Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘You can’t do much with a slow foxtrot,’ said Linda when it finished, ‘save sort of stick against each other.’

  ‘Did you have to be so close?’

  ‘Oh Joe,’ said Rachel. ‘I knew you’d say that! It’s just a dance.’ He did not believe her.

  ‘You’re in a sulk,’ she said, as they stood in the shadows, just inside the gate of the farm. Alan had given them fifteen minutes.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You’re a liar, Joe Richardson, and not a very good one.’ How could she be so casual about it? Clinging together. ‘I turned him down when he asked for a second dance.’

  ‘That was a quickstep,’ said Joe, miserably. ‘He has a girlfriend, you know. She broke her wrist this morning.’

  Rachel kissed him, deeply, and he had to give in. ‘Tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘In Wigton. I’ll stay the night.’

  ‘O.K.’

  ‘You’d better go now.’

  She watched him walk into the middle of the barely lighted road and stand to be seen. Alan’s motorbike revved up a score or two yards away. Rachel waited until they were gone.

  The truth was that Robert had pressed himself against her very hard and she had not resisted it.

  As she undressed for bed she thought she would apply for that job in Carlisle and see if she could share a flat with some of the other girls. It was time to leave the village.

  Peter Carson was funny now that she had cottoned on that his propositions were never serious; William Anderson’s bold free-standing house looked clear over the rooftops of Wigton right into the Lakes. He was as good mannered as anybody at Oxford, she thought, and spoke just as well as they did. But Joe so swaggering in that duffel coat! And sometimes his pronunciation just skidded away. Neither Oxford nor Wigton nor anything else. Talking to Archie about whatever it was, knowing nothing about it but going on and on, had been embarrassing. And imitating Roderick too often, even though it was funny. Yet he liked Roderick.

  It took Rachel some time to get to sleep. Her mother would not want her to leave for a flat in Carlisle. Rachel smiled to herself in the dark: even Isaac might want her to stay. It was Joe, to be fair, who had sorted Isaac out, to everyone’s surprise. She ought not to have danced like that with Robert. She would make it up to Joe. It was Joe she loved.

  Aunt Claire was still away at her brother’s and as Rachel had brought in her clothes for going out and also the clothes for work the next morning, Ellen said it was easier if she stayed the night with them.

  They went to Carlisle to see King Creole. Elvis seemed distant. He did not hit the nerve. Joe felt out of sorts, even disturbed. It was only too obvious what it was, he concluded gloomily, as they swayed home through the black countryside upstairs on the last bus. He would be leaving for Oxford in the morning. Where was the happy anticipation other people reported? Why had it not infected him? Already he felt a certain dread, bracing himself for conflict.

  They had a cup of tea with Ellen and Sam who sometimes seemed to get more chat out of Rachel than he himself did, Joe had observed. She would tell Sam stories about the bank and make comments he had not heard before. Rachel often told him how much she liked Sam and although he was pleased there was just a prickle of resentment.

  Rachel’s bedroom adjoined his own. It was where Golin had slept, for two or three weeks, until Sam had moved him out. It was separated from Sam and Ellen’s room by the landing.

  Joe lasted no more than a few minutes on his own. Rachel was waiting for him. Danger lent urgency and also Joe desperately wanted to kill this stupid fear of going, to lose it in the body of Rachel. They lay a while wide awake, listening, sharing a cigarette. Outside, Wigton wrapped around them in a quiet as complete as could be, no cars, no dogs, no sudden shouts.

  Again they made love, this time with a languorous, even sleepy care not usual between them, more tender, more homely even, and fell fast asleep.

  Ellen opened the door. For a while she stood stone silent, simply gazing on the two of them in the same bed. Joe appeared to feel her gaze and woke up to look at her, but he could not see her eyes: she stood with her back to the thin curtains which let in the morning light. Joe could detect the beginning of tears in her voice when she said,

  ‘The sooner you two get married, the better.’ Then she was gone.

  It took some time to coax Rachel out from under the bedclothes. Breakfast was apologetic.

