Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  The black boy, the Blackamoor, on the stained glass in the internal door used to frighten him. He butted the door open with his bike and glanced at him without even a whisper of fear. He had got through that.

  As he walked up the stairs he was possessed by sensations and thoughts of Rachel and himself alone on the empty train, the smell and sound, the touch of her and her face, eyes tight closed, pale, strained, lit so faintly by the orange station lamps, and that moaning sigh, the surge of it. Joe was consumed by a fierce feeling of the two of them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  On the last Saturday of the Easter holidays they hiked to Bassenthwaite Lake. There was a boating station on the west side, Joe remembered it from a choir trip. He remembered a very small bay, high slate rocks giving it shape, old trees, beeches, oaks, densely clustered, lending it a seductive feel of secrecy. They had sandwiches for the day which was kind enough, cloudy but high, warm as they pedalled their heavy bikes the dozen or so miles up into the fells. Once or twice it was too steep and they had to give in and push the bikes. Cumberland Gap, Joe sang, fifteen miles to the Cumberland Gap. The group had just added it to their repertoire, along with ‘All Shook Up’ and ‘The Girl Can’t Help It.’

  They felt they had the narrow roads to themselves, a few cyclists, fewer cars, the one major hold-up when a herd of milkers walked with majestic udder-swinging slowness in front of them back to their farm. There was a growing quietness about the place they were about to enter, Joe noticed, and grandeur, the hills rising up before them as finally they pushed themselves up into the mountains, waters and forests of the Lake District.

  At half term Mr. Tillotson had taken Upper Sixth English to Newcastle to see extracts from Shakespeare’s plays. On the way they had gone to Durham Cathedral. It was late afternoon when they climbed the steep twisting street whose quaintness and sense of past wholly enveloped Joe. Yet when they breasted the hill and came on the Cathedral across College Green, his feelings, his imagination soared in an attempt to match, to meet the mighty, dour magnificence of the Cathedral, so massed and solid, a building to withstand time. But there was more. Inside that mass was a space vastly captured by a weight of stone, columned, steep arched, tapered, squared, such an unlikely earth-locked material for the creation of this lofty ethereal effect that the boy’s spirits were humbled, deference came on him, an amazed piety. This was a proper space for God, he thought.

  Their bicycled entrance into the Lake District was like that: the sense of a hallowed place, a feeling of omnipotence, of a soul set free, coupled with an equally strong feeling of insignificance, yet an insignificance somehow glorified because you had become part of the world at its most inspired, and that was good.

  They freewheeled down from Castle Inn, Bassenthwaite Lake on their left, the clouds breaking up, some blue, the wind sweeping back Rachel’s hair, pressing the blouse and skirt against her body, all but immobile on the marvellous machines which took them as fast as a galloping horse.

  He wanted to get a boat, go out onto the lake. He wanted to go into that dense wood and lie down with Rachel. He wanted at least to kiss her and press himself against her, best with her leaning against a tree. He wanted to unbutton the blouse and in a place of utter privacy and disturbing silence. He wanted to forget everything he had planned to do. His thoughts rioted in sexual fantasy. The spiritual exaltation of the Cathedral arrival was metamorphosed into young lust, glory into the itch of desire.

  Joe believed that what he felt was wholly new. Surely this feeling had never been experienced before. There had never been anyone possessed as he was. He had read about it. He had seen it on the screen. He had, a few times, thought that he had been caught up in it. But nothing like this. Nobody had told him about this - urgency, this saturation of desire. Or if they had told him he had not been listening. Perhaps you could only listen when you already knew about it, and the only way to know about it was to drown in it. It was a feeling which was as deep inside him as the circulation of his blood.

  He looked, jealously, as the brawny young boatman helped Rachel board the long Edwardian rowing boat with unnecessary fuss and felt superior - clearly the boatman did not know anything about this, this elevated life composed of flesh and feeling and something rarer, something inexplicable, more than flesh, more than feeling. Nor did anyone else on the lake, he was sure, as over-effortfully he pulled the heavy oars in their rather insecure rowlocks, lifting himself out of his seat as he rowed, guiding the boat away from the eye-stroking young boatman.

