Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘That was great, Joe.’ She stood on the platform, her luggage safely stowed, the doors still open. ‘That was one of the best times we’ve had.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Yes. It was. And,’ she gave him a proper kiss, not lingering, not slow, but no peck, ‘thank you very much for being so generous.’

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  The guard blew his whistle. Doors began to bang shut along the platform.

  ‘I liked your friends. Bob was very funny.’ She laughed, remembering the story of the fish that would not be caught.

  ‘They liked you as well. At breakfast this morning they all said they liked you.’

  Meaning - who wouldn’t? Who couldn’t? Who was he alive who would not like and even love you, as you moved away and waved until the train went out of sight.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  ‘Did you understand much of it?’ James asked.

  They were still applauding. Joe felt that his brain had been taken over but by what he did not yet know. Nothing had prepared him for this.

  ‘Some of it, I think. Just some.’

  The young actors skipped onto the stage, in movement and gesture almost absurdly at odds with the movements and gestures which they had seized on to play Waiting for Godot.

  ‘I suggest we discuss it back in our rooms,’ said James.

  Roderick: ‘Beats me. Bored me, frankly. Two old tramps spending two hours waiting for Godot who never came. Who cared if Godot came or not?’ He decided to ‘push off and draw up guidelines for a P.G. Wodehouse Society, urgently’. Bob Romford, the zoologist, who had been a regular theatre goer in his school vacations, spurred on by a stepfather who was a critic, edged diffidently into the room clutching a bottle of sherry, ‘Can’t drink yours all the time.’ James had asked along Brian Jacobs, a friend from his old school, described as ‘brilliant’, two or three years older, a major scholar at Balliol. Joe knew himself to be far and away the least qualified of the quartet and guessed he would have more to offer to the P.G. Wodehouse Society. But he had to know what the play meant. His mind had now unfrozen, leaving only a question mark on a blank sheet of paper.

  Sherry was poured. Joe was getting used to it. He was even beginning to develop a preference for dry. They sat down as if taking up positions. Joe had never before seen James as an acolyte but there was no doubt that Brian was to be deferred to.

  ‘What we’re talking about,’ said James, after a glance at Brian, enviably long-haired, Joe thought, but intellectually long-haired, almost excessively slim, very white-faced, long fingers draped around the tiny sherry glass, almost chain-smoking, ‘is clearly a play of ideas: the problem is, which ideas?’

  ‘I rather thought,’ Bob said, in his hesitant voice, gazing down legs which seemed to reach out for the skirting board, ‘that if they’d done it as it were Charlie Chaplin, you know, music hall, we would have laughed a lot and not been so very bothered about meaning.’

  James, infinitesimally, nodded.

  ‘But you don’t deny it has meaning? Why are they there? Who do those tramps represent? Why the sadism? Who is Godot? Why does he not come?’

  ‘Godot’s God, isn’t he?’ said Joe, hopefully.

  ‘God is dead,’ Brian murmured. ‘Nietzsche told us that.’

  Dead? God? Joe could not let that pass.

  ‘He was never alive, was he?’ said Joe. ‘Except through Christ: and Samuel Beckett calls him Godot. It’s got to be something to do with God, hasn’t it?’

  ‘So why does he not come?’ James talked to Joe but still his glances flitted to Brian.

  ‘Maybe they weren’t good enough for him,’ said Joe and felt his words fall on stony ground.

  ‘I rather think,’ said Bob, picking his way carefully, in build and speech rather like a heron delicately picking its prey, ‘that the Christian context is not necessarily the one we should be looking at here.’

  ‘Godot’s a blind?’ James asked. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘So why call him Godot?’

  ‘Irony, I presume,’ James said and Joe was checked. What was ironic about that?

  ‘It may,’ said Bob, musing on his ankles, ‘be one of those pieces subject to several interpretations. I do concede that it is tantalising.’

  ‘Brian?’

  Brian lit up again and spoke in smiling, nervous and rapid sentences, and in a manner that sounded familiar to Joe. He got it! Professor A.J. Ayer, whom he had seen on the Brains Trust and once thought he’d spotted in the High Street.

  Joe took out his pipe to listen with full attention.

