by WALL, ALAN
Uniquely in Oxford at the time, our Master insisted on meeting every undergraduate individually each year. This interview was dreaded by all the students and I soon found out why.
His room was at the far side of the college from mine. I stood outside at the appointed hour in my gown. Mortarboards, the invitation had stated, were not required. When the fellow before me came out he raised his eyes theatrically to heaven, and then the voice of authority sounded from within.
‘Come!’ it said, and I did.
Sir Nigel, so I had been told, was once an eminent surgeon at the Radcliffe, but had long since been retired from his post there. One would occasionally see him hobbling about the quad with a pair of walking sticks. Both hips had been replaced, apparently, though it looked as though the operations might have been left until a little late in the day. He had developed a most striking syncopated gait to compensate for his disability. There was a hint of Kenneth More playing Douglas Bader in Reach for the Sky, but Sir Nigel invested his movements with such manic energy that it seemed for all the world as though a biped were trying to return to its quadruped status, heaving its way backwards through evolution.
Now he was horizontal on a chaise longue, smoking an untipped cigarette. The blue smoke rose vertically from his mouth. A few sheets of typescript lay on his chest.
‘Sit down, Tallnow.’
‘Tallow, sir.’ I sat on the one chair provided before him, positioned at ninety degrees to the line of his flattened body. He did not look up.
‘What do you think of the moon, Tallnow?’
‘The moon, sir? In what respect?’ Not long before we had all been sitting in the television room watching Neil Armstrong kicking up moondust. It had been a great step for mankind, but merely a soft-shoe shuffle, short of gravity, for a man. Could this be what he was on about?
‘You must have some view of the moon, surely. You study literature, after all.’
‘History, sir.’
‘And what does moon rhyme with?’
‘Spoon?’ I said hesitantly. He raised himself up on one elbow and gave me a stern look. His blue eyes were unnervingly precise beneath what was left of his grey hair. His head seemed too big for his body, but perhaps he’d been shrivelling.
‘It might be a little more apt to remember the first syllable of lunacy, surely? Do you want a cigarette?’ Before I had a chance to answer he continued, as he lit up once more: ‘Well, you can’t have one, even if you do. I’m an old man.’ The smoke steamed out of his nostrils with sudden force as he laid his head back so that he was gazing at the ceiling. ‘For me it doesn’t matter. But for someone of your age it’s ridiculous. Might as well offer you a gun and six bullets. It’d be cheaper, even if you weren’t a very good shot. Having any problems here, Tallnow?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Enjoying it?’
‘Not really.’
‘Good. It’s not meant to be a picnic after all. Off you go then.’
As I left, his voice called, ‘Come!’ and another forlorn figure outside the door stepped inside for his shilling’s worth of elder’s wisdom. The next day I sat in the bay window of my tutor’s room overlooking the old quad.
‘Had your interview with Sir Nigel yesterday, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he called me Tallnow.’
‘Surprised he got so close. What did you talk about?’
‘He talked about the moon.’
‘The moon?’
‘Don’t ask me why,’ I said, ‘it was all a bit strange.’
My tutor ran his finger along the spines of a ragged line of books.
‘Sir Nigel is as mad as a hatter and always has been. Completely bloody barking. It’s not age, by the way, in case you wondered – he was exactly the same when he was younger, even when he was sawbones-in-chief down the road. Don’t think I’d have much fancied seeing him bearing down on me with sharpened blades. Anyway, don’t blame me, Sean. I nominated Vera Lynn.’
