Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  She had not enjoyed it but the job was now done. She felt tired and looked out of the window as the familiar countryside wound past them, tugging them home.

  Then it rushed him. Then it was there. The last night out with Rachel, her father let her borrow the car. They made for a small country pub where they sat alone in a saloon bar surprisingly elegantly furnished. The landlady was Spanish. ‘They’ve just done it up,’ Rachel whispered, ‘a lot of professional people come here at weekends.’ They served sandwiches and Rachel bought two rounds. Eating helped because they had already talked everything over more than once - how they would write on alternate days, how she would take a Friday off in a month’s time and come to Oxford for a weekend, how they would manage to fill in time without each other. As they were leaving, the landlady asked if she could try on Rachel’s bangle. Both of them glowed in her praise for it. ‘He must love you very much to buy you this,’ she said. In the car Joe imitated the way she had said it - not to mock, but to have the words repeated.

  Now that the departure was imminent, Joe felt deadened. His one overwhelming feeling was that he wished he did not have to go. Where he was now was bound to be better than anywhere else because now was as good as life could get.

  They made love in Aunt Claire’s and she heard them as she often had, listened a while as she often did, and then turned over to sleep again. He waved Rachel off in King Street. He would not see her in the morning. The town was empty as she drove away and that matched his mood.

  He took his time, walking slowly down the night street. He was leaving all this. He stood at the end of Water Street and looked around him, trying to summon up a feeling of departure, a moment of drama, a sense of an ending. Nothing came, save that deadness and the faint recurring siren whisper that he wished he did not have to go.

  ‘Let me look at you,’ said Ellen, the next morning, and he stood still, dutifully, for her inspection. ‘Pack everything?’ He glanced at the bulging suitcase. ‘Enough to eat?’ He indicated the haversack, picnic packed, flasked and lined with books. She stood there for a few more moments, wanting to say more, wanting to say much more, not knowing what to say. ‘You’ll do,’ she said and she gave him a rushed little kiss.

  Sam walked him down to the station. When the door banged, Ellen came into the kitchen where Sadie was pretending to work.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she said, and Sadie turned away. She knew that if she looked any longer at the expression on Ellen’s face, she would cry.

  ‘The bar top still has to be polished,’ Sadie said, eventually.

  ‘Yes.’ Ellen took the duster out of her pocket and looked at it. ‘I’ll do that.’ And she went out tentatively as if afraid she might trip or bump into something.

  They were some minutes early at the station. The cold made clouds of their breath. Sam looked at the bridge and wanted to tell Joe a story but he decided against it.

  ‘Cigarette?’

  Joe was surprised.

  ‘Thanks.’ He took one. Sam lit a match and cupped it to Joe’s cigarette and then to his own.

  ‘I should have landed here,’ he said, ‘when I came back from the war.’ He scratched the back of his head with the hand holding the cigarette. ‘But the engine broke down a mile or two away and we had to walk.’

  ‘I remember climbing across that bridge,’ said Joe. ‘Stupid.’ The cloud of cigarette smoke was darker than the breath.

  The train was ahead of time. Sam levered in the suitcase. Joe leaned out of the window, lost for words, wanting words, needing a sort of conclusion.

  ‘Just be yourself,’ Sam said, ‘that’s all. And be decent to people.’

  The boy had no immediate response but when the train edged forward, gathered itself, began to pull away, he waved and he found the words.

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ he said, and wanted to add more. He hesitated. But Sam nodded. That was enough.

  PART FIVE

  UNIVERSITY ENTRANCE, 1958/9

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  ‘Dear Rachel,

  ‘Why does it hurt so much? And what is it? The moment I wake up my stomach feels as tight as a drum but at the same time it’s queasy and I want to be sick. I don’t think it’s because I’m frightened because I can’t see what there is to be frightened of. I just don’t want to be here. In its own way it’s as bad as those things that used to happen in my head. There was a bit of this in Paris, but it’s much worse here. I want to be in Wigton and I want to see you! This feeling never goes away for long and I find I can only damp it down if I really concentrate on something else but I can’t concentrate on anything else because of this feeling! The day crawls along whatever I do. I look at the clock and only ten minutes have passed. To tell you the truth, I’m ashamed of it. It’s as if I’m going to burst out crying all the time! It’s such a sign of weakness. Isn’t it? What a baby! He wants to go home! What a kid! But I do. Sometimes inside my head feels frantic. And I can’t tell anybody because they would just laugh. The truth is I daren’t tell anybody.’

