Be Near Me

by Andrew O'Hagan

  Nashe took what you might call the anti-Carlyle view of history: it wasn't the bigwigs that concerned him so much as the ones wearing aprons stained with blood and sweat. This was clear from his interest in the flower-sellers and butchers of the French Revolution, but, even more so, from the way he spoke about himself and his own background. Those years with Nashe left me with a full picture of the great historian's personal England, a place which, in his animated telling, could seem to outline all the parameters of English life, a view which included, I'm afraid, the notion that the better part of civilised experience began with the boat to France.

  He grew up in the riverless town of Tunbridge Wells, and he used every square inch of it—the blackberry thickets, the efforts of the Luftwaffe to bomb the town, the speech of his mother's friends, their sensible shoes, their gins and tonics at five o'clock, their water colours of Scottish glens—to describe a notion of middle-class contentment that he made seem a matter of history to me, my childhood's holy details having temporarily faded in a blur of ambition, the prevailing upward draught of the scholarship boy. 'I am attempting to illustrate a society both immensely self-confident and largely immune from class conflict and social tension,' he would say, before going on to give a short history of the manufacture of Romary's Water Biscuits in Tunbridge Wells. That was how he did it—'they were the very cream of middle-class biscuits'—and more than any single thing in my life it was Nashe's method that revealed to me the raw material of history and the inconspicuous material of oneself.

  Nashe spoke about Sussex as if it were Babylon, which I suppose it was from the perspective of Tunbridge Wells. He had strange cousins, the Pemberton-Aulds, who did nothing all day and who had ignored the war playing cards in Lewes, and he expressed their decadence as a matter relating to the downfall of the English counties. Not that he was at all socialistic. He adored privilege, counting it among those traditions that enlarged the life of good taste, but he was one of those, unlike me, who held his public school (Shrewsbury, in his case) personally responsible for what he called 'the British tendency to ridicule passion'. He sometimes mentioned the host of satirical young men—'the Private Eye crowd'—who came through Shrewsbury and Oxford in the years just before me. But more often he told the story of Daniel Plunkett, an Irish friend from school who had murdered his mother and tried to put her dead body over the cliffs of Howth in a faulty car. Just as Nashe wasn't a socialist, he wasn't a Freudian either. 'Too programmatic,' he'd say, before outlining, in his anecdotal way, the general faults of mothers and the shocks of the Irish legal system.

  'Aha!' he said one morning in his Balliol rooms. 'The mind of the college was expressing itself the other evening.'

  'How so?' I asked.

  'I brought my friend to dine in college. You may have heard me speak of him, a gentleman by the name of Plunkett. He killed his mother over a quantity of money. She was a terrible wretch and an hysteric, poor woman. Yet he was a joy at high table. I might say the other fellows were mightily alarmed in the first instance, yet by the end, when a discussion of Harold Wilson's penal policy took hold, my friend rather distinguished himself and I can report that everyone was frightfully keen on more brandy.'

  'Good heavens,' I said. 'A murderer in the SCR.'

  'Yes,' said Nashe. 'Quite distinctive.'

  'I hope he has learned his lesson,' I said.

  'Naturally,' said Nashe. 'And I hope we have learned ours. It is not the first time the murder-minded have scaled the college walls. Only a few yards to the west of here there was once an inn called the Catherine Wheel. It was there that the Gunpowder plotter Robert Catesby told of his intentions to Robert Wyntour. And these things still go on. A couple of your clever accomplices are said to have cut up some new turf from the gardens over the wall'—he meant Trinity—'and they carpeted the JCR with it. Caused a terrible fuss with the janitorially-minded.'

  The intermingling of history and autobiography was essential to Nashe, and yet one always felt it was the personal part that struck him as carrying the larger portion of educated wisdom. 'I hear you are still thriving as a social phenomenon, young Anderton,' Nashe said at the end of my second year, when I sat in his easy chair to read out my essay. 'Let's dispense with the essay for now,' he added. 'What have you been doing? Still stealing cigars?'

