The Summer Isles

by Ian R. MacLeod

  I ungum my eyes and look out at the world, accepting the strange fact of my continued existence. But it remains a slow process even though this beamed ceiling is familiar to me; fraught with a sense of aftermath, a feeling that another dreadful discovery still lurks amid the gaudy wrapping of my life. I am Brook, yes, I am Geoffrey Brook. I am a lecturer, a teacher—in fact, a true Professor of History now. And Oxford, yes, Oxford. I live in these college rooms, just as I have done for many years. Once, as a preference, I used to love men. Now I seem to love no one, although I sense from the warmth of this bed and the play of firelight over this ceiling that I am encased in cottony layers of help, goodwill, money. By twists and turns that my mind cannot yet fully encompass, I have been close to death. I’m still close to it now. It hangs there with the scent of applewood smoke and old stone and Mansion House floor polish and cut flowers; it whispers to me in the thinning darkness. That, I suppose, is the final sour message within this package that I have been unwrapping.

  I feel for my glass, my tablets, which lie a long way beyond the Chinese pheasants cavorting on my eiderdown. That journey accomplished, much water spilt and a few white pellets of bliss lost beneath the counterpane, I lie and wait for something else to happen. I sense that it is early, still dark outside my window, although a strange light seems to wash up from the quad and there is a chill to the air beyond the crackling heat of my fire. A clock ticks somewhere, and a beam creaks in sympathetic rhythm. Somewhere across the rooftops and towers, a bell, distant yet clear, begins to chime the hours. The sound is sharp, bright as freshly cast metal as I try to count each stroke before time gets lost in the bubbling maze of my breath and my heartbeat, the welling memories, the ebb and flow of pain. When silence and equilibrium return, I shuffle inch by inch across the constricting pull of the sheets until my feet slide off the edge of the bed and the top of my body, in compensation, is forced to rise. I am old, I think. I am old. Perhaps that is the last shock I have been waiting for.

  Bunioned, barefoot, trying not to exhaust myself by coughing or retching as I cradle my stiffened and arthritic right hand, I stumble through the cavorting firelight towards my window. Its cold reaches out to me, dribbling fingers of condensation as I wipe the mullions with the sleeve of my nightshirt to gaze at the strange whiteness that lies framed and glowing. It has snowed again in the night. Of course. This is Oxford and it has snowed again in the night. More paths to be cleared. More slush in the alleys. Gargoyles with icicles dangling like dewdrops from their fingers and noses… I have to close my eyes, then, as a twinge of pain from my right hand and the rawness in my throat sets off another ugly memory.

  I remember everything now. I am here. I am alive. This is the last day of the year of 1940. John Arthur is dead.

  I’m still leaning there, still staring from my college window in a drugged half-doze, when the breakfast trolley rumbles towards my door. The knock sounds hesitant, mistimed, yet still I’m somehow expecting Christlow as the handle turns and the chill outer air touches my skin. But it’s Allenby. Of course. It’s Allenby.

  “Good morning, Professor. Terrible lot of snow in the night as you’ve doubtless seen. Got a nice fire going for you earlier whilst you were still asleep. You’d like to eat at the little table, perhaps, seeing as you’re up?”

  Allenby hovers, tray in his hand, steam rising in veils from the sausages and grilled tomatoes, diamonds of fat glinting on the fried bread. He’s young and good-looking, is Allenby. He says all the right things, and his bacon isn’t greasy like Christlow’s; he doesn’t even wear an EA badge. But he still seems like a barely competent actor, forever trying and failing to find the essential meaning of his role.

  I open my mouth to speak, and ruminate for a while on the phlegm that fills it. “On the table,” my voice squeaks, “would be fine…”

  Allenby slips my padded silk dressing gown from the hook near the fire where it’s been warming. His breath is cool on my neck as he helps me into it; like the air from that doorway, like the sense of the snow. He bends down to sheathe my feet in lambskin slippers, and he ties my sash at the front. For a moment, I’m five years old again; I’m half expecting him to produce a handkerchief and tell me to spit so he can rub the grime from my face. More than ever, I miss Christlow. And my mother. There are so many people to miss.

  “You’ve got that appointment, by the way.”

  “Appointment?”