  Not even Rachel.

  ‘Dear Rachel,’ he wrote, and sent,

  ‘Thanks for your letter. You collect letters in the morning from a pigeonhole in the Porters’ (sort of receptionists) Lodge (reception). It was great to get your letter. One so far, fourteen more by my calculation until you come down (I think the proper word is ‘up’) to Oxford. I live on a staircase (it is a real staircase but what it does is let off to eight different rooms or sets of rooms). I share with James Carr-Brown who went to an independent (you pay but you don’t board) school in London. I like him and He’s very kind. We dine (at night) in the Hall - the canteen! - about three hundred or more men (nobody’s called a boy or even an undergraduate - and student is not a word used in Oxford: we’re all men) and the cost of it goes on our Battels (end of term bill). You wear gowns for dinner and for lectures and tutorials. The Scouts (college servants) bring the food like waiters. The college has a closing time at night and you are fined if you don’t obey it.

  Our room has two doors and when both are closed this is called “sporting your oak” i.e. Do Not Disturb. Most of the Men have been in the Forces but James hasn’t, he said that’s probably why the Bursar (the college organiser) chucked us in together. That’s one big difference - those who’ve been in the Forces and the few of us who haven’t. Some of them have been in action. One man on our staircase (Staircase Number 2) was in Malaya. James has an older friend from his school who was an officer in Kenya. Most of the men are from public schools or independent schools. And it is only Men, a bit like a monastery, I suppose, and very strange.

  ‘The nearest bath is on Staircase 6 in the far corner of the quad! (Main square - with a bowling-green-sized lawn in the middle.) There’s a don (lecturer) who lives in rooms on our staircase: he keeps a dog and gives it a bath on Fridays, I’m told. There’s another who seems to me to have been drunk after lunch (dinner) the three days I’ve been here. He’s supposed to have a brilliant mind. Oxford is a great place to walk around and look at. I bet you’ll like the “dreaming spires” they talk about. I was wandering about late in the afternoon yesterday when there was a fog (or would it be a mist?) and it was fantastic to see those beautiful old buildings looming at you. They seemed to float in the fog. But to be honest -I know this is crackers -I prefer Wigton!’

  Rachel merely scanned the letter. She would read it more carefully when she was alone in her bedroom. He was unhappy and trying to hide it. She would dig up some Wigton gossip for him. She would pop in and see Mrs. Richardson on her way home.

  Checking and finalising her figures at the end of the working day had become something of a pleasure. Rachel could not quite pinpoint the reason for this, although of course that it was the end of the working day must have had something to do with it. But there were subtler strands. She found the balancing of the numbers extremely satisfying. It was mundane, it demanded no great intelligence, some would call it boring, but when she arrived at the foot of long columns of numbers
which balanced out precisely, sums which were dependent on scores of individual accurate transactions she had made throughout the day, Rachel experienced a distinct hum of pleasure. It was compounded by an ability she developed which was to pursue a parallel line of thought independent of the calculations she was making. At first she had worried that her mind was wandering recklessly and the calculations would suffer as a result, but that did not happen. It was odd. She even began to look forward to it. It happened in no other circumstances in such a sustained and calm way. She could think things through in an orderly manner while the tip of her pen steadily scanned the columns of pounds, shillings and pence.

  So she thought through the letter again as she sat, head bowed over the ledger, her concentration on the job apparently absolute. There was something frantic about it, she sensed, something that disturbed her about Joe. She could be unnerved by his demands. But she missed him and wished she had the words to tell him that; the reflection made her melancholy, a mood she took care to shake off as she walked down darkening late afternoon streets to the Blackamoor just opened for the evening stretch.

  She went straight into the kitchen, comfortable in the place now.

