in the parlour and sort through Walter’s old books and magazines and telephone directories, all of which simply need to be thrown away. “The shed’s done of course. Some men from the War Office came yesterday in a big van. They seemed surprised at how much there was in there. But you know what they’re like up in London. They probably thought the work he was doing was theoretical…”