Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘Seconded,’ Roderick said.

  ‘I thought that at least three of the speakers were really quite excellent,’ said James, in that rather hushed clerical voice. ‘Shall we have a beer?’

  Was the train going up to Oxford or down to Oxford? Were her best clothes good enough? It would be an expensive weekend. Did he really smoke a pipe?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  But when she saw him her fears fell away. He was standing too near the train but looking the other way. He should have been wearing his specs, she thought, affectionately, but when he turned and saw her and his face shone with a smile that brought out her own, she was glad, as she had been the first time at Wigton pictures, that he was spec-less. Even before she put down her case they attempted a hug, awkward because they did not want anyone to see them doing it, but vital because both felt they would have burst if they had not touched. He took her case and marched off for a taxi. He had it all planned and budgeted; he had dug into his savings.

  Rachel decided to be generous as they waited in the rank.

  ‘I think I like your new haircut,’ she said. It made him look like a schoolboy.

  Joe was relieved.

  ‘It’s just that this is what most men have,’ he said, hoping to sound careless, even lofty.

  ‘Just a bit too short at the back.’ She paused. ‘And on the top.’

  He agreed. He scarcely dared look at her. Could just four weeks have made her even more lovely? The black hair seemed even blacker, more silky, more lush: her skin softer, sweeter, her eyes, her body. Joe peeked little side glances, aching to get to the small hotel he had finally settled on, a little more expensive than the bed and breakfast but convenient - in a street immediately behind the college.

  ‘It’s the first time I’ve been in a taxi,’ Rachel said.

  It was Joe’s second but he did not quite know whether such a confession would be boastful or pathetic so he kept quiet.

  The taxi was the right thing to do but Joe would have preferred to walk Rachel into the city in the eternally becoming dusk, to point out this and the other college, to stroll down the Broad in the Friday drift, to refer with casual grandeur to the Clever Men of Balliol, point out the Sheldonian, perhaps even slip around the corner to see the Radcliffe Camera, show off the little Bridge of Sighs, welcome her aboard this place in which her presence confirmed his own place. For the first time he felt that something of Oxford was him. And for the first time he knew that over the next three days and two nights he would not be mortified by homesickness. Or perhaps it had been love-sickness, because inside his composure, the successful straining to be the correctly anonymous Oxford chap, there was a rage to satisfy a desire suddenly unbearable.

  He paid the taxi and calculated a ten per cent tip. Rachel stood on the pavement, her new suitcase in front of her, a sense of relief all but drowning her. It would be all right. Joe was tense and shorn and a bit distanced because it was in public but he was still Joe.

  Mrs. Pryor, a woman whom nothing passed by, admitted Rachel to the hotel with, it seemed, reluctance. Rachel signed the book rather as if she were signing a confession.

  ‘I’ll help her up with her case,’ said Joe.

  ‘Gentlemen are not allowed in single ladies’ rooms for more than five minutes. All guests are expected to be in by eleven o’clock unless special circumstances can be argued. Gentlemen are not allowed to accompany single ladies into the hotel after 8 p.m. Your room is on the second floor, up two flights, turn left, along the corridor, right, down two steps, past the bathroom and the W.C., number fourteen, at the end. No more than one bath a day. No alcohol in bedrooms. Breakfast is seven-thirty to nine. No loud music,’

  Rachel tried hard not to giggle but did not quite succeed, which was noted by Mrs. Steel-haired Pryor, who would keep a close eye on this one.

  Joe dumped the case on the floor, took a look at his watch, did what could be done in five minutes and clattered loudly down the last flight of stairs into the tiny reception area. Mrs. Pryor looked up but without appreciation.

  As they walked up Holywell towards the King’s Arms, Joe could never remember being happier. Rachel looked excited, his arm was round her, they would have a drink in the King’s Arms, then go back to his rooms while everyone was in Hall having dinner. James had pointed out he would not be coming back to the rooms until well after ten o’clock. Joe planned to go out to a restaurant picked after scrutiny of several price lists. Roderick had told him it was ‘perfectly O.K.’