  ‘I’ve decided I’m going to make a combined kitchen and sitting room out of that old parlour upstairs,’Ellen told her. I don’t know why I didn’t do it years ago. I suppose this kitchen was just too convenient.’

  Sam had said,

  ‘The brewery won’t give us a penny towards it.’

  ‘I’d rather have a kitchen than a car.’

  ‘Why the sudden decision?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ellen. But she had to do something. ‘Shall I tell him about the kitchen in my letter or will you?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘You can.’ Ellen gave a tight smile. ‘His dad writes. I just add a few lines on at the end. He seems to be enjoying it, from what he says. He seems quite settled in.’

  ‘They get long holidays,’ Rachel said, trying to help. ‘He worked out there were more weeks off than time at university.’ But three years, Rachel thought. Ellen’s fears triggered off her own. Three years before they could make a move.

  ‘It’s not that he’s somewhere else,’ Ellen said. She looked at Rachel as if unseeingly. ‘He’ll be changed, you see. They’ll change him.’

  ‘Joe?’

  ‘Yes. And maybe that’s how it has to be. But I won’t know him.’ She paused and then appeared to come awake. ‘Does your dad still shout?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rachel nodded. ‘It’s the only way he can talk.’

  ‘Isaac was like that even when he was at school! This fat little boy with this big man’s voice.’

  ‘I’ll tell him you said that.’

  She would put the last bit in her next letter. She would say nothing about Ellen’s sadness, maybe even lie, say she was cheerful.

  William was rather ashamed to take advantage of Ellen’s decision to switch the kitchen to upstairs. But it made it perfectly acceptable for him to ask to look at what she intended to do and so engineer a few moments alone with her.

  They went upstairs together, the first time they had gone up the stairs together. Ellen felt uncomfortable. It took no time at all to point out her plans and she wanted to leave the cold room immediately, but it was clear now that William intended to say something and that was the purpose of this little expedition.

  Very quietly, looking out of the window as he talked, his back to Ellen, William said,

  ‘Alfrieda and myself are thinking of getting, maybe, engaged, Ellen, but I want you to know that this is, I don’t know how to put it, because I know, well, I think I know, that I have embarrassed you enough. You’ve been very understanding. Likewise Sam. Not that I ever had any hopes. Never. I will marry Alfrieda.’

  He turned and she saw a desperate expression she had not seen before, nothing approaching it. She took a breath to be calm.

  ‘Everybody!! be pleased about that, William,’ she said. ‘Alfrieda’s just made for you.’

  ‘I’ll still soldier on doing the washing-up,’ William said. ‘I enjoy that.’

  Joe came back from playing rugby to find the sitting room he shared with James occupied by four newcomers. The air was a fog of smoke.

  ‘Goodness me!’ James, just a touch plump, voice a mite sepulchral, manner tentative but generous, stood up from his squat in front of the electric fire with toasting fork and crumpet. ‘You look all in. Have some tea.’

  ‘I’ll,’ Joe indicated his gear, ‘thanks. I’ll just …’

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right? You look bushed.’

  ‘St. Edmund Hall,’ Joe said.

  ‘Teddy Hall,’ a newcomer corrected.

  ‘They’re a big side.’ Joe felt he had to explain his refusal of James’s warm offer. ‘Some of them played for the army. There’s a full Scottish international - they murdered us.’ And I funked, plain to see, at least two tackles on that Welsh centre.’

  ‘They lose their scholarships if they lose their games at Teddy Hall,’ said the newcomer. ‘The last of the Neanderthals!’

  Joe nodded in appreciation of the attempt to help and limped to his bedroom. He had to be on his own for a while. He was sore, bruised on his thigh, his shoulders ached, and he felt humiliated by those failed tackles. One of the friendlier men had commented, as they walked back to college through the fields and the Parks, that Joe was rather lightly built for this level of rugby. Five foot eleven and a few pounds under eleven stone did not make for a fearsome forward. Joe had immediately suspected a tougher message behind the genial conversation. That was depressing enough. More, though, he was becoming worn down by this clamp of homesickness, love-sickness. It would not budge. He flopped on the bed. Counted the days until Rachel would arrive, sought consolation in the diminishing numbers. It was pathetic. He looked down the barrel of a Saturday night bleaker than midwinter. No way out.