  ‘I think the play has to be seen in the context in which Beckett wrote it. Here we have an exile, a man who writes in French and translates his own work into English.’ Joe had not known that. He listened even harder. Brian was diffident but authoritative. He would glance up every now and then as if seeking permission to go on and yet he was enviably confident, Joe thought, miraculously at ease with names and ideas which were often just vague shapes on the far horizon of Joe’s knowledge.

  ‘We have someone, we are told, who was a member of the French Resistance and so we add war to exile and the deliberate distancing and disguises of a language not his first. He is in Paris after the war when not only Nietzsche but Kierkegaard and to some extent Dostoevsky - two plus two equals four is a wonderful thing: two plus two equals five is a more wonderful thing - have influenced the French, especially of course when Sartre came along.’ Joe wanted him to slow down. He wanted to make notes. He wanted him to go over it again.

  ‘Sartre has become as it were the St. Paul of existentialism and it is his sparring partner Camus who tells us in The Myth of Sisyphus that each one of us is Sisyphus, we are all condemned to roll the rock to the top of the mountain only to see it roll back again which raises the question, the only question, why should we stay alive? Why are we waiting for Godot, not who is Godot?’

  Joe was holding on for dear life and partly to give himself time to digest some of this, he said,

  ‘I read The Myth of Sisyphus. I read The Outsider as well.’

  And then he stopped. They waited. But his brain had clammed up. No words came. No thought gathered. They waited politely.

  ‘But how does this bring us to Beckett and this particular play?’ Bob asked, after a silence which seemed to Joe as long as the Lord’s Prayer.

  ‘Existentialism infuses the work, in my view,’ Brian said, ‘and one way to approach that is to note the prevalence of anxiety in the piece, anxiety being the pre-eminent creator of awareness.’

  Was it? Joe wanted to know. How could you prove that? And awareness of what?

  ‘I would still like a neater conclusion,’ James suggested. ‘What you’ve said is very impressive but we are still looking for a key interpretation, aren’t we?’

  ‘We are still - all of us here -’ said Bob, laughing aloud, ‘Waiting for Godot.’

  Brian took another cigarette, the smallest sip of sherry, and a deep breath as if embarking on a risky venture.

  ‘I believe that if it has a single root, then we can find that in the Holocaust, in what happened to the Jews.’

  It was the first time Joe had heard the word Holocaust uttered.

  ‘The Holocaust,’ said Brian, looking ahead above the mantelpiece, and speaking more slowly, ‘was an event of such significance or will prove to be, on the minds of those sensitive to its true meaning for humanity, that no hope, no answer, no speech will any more be adequate.’

  ‘Was Beckett a Jew, then?’ Joe asked.

  ‘No,’ said Brian. ‘He was Irish. But the essential condition of all our lives has been disturbed, deeply and possibly permanently, by the Holocaust. An artist of Beckett’s genius would recognise that, consciously and unconsciously, and this is his reaction. It may,’ he looked benevolently at Bob, who, like the others, felt subdued by Brian’s intensity, ‘it may well “play” as comedy. But the comedy would be a travesty. Beckett’s play i
s a call into the abyss and out of the abyss.’

  Joe concentrated on trying to score into his mind as much of this as he could. When a few moments of silence had passed, Bob asked why it was that this particular event, the Holocaust, terrible though it was, should be so much more significant than other massacres, other exterminations of tribes or classes or peoples, and for the next quarter of an hour Brian, face even whiter, Joe thought, dark eyes even darker, haunted, responded patiently, gently, unyielding. Joe saw the door open and he had a glimpse of another world in which ideas about life and how it should be lived were central to any life worth living.

  James walked Brian back to the gate and down to the corner of the King’s Arms.

  ‘Do you think your friend Joe has ever met a Jew before?’

  ‘Not,’ James chose his reply with care, ‘not I suspect knowingly. Even though there are several in college.’

  ‘I imagine he’s sound.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘I liked him. But a dangerous ignorance.’

  ‘Innocence might be better. He knows other things.’

  ‘I’m sure… but in the end, James, we all need to know the same things, don’t we?’ For a moment, their eyes locked and James felt that he had heard a great truth.