  Joe walked her to the bank. He would be gone before her midday break.

  ‘I’ll never be able to look your mother in the face again,’ Rachel said.

  ‘She won’t tell anybody. Except Dad.’

  Rachel smiled. Sam would be all right. She looked around, very carefully, gave Joe a quick kiss on the cheek and went in to work.

  He was packed to go.

  ‘I'll see myself to the station this time, Dad, thanks all the same.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Sam said. ‘Your mother?’

  ‘Upstairs. We said - it, cheerio, upstairs. It’s great, isn’t it, upstairs?’

  Sam raised his eyebrows. In the nervous state before this unwanted departure, Joe felt a surge of affection for his father, as he had done in their first talk on his return. Yet they had talked so little since, Joe so often ducking a conversation, pleading work, appointments, fudging it. Now that he saw him standing plain before him, the quiet smile, the steady look, he said,

  ‘You’ll have to come to Oxford sometime.’

  ‘Do you mean that?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. You have to. You’d really like it.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll show you round.’

  ‘I might take you up on that, Joe, one day.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Time to move off. Make sure you look up to the window and wave when you get outside.’

  CHAPTER FORTY

  ‘Dear Rachel,

  ‘I think that we should get married. I don’t suppose I’ll be allowed to while I’m living in college but next year (October that is) I can live in digs and I know at least one man who is married and lives in digs. Admittedly he did three years in the navy and is a bit older but it shows it can be done. And there are plenty of banks in Oxford!

  ‘Why not? If we wait until I’m finished here and get a job that’s more than two and a half years and what’s the point? I just sit here missing you. It would have to be investigated and maybe they would cut off my grant but not if you weren’t pregnant, surely? Even if they did cut off my grant I could get a part-time job in a pub. But I can’t see why they should. It will have to be sorted out. You would be here: we would have the best of both worlds.

  ‘All this must sound very practical. I don’t feel “practical”. I know that if I were with you all the time I would be very happy. I hope you feel the same. So why don’t we do it? I love you and you say you love me. We’ve known each other more than two years and I’ll be twenty next birthday. We’re going to get married one day, anyway. It would be normal. It would be so good if we could do it now. So, Rachel, please, will you marry me?’

  He took the letter to the main post office some distance away, giving himself every chance not to post it. But walking only stimulated him. To be with Rachel every day, to make love to Rachel every night, without a doubt that would not only be wonderful but it would take away this underdrag of missing, he would be able to belt into things as he should be doing, not dither around the edges, wondering what an undergraduate was supposed to do - he would do it, whatever it was, because Rachel would be there. Joe felt himself the beneficiary of a revelation. The more he thought about it the more euphoric he became and the sooted buildings and the anxious chilled faces of an Oxford winter January afternoon were exactly the contrast he needed to confirm his own mood, full of light and warmth and certainty.

  Rachel read the letter quickly, stowed it in her bag and went to the Picture House coffee bar in her break, where she read it again, several times. She was thrilled. Married, away, living in Oxford, Joe, a new life, Joe’s wife, married.
The sensation filled her with a sense of boldness and a flush of happiness which she concealed rigorously as she took another cigarette and read, yet again, ‘Will you marry me?’

  Her letter arrived the next day.

  ‘Dear Joe,

  ‘Well, that was a surprise! I nearly fell off the chair at home and only dared peep at it in the bank in case my calculations all went mad. I went to the coffee bar to do it justice! The most important thing is to tell nobody. I won’t. Nobody at all until we talk about it face to face when I come to Oxford a week next Friday. But I do love you and your letter made me realise how much. You’re right. We’ve been together at least as long as most people who have a formal engagement. I suppose they’ll make us have an engagement -I would want one anyway! The ring! Have you thought about that, Joe Richardson? I never thought a proposal would come in a letter, but there’s something very romantic about it, I think. Am I supposed to say “thank you”? …’

  So that’s it, Joe thought. He folded the letter very carefully and put it in his wallet so that he could take it out and read it whenever he felt like it. It’s all settled.

  For the next ten days, Joe floated. The strain went and in the slack he prospered.