  They were shy in the King’s Arms and there was no one Joe knew well but two or three Wadham men waved or said hello, one even came across and was introduced. They were impressed, Joe thought, some of them noticing him for the first time. Rachel was relieved that the pub was her first step into Oxford.

  ‘It’s just a pub after all, isn’t it?’ she said as they left. ‘I mean, just another pub even though it was full of students.’

  ‘Undergraduates.’

  Rachel took an unnecessary amount of time to look around the room, Joe thought. She was intrigued by the duties of Cliff, his Scout.

  ‘Makes your bed, cleans the room, washes the dishes and the bed linen and the towels for you? What else? He’s like your servant!’

  Joe mumbled. At first he had found it embarrassing to have a Scout and had gone through contortions of over-politeness, of helping, making his own bed, washing his own dishes, but Cliff had said he was doing him out of a job. Nor did he respond well to matiness of any sort. Now Joe accepted Cliff. Soon he would scarcely notice him, even criticise him for not dusting for a week, and although he apologised for criticising him, he did it. But Rachel’s rather scornful tone hit the nerve. He’s like your servant!

  ‘You can’t do anything about it.’

  ‘You’re all spoiled. Put this gown on then.’

  Joe did.

  ‘Walk about.’

  Which he did.

  ‘You look like Mr. Braddock. I thought - undergraduates -would have different gowns.’

  In the bedroom, in the dark, in the front quad of Wadham, it was, Joe thought, even better than he remembered it and God knew that had been often and intensely enough.

  ‘Why don’t we just stay here?’

  ‘If you think I came to Oxford to lie in a single bed you’re mistaken, Joe Richardson. Besides who knows when that Scout of yours is going to pop up?’

  They took their time to walk the short distance to the corner of Turi Street, Joe compulsively playing the tour guide, Rachel soon switching off, relaxing into the ambling strangeness of the place, the vast street, the fine buildings, the monopolising presence of these polite young people.

  ‘Are you sure it’s all right?’ Joe whispered.

  ‘Yes. That’s the third time you’ve asked,’

  It was not confirmation he wanted for the third time but praise. To Joe the restaurant was more than perfectly O.K. There were prints of Oxford colleges on the walls, little lamps on the tables, not too long to wait for the menu, his glass of beer and Rachel’s experiment with a glass of white wine served by an unsurly waitress - ‘She’s a bit like Jennie,’ Rachel whispered, ‘try to get a good look at her’ - but most of all there were others like them just taking it for granted that you could eat quietly in a lovely room on the first floor overlooking Broad Street. Rachel was entranced by the men outside, walking singly or in groups, so purposeful, she thought, so confident.

  ‘They’re another breed,’ she said, looking back from the window.

  ‘Some of them are very nice, I mean, decent.’

  ‘I suppose if you were out there just walking past I would think the same about you.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Another breed.’ She gave that quick smile, the nod, the clincher.

  ‘Would you like another glass of wine?’

  ‘No,’ said Rachel, ‘I’d like a beer but I’m not drinking beer in a place like this. Do you think they’d mind if I changed to a glass of red wine?’

&
nbsp; They took it in their stride.

  ‘That’s better. It’s red for me from now on.’

  They lit up, leaned back, felt fully admitted. Joe had deliberately left his pipe in college.

  They loitered back to the hotel by way of the High Street, taking a loop, Joe determined that not a drop of time be wasted. Both of them were tired, with Rachel’s tense anticipation, the long and clumsy rail journey, the repletion, seeing Joe; his similar anticipation, the slog to clear the weekend of reading and essays, an over-intense obsession with arrangements; and they were in a drowse of love for each other.

  They reached the hotel.

  Joe had been working out his five minutes.

  ‘No,’ Rachel said, as he turned in. ‘Remember? “Gentlemen are not allowed to accompany single ladies after 8 p.m.”’

  ‘We could go back to my rooms.’

  ‘Your friend will be there, won’t he?’

  ‘He wants to meet you anyway. He’s giving us tea.’

  ‘Tea!’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  They found a dark slit between houses across the road from the hotel and stayed there for a while, although both of them felt a little uncomfortable, being in Oxford. They did not go as far as they would have done in Wigton.

