by Melvyn Bragg
Then Joe did a little presentation: as if he were a magician about to perform a trick.
‘Does anyone have a plank? Josh - could you bring me that plank from the barn over there. Thank you.’ Josh went across for it. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ Joe said, ‘you are about to witness your very own version of The Great Houdini. Bring the plank up the ladder, Josh.’ Aware now and tickled to be part of the act, Josh took the plank to the top of the ladder and aimed it at Joe, who guided it to the small untarred patch. ‘One moment,’ he said, and he turned around and tarred the last bit.
‘And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I will walk the plank. So.’ The brush in one extended hand, the tub of tar in the other, like a tightrope walker with a pole, he walked slowly, even delicately, up the plank, gave the implements to Josh, twisted himself onto the ladder, carefully drew the plank behind him and when he reached the ground, turned and bowed.
‘Well, that beats the band!’ said Isaac almost proudly, and Rachel sought out Robert to give him a victory smile.
Linda had sworn total discretion. In her bedroom she played her new passion - Buddy Holly - low, but loud enough to prevent any possibility of their being overheard. Rachel had been waiting for her when she came back from Chapel.
‘The fact is,’ Linda said, sitting on the bed in her Easter-new ruby-coloured coat, ‘everybody will say why don’t you wait?’
‘I know.’
‘Why don’t you?’
‘I’ve thought about it a lot,’ said Rachel, lighting up. Linda turned down the offer: she was trying to give up smoking, cakes and sweets at the same time. ‘Joe really wants to do it. I think he misses me a lot down in Oxford and he just doesn’t see why we don’t get it over with and get on with it.’
‘They would still say “wait”. What about you?’
Rachel laughed.
‘It was nice to be asked!’
‘But now?’ Linda’s questioning was close.
‘I want to as well.’ There was, Linda thought, a defiance in the tone.
‘Well, do it then.’
‘He’ll have to find out if he’ll lose his scholarship. I don’t see why he should.’
‘Has he found out?’
‘We’ve done nothing yet. You’re the only one, the only one who knows.’
‘Why hasn’t he found out?’
‘I asked him to do nothing. I thought it was better to wait until nearer my eighteenth.’
‘When are you going to stop doing nothing?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He must love you,’ Linda said, rather wistfully, ‘he must really love you.’
‘He does.’ To Linda’s ears, Rachel’s words sounded helpless.
‘And you?’
‘Love Joe? Of course I do. You know that. You knew that before anybody.’
‘Marry him then.’
Joe could hardly contain himself on the way back to Oxford. Every mile was taking him nearer the place in which he would live with Rachel. The anticipation made him giddy with confidence and though he tried hard to concentrate on the books he had under way - Justine from the ‘Alexandria Quartet’ and The White Goddess - a general warmth of Rachel overwhelmed his senses and he was content to let it, and sit supine as England slid away behind him.
‘You look extremely well,’ said James, and Joe was far too self-absorbed to notice that James looked troubled.
‘Are you anywhere near the Eden?’ Bob asked. ‘I’ve been looking up the rivers.’
‘Why not try the Lakes?’
‘The Lakes.’ Bob looked down at his feet. ‘You know, I don’t think I’ve fished in a lake. A tarn. A pond. A reservoir. Never a lake. Yes.’
‘I was talking to Andrew when that very clever indeed chap came up to us,’ said Roderick. ‘You know. Got a First. Black curly hair: too long. Published a short story in London. Needs a shave. Writes for one of the Sundays now and then. Hanging on for some American scholarship bung. Jacket always buttoned up one-two-three. Know what he said? Not quite straight off, but said it - “What I’m going to do,” he said, this chap, “in my first novel, is cross Evelyn Waugh with Scott Fitzgerald and give it a contemporary twist.” He actually said that! Gawd help us!’