  Rachel lowered her left hand into the water.

  ‘Freezing,’ she said.

  The word threatened Joe’s strained and heightened mood. He wanted to sustain the mood. He wanted to articulate it. He wanted to be a match for it. Poetry, he thought, would do it. He jumped in, rather breathlessly, his rowing unpractised and far too violent. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date …’ But he faltered. Rachel had first looked startled, then attempted to assume her forced-to-listen-in-school face, then she laughed, not cruelly, not loudly, it may have been a laugh of affectionate understanding, an embarrassed, flattered laugh, but Joe, high on his euphoric mountain, was too distant to make such distinctions and the laugh sounded like an almost polite way of saying, ‘Oh do shut up!’ He did.

  ‘What did you stop for?’

  ‘It sounded soft,’ he said, though he thought it sounded wonderful.

  ‘It sounded great!’ Rachel said. ‘You’re good at Wordsworth …’ Joe knew he should let that pass. ‘It’s Shakespeare,’ he said.

  ‘And you want me to stay on at school?’ She laughed.

  ‘Wordsworth most likely walked around here,’ said Joe, gamely, using talk as an excuse to rest on his oars. ‘He walked everywhere. He used to make up his poetry while he walked. He used to recite it out loud.’

  ‘He was lucky not to be locked up.’

  ‘He thought you could learn most about life just by letting yourself listen, well, not quite listen, listening’s the wrong word, he thought you could learn about life just by walking - around here, especially in isolated places.’

  ‘Learn what?’

  ‘All about moral evil and good, for instance.’

  Rachel nodded rather earnestly but Joe could tell her heart was not in it. Yet he wanted her to understand because, at this moment, he knew that Wordsworth was right. The difficulty was to find a way to tell Rachel.

  ‘I don’t understand all that.’ Rachel smiled, leaned back and closed her eyes and Joe urgently remembered the holy, tense look on her face in the orange light in the train when he had stroked her. ‘You’re getting quite good at Little Richard,’ she murmured.

  He picked up the oars. He had seen his destination. There was a copse fringing the lake and beyond it, alone in a wide field, was a small white church. He kept glancing over his shoulder, taking his course from that. He was on fire with longing for Rachel.

  She wanted to paddle in the lake and he skimmed stones while she stood, water up to her knees, skirt tucked up, arms folded, face aimed at the sun, unscreened at last. Joe had taken off his shoes and socks to pull in the boat. He rolled up his trousers and joined her. She glanced at him.

  ‘Why don’t you take your trousers off?’ she said. ‘Nobody’ll see.’

  Nobody would. The few rowing boats on the lake seemed miles away. They had landed on a spot which felt as remote as Robinson Crusoe’s island.

  ‘I didn’t bring any swimming trunks,’ he said.

  ‘Neither did I.’ Rachel waded back to the shore, slipped off her skirt, revealing stout white knickers, and her blouse revealing an equally stout white bra. Then she waded back in, her smile a challenge. Joe kept his trousers on.

  ‘It’s no different from a bathing costume,’ she said, ‘save for being three times bigger than a bikini.’

  But a bikini was a bathing costume. Her unde
rwear, that hidden first covering, was altogether and disturbingly different. A bikini was meant to be like that and for outdoors. What Rachel was wearing was not meant to be seen by anyone but her: and perhaps him. And it was for their new world, not for standing in the shallows of a lake for everyone to see. Her slim white body, whitely clad, looked across the steel white-flecked lake up to the white-grey clouds. The way she looked, Joe thought, was what started off love poetry. He stood a step or two behind her. The poetry went away. What he wanted, more than anything, was to walk into the dark copse and find a place to lie down together.