  ‘Do come and join us.’ James’s knock on the door was gentle but persistent.

  ‘Just a minute.’

  He let nothing happen for as long as was polite and then jack-knifed himself upright and went into the ample and classic seventeenth-century room with its deep window seat which overlooked the perfect seventeenth-century quad, a narrower window looking into the extensive college gardens, comfortable battered furniture, a two-barred electric fire.

  ‘You must have met Roderick on the staircase,’ James said.

  ‘Room seven. Didn’t know you were a ruggah buggah,’ Roderick, blond, military cut, clipped voice, immaculately uniformed in checked shirt, school tie, sports jacket, flannels, brogues, ‘I play the girls’ game myself.’ He saw Joe’s puzzlement and smiled. ‘Hockey.’

  ‘The others,’ three of them, ‘are friends from school, I’m afraid,’ said James, that gentle vicarage tone mocking himself. ‘Appalling failure of imagination. Edward, Henry, George.’

  ‘All kings,’ said Joe. ‘Like James.’

  ‘Another appalling failure of imagination,’ Henry said. ‘It carries on from generation to generation. We are doomed.’

  ‘All the crumpets have gone but I can recommend this fruit cake.’

  James cut off a chunk, poured a cup of tea and brought them over to Joe, now sat or rather squeezed onto the sofa. ‘It’s almost time for sherry,’ said James. ‘But you probably need this more.’

  ‘James always plays mother,’ said Edward.

  ‘I rather wish my mother did,’ said Henry.

  ‘You’re from the North, aren’t you?’ George looked closely at Joe, who was instantly mired in self-consciousness. ‘I think people from the North,’ he said carefully, ‘your sort of people, are much more real than we are.’

  Joe felt flattered. Later, in recollection, he suspected that he had been regarded as a bit of a specimen. Yet his willingness to embrace what was offered him overlaid, at that time, any suspicions.

  ‘Absolute rot,’ said Henry. ‘Well-meant rot. Perhaps rot because well meant. But rot.’

  ‘I mean coal
miners and steel workers, men in shipyards and the factories - the Satanic Mills,’ George said, his face set in sympathy.

  ‘I felt that about my school more than once,’ Roderick said.

  ‘But you were head boy, weren’t you?’ said James.

  ‘That was the cover-up.’ Roderick grinned: it was infectious; Joe followed.

  ‘I suppose it made a man of me. Gawd help us.’

  ‘I rather think,’ James said, arranging his hands so that they formed a steeple, ‘that the uniformity of our system which was originally designed to turn out leaders of Empire and men of Roman virtues has now lost its purpose and just churns out rather grey men.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Roderick, ‘did I hear a mention of sherry?’

  ‘My turn,’ said George and he took the bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream to a pre-arranged line of small glasses and as far as was humanly possible filled each one full.

  ‘Why has James, or Jim as we knew him down in our particular Satanic Mill,’ said Henry, as he handed out the brim-full glasses of sherry with the care of a magician demonstrating a very difficult trick, ‘thank you, squire, why has he called up the notion of Grey Men?’

  ‘What is a Grey Man?’ Joe spilled only a little of the sherry.

  ‘Oh,’ said George, ‘a Grey Man will try to get to the Bodleian or the Radcliffe or some such library as near nine o’clock as he can make it.’

  Joe tried to do that.

  ‘I Grey Man will always eat in Hall.’

  Joe did that.

  ‘I Grey Man will always get his essays in on time.’

  Joe did that.

  ‘I Grey Man will wear a college tie every day.’

  Joe fingered his tie. Roderick noticed.

  ‘I think you’re rather tough on us Grey Men,’ Roderick said. ‘Salt of the earth. We’ve worked at being grey. Some of us have sweated blood in our Satanic Mills to be grey. We’re proud to be grey and by God we’ll stay grey.’ He raised his glass. ‘Good luck.’