Everyone agreed that the dullest and direst part of Modern History was the Gobbetts - where you had to translate from mediaeval Latin and comment on the constitutional importance in what you had translated. Joe’s tutor was a boyish Welshman in All Souls who was mocked for his too perfect sports jackets, his immaculate suede shoes, his perfectly knotted cravats. Somehow, Joe thought, he made it all easy. He liked going to All Souls. He liked to imagine himself there one day, with a set of rooms for life, nothing to do but read and if moved write a definitive scholarly article. Love and the imminence of the total satisfaction of marriage tamed the terror of Latin.
He played no sport at all in these summer weeks. He did the things all Oxford undergraduates had to do in order to be an Oxford undergraduate. He learned to punt because you did. He drank Pimms, only one or two because of the expense, but Pimms had to be drunk. He lay on the lawn to read in any afternoon sun even though it was uncomfortable, stained your shirts and was too distracting to read anything properly: but that is what you did. He resented none of it.
With Roderick he went to a series of free lunchtime concerts in St. Peter’s Church and discovered Bach. At first he could not warm to it. Joe wanted music to possess him, to overcome him, and Bach seemed to make few demands. But with unusual firmness Roderick insisted on Bach’s virtues and Joe began the experience of learning to like somebody he only admired.
In his political philosophy course he had begun with Aristotle and the experience of hitting a wall of genius in a discipline for which he was so inadequately equipped was invigorating.
And now there were films. There was La Scala. Ingmar Bergman and what seemed to Joe to be his progeny called him down to Walton Street at every change of programme.
‘I miss you but it’s all right,’ he wrote. ‘Now that everything’s settled I’m quite happy to wait. But not for too long! Next time I come home, remember, that’s when we tell them. Oxford is such a fabulous place, Rachel, you’ll really like living here.’
I’ve moved out of those terrible digs,’ she wrote, ‘and I’m sharing a two-bedroomed, one sitting room, kitchen and bathroom (all quite roomy) with Alison Hargreaves whose brother was at Carlisle Art College with Peter! Small world. It seems he was mad as a hatter even then. All my love.’
‘We stayed up all night and got a bit drunk and punted down to Magdalen Bridge for May Morning. We couldn’t hear the boys’ choir singing at the top of the tower but some of the men jumped in the river from the bridge. The truth is I was freezing cold all the time and it seemed a bit pointless at about 4 a.m. but everybody does it.’
‘Alison is really very nice. We laugh together all the time! We go out together but you mustn’t be jealous. She says she’s my bodyguard! Not that I need one.’
‘Only a week to go,’ he wrote.
He walked around the college with a smile on his face and discovered, as summer brought people out of their rooms, that from the rugby and his brief time in the choir, from his own History set and the college drama society, and the new core of film addicts who had asked him if he would be interested in helping them set up a college film society, a network had grown up. Effortlessly relaxed, well able to withstand the few snobs, he was part of an unofficial company of men, he thought, leaderless and without any common strategy save that of being pleasant enough on a passing level, perhaps knowing that out of such unspoken unobtrusive connections, daily lives could feel secure and even reach the foothills of a kind of unaware contentment.
The promise of his secret fed Joe day and night.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Joe was lucky to hitch a lift at the top of the Banbury Road which took him to Warrington. The driver apologised for dropping him off in the dead of night. But he only waited three-quarters of an hour for t
he next lift. By eleven o’clock he was on Howrigg Bank looking down over Wigton, the Italian tower, the church, confident sandstone buildings guarding the mediaeval huddle and the last of the Saxon settlement. He went straight to bed.
He overslept but phoned and took his bike up to Aunt Claire’s and collected her Wigton gossip until Rachel arrived on her bicycle, furious, it was mad to depend on her father for the car, she had to save up for her own. Joe thought she looked perfect but he noticed she took more than ten minutes to get ready. They walked to Peter’s. Her rather strained quiet attitude was not difficult to explain away - the bike ride had been into a strong wind, the lack of a car had been a loss of dignity. Joe was supposed to have come out to the farm that afternoon.