  He showed her the Singing Tower of Magdalen College and went up Merton Street, already one of Joe’s favourite streets, small town, intimate, an intense seductive feeling of ancient scholarship, and from there into the bright vastness of Christchurch where Joe pointed out Big Tom the Bell over the main entrance and spoke rather inaccurately but enthusiastically about Cardinal Wolsey and the extraordinariness of the College Chapel being the city’s cathedral. She peeped into the Radcliffe Camera, not allowed past the librarian, craned her neck looking at the cupola in the Sheldonian, saw the famous Uccello in the Ashmolean, had a drink in the Eagle and Child in whose back room, Joe had heard, men of unrivalled intellect spoke in impenetrable Old English. They landed up at George’s in the Market for a quick, cheap, late lunch - home-made pie, mash, peas, and treacle pudding. Rachel went on strike after a walk in the Parks and insisted they sit on a bench and watch the ducks and do nothing else.

  It was here he made his move.

  ‘Not a pipe! So it’s true! Oh, Joe! Not a pipe!’

  Joe laughed at her outrage but stuck to it. There was a stiff northwesterly and it took three matches to get going and Rachel spared him nothing as she commented on his struggle.

  ‘It’ll be cheaper than fags,’ he said, coughing just a little, ‘in the long run. It’s the wind that makes it difficult. You can get a little cap thing that keeps the wind off.’

  ‘I pipe! Will you smoke it in Wigton?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I hope not. I’ll pay for your cigarettes.’

  ‘What about tonight?’

  ‘Is there a dance on?’ Joe had considered that.

  ‘I know some men who went to one and they said it wasn’t much good. I thought we’d go to the theatre. They’re doing The Seagull James says it’s a very fine play.’

  As with the haircut, Rachel made an immediate accommodating decision.

  ‘We can always go to dances in Carlisle,’ she said. ‘Do they dress up for the theatre?’

  ‘I’ll wear my suit,’ said Joe.

  They went to the Playhouse to buy tickets before heading for Wadham for the encounter Rachel had dreaded for weeks: meeting Joe’s friends.

  ‘It’s the first tea I’ve had where you start with fruit cake and end with sherry.’

  It had worked. She was happy. Joe sipped at his glass of bitter. They had hit the King’s Arms at opening time and for a few minutes the small saloon bar would be theirs. Joe was enjoying the post mortem much more than the tea.

  ‘James’s very kind, isn’t he? You said that in your letter. And none of them was as snobbish as I’d thought’ Rachel said that to please him. There were bits of evidence she would weigh more carefully over the coming weeks. Joe suspected nothing. All he wanted was to listen to this proof that the two worlds had moved together. ‘I liked his sister as well.’

  A rather older sister in Oxford for the day to visit friends, and dragooned into service by James.

  ‘She gave me one or two looks,’ said Rachel, glancing down at the cigarette she was dabbing out in the huge red bowl of an ashtray: there was nothing she would say against Joe’s friends, but the sister had made her aware that her tight skirt and high heels and hugging white rollnecked sweater and perhaps most of all the big buckled belt were worlds away from what she should have been wearing at an Oxford tea. And in the presence of this other woman the words she spoke suddenly sounded guttural, even rather coarse.

  ‘Roderick’s great, isn’t he?’ Joe nodded, happy as the smiling Buddha. ‘Speaks’ - she attempted an imitation - ‘like officers do in war films. Tries to do it without moving his lips. He should be a ventriloquist.’

  ‘He’s -’ Joe wanted to say ‘grand’, hesitated, stopped.

  ‘Upper Class,’ said Rachel. ‘But nice with it. And he knows a lot about dogs.’

  ‘He hunts,’ said Joe, ‘with a pack of beagles.’

  ‘The fisherman was hilarious.’

  ‘I don’t really know him. He shares with Roderick. At the top of the staircase.’

  ‘I thought I’d die when he told about going deeper and deeper into the river to get that trout. And just not noticing!’

  Joe laughed as he had done then. He hoped he’d see more of the lanky, gentle zoologist.

