by Melvyn Bragg
They lit up, private face furnaces, and the smoke competed with their breath in the crystal air.
‘Well, it’s yes,’ Rachel said quietly, rehearsed, steadily, and the tone restrained Joe, on whom the word ‘yes’ had the effect of a match lighting the blue touch paper. ‘But I think we have to wait a bit before we tell anybody.’
‘How long?’
She shook her head and drew hard on the untipped cigarette.
‘I think we should do it before autumn,’ he said. ‘So I can come back married for the second year. So that means we should do it in summer at the latest.’
‘I’m not eighteen until September. It’ll be that much easier when I’m eighteen.’
‘All right, September. But we have to tell them before then, surely. And I have to talk to everybody here and make sure it’s all right.’
‘It depends which comes first,’ Rachel said. As soon as you tell them here, then the odds are it’ll get back. If we start at our end then it’ll get out and that could affect your scholarship money. I’ve thought I could apply for a job down here; that would be one way to get it going.’
‘That’s a great idea! Then you’d be here anyway. And -’ he paused, ‘but we have to get married. It’s not just you being here.’
‘I’m glad you said that.’ Rachel looked at him, seriously. ‘I’m very glad you said that. So,’ she scoured the cigarette into the path, ‘I was thinking of applying for a full-time job in Carlisle - it’s counter work, not stuck in a back office and it would put me in a much better position to get a job down here.’
‘Carlisle.’
‘Don’t worry. Garry’s moved on; I made a phone call. So I’ll try Carlisle. And then, I think, we have to choose our moment. Your mother won’t like it, whatever she said, and my dad certainly won’t -he’s been waiting to get one over you and he’ll take it. Some time in summer. We’ll announce we’re engaged.’ She looked at him. ‘And they’ll just have to put up with it.’
He should have kissed her but he feared the eyes from dozens of the rooms with windows like his, overlooking the gardens.
‘Until then - nothing?’
‘Nothing and nobody. Except us.’
‘So you accept?’
‘Aren’t you getting down on one knee? Joe! Don’t you dare! I accept! I accept!’
It was not a good sequel to go to Mike’s rooms and endure a run through of the crucifixion with no scenery.
Rachel thought it was terrible. Everybody spoke in fake flat northern voices including Joe, who had nothing to do but just stand and tell the story that everybody knew anyway. The director, who was the chief actor, kept asking her opinion and she did not want to give it, but he would not give up. He also said she was ‘totally authentic’. She kept all this and more to herself.
She looked so like her. Had he carried on down Walton Street and just glanced quickly at the photographs outside the Scala Cinema he would have sworn they were of Rachel. The film was called Summer with Monika. The photographs of the star drew him into the cinema. He rearranged his timetable as he bought the afternoon ticket. He had not been to this or any art cinema before.
He came out shaken. The young man who had so desperately loved Monika had been brutally rejected. How could he live now? Joe wondered as he walked slowly back to his college. How could he possibly face life knowing that the incredible, sexy, unique, enrapturing woman who had been his was now angling for someone else, had cut him out of her life, just cut him out with no anaesthetic, nothing to do but bleed. What would he do?
And wasn’t she so like Rachel? It could not be, it was not possible that Rachel could do that, but there had been a recognition of resemblance, and not only physical, on some level which Joe could not begin to unravel save he knew it was there. He had never loved Rachel as much as he did now, walking what might as well have been empty streets, nor had he ever felt such an engulfing sense of loss should she go.
In his bedroom he read again the letter she had written after her visit three days before and slowly he thawed to reassurance.
That a film could do this! Joe had been to films since he was a child, often two or even three times a week. He had cheered them on, he had danced to them, sung along with them, laughed hysterically, bitten his nails, found heroes, heroines, sex symbols, icons, people next door, followed adventures at sea, in deserts, in jungles, in war, in big city crime, on the range, and in the analysis and dissection of scores of crimes, and so it would not be true to say that this film affected him as no other had done. Yet there was a difference. Seeing a film would never be the same again.