When they all met up, it seemed, to Joe’s relief, that she relaxed. Peter could make her laugh whenever he wanted to. There were about a dozen of them and Peter’s mother gave them tea while they all assembled and decided on their evening. Malcolm was there. Joe felt a surprising warmth towards him - they had not talked for months. Joe listened while Malcolm talked about Dizzy Gillespie whom he had seen play live in Newcastle and Joe had to be told about it in detail. He enjoyed it, enjoyed Malcolm’s obsession in a way he had not appreciated before.
They decided to make for Sour Nook, a tiny country pub on the back road to Sebergham, a pub with a landlord of the new kind, attracting groups such as this, knowing how to pander to them, unable any more to make a living from the dwindling number of farm labourers and locals. There were three cars. They piled in. Seven miles later they decanted into the saloon bar which they all but filled, like a private party.
Joe was separated from Rachel but he tried not to mind that too much. They were all friends together. When he glanced at her she seemed absorbed - for some time she was talking to William Anderson but Joe neutralised his jealousy by switching points of view, since for some time he talked to Malcolm’s girlfriend, Ursula, who, like Malcolm, was reading Natural Sciences at Durham. They were, Malcolm observed, a little club of their own inside the pub, better-dressed, better-off, classy. Joe was uncomfortable at the accuracy of this.
William invited them back to his home for beer and sandwiches and though Joe was not keen, Rachel wanted to go. The billiard room had been completed and Joe tried his luck while Rachel sat in the adjoining drawing room deep in a three-seater sofa, talking to two of the women.
Peter gave them a lift back to Church Street.
‘It really is becoming a set, isn’t it?’ Joe said as they walked the few narrow yards to Aunt Claire’s which Peter’s car could not navigate.
‘I suppose it is,’ Rachel said. ‘Do you like that?’
‘I do. It’s something to come back to.’
‘Yes,’ said Rachel and she slid in the key very quietly.
‘I can’t do it, Joe. I’m sorry. I can’t do it.’
They walked their bikes down the twisting narrows of Church Street and under the arch which led to King Street. There was not a soul to be seen. The only life was the three lights thriftily illuminating the street. The town appeared like a rock, deeply settled, blending into the dark, not clinging to the land but dug into it, deepening in until it became like the oak from the ice age Flow which Mr. Kneale had given him. That tranquil sense of permanence temporarily eased the shock of her words. They got on their bikes and freewheeled past the Blue Bell, freewheeled down Station Road, could have freewheeled under Station Bridge but applied a steady pedal or two before turning towards the sea, the Flow, up the hill to Standing Stone.
Standing Stone had once, perhaps as long ago as Stonehenge, been the marker of the place that became Wigton. There were two references to the Standing Stones in unreliable histories but the name had been noted clearly in the first records and Mr. Braddock had pointed out the ‘beauty of the location’, how it commanded both the plain to the sea and the flat lands which led to mountains distant but fully in view. It was here that Joe and Rachel would usually change pace, here they would finally quit the town and dive into the full darkness of the country. But on this night Rachel stopped.
She had chosen a spot far from the single yellow street light to be certain of privacy, even in such a remote undisturbed place.
‘Best to talk here,’ she said, ‘rather than you bike back.’ She felt sick to her stomach. She did not know if she could go through with this. Perhaps she did not need to go through with this? Joe, and it was the only time she smiled to herself, Joe did not yet understand. It hadn’t dawned. She pushed down the protective affection that this provoked in her.
They parked the bikes against the beech tree. Rachel leaned against its broad trunk on the other side. Joe faced her but did not touch her. The street light was barely a glimmer. The lights of Wigton were blocked from view. He began to fear the significance of all this.
‘Well then,’ his voice sounded over-loud, ringing with nervousness. He spoke more softly. ‘What made you change your mind?’
‘I don’t know,’ just as softly, very carefully, ‘it seemed to decide itself.’
‘But we’d worked it all out. You thought we would sort it all out about now.’
‘I did.’ She tried to think what to add. ‘I did.’
It would be all right, he thought, it would work out, wasn’t it usual for people to have second thoughts before marriage?