The truth is that I didn’t play much part in the social life of Oxford. The first symptoms of my migraine had started to manifest themselves intermittently as an extreme aversion to noise, though the embryo eyes of that grub within me were then no more than tiny freckles. Beige, were they? I didn’t understand them then; I’d try from time to time to drown them, but it didn’t work. And I was continually asking the students around me, however politely, to turn down their stereos. The bells of Carfax and Big Tom could sometimes have me wailing. Once, I had to leave a film by Jean-Luc Godard, in which late capitalism was represented by speeding French cars burning up the world’s resources on their way to a fatal accident, only because of its clamorous soundtrack. Anything much louder than the turning of pages often had me wincing. The sound of day-to-day events, even on the unspectacular streets of Oxford, could sometimes force me back into my room. So the noise of Dan’s arrival one evening was momentarily deafening, particularly since I’d no idea he was coming.
My room was one of the old ones. The electric-bar fire set into the wall was rusty, the curtains had long before lost anything but a fading memory of their colour, the carpet was threadbare and the wardrobe would hardly have qualified as one of my grandfather’s binners. Daniel looked around him and clicked his tongue.
‘So you call this Oxford, eh? Well, my mother wouldn’t put up with it, I’ll tell you that much. No, if this is what you get with an ancient university, then Jacqueline Pagett would want to know why she’d not been delivered a new one.’
Half an hour later, Dan was rolling a joint on a book of Elizabethan street maps I’d taken from the library; he appeared to do it with considerable expertise.
‘Music, Sean, let us have music.’
In the corner cupboard I kept my record player. It was a dubious acquisition. Only half the size of a long-playing record – you had to perch the disc carefully on its tiny rubber turntable – it was made of blue plastic and ran on batteries. It couldn’t really compete with the stereos in the rooms around me and it seldom saw the light of day. Dan looked at it, then he looked at me, shook his head slowly and smiled. I gave him the choice of my records: Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson and Django Reinhardt. He chose Satchmo. And the hilarity and merriment in those early recordings soon transferred themselves through the smoke into our minds.
By the time we left college for the restaurant, our two mouths were shaped into the same permanent smile.
‘Discovered owt of any use down ’ere yet then, young Tallow?’ Dan said, in his Yorkshire mill-owner’s voice.
‘They’ve renamed me Tallnow. What did you have in mind?’
‘Well, Mother would like a dust-free grave and, let me see, a dog that doesn’t shit. Aye, that’d be grand, if you could invent a dog that doesn’t shit.’
‘I think that’s next term.’
‘Non-faecal canine manufacture, that’s where the serious money’s to be made. You’ve got to look forward, young Sean, not back all the time. When you’re my age you can start peering over the chip on your shoulder.’
As we went into the courtyard of the restaurant, I pointed to Number 3 Cornmarket.
‘That’s where Shakespeare stayed when he travelled up to Stratford from London.’
‘And what did he get up to, on those long Elizabethan evenings?’
‘Depends who you believe.’
‘Give me a chance to believe someone, at least.’
‘It used to be a tavern, owned by a man called John Davenant. Had an extremely beautiful wife called Jennet. One of her boys was William Davenant the poet, who in later life, and after a drop or two, had a way of hinting that his gift hadn’t suddenly sprouted from nowhere.’
‘He was suggesting that the Bard had rogered his old mum in the attic and got her with child, is that the idea?’
‘That’s the idea.’
‘Do you believe that?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not even sure I know who the Bard is. Not necessarily who we think.’
‘You’re making great progress down here with these historical studies, I can see that. Mind you, Mother always said to watch it with theatrical types. Insalubrious, she calls them. With a fruiterer at least you know where you stand. Do you think that might have been Eve’s line when she handed Adam the apple? What have you actually been doing, Sean? Really doing?’
In normal circumstances I would probably have been a little more costive and circumspect. I had, after all, seen him in action many times, but I suppose the joint had loosened my tongue and so I started to speak. I spoke of my increasing conviction that the accrediting of all the works of Shakespeare to the man who came from Stratford was almost certainly wrong. I explained that I’d gradually come to see how King Lear was effectively a coded treatise on the subject of alchemy. Whoever this writer had been, he was someone immersed in the secret arts. Such a man couldn’t have left off from his studies; none of them ever had. Look at John Dee, I said, still pursuing the arcana through poverty and old age. Look at Ralegh and the Earl of Northumberland – even in the Tower of London they went relentlessly about their strange business, fathoming the secrets of nature.