  'Sorry?'

  'Come now,' he said. 'From the Master's Mondays. The whole point of them is to steal the old leaf, is it not?' With this he opened a drawer of his desk and smilingly passed me a cigar and some matches.

  'Heavens,' I said, 'this is festive,' as he poured a couple of sherries.

  'Indeed,' he said. 'And those young friends of yours, the Rhodes Scholar and the other one from out of college—are they well? I hear you have now completely conquered Proust.'

  'Just a wheeze...'

  'Not at all. A jolly pursuit. Good young men, I gather. It's bracing to see young men of that sort still pounding the quads, their faces shining with ... what might one say ... with polished ungodliness.'

  'Yes.'

  'But not you, Anderton. You're still for God, aren't you? You're still with the old team?'

  'Yes,' I said. 'It would appear to be the case.'

  'It would appear, yes.' I remember feeling exposed in some way. There was nothing sinister in Nashe's words. He was just being a historian. But I felt uncertain.

  'Shall I read my essay?' I said.

  'By all means,' said Nashe. 'You are a free man, Mr Anderton—l'homme disponible. Ever ready to fill the gap, what, what?'

  I blushed, I'm sure, and lowered my head. But my answer was in the essay before me, which started with an account of my Lancashire ancestors and the trials of English faith. By then Nashe's method had turned me into a new version of myself, or was it Proust, or the rhythmic bleating of Hippisley-Cox and Curtis? It's really impossible to tell. Oxford had me. The room filled with smoke and the sherry was perfectly sweet.

  And then, a season of pain. In that parish house in Scotland, I often sat in the bedroom at night staring at the bright window, thinking of those young people and their easy, terrible laughter. And sitting up, hearing the trees at the end of the lane performing their dark susurrations, my mind would go beyond them to the places of my own youth, Oxford in those long-ago dreamed-up summers and the words I could still see carved into the bricks on the outside wall of Staircase XI:

  Verbum Non Amplivs 189

  'A word and no more.'

  Conor.

  I first saw him at the back of the Grapes, lifting a pint jug to his fresh smile amid a group of leather jackets. He was a beautiful listener, an almond-eyed person with a head of chestnut hair. Edward was with me that night. I'm afraid my friend was railing against the grammar of the Civil Rights leaders, flicking his white hand in the direction of the Bombastics, and when I looked up I saw Conor sitting among them. What can I say? I ordered more drinks and watched him over Edward's shoulder, the way he picked up papers and smiled his self-possessed smile in the amber light. And then, not for a second stepping out of his world, he looked at me. The look was both casual and piercing. I imagined a world of opportunity in that look. The pub bustled with its smaller concerns, while Conor, the man at the end of the room, his arms enfolding himself in mirth, looked at me again, inhabiting every quiet hope I had.

  Hippisley-Cox continued his banter at my side, but I didn't hear a word he said and he faded out, like a distant piano. I could feel the glorious young man at the ends of my fingers and in the gin scorching my throat. I looked at him again.

  He turned to rub his shoulder, and seeing his hand on his jacket, I suddenly wanted to be his jacket or be the cotton of his shirt. For nearly forty years I have thought about the amber light and the smile on him that evening. For I loved him the second before I saw him, just as one does with love: we know whom we love before we find them, or think we do. We feel we have waited for such a person, and when we see him, he is perfectly familiar.

  Love me back, I whispered into the short
glass.

  I found out the next day that he was at Worcester. I heard he came from Liverpool—'how impossibly thrilling', said Edward—and eventually I found my way to one of those political meetings. I went to other meetings after that, and Conor was always there with his timidly devouring eyes. When I first walked up to him I stared at the badges on his jacket. 'You're one of them Balliol aesthetes,' he said.

  His accent was intimidatingly friendly.

  'Not exclusively,' I said. 'I like the Beatles.'

  'Oh, them four.'

  'Sorry,' I said. 'That's a bit pathetic.'