  “Twelve o-clock at the George Hotel. Miss Flood is coming up from your publishers in London.”

  Allenby scrapes back my chair and steers me down. He flutters a napkin, tucks it beneath my chin, then begins to cut up my food. The bloodied eye of the tomato stares at me. He pats my back gently as I begin to cough, pours out the tea and lifts it to my lips—sweet, milky, barely warm—for me to swallow.

  “No hurry, Professor,” he says. But he hovers over me anyway, and makes sure that I eat it all up, just as P. Wiseman has instructed him to do. Afterwards, as he dabs at my chin and whisks the tray away, I picture him with one of those glass jars, holding my cock with snowy fingers as he slips it into the aperture; massaging it, even, to erectness. For Allenby, nothing would be too much trouble. Then he lays the morning’s papers out before me. The New Cross. The Daily Sketch. The Express. The Oxford Chronicle. The Times. Sheet upon warm rustling sheet that smell so crisply of ink and freshly-felled wood that I wonder if he irons them for me, the way butlers do in country houses.

  My vision fills and blurs with newsprint. All those words, all that history in the making. I’m tempted to ask Allenby to take the damn things away, but I know that that would seem ungrateful. And there’s something—I remember now—something that still piques my interest, although as yet I can’t quite recall what. But, after all, as I have to keep reminding myself, I’m still here. I’m still alive. So there must be something…

  I reach out towards the table, using my right hand like a scoop to push the Times into the better grip of my left. Allenby watches, good servant that he is, as I struggle to unfold it, knowing that he mustn’t always help his feeble master. The Times’s front page seems odd now that they’ve dropped the columns of classifieds. This headline, in fact, looks even bigger than usual.

  PM ANNOUNCES IMMEDIATE INQUIRY INTO SCANDAL OF JEWISH HOMELAND. RAF AIRLIFTS AID. The photograph beneath shows a group of people huddled outside a rough hut. They are skeleton-thin, clothed in rags. The image belongs outside history—outside time—but I still raise it closer to my eyes, so close that the faces become smudged outlines, then collections of printed dots. The hope remains that I might recognise…

  My college Rover slides through the slush along High, Catte and Broad. The air is blue with frost, the cyclists are tentative, and the Radcliffe and the Sheldonian look like iced Christmas cakes. We park at the corner of George Street and the Cornmarket, where my driver helps me out onto the oystered ice of the pavement, and then through the entrance-way and up the brass-rodded staircase.

  Miss Flood is already perched on a stool in the Ivy Restaurant’s outer bar. The colours that the snow and the cold have bleached out of Oxford all seem to have fled into these rooms. The ceilings are pink, the walls lean with gilded mirrors, there are flowers at every table. As is often the case now, rumour of my arrival has spread before me, and I must wait and smile and raise a trembling hand in acknowledgement as the main dining room erupts into applause. But the moment isn’t over-played; British through-and-through, and mostly upper-middle class, the other lunchtime diners soon settle back to their meals and their conversations as I shuffle with Miss Flood towards the best table by the window where the head waiter is on hand to serve us.

  I settle down. Miss Flood settles opposite me. Her black hair is close-cropped, high at the forehead, framing her pale, red-lipped face like a television screen. Her bracelets slide and jangle as she sips her wine and her fingers are restless as she picks at a bread roll, missing the chains of cigarettes that, since I succumbed to a coughing fit at one of our early meeting
s, she refrains from smoking in my presence.

  “I was speaking to Publicity only yesterday, Geoffrey,” she tells me. “And you’re definitely the flagship of our spring list.” Her legs slide as she crosses them.

  “That’s good to know…” I wheeze. “I received your letter with the, er, galleys only the day before yesterday.”

  “Try not to think of them as galleys or proofs, Geoffrey. Think of them as…” Miss Flood waves her hand, clutching an imaginary cigarette. “Complimentary reading material.” She smiles. “We’ll do all the donkey work. The re-checking. The few minor corrections. In fact, it’s mostly already done. We’re well on schedule to get it to the printers by late January. So you really needn’t worry…”

  I nod. What she means is that she wants to keep me well away from the tricky business of correcting my own scholarly inaccuracies, my pointless circumlocutions, my ungrammatical turns of phrase.