He was to spend some time trying to define that difference. Summer with Monika, he discovered, was directed by Ingmar Bergman and the Swedish director became a passion as powerful as that which he had had for any novelist, any playwright. And through this director, and in the Scala, he was to meet other directors - and directors, not actors, were the stars now: the Italians, Fellini, Visconti, Da Sica, Rossellini; the French, Carnè, Renoir, Godard, Truffaut; Bunuel from Spain, Wajda from Poland, Ray from India, Kurosawa from Japan. At school, Mr. Tillotson had said that great writers spoke to the human condition. For Joe, so did these film directors.
Perhaps the impact on Joe was so strong because films had been such an everyday, throwaway part of his life, and so to be confronted by films as immediately compelling as a work of art unbalanced him, made him think anew, made him think more clearly. Perhaps he was readier for the complexities in these films because of all the complexities absorbed without being aware of it in the films he had seen at the Palace Cinema, Wigton: he had been unknowingly educated in films. It was an education which only now came into play. But it was the vision of these directors that mattered most, a vision which bit into him and brought insights and a community of interest with others similarly afflicted that he was to find in no other arena throughout his time at Oxford.
‘Dear Rachel,
‘Thank you for your letter. Yes. I can’t believe it either but now we’re agreed. I wonder why we didn’t do it a year ago! I do love you. I was walking down Walton Street this afternoon and saw what I thought was your photograph outside a cinema. From a distance -and without my specs! - it looked exactly like you. It did honestly. She’s Swedish and the film was called Summer with Monika. I’ve never seen a film in a foreign language before but I went in because of the photograph. There were subtitles. Rachel, you have to see this film. You have to. It gets right inside you somehow. It makes me remember how mad I was about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and how frightened I was of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and dancing down street (trying to!) like Fred Astaire, but the difference is it’s about people like us, now. I won’t spoil the story for you. You have to see it …’
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The days were getting longer but all that Rachel could see from her bedroom window was a row of red-brick semi-detached houses. She hated the room. She hated being stuck in Carlisle with no real friends and nowhere she wanted to walk to on a warm spring night such as this. The two girls from the bank who had alerted her to the accommodation had gone to the Wednesday night hop at the County. Rachel had felt obliged to turn down the invitation to join them. She was, after all, spoken for now. Public dances without Joe were out. But the move to Carlisle had been more upsetting than she had anticipated, chiefly, she thought, because it coincided with this new self-imposed rule of non-availability. You had to get up and get out in a new place and it would not do to do that.
Joe had compounded her restlessness by taking an extra week to get back home. This ‘authentic’ Mike person had fixed up a ‘tour’ of the Mystery play in London schools, starting at his own old school. Joe was going to stay with James for some of the time. When he had originally written to her about the tour it was to tell her that he was not going on it. Rachel had immediately replied that he should, he would enjoy being in London, he would like staying with James, he liked acting. She was a little disappointed when he wrote back say
ing that he agreed with her.
She got up for work in the dull, over-furnished room which she would never like. The heavy furniture was so unused it seemed to belong to a museum, she thought. Whoever could have lived in a place like this? It was dead and it made her feel dead. She made herself a minimal breakfast.
In the bank she was now at the counter, which had more interest than being stuck in the back room and she enjoyed being directly in contact with the customers. Rachel had no complaints about the work. It did not take long for some of the customers to act like old admirers. She brought sandwiches for lunch and ate them as quickly as possible in the tiny kitchen at the back. The three young women had agreed that they would take it in turn to make the evening meal but a combination of fads, sudden dates and forgetfulness made that an unreliable fixture. Besides, Rachel admitted, she liked the other two well enough but not enough to work with them, lunch with them, gossip with them, work again, eat again, chew over the same stale bank gossip and go to bed knowing that they would walk to work in the morning, all three, and do it all over again.