  Brian waved and then glided off, almost a spectral figure, under the dim night lights on the Broad.

  When James got back he found Joe with sherry poured. He handed him a glass.

  ‘God,’ he said, ‘he’s just brilliant.’

  James nodded, curiously relieved. Things had gone better than he had anticipated.

  ‘Brilliant,’ Joe repeated eagerly and raised his glass.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ James said, ‘but I’m rather tired. I’ll pour this back into the bottle and then - bed. Good night.’

  Joe walked slowly across the quad. There was light drizzle which made the winter lawn shine emerald. He had been to a lecture he regretted wasting time on and so he wore his gown but no coat. The quiet persistence of the drizzle matched the depressed persistence of his homesickness, which had lifted when Rachel was here, held off for a couple of days afterwards until the evening of the discussion he now looked back on with such respect, but now it was back, lodged, and he was again counting the days until he’d see Rachel again, fed up with himself, with this mood, evidence of weakness, proof of cowardice but not to be budged.

  He concluded that he did not really know what existentialism meant. He had read parts of The Outsider again and knew that he felt like that but as to what it meant, if he was honest, he was all but clueless. When someone passed by and nodded it seemed as if a fish were swimming past, something which was wholly unlike himself. Was that existentialism? The buildings, so praised, oppressed him with their bare-faced stone, enclosed, cut off. Was that it? On this morning the college was like a prison for scholarship. Only men and so many so clever, the burden of their achievements, their potential, the certainty of their upward advancement. He would have stayed outside in the drizzle until he got soaked but knew enough to know that would do him no good, he would be seen to be merely eccentric.

  Uncharacteristically, he decided to waste the hour before lunch in the Junior Common Room. He had looked in briefly, once or twice, when he had been working in the College Library and seen young men as absorbed in newspapers as the old men were in Carlisle Library. Joe could not see the point: books, yes, but newspapers were to be polished off over breakfast. He picked up the Telegraph, spotted the Daily Mirror, carried both to a corner and read the Mirror. He felt he could be in an aquarium.

  Mike had spotted him and navigated his way down the room with many a ‘Hi!’ and a wave and eventually docked alongside. He tapped Joe on the knee.

  ‘Hi!’

  Joe looked up to meet a wide smile, merry poached eyes, a large head already bursting through its hair, and a magnificent black corduroy suit.

  ‘Sorry about the audition.’

  Mike’s accent had been worked on but, Joe thought, still ‘us’, not ‘them’. There was some camaraderie in that.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Joe muttered, though why had he attempted that raving ranting speech of King Lear on the heath?

  ‘It’s just a three-hander. In fact I’d more or less promised the parts. We’ve all worked together before.’

  So the audition had been a waste of time. Joe put his pipe down. A fix.

  ‘I wanted to say,’ Mike put his hand under the seat of the lightweight armchair and both he and the chair did a frog-hop forward, ‘there’ll be more. I’m thinking of doing something from the Mystery plays next term. Do you know them?’

  Joe nodded, lying, he excused himself, in order to keep the attention of this star of the college’s dramatic firmament.

  ‘The Guild that interests me is the Carpenters. They made the cross. They actually made the thing. Then they did the crucifixion. They put Christ up on it - one of them actually played Jesus Christ! In the bloody Middle Ages!’ Joe immediately saw himself on the cross. Mike had himself in mind for the part. ‘We’ll need good northern voices. I want to do it northern. We can all get near it but I want the real thing. At the heart of it. So keep that in mind, would you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mike glanced at his watch. Another three or four minutes.

  ‘Do you read many plays? I saw you at Godot- isn’t he a genius? -but as I always say first do it, second see it, but a good third - read it. A surprising amount rubs off. Oxfam has a good line in second hand,’ he laughed, ‘tenth hand! paperbacks. You can pick up a lot there. Sixpence a volume. The kitchen sink stuff s harder to get your hands on - Osborne, Wesker …’ His smile grew enormous. ‘You haven’t seen them? Read them? I’ll put something in your pigeonhole. Don’t thank me. And,’ he stood up, only, then, to lean down and whisper, ‘don’t lose the northern thing. They all want you to. They want to absorb you. They want to rub you out. Don’t let them. Look what’s happened to me! I was Manchester when I came up two years ago. Don’t let them get you! Ta-ra!’