  The first course arrives. I prod at the shrimps, bits of lettuce and herb without eating whilst Miss Flood, thin as she is, does the same. Then she delves into her briefcase and shows me a glossy mock-up of the dustjacket. The first print run is 30,000, with the presses ready to roll with another 30,000 after that. They’re mass market, these people, and have already generated far more interest in these warmed-over goods than the Oxford University Press could ever have done. Amazingly, they’ve stuck with my suggestion for the cover of an un-specific but undoubtedly English landscape of fields, woods, farmhouses and distant church towers, with an island-dotted sea on the horizon. And I, Geoffrey Brook, seated in the back-flap photo in my college rooms—you can just make out the Stubbs and Tort on my bookshelves behind me—seem almost healthy, suitably scholarly. You’ll never know from the look of this book that Miss Flood’s other major authors write do-it-yourselfs and who-dunnits. I really can’t complain.

  “As to the title,” she says, tapping the celluloid with a scarlet fingernail, “you’ll see that we’ve stuck with our original suggestion…” She waits a moment, gauging my reaction.

  FIGURES OF HISTORY

  GEOFFREY BROOK

  “…That, er, other suggestion that you made. Good though it was, I’m afraid that it didn’t quite click with our marketing people. Fingers of History was too close, if you see what I mean. There are a lot of people out there who still remember your work for the Daily Sketch, and who’d love to have a hardback copy of your best articles…”

  “This isn’t the book I wanted, you know. That, I burnt. This is just…” But I’m lost for words.

  “What? Oh, and we’ve finally cleared up the copyright business. Being who you are, Geoffrey, I really didn’t think that they’d want to resist.”

  I gather from the look of the bottle, my empty glass, the rosy warmth that has settled over my skin, that I’ve been drinking the wine. My mouth now tastes of metal—brass, pewter, or some other tarnished alloy—rather than soil.

  “We’ll need to hurry you,” Miss Flood says more quietly, slipping in the words when she imagines that I’m not really conscious as I gaze out of the window at the snow-softened spires, domes, towers of this city. Balliol, All Souls, Queens… The litany of my dreams. “If we’re going to squeeze in that new extra chapter you were talking about.”

  “I’ve decided,” I squeak, “what I want to write about.”

  “Oh? That’s… Good.” Miss Flood nods semi-eagerly, balancing her jaw in her hand.

  “It fits in with research I was doing into the history of the Jews.” Jews… My voice sounds even lighter than ever as I end the sentence, but I’m sure her blue irises contract at the mention of the word, and that the restaurant conversations fade into shocked hush all around me. “What with all the fuss there’s been in the papers these last few days about their mis-treatment in the Highlands…” Something sticks and crunches in my throat. “I was thinking…” I cover my mouth with a handkerchief and cough lightly, carefully, to clear it. “Thinking that the time is right to remind people…”

  “Geoffrey, that sounds fascinating.” Pause. “Although everyone’s hungry to hear more about your links with John Arthur.”

  “Of course.”

  “Not that I want to steer you in any particular direction.”

  “There’d be no problem with censorship, then, if I was to write about the mistreatment of the Jews?”

  Miss Flood smiles at me. “What problem could there be, when it’s on the front pages of the newspapers?”

  “You tell me.”

  “In my experience, Geoffrey, the only barrier you’re likely to come up against is what people want to know about. All the rest of it, the D Notices, the Truth Guidelines, our in-house Censorship Liaison Office, it’s all…” Her bracelets jangle again as she waves her fingers to indicate something far off, barely tangible, quite beyond all the realms of normal experience.

  “And what about the writers who’ve been pulped, burned, disappeared? You must have had some on your lists.”

  Miss Flood’s nails dance amid the cutlery, bright as blood. “Books always get pulped and burned, I’m afraid, Geoffrey. It’s what happens when they don’t sell. But I’m sure we won’t have that problem with Figures of History.”

  My eyes are watering. My nose is starting to run. I fumble to find a clean corner of my handkerchief as I begin to cough. The sense of all Oxford—the chime of bells and the clatter of lunchtime cutlery, the waitresses’ whispering and the taste of the wine and the smell of the cooking and clangour in the kitchens and whispers in ancient corridors and the scent of old stone and fresh snow—fractures around me.