‘So now take a look at Shakespeare,’ I said, as Dan poured wine into my glass. ‘The figure who retires to Stratford at the end of his life spends all his time counting tithes and proceeding in petty financial squabbles. Not an alembic in sight. Not a treatise on astrology or astronomy. Nothing. No books of any sort in his will, in fact. And that’s not the man who wrote some of these plays. It can’t be.’
‘But now wasn’t this one of Crawley’s numbers?’
‘He expressed doubts, that’s all.’
‘And does any of it matter anyway?’
‘It matters to me.’
‘What happened four hundred years ago?’
‘There’s not much point studying history otherwise, is there, Dan?’
Then I told him about Becky Southgate putting me right that evening, with her immaculate enunciation and the superior smile that kept crossing her bony, twitching face. He shook his head once more as he looked at me.
‘Alchemy and tiresome women, and who wrote King bloody Lear. Trying to catch up with what happened four hundred years ago. First principle of cybernetics, Sean: the control system must be at least one step ahead of the motion it controls. But thought never catches up with history, if you ask me, not Crawley’s and not yours; only money ever does that. Money’s the fastest thing. If you want to know what’s going on around you, check where the money’s going, where it’s piling in and where it’s getting out. That’s true of the past as well as the present. The rest is all talk. Suit Oxford very nicely, I should think. It obviously suits you.’ Then he switched off, fell silent, pondered. I wondered where he’d gone as we sipped our coffee, until he looked up finally and smiled; a low-wattage, antiseptic, doctor-at-your-bedside smile.
‘Sean,’ he said, ‘there’s something I’ve got to tell you about Sally.’
* * *
(It starts with a blade going through the front of your forehead, a wide blade that seems to sever one half of your brain from the other. The throbbing begins in response to this blade’s entry and the throbbing is you, the whole of your living mind, the flesh of thought itself. Then, almost simultaneously, your mouth dries, like a chamois left out all day in the sun. Soon it is parched suede and you are breathing the fetid air of a drought, cracked clay now grown solid where the lake once stood. Then nausea, a general state of emergency across the system, not located in the stomach merely, but a pervasive sensation of sickness through throat and chest and down to the bowels, already loose and quirky. Within ten minutes, total disablement; now you can no longer focus on anything without the severest punishment delivered from some part of your nervous system. Flat out on a bed, eyes clamped shut, curtains drawn, desperately attempting not to move by even the merest fraction, since that will send a scythe of lacerating pain through your head and double the surge of nausea from below. Sleep is an impossibility, hard even to imagine now, the country of lost content.
Perhaps that’s how it felt for the maggot when our barbed hook severed its eyes. By then, the migraines still only hit me twice a month.)
* * *
That Christmas we sat before our drinks in the Yarnspinners, the three of us, Dan, Sally and me. I was surprised how quickly I had come to accept the idea. It’s true that for a while I had woken again each morning and thought of Daniel Pagett, this time wanting not to be him, not that at all, but simply to hurt him very badly. But I had no means to hurt him, or anyone else for that matter. I seemed to lack the facility. I say this now without self-reproach. What is the point, after all, of lamenting who you are? You can’t reverse things. Even to contemplate such a manoeuvre is a sin against time, for it spits in the face of all that’s given. My indoctrination in the catechism has left me with an abiding conviction of the truth of the doctrine of Original Sin: we are all of us flawed, mangled, damaged, and no amount of therapy or solicitude will ever redeem us from being that way. The seeds take root and grow, and we are thus and thus. One of us is Sean Tallow and the other Dan Pagett. And Sally, my Sally, was now with Daniel. She also looked at me and smiled, but it was a sad smile. Who could blame her, after all, for choosing my companion? If I’d been a woman, I’d have chosen him. He didn’t have any trouble looking in mirrors. He’d been designed to look in mirrors. He could have chosen one as his home. And they made a handsome couple, there was no doubt of that. Dan said it was one of those things. He said he hadn’t planned it. The soft doors opened and he went in. She was wearing the same cashmere sweater my fingers had alighted on during our first night out. Perhaps I should have fought after all. But which one of us, if so? Daniel, Sally or myself? Which part of the river should I have chosen to push against?