On one miserable night she wrote three long letters to Joe but in the morning she put these aside, too long, too mawkish, too sad when they should not be. A brisk cheerful note was substituted and posted on the walk into the mediaeval centre of the old city near the Cathedral where she worked. She supposed that her loneliness was proof of how much she loved Joe and how much she missed him. ‘College’ll be worse than him doing National Service,’ Linda had said.
At weekends, after the morning stint, when she jumped on the bus which would take her straight through Wigton and back into the village, her spirits lifted. She could not wait to get back to the farm, to the busy house she knew, to her family, the village and the gossip from the kitchen of the Donaldsons. She had not realised how much she liked her own place.
‘I’ve one confession,’ she said, ‘and one surprise.’
She tried to sound happier than she felt. She found the location disagreeable. They were, yet again, on their ‘island’ on the Moss, the first time since last summer. Once a den of secrecy, a hidden cave for early forays into sex, glamorised, magnetised by the force of what they felt for each other. Now the den seemed to Rachel to be intolerably childish. But where else could they go to be as private as this on a Saturday afternoon? Especially in the Easter holidays: people out and about, taking time off.
‘Go on then.’ Was he taking her for granted? Straight back to this damp dump. He had scarcely been back for twenty-four hours but it seemed they had hit a routine as old as Darby and Joan.
‘The confession is that I went to a party at Peter’s.’
‘Who was there?’ He tried to sound calm.
‘Only the people we met before. I thought, should I go? But’ - I was lonely - ‘it wasn’t a dance’ - it was better than a dance - ‘and it was in his house’ - but his parents had gone away for a couple of days - ‘so it was all right, wasn’t it?’
‘But did you enjoy it?’
After the digs in Carlisle and the brooding on Joe and herself, the inklings of a too early sense of enclosure, a nagging spreading greyness in her life, the party had been like November the Fifth.
‘Yes,’ she said in a neutral tone, ‘they’re a nice set.’
‘They are a set, aren’t they? That’s a good word for them.’ Joe hunched himself around his knees and took out the unreliable pipe. ‘And I suppose we’re part of the set now.’ Rachel was wary. He was trying too hard not to be seen to mind. ‘What did they talk about?’
‘Oh - I can’t remember. Peter was very funny.’ About going to the lavatory in France, that was all. About doing his backside business standing up or squatting down on what he called the gorilla’s footpads and he demonstrated this with sound effects and all the miming. He had them in stitches. He had done it in broad Wigton dialect which made it even better. She did not offer this to Joe.
‘The surprise?’
‘Aha! I met your mother in the street last Saturday afternoon. To tell the truth I think she had been waiting to meet me because she came right across and started talking as if nothing had happened.’
‘She’s said nothing to me either.’
‘But,’ said Rachel, clearly pleased, ‘you know what she did? She said we should go to the pictures together and when I said I was stuck in Carlisle all week she said she could come down to Carlisle one night and we could go to the early evening performance.’
Joe swelled with comfort.
‘So she’s got over it.’
‘Looks like it.’
Joe wanted to take the opportunity offered, he thought, by the upswing in her mood and he moved to lie on her but she checked him.
‘Not here,’ she said. ‘Everybody knows. It’s become embarrassing, this place.’
‘Nobody’s around.’
‘That’s what you think.’
‘Who cares? Especially now.’
‘I care.’ She got up and stooped her way out of their cave.
Outside, in the bright spring sun she stretched widely as if her whole body were expelling a deep yawn. Joe looked crestfallen.
‘Tonight then?’
‘Yes.’
‘After the dance.’
‘After the dance.’
She had hoped they might go out to one of those country pubs Peter had talked about: they sounded something new. ‘I wish you would give up that pipe,’ she said.
Joe and Sam were together in the bar just before opening time. ‘Why do you want a job at the lemonade factory?’
‘Good money,’ said Joe. ‘Have you got yourself into debt?’
‘No.’
‘I could put a bit more to your top-up,’ Sam offered.