  He even went to the College Labour Club and, where previously he would have been too strangulated to speak, took part in the debate and though he felt patronised by two expertly pipe-smoking men from Winchester who talked about Trotsky a lot of the time and implied that Joe’s Labour Party values were little more than a form of conservatism which duped the masses, he managed to come away without feeling the need for self-flagellation. What did they know about Labour, he thought? They were supposed to be Conservatives. Why was what British Labour had done so much less, so insignificant, so dismissible, compared with what the Russian Trotsky had done? Joe had been on shaky ground with Trotsky and he would try to read up on him, but it was very annoying that these two from public school should virtually tell him he was not really Labour.

  It was at this time that he decided he would play out the season in the rugby team but not pursue it after that. It took up too much time and, in the privacy of himself, he did not enjoy it. Both tackling and being tackled were no fun. Another load lifted.

  He refused to join in a desperate raiding party led by the Yorkshiremen who were bound for a hospital dance in search of Irish nurses. He felt new clad in virtue: it wiped out Carfax.

  Bob said that he had heard there was excellent fishing in the rivers of Cumberland and could he come and stay for a few days in summer to chance his arm? Joe felt complimented, both for the rivers of Cumberland and for himself.

  It was at this time that he encouraged a shake-out of his societies, cutting down to the History Society and the College Dramatic Society. He found himself spending more time with the Joint Action Committee against Racial Intolerance and made a couple of obvious but welcomed points at their biggest meeting so far.

  James seemed unsettled this term, there were two or three sudden visits to London, asking Joe to cover for him in the morning. Whenever Joe enquired, though, he insisted he was fine, just fed up with these bloody exams, the Prelims they all had to do at the end of their second term, as if getting in had not been proof enough, James said. It was childish to keep swotting for exams, James said, and he found that he resented it so strongly he could not bring himself to do it.

  He left the choir but would, he promised himself, still go to chapel. What if they could get married in the chapel!

  Roderick met him after a tutorial and they went to the King’s Arms. Joe was becoming a regular. Perhaps the landlord would take him on if it proved necessary. Before they had taken a sip of bitter, Roderick picked up on a conversation they had started a few nights ago about the Impressionists in the Jeu de Paumes. Roderick was ecstatic, detailed, lavish in his adjectives, he out-boxed Joe several times on artist and painter, but the fact that Van Gogh was not his favourite gave Joe as he thought an unbeatable edge, a winning argument. Roderick put his money on Manet.

  ‘Did you go to many strip clubs?’

  Joe was totally off guard. The blush was the answer.

  ‘Bloody expensive,’ Roderick said. ‘I trawled Pigalle half the night until I found a place I could afford.’ Joe’s throat went dry.

  ‘The Apache,’ Roderick said. ‘What a dump!’ Joe nodded. ‘Same again?’ Joe nodded again. While Roderick was at the bar he rehearsed all the options and decided to confess nothing. Later, on his own, as he was walking along the street to the Bodleian, the recollection of it made him smile. Roderick! Gawd!

  When Joe met Rachel at the station this time he thought that their new circumstances justified a deep kiss, but Rachel was having none of it. He was not offended: nothing could now disturb him, it seemed: his life was now fear-proof, afloat, ready for all comers.

  ‘I’ll pay for the taxi this time,’ Rachel said, before it came. ‘And I’ll pay for the hotel. And we’re not arguing about it. And when we have a meal we go Dutch.’

  Mrs. Pryor unbent to receive a returning customer and Joe took advantage by spending almost three times the allotted span with Rachel in the narrow single bedroom. Neither by look nor word did Mrs. Pryor reprimand him, but neither did she smile.