  ‘I'm famished,’ she said. ‘I hope that flask works.’ They opened up their picnic. Between them they had sandwiches - egg, tomato, ham, corned beef; sweet biscuits; a chunk of cheddar cheese; cold sausages; pickled onions; boiled eggs; fruit cake, gingerbread; apples; a bar of milk chocolate; crisps; lemonade; tea in a flask.

  ‘We should have brought the Five Thousand,’ Rachel said, but they ate a surprising amount of it. After they had tidied everything up, Rachel produced a pack of ten Players. There were seven left, Joe noted. She smoked much more expertly and pleasurably than he. Joe liked the idea of a cigarette, of holding it, lighting it, echoing poses and gestures of his screen heroes. He was not keen on the taste. He would just have to smoke a bit more, Rachel said, then he would get used to it.

  Joe simply could not harness together the two drives within him. So much of him was ecstatically entrapped in this sound of joy, to which he was unable to give words, it was like the best music in his head, it was what he felt for Rachel, it was singing, all the good things in his life crammed into this sound, a harmony of everything, as if everything he ever needed to know of why he was there was being played inside him now in this spot on this day.

  Yet, and at the same time, alongside this, all he wanted to do was make love to Rachel. Surely the one feeling, the higher feeling, should drive out the lower, he thought. But no. His fantasies were torrid, and soaked in guilt and shame, which just spurred them on. He had to look away because he knew he looked at her so hungrily direct. The long black hair framing the face, he wanted to push it back, to kiss the face, to stroke the soft cheeks, the strong nose, see the crooked smile. Her white skin made his fingers tingle to touch. He was growing more certain that he could tell what she felt but could she not tell what he felt now? How could she eat a boiled egg so calmly when they had the perfect conditions to embark on the first real love affair in history? Again he thought - surely nobody ever before had felt like this. He shivered a little although it was not cold and tried to call up the greater harmonies as she took her time over the gingerbread.

  Joe remembered being told that they once made sacrifices in Bassenthwaite Lake. It used to be a place for druids and magic before the Romans came. He decided to keep this to himself. He could not predict how Rachel would take it.

  It was not easy to find a place which was comfortable. The copse was cluttered with undergrowth, fallen branches, roots rearing out of the ground, rock barely under the turf. Rachel went back for her skirt, Joe offered his shirt and the two inadequate garments served as a groundsheet.

  Rachel was very loving. On Saturdays he could touch her breasts, but today she also let him touch elsewhere as she had in the train, even though neither bra nor knickers were removed. They said nothing. She held and stroked him passionately until he was spun once again into that high, intoxicated state of acute joy, a state which consumed everything into nothing and yet filled and fulfilled him.

  They heard the dog bark but broke free of each other only when it was on them. It shivered beside them, a big, golden, labrador puppy, long pink tongue slung out of a corner of its mouth, legs square planted, lunging and retreating, half wanting to play, half ready to run.

  Rachel reached out to it, instantly re-directed. ‘Hello! Hello! What’s your name, then, eh? Aren’t you lovely, aren’t you?’

  The dog barked happily. Joe resentfully sat and watched. Rachel was very taken with it, stroking it, nuzzling her face against its face, then pulling back as the tongue flopped over her cheeks.

  The owner was there almost before they knew it. He was wearing wellingtons, corduroy trousers, an old sports jacket and a checked cap. He carried a gun. He was exceptionally tall. Rachel felt naked but did not know what to do: she had nothing to cover up and to do so would have been silly, but he looked down on her with a seigneurial flirty expression which she did not like at all. She drew up her knees to her chin and clamped her arms around them.

  ‘Sorry about that. Here! Brute!’ The accent was above that of Mr. Braddock, Joe reckoned, even above that of the vicar. He wished he would go away. He still felt rather dizzy. Rachel was alert.

  ‘Private land,’ he said. ‘Not to worry. Don’t want you mistaken for a pair of rabbits, that’s all.’ He glanced at his gun. ‘Enjoy yourselves. Carry on. Brute! Heel!’

  They crashed away.

  Rachel put on her skirt.