As we stood before the urinal at the end of the evening he turned to me and grinned.
‘What am I supposed to do, Sean? It’s my animal magnetism, I suppose. Has exactly the same effect on the cat at home.’
9
Man makes his true maps in stone, only later recording them on paper. Thus Ralegh, according to Hariot.
One day in a pub close to Folly Bridge I met Roy Cairn. Roy had about him a carefree luminosity. His long brown hair fell down in a great swathe over his face whenever he laughed, which was often. The wind-tanned skin of his face creased in good-humoured lines that fanned out in all directions. He was not part of the university, but a sculptor from the Isle of Lewis. He had found some unexpected work, since the grotesque heads of emperors forming a broken ring in front of the Sheldonian Theatre had become so badly weathered that the authorities had decided to replace them. I regretted this. However eroded they were, however unintelligible their features, I felt they had gained a kind of authenticity simply from being there so long. Roy didn’t regret it though, since it provided him with much-needed money.
His rented studio was a large dilapidated workshop down by the canal. I started to go there in the evening and by the uneven illumination that his lamps afforded I would watch him hack and chisel great blocks of sandstone. As the weeks went by, features slowly started to emerge. Flinty dust filled the air, riddling the beams of light. By the end of the evening there was always a desert dryness in your throat. I was fascinated at the way the shapes grew visible, defining themselves slowly in the half-darkness.
His accent was strange; more conspicuous than mine. He explained that he had spoken only Gaelic until he went to school, but after that he was not permitted to speak it at all – he would be beaten if he did. He invited me to the ceremony that saw the new heads fixed in place. They were novelties now, perched up on their plinths with their perfect features. They looked new, desolately new. They no longer reminded me of Ozymandias. The local morris dancers jigged and jingled to summon spirits of fecundity.
I had started explaining to Roy my obsession about how, whoever wrote the words ascribed to William Shakespeare, he must have been a man obsessed with alchemy as well as crime.
‘Alchemy?’ he echoed as he hammered away. ‘I hadn’t realised it was so important back then.’
‘To the Elizabethans it was the equivalent of nuclear physics or the double helix today. It was the key to the riddle of life and its riches. Lord Burghley actually wrote to Edward Kelley while he was in Prague asking for some of his powder – what we’d call the philosopher’s stone. He said the queen desperately needed the gold so that she could strengthen the English fleet, given the threat from Spain.
‘So whether it was Ralegh sailing up the Orinoco or Ralegh in the Tower, conducting alchemical experiments with the Wizard Earl, he was after the same result both times. Searching for the brightest thing, for something so luminous, even though it was hidden away at the heart of matter, that, should it ever get to be uncovered, it would have made the earth itself shine.’
‘Make the sun blink, you mean.’
‘That’s it, yes. Make the sun blink. Just once. As our nuclear explosions made the earth shake, if only an inch or two, on its axis.’
Then one evening I arrived at the studio to find it all locked up. It was the same the following day and the one after. I left a note for Roy, but I never heard from him again. He’d left in a hurry. He probably owed somebody money.
10
I had returned once more to the practice of my religion, which in truth I have never abandoned, despite long periods of neglect. It is, like the north of England itself, home – even when you stop going there for a while, even if you were never to go back there again. You still can’t forget the austerities of its peaks and mineshafts. Or its lakelands of mercy, its unexpected rivers veining the stony ground. Somehow I had made my way to the Dominican house. I found both its atmosphere and its priests congenial.