  'You have nice skin,' he said.

  'I'm sorry?'

  'Good skin. Where you from?'

  'Lancashire.'

  'Thought as much,' he said. 'Lancashire or Yorkshire. I knew I could hear something in there.'

  'I don't know what to say to you,' I said.

  'Let's go for coffee and think of something,' he said. 'Don't you think Wilson is a war-loving hypocrite?'

  We took a short trip to Florence that August and at the end of the summer he took me to see his parents in Liverpool. There wasn't much of them to see, though Conor brought me into their company as if they were a special room at the British Museum. We had two rounds of drinks in a large Victorian hotel next to a bingo hall in King Street. His father owned a clockmakers and was a keen gardener. He spent most of the time talking about rose bushes and his battles with the weather, while his wife, Conor's mother, made it clear that she ran her life (and everybody else's) according to principles rigorously upheld in Holy Catholic Ireland. Conor, by then, wasn't Catholic at all, but he went to Mass whenever his mother was around and said it was sensible to see her piety as an apt expression of all that her people had suffered at the hands of the English. I smiled when he told me that. 'Just play up the Scottish bit,' he said.

  'Does she care that much?' I asked. I remember he struck a match off the sole of his shoe and lit a cigarette, whispering the smoke into the space between us.

  'Just give the Voice what she needs,' he said. 'She doesn't need a great deal. She's not hard to manage.'

  It was my friend Edward, when I told him about Conor's mother in advance of meeting her, who had christened her the Voice—short for the Voice of Doom—and even Conor took it up. In the hotel bar she proved that the name was not ill-suited. 'These Oxford ones,' she said, 'the best of them would sit down on the pavement and weep before they'd accept a day's work or a sign from God. Is that not right, Conor? And the best of it is, their gowns and their degrees and their mortar boards won't keep them safe during the nuclear war. Is that not right, Conor Docherty? Their eyes will melt away from their heads in the nuclear war—soon enough, mark my words—before they can so much as reach out to pick up their books. Where will your Willie Shakespeare be to lend you a hand then, Conor Docherty?'

  For me, Conor was the better part of the 1960s. He expressed the times better than anyone I ever met. Looking back on those years now, people speak as if they were little more than a pantomime of alternative ideas, but Conor taught me how glorious it might be to live in colour for the first time. That night in Liverpool he spoke about the matter with a personal urgency. 'People forget what it was like in the 1950s,' he said, 'how grim Britain was. I used to worry that the world would never have a place for our way of thinking.'

  'What way of thinking?' I asked.

  'I don't know,' he said. 'Being who you want to be as opposed to who you were born to be.'

  'Heaven forfend,' I said. I was never a 1960s person in the way that Conor was, partly, I suspect, because my father was dead and my mother was a 1960s person before her time.

  'I thought I might never be allowed to say anything,' said Conor, 'or be anything that mattered to me. It was all cloth caps up here. Or petit bourgeois rubbish about refrigerators and savings. When I got to Oxford I thought somebody had turned the lights on.'

  We were alone. I put my hand into the pocket of his coat.

  'And it's political,' he said.

  I could never share that feeling very precisely, but I had my share of the freedoms he spoke about, my share of the decade's hopes too. Conor looked up with his Bob Dylan eyes: 'These are our changes. Yours as much as anybody's.'

  'Hell knows,' I said, walking down the pavement in a Liverpool of tin chapels and sleeping docks, the set of an old movie. 'I fear some of us are even more subjective than that.'

  He smiled.

  'Spoken like a true Marcellist,' he said.

  Back in his beloved second-hand Triumph Herald, Conor meshed his hands in his hair as he leaned over the steering wheel. It was dark in those streets and Liverpool's own popular songs seemed to animate the living air and render the old buildings closed and lonely. We didn't see it as a decade then but just as now, now, now. He turned round to face me in the passenger seat, laughing and biting his bottom lip, then he leaned over and kissed me. 'It was a masterstroke,' he said. 'Did you see the way the Voice's tone just changed when you mentioned the ancestors?'