  ‘He may say he loves the trout but if Bob can’t kill anything that moves in the countryside, it’s not worth his getting out of bed,’ Roderick had said.

  ‘It was James kept it going,’ said Joe. ‘James made it. He liked you. I could tell.’

  ‘He seems to like you, as well,’ said Rachel.

  Joe was surprised. That might be true.

  ‘I was going to teach you to play shove ha’penny,’ he said, ‘but I think we’d better get ready for the theatre. We can play shove ha’penny tomorrow after we’ve been to St. Mary’s.’

  ‘It’s still funny to think of a man coming in to wash all that lot up after we’d finished.’

  ‘You are very lucky,’ James had said to Joe, almost severely, as they left.

  For the theatre Rachel wore her new dark blue close-cut dress, with another tight belt, only slightly less heavily buckled, this time in gold to match the great Parisian bracelet. Joe thought she looked sensational. Rachel glanced around the foyer and the bar in the interval and realised that she had dressed for the town dance. It did not bother her, as it had at the tea. There were many different styles on display and in that difference she found any extra confidence she needed, which was not a great deal, as she knew from the mirror, from Joe, and from the grazing gazes of the young men in scarves that she looked good enough.

  Everything about both the theatre and the play gripped her. She liked the bustle in the foyer beforehand. She felt a shiver of expectation when the lights were lowered. The actors and actresses were wonderful, she thought, so real, and she could have cried for the girl. She loved the so good-mannered crush for drinks at the interval, the bells ringing them back, the meeting again with old acquaintances on stage. She hated the writer who seduced and then dumped the girl. Then the real shock of the ending.

  As they walked back, Rachel said,

  ‘That poor boy. Why did he have to do that? I still can’t quite believe it,’ and,

  ‘What a bastard that writer was to that girl,’ and,

  ‘I’d like to see it again, even though I do know the ending.’

  ‘I am a seagull,’ said Joe, flapping his arms as the girl in the play had done.

  ‘Don’t,’ Rachel said. ‘It gives me the creeps.’ They approached Wadham. It was almost ten-thirty. ‘James said he would be out late.’

  ‘Where does he go?’

  ‘I don’t know. He keeps some things quiet.’

  They turned into the front
quad. Blotches of light from flung-open windows and little energies of sound indicated where the parties were. Joe, who had never been to a private college party, suddenly wanted to crash into one of them, Rachel on his arm. He knew you could. Especially if you took a bottle. He had an almost full bottle of dry sherry in his rooms.

  ‘Eleven o’clock is closing time at Pryor’s Prison,’ Rachel said.

  They went into his bedroom. The sound from the parties somehow teased Joe and distracted him.

  ‘Careful!’

  He fumbled with the condom in the dark and Rachel vaguely wondered why fitting it was so difficult.

  ‘That writer in the play really was a bastard,’ she whispered, ‘wasn’t he?’

  They walked to the station later on the Sunday afternoon and though an observer would have guessed at their closeness, Joe tilting to Rachel with the weight of the suitcase, Rachel’s arm loosely through his, the two of them in step, in physical harmony, there was unresolved agitation.

  Joe had insisted on paying the bill at the hotel. Rachel had said nothing at the time but found herself blushing, she did not know why, as Mrs. Pryor made rather a meal of it. Outside, out of earshot, she demanded that she be allowed to pay. Joe would have none of it. Again without knowing why, Rachel became flustered. She worked, she said, Joe didn’t. He had budgeted for it, he said. She did not want him to pay for everything.

  The more she argued the greater grew Joe’s obstinacy and the greater his sense of pleasure and perhaps of proprietorship that he could and had done this for Rachel. She knew that in such a mood she would not shake him, which infuriated her: but the obstinacy impressed her.

  Yet it disturbed them, it raised the spectre of Joe’s unpaid years ahead, it crystallised the visit as an intermission, became the hyphen between them, when what they wanted was to be joined.

  When she got on the train which would lug her across country to Bletchley to meet the London connection for Carlisle, Rachel quelled all that. Joe looked miserable. He was trying to smile but that made him seem even more miserable.