‘You give me enough. I like working there anyway. I like doing the deliveries around the villages with Wally. We go to places I haven’t seen since Alan and I went there on our bikes.’
Sam was not convinced. He had waited a few days for this conversation. This late Monday afternoon, Ellen in Carlisle, the bar empty, Joe just back, all conditions met.
‘But what do you want this extra money for?’
‘There’s an outside chance I might be going to Germany for a month this summer.’ That was strictly true.
‘Germany?’
‘They’re taking a play and I might audition. If I got a part I’d need more money.’
‘What does Germany want with a play from you?’
Joe beat his father to the draw and it was he who held out the packet of cigarettes.
I don’t know. Except this director, who’s brilliant, he’s had a review in the Observer, he says the Germans are mad on Shakespeare and somebody he knew at his school who teaches English in Heidelberg says he can lay on a tour of the university cities along the Rhine.’
‘Well, I’m blowed!’ Sam smiled. ‘Will you have to learn German?’
‘They all understand English.’
‘Do they now.’ Sam looked at him slyly. ‘Is it King Lear?’
‘The Tempest, Joe said. ‘Any good?’
‘Not as good but it’s famous because it’s his last play. Mike says he knows how to stage it with a minimum of props. And he says it’s the most significant of Shakespeare’s plays for the state of European culture as he sees it today. Anyway - it hasn’t happened yet. And it might never happen.’
‘And that’s what this lemonade job is all about?’
Joe paused, and to save him from a direct lie, Sam said,
‘I saw some college lads on the television, with their scarves and their duffel coats, marching to Ban the Bomb.’
‘I wish I’d been there,’ said Joe and he braced himself.
‘And I wish them luck,’ Sam said, quietly. ‘All the best. I don’t agree, not a bit, but maybe that’s what you lot should be doing and keep on doing.’ He turned and leaned on the bar and concluded, quietly, ‘But I’m afraid it’ll never happen, Joe. Not in this world.’
Isaac liked to give Joe jobs to do a
nd the boy was willing enough.
‘I want you to tar that flat roof, Joe,’ he said. Joe had joined Rachel’s bus at Wigton as she came back from Carlisle for the weekend. Joe took the tub of tar, the thick-haired stiff brush, announced it the ‘best job of the day’, whistled ‘Hey ho, hey ho, it’s off to work we go!’, put the ladder against the roof and tried to feel like Tom Sawyer.
Sometimes he enjoyed working on the farm and part of the enjoyment came in the associations it set off. He tried to turn the kitchen into the lair of the Brangwens. When they were down on the Flow he imagined it as Egdon Heath. Haymaking the previous summer he had felt like Tolstoy and explained Tolstoy’s great happiness at haymaking to Josh, Rachel’s more sympathetic brother. Now he was blacking the roof as energetically and hypocritically as Tom Sawyer had whitened the fence. Tarring a roof had no dignity to it, he thought, it was just a dirty job to be foisted off. He had planned to walk to the Moss with Rachel. The walk was still an erotic promenade despite the ban on the cave.
He must be thinking about that studying, Isaac thought: the boy’s mind was certainly not on the tar. Isaac noticed but raised his fingers to his lips as Josh too saw what was happening. Robert Donaldson came into the yard with some bales he owed and he too was mimed to silence. The three men pottered about, doing some business, but never more than a few seconds away from looking at the young man on the roof, furiously lashing down the tar.
Isaac slipped into the house.
‘Mother!’ He managed to whisper a shout. ‘Rachel! Come now! Come quick!’
The women came to the door. Robert concentrated a strong smile on Rachel which it would have been ill-natured not to return, though not to the same degree. Isaac’s timing was perfect. Joe had tarred himself into the centre back of the shed top. He was marooned. He looked up, looked round, looked down, saw the crowd and swore silently.
‘And you’re supposed to be at Oxford University!’ Isaac was delighted. ‘Where’s your brains now, eh?’ The laughter was generous but it was laughter and Rachel was not altogether pleased.