  'But they're real,' I said.

  'I don't care if they're real. It was perfect. The Voice likes a martyr more than anything in the world.'

  'I like a martyr myself,' I said.

  'Must be a Balliol thing.'

  A ferryboat sounded on the Mersey. 'This is good, Conor,' I said. 'A wonderful night.' We got lost driving in the city and at one point he pulled up in Scotland Road next to a shop that said Cookson's Diamonds. His eyes were so alive and only the audible burn of his cigarette hung between us as we discussed our plans in a pool of yellow light falling from the shop window.

  'These dead recusants of yours can't be far away from here,' he said. 'Let's drive to Lanes and visit them.'

  'No,' I said. 'Let's go south. I don't know how to find them.'

  He turned the ignition and we moved at speed through the grey roads of northern England, the car filling with pot smoke and sudden laughter, the towns blurring past in the dark.

  'De Gaulle betrayed the workers,' he said.

  That was what he did all the time, tried to improve my politics. I can picture the exact greyness of that journey, Conor's beautiful face, a downpour outside Birmingham, the oily rain on the windscreen, a tunnel of trees sucking us into Oxford and the sound of John Lennon's voice suspending all other voices as it emerged from the new car radio.

  Men had a sense of danger about these things. You had to have: homosexuality was not yet legal for people our age. It is not often said, but the need for discretion suited some of us perfectly. It certainly suited Conor and me, the idea that privacy was not just a survival requirement but something quite central to what we had. I've seen men holding hands in the years since and wondered if something wasn't lost by what they gained. Maybe not. We found it easy to outwit the law because our own law called for caution.

  I remember Hippisley-Cox stopping at the gate to the Fellows' Garden to tell me, under his breath and with his London face on, that I must dread the outcome of such a passion. 'Your admiration of that young political rogue has become exclusive,' he said.

  'He's interesting.'

  'Don't be ridiculous,' said Edward. 'You're interesting. Your curiosity about him is just another way for you to be curious about yourself. That's how love works.'

  'That's hideous, Edward,' I said. 'And not at all the case.'

  'You're becoming more like him,' he said.

  'Is that an illness?'

  'Not quite,' said Edward, 'but a form of suffering, yes. Just look after your pride, dear heart.'

  'It seems so necessary,' I said. It took a lot for me to say that: I've never been good at saying what I wanted to say.

  Edward looked at the base of the gate and pointed down. It was the Fellows' Garden tortoise, Hector, who had crawled out of the bushes covered in purple juice, having gorged, as usual, on the mulberries. We stared for a moment at the pawing reptile in its dark shell.

  'Nothing about fondness is necessary,' said Edward.

  'Is that
from the Big Book?' I asked.

  'No,' said Edward. 'It's just from me to you.'

  I felt a flush in my cheeks and a rush of feeling. I wanted to tell Edward once and for all what it was like. I wanted to say to him: 'I am finally myself with this man and he is interesting and good and makes everything else seem cold.' But it didn't feel possible for me to say those things, and I realised that my undergraduate friends and I had never really wanted to know each other.

  'He is a reality,' I said.

  Edward took a breath and released it from his mouth both slowly and sadly, as if a tyre was being let down on purpose, along with his hopes for me and his hopes for himself. 'Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us,' he said. 'And that is from the book. Volume Two. Page 207. Good evening, Anderton.'

  I saw less of the Marcellists after that. At Oxford I seemed constantly to be moving between realms of belief. I had an authoritarian tutor who hated the authorities and loved the people in their ideal state. Nashe somehow continued, via anecdotes about Tunbridge Wells, to feed me wisdom in regard to the libertarian and fraternal instincts of the revolutionary French. But, when it came down to it, Nashe was no fan of the new student politics. He found those students to be false, spoiled, unfunny and lacking in proper social zeal. He favoured the Marcellists as examples of the good old-fashioned college sort.