‘Joe,’ Rachel said, and she knew this was it, this was the seed of ending, this was what she had to say, the truth which would hurt, ‘what I mean is it’s all over. Not just us getting married. But us. Altogether.’ She licked her dry lips and leaned, almost slumped against the tree, weakened.
‘What do you mean?’
She said nothing. Joe’s question was so forlorn she almost gave in. But she had guessed it would be hard. ‘Not even seeing each other?’
Rachel needed a moment. It was painful to breathe. ‘Not be with each other at all?’
Joe began to see the consequences of this and the shock was turning into panic.
‘Not even like it was before we said we’d get married?’
Joe, oh Joe, if we, if you, if you had not suggested we get married then none of this might have happened, we might have gone along as we were. It was the marriage that made me feel so loved by you and I’ll never forget that. But it was marriage that scared me, Joe.
‘There isn’t anybody else?’
‘No.’
‘Not Robert. Not Peter.’
‘No. They’re not a patch on you. I like them.’ She was scrupulous. ‘I like all your real friends - Alan, Malcolm, James, your other Oxford friends and the new Wigton friends.’ I’ll miss them, she thought. It was a new thought. Will I see them again? That was sad. ‘They’re a good lot, your friends, Joe.’
‘Our friends.’
‘Yours, Joe. I tagged along.’ It was still difficult to breathe properly. ‘Maybe that’s all I did,’ she said.
‘No you didn’t.’
‘It began to feel like it to me,’ her voice was thoughtful. How could she sound so measured, when inside her head there was such turbulence?
‘But more than that.’ She was tired again, but this, she knew, was as near as she could get and Joe deserved that, he deserved the best she could give him, he had done nothing wrong and he loved her, she loved him, maybe she was just a fool.
‘I couldn’t move without you keeping an eye on me. You were always watching me, Joe, wherever we were. And if anybody talked to me, let alone danced or had a drink or gave me a cigarette or just looked at me, I knew you would see it, you would be onto it and I would feel awful. I would feel guilty. I felt trapped, Joe. I knew that you were always watching me. Maybe I should have felt flattered but I just felt trapped. And it was getting no better, Joe.’ This, she knew, was as near as she would ever get.
‘What’s wrong with looking at you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What’s wrong with making sure nobody else … You’re my girlfriend.’
I was. She could not bring he
rself to say that. ‘Anyway, I don’t think … You’re exaggerating.’
‘Not from the way I saw it, Joe.’
It was over now. She had said it and she could not bear herself with Joe any longer. Yet you could not just run away. You could not just abandon him.
‘I have to go now, Joe.’ Her voice trembled a little. Joe took heart.
‘Stay. Please. Just another five minutes. Please.’
It was real now. Joe could not bear it.
‘Please, Rachel. Please stay.’ A sudden gust of tears threatened and he drew in his lip, bit on it hard and checked them.
‘I love you, you see,’ he said, helplessly. ‘What’ll I do without you?’
Rachel felt the tears on her cheeks but forced herself to ignore them.
‘You’ll be fine.’ It was so difficult to speak. ‘You’ll show them,
‘Joe.’
‘Please, Rachel.’
‘I have to go now. I really do have to go now.’
With a great effort, she levered herself from the tree and took her bike. She wanted to kiss him but it was too much for her. Finally she said,
‘I’d rather bike home on my own, Joe. And, I’m sorry, I really am sorry, but I mean what I said, Joe.’ It should not be so hard. The tears were uncontrollable. ‘And I won’t change my mind.’
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
‘I've brought us a couple of bottles of cold white wine,’ said James, in that almost clerical voice. I can’t bear any more bloody sherry. I shall never drink sherry again.’
Joe was pleased to stop working. The windows were open onto the quad on one side, the gardens on the other. The light breeze of a late warm summer evening drifted happy murmured sounds through the rooms, like bees, Joe thought suddenly, like Mr. Tillotson’s bees.
James looked in disarray, no jacket, no tie, shirt with two buttons undone, hair grown long, unkempt, shirt sleeves ineptly rolled up, loose and flapping.