  As he rowed back across the lake they were rather subdued. Joe had wanted to go and look at the small church - it would somehow absolve him - but Rachel had said no, it was on private land, it probably belonged to that man and she did not want to see him again. They were still subdued as they pedalled back alongside the lake, but when they came to Bothel, with the Solway Plain beneath them, and seven or eight miles of downhill swooping ahead of them, their natural mood broke through and they raced in top gear even pedalling down the hills, laughing at the speed of it, already crystallising the good that had come from the day and knowing there would be more, more days, more together, more love, though the word was too big for either of them to have spoken it yet.

  He reserved Sundays for the scholarship papers. Despite their mediocre marks, Brenda and Joe had been entered for scholarship exams in English and History, which were ‘more advanced than A levels’ as Mr. Tillotson put it, drily. The work involved an enhancement of their regular syllabus. ‘Take more risks,’ said Mr. Braddock. ‘Just enjoy yourselves,’ said Mr. Tillotson, ‘it’s a bonus.’ Brenda had also been entered for Latin S level.

  Sunday was eight o’clock communion. Then breakfast. About half an hour to get through the few jobs now required of him. Back in the empty parlour before ten to start at ten on the dot and work in fifty-minute stretches until one o’clock. The fifty minutes were strictly kept - he had read that the British Army marched for fifty minutes and rested for ten, which enabled them to march all day. Even if he were ‘reading around’, he would stop, mooch around, go down to the kitchen to get a cup of tea or deal with the business of the band.

  The arrangements always landed on him. They had been offered an interval spot at Abbeytown, a village six miles away. But it was on a Friday, a work night. Yet they needed to do it. Joe found it hard enough to keep the band together - they had only been asked to play in public twice in the last three months - and if they did not go they would lose heart. But Friday was English. When it got noisy downstairs on Fridays he went across to his Aunt Grace’s house for the last two or three hours: English was the most portable subject, he had found. He knew that if you broke a rule once, it was fatal. But Abbeytown dances drew the crowds. Could he break his Saturday rule and work three hours on the Saturday afternoon to compensate?

  He deferred the decision as the ten minutes were up and went back to reading The Prince. It could be useful three times over, Mr. Braddock had said: once for the Scholarship Paper - power was a regular question and Machiavelli was a primary source. Again for the History A level - for the influence of the philosopher on crucial ideas of sovereignty and the most successful way to govern. Lastly, and least, for the General Paper all of them were required to take alongside their specialised subjects. This second time round, Machiavelli was beginning to make sense to Joe, who had struggled his first way through, stumbling over what sometimes seemed too elaborate, sometimes too obvious. It needed to be re-read, often more than once.

  He kept finding sentences with which he disagreed. ‘It is be
tter to be feared than loved,’ for instance. Well, was it? Jesus Christ was not feared and he had far more influence than any Prince. But best, he sensed, to keep that to himself. Best to settle for it for the exams.

  He thought he saw how Henry VIII might have used it. He could write an essay on Henry VIII which would include Machiavelli’s ideas on the way to organise a state. He had already written a test S level essay for Mr. Braddock comparing Machiavellian princely rule with the Welfare State: the teacher had said he was getting the hang of it. One of several bets Joe had on with himself was that Henry VIII and the state would be a question: evens were the odds. Elizabeth’s foreign policy was two to one, Coke and Common Law three to one.

  He had dinner at one, the simpler the better, fish fingers, chips and peas, and then half a tin of fruit drowned in condensed milk.

  Two to five was English, which Mr. Tillotson suggested was best used by reading.

  ‘Just reading?’

  ‘Just reading, Richardson, as widely as you can, poetry most of all, try to learn some of it, examiners like quotations.’ It seemed too easy to count as work and Joe felt guilty. You did your own reading in bed, at free times, between other things, whenever there was a chance. Just to sit and read whatever took your fancy and call it work made him uneasy. Mr. Tillotson had yielded and offered up a few general lines of study. Joe was on the history of the sonnet from Da Lentino and Petrarch to Milton, the Romantics and finally Wilfred Owen.