  Geoffrey Brook was born in Staffordshire, Lichfield, in 1875. He has devoted most of his life to teaching history, firstly in and around the City of his birth, where he influenced the young John Arthur, and later in his life at one of the most distinguished and ancient Oxford colleges…

  Running my pen through the word ancient, scratching a question mark over distinguished, I close the file of publicity material as my college Rover hisses slowly along High. Already, it’s getting dark and the lights in the shop windows are glowing. Prices have gone up a lot recently—taxes, as well—and you’d think that people would have had enough of shopping after the frenzied weeks before Christmas. But there they all are, wading through the slush and the grubby snowdrifts and the dangerous ice with their bags and their bargains and their weary children. The windows offer BIGGEST EVER SALE and HUGE POST-XMAS DISCOUNTS, even though tinsel still sags at the windows and it won’t be twelfth night until Sunday.

  My college tower looms and the chill air bites as I dismiss my driver and wade unaided across the snowy quad through clouds of dizziness and my own breath. Nurse Cunningham, who comes daily, is waiting for me up in my rooms. Her bag is open, and her rosy cheeks, her bare arms, her needles and her vials, all glisten welcomingly in the firelight. I fight her off as she begins to disrobe me.

  “A problem, is there, Professor Brook?” Her breath smells of onions. “Something else you want?”

  Wheezing, I slump down into one of the leather armchairs beside the fire as she bears my telephone across to me. A new privilege, it lies heavy in my lap as I stab and turn, stab and turn, dialing out a number from the back page of the Times. Relays click and electricity pulses in Oxford’s new automatic exchange as, somewhere in London, a telephone begins to ring. I gaze at the empty armchair opposite, willing all the smoky ghosts of Oxfords past to give me hope, strength. I try to picture a bustling newsroom filled with the same clean purposeful smell as the papers Allenby brings me. An eager staff reporter, his sleeves rolled up and clasped by a pair of elasticated metal bands, pauses in a conversation and grabs the jangling receiver. And yes, yes, he knows all about the sad mess in the Highlands. He’s just back down himself on the overnight sleeper. And a list of names—the Jews who have survived? He has a copy. Not, of course, for public consumption, but seeing as who I am, he’ll check it now whilst we’re talking…

  But today’s New Year’s Eve, and there are no ne
wspapers tomorrow. The telephone just rings and rings.

  Nurse Cunningham performs her duties. She makes notes. She pricks me with fountaining needles. Sometimes, also, there are coils of brown rubber and white medical steel. But, once the needles have gone in, I find it hard to keep track of what she’s doing.

  “I’ll make sure Mr. Allenby looks in at about six so you’ve plenty of time to get dressed.” Her face looms as I’m tucked back into my bed, mummified by blankets. “Oh, and here’s the Evening News…”

  Again, that smell of newsprint. Beneath it, and Nurse Cunningham’s clean oniony odour as she leans close, beneath the wood smoke from the fire and the complex aromas of ancient lives lived amid ancient stone and the reek of disinfectant, the air is faintly, pervasively, soiled.

  “Bad news about the Bypass, isn’t it, Professor?”

  “The what?”

  But Nurse Cunningham’s already fading, and I’m alone with my room, my body, my bed, my pains, my medications. My good left hand struggles with the paper. For a few moments, I manage to half-lift it as I raise my head from the pillow.

  NO TO NEW OXFORD BYPASS

  GOVERNMENT CUTS BACK ON ROAD FUNDING

  The paper slides from my hands and my head drops back, spinning. I wonder about Ursula Bracken, and if she ever made it safely to America. At moments like this when the entire world seems fluid and bends to my will, I can still nurture mild, pleasant dreams, such as that of receiving a postcard from her—a postcard from some pretty, unspoiled place in empty nowhere where you can ride for days and the mountains will follow you in the distance, and there is no history. It would have been nice to be able to tell her that Oxford will be spared its bypass for another few years after all, although the city centre will doubtless become ever more congested as a result. So there you are, Ursula. Not every effort is in vain.

  I smile as the fire crackles and warm tentacles of oblivion entwine me. Then something spasms in my chest and the same empty panic that I feel when I awaken pours through me. My sweat chills. My heart seems to shrivel. Again, the windows are bursting, a car engine is roaring.