  Mr. Tillotson was waiting in Joe’s rooms. He had come to Oxford for a short conference and had an hour to spare.

  ‘I had given him another twenty minutes,’ he told the other two in the staff room. ‘His friend had been very kind and made me a cup of tea. He left as soon as Joe got back. Nice touch.’ Mr. Tillotson had thought he might not divulge this next observation. ‘To be quite honest I had the impression he was going to burst into tears at the sight of me. He didn’t of course. Nobody ever has to my knowledge. But it was an odd moment and it was consistent with our meeting in that he seemed more than a little - how shall I put this? - discombobulated.’

  ‘Little fish in a big pond,’ said Miss Castle.

  ‘They should have reduced National Service to a year,’ said Mr. Braddock. ‘Abolishing it altogether -’ he reached for his pipe, ‘a big mistake.’

  ‘The way he talked he was just longing to get back here.’

  ‘But here will begin to be as strange as Oxford,’ said Miss Castle. ‘Does he still see Rachel Wardlow?’ Mr. Tillotson nodded.

  ‘He’ll never settle until he leaves her,’ the Latin mistress said. ‘Which he will.’

  Mr. Braddock lit up.

  ‘He’s trying to smoke a pipe,’ said Mr. Tillotson. ‘He’s making a terrible mess of it.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  ‘We come from the same place,’ the young woman said and closed Dr. Zhivago. The train had just pulled out of Crewe, they were half way home. She had been reading all the way with commendably close attention. Joe, with his sixpenny volume of Three Ibsen Plays, had found it difficult to keep his eyes on the page: he could justify looking out of the window as a thought break, to digest what Ibsen was on about in The Doll’s House, why it had caused so much fuss at the time, but, truthfully, he gazed out of the window to will on the train, take him to Rachel, take him home, flicking telegraph poles taking him home.

  The young woman’s remark, her first, surprise
d him. He had noticed her as they waited at Oxford Station, how tall she was, short blonde hair, that sort of easy uppery thing about her which he had begun to spot on the rare female sightings at Oxford, self-possessed and, he concluded, without any wish to chat, a wish for privacy in public which through painful snubs he had learned to respect over the past two months. He was learning not to take it personally.

  ‘Just a few miles from Wigton,’ she smiled, a sensible smile. ‘You played rugby against my brother Archie when you were at school. We went to the Friends’ School. We saw you at Brenda’s party.’ She laughed. ‘I thought you were terribly funny.’

  ‘What’s it like to be a Quaker?’ Joe’s question was stabbed out to puncture the blush of embarrassment. Funny?

  ‘It’s what you must already know,’ she said. ‘We use the lovely Meeting House on West Street.’

  My mother told me she used to clean that. Joe checked himself.

  ‘They have the library there as well,’ he said.

  ‘My mother helped set it up. Archie and I used to help choose the books. Great fun.’

  ‘But what’s it like? Do you really just say something when the spirit moves you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her head tilted up with seriousness and as she paused the regular consoling rhythm of the wheels on the track appeared louder in the crowded softly moving carriage. They were at full speed now, Joe thought, streaking back into the far North, leaving behind the farewell plumes of smoke.

  ‘How do you know when to do it?’

  ‘You know,’ said Mary, firmly. ‘It needs to come out of a particular quality of shared silence.’

  Joe took this as a reproach and prepared to re-enter The Doll's House.

  ‘Archie,’ she said, ‘thought you were very good as Elvis Presley. Do you still imitate him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  Joe shrugged and grimaced. There had never been an opportunity. He had never had the energy and boldness to make one. Classical music was O.K., jazz was O.K., even American musicals were O.K., but he had found no fertile ground for Rock ‘n’ Roll. There would be the occasional reference, but Joe had kept his peace. Once or twice he thought he had betrayed Elvis by not sticking up for him. Elvis was just one part of what he had done in Wigton which was not mentioned, which did not count, around which an embarrassment was beginning to fester.