  Joe had worked out a new routine but Rachel wanted to follow the old. The King’s Arms, followed by his rooms while the college ate in Hall, even the same restaurant, red wine from the start and then less tired than before to the White Horse where they had played shove ha’penny on the Sunday after church and where they queued to play again. Joe raised the issue, the chief, only, burning issue in the hotel bedroom, in his own bedroom, over the table in the restaurant, on the street outside the White Horse and each time with a different line or manoeuvre though never hurtfully she put it off. ‘There’s no rush, Joe,’ she said; Tm here all weekend. Let’s just get settled first.’ Even on the walk back to the hotel as eleven o’clock rushed towards them, she brushed it off and yet before they reached the hotel she gave him such an embrace that he shimmied back to Wadham.

  ‘We’ll talk about it tonight,’ she said in the morning, ‘after we’ve been to the theatre. We are going to the theatre?’ He had taken her for coffee in the Kardomah, which James had suggested and called ‘famous by Oxford standards’.

  ‘It’s Hamlet, said Joe. ‘Undergraduates. They’re brilliant. They’ll probably be the next stars of the London stage.’ Some of them were known to come to the Kardomah. He waved, indicating limitless horizons. ‘Writers and directors as well - they’re all here. But Hamlets -’

  ‘Do you think I’m too thick to go to Hamlet, Joe Richardson?’ Her laugh was contagious.

  ‘Now I come to think of it.’

  ‘I’m not missing Hamlet at Oxford. We’ll get tickets right away.’

  ‘O.K.’

  ‘Then - are those boats - on the river -’

  ‘Punts.’

  ‘- available at this time of year?’

  ‘No.’ Joe took the right swipe at a guess.

  ‘I’d like to see one or at the very most two colleges. And no museum this time. Are we meeting your friends?’

  ‘I thought some of us would have a drink in the Turi. You’ll like that.’

  ‘Good. I want to see them again. We’d better make sure of the tickets.’

  Rachel paid for the coffee. As they crossed the café to leave, Joe thought he recognised one or two ‘names’ and ‘faces’ lounging in their young success, cloistered glamour.

  ‘Let’s not rush,’ Rachel said when they went for a drink in the bar of the Randolph Hotel - another first for Joe. ‘We can talk about it after the theatre.’

  But the play was long and back in the King’s Arms, Rachel said,

  ‘Why did he not kill him when he could have done, when he was saying his prayers?’

  Joe had a vague idea of how to answer that, was it to do with not killing men when they were praying? To do with stabbing him in the back being cowardly? To do with him being ready to go to Heav
en because he was talking to God? To do with Hamlet’s chronic indecision? He tried to bluff it out. It was not easy to be tested in the King’s Arms on such a Saturday night, even in a corner of the saloon bar and especially when two or three came over to say hello to him and, as Joe saw it, eye up Rachel, which first pleased then began to agitate him.

  ‘O.K. then,’ said Rachel, ‘if you don’t know that one, here’s another. Why did she kill herself? Ophelia.’

  Once more, Joe struggled and in response to her persistence, tied himself in knots.

  ‘I can agree with some of that,’ Rachel said. ‘But she needn’t have killed herself. Her brother was sexy, though, wasn’t he? Better looking than Hamlet.’ She touched his arm. ‘He was a bit like you. Last one. Why did the Queen let Claudius kill her husband in the first place?’

  ‘Lust,’ said Joe, firmly. ‘Lust.’

  ‘Yes.’ Rachel nodded. ‘That’s what I thought. And he was very good looking. It’s amazing to think that they are - “undergraduates” -as well. They were as good as real actors. You were good in that one at school.’

  ‘Our Town’.

  ‘The part you took was nearly as big as Hamlet’s.’

  ‘I didn’t get a sword.’

  ‘No. And it wasn’t anything like as interesting.’

  He decided that he would ask her if she wanted to see the final run through of the section of the Mystery play in which he had a part. Others were coming. He had mentioned Rachel to Mike who had been very welcoming. It would be at eleven.

  ‘We have to talk before then,’ he said.

  ‘As long as we don’t go back to that stuck-up place you took me to this morning.’

  Joe was relieved. Rachel had received one or two caressing looks in the Kardomah. But they could find nowhere else open early on a Sunday morning and so they sat in Wadham’s gardens on a bench beside the huge and famous old copper beech tree, both wrapped up like mummies against the frost which had crept in through the night.