Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘Not bad is it?’ James asked after more of a gulp than a sip.

  ‘No,’ said Joe. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Not that I know the first thing about wine,’ James said, accepting the cigarette. ‘Thanks. I’m glad you’ve dropped the pipe.’ They lit up. ‘That’s one of the things that annoys me about this bloody place, people talking as if they were connoisseurs or eighty year olds when in fact they know damn all.’

  Joe was surprised at James’s language. Two bloodies and a damn so far.

  ‘The snobbery doesn’t seem to impinge on you,’ said James, and Joe, who was still cowering deeply in himself, nursing the wound of Rachel, saw enough to register the anger in James, more of a wildness, all the more disconcerting because it came in those precise tones and from that hitherto so well-poised friend. ‘I don’t mind the Tory Viscounts of Christchurch,’ James said, ‘and all that old snobbery of the Gridiron and Vincents and croquet on Merton lawn.’ Joe had only the very dimmest awareness of what these references meant. Seeing that, perhaps, James clarified it for him. ‘The Brideshead hangover is quite fun, another colour in the palette. As long as it does not predominate. It would be sad to see it go.’ This time he took a sip. ‘It’s not much good, is it? It’s what you get for six and ninepence. Still, it’s cold.’

  ‘I like it,’ said Joe. ‘It’s the sort of stuff you could drink all night.’

  ‘It’s too obvious to list the glaring deficiencies.’ Joe was happy to let James do the talking and James talked as one who has waited some time to talk. ‘Remember the chap caught in flagrante with the girl at Somerville last term? She was sent down, permanently, possibly ruined for life. He was rusticated for a couple of weeks and I believe the University Jazz Band gave a party for him when he came back! And of course people like you are under-represented, to say nothing of women. But it would be hypocritical of me not to admit I could live with that because that is exactly what I have done. But it’s all so intolerably bloody smug!’ He drank more wine and a new mood came on him. ‘I’m talking about myself far too much. You’re not at all smug, Joe. Quite the reverse. And since you came back, you’ve looked rather rattled. I hope you don’t mind my saying so. None of my business. Have another drink.’

  So Joe told him. He had told no one else. He wanted to say, ‘Rachel and I have broken up,’ and leave it at that, but he responded to James’s intense attention and his silence, steepled hands to his lips, eyes never making contact for more than a second or two. He talked at length. It was such a relief. He even confessed that he had proposed to her and found the guts to say that it was she who had turned him down. But why, he wanted to ask and did, into the silence. He went over her reasons and added some of his own - he showed off too much when he was talking to her and in her presence to others and she hated showing off. But he could not understand it. He told James about her father and her brothers, he told him about Linda and the dancing, he told him about the parties and their new ‘set’ and how they went for walks to the Moss and into the Flow. He did not talk about sex.

  ‘I presume there was sex,’ said James.

  Joe nodded and left it at that.

  ‘Well, I’m very sorry to hear about it,’ said James. I liked Rachel very much indeed. We all did. Remarkably attractive and intelligent and unspoiled. She seemed very fond of you. Are you quite sure it’s over?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Joe was too ashamed to admit that he had rung three times and each time asked her to come back. The last time she had said the calls were upsetting her as much as they seemed to be upsetting him and would he mind not phoning again, it would be better that way.

  ‘You’re obviously cut up about it and I can’t blame you.’

  Joe wanted to say more but he thought that already he had said too much.

  ‘I can’t give you any consolation,’ James said, and Joe noticed, once again and affectionately, in the latening evening that slight boom in James’s voice, ‘except to say - and of course this is meaningless -that in the very long term Rachel may have done you a favour, indeed she may well think that she is doing you a favour in the short term.’

  ‘I don’t understand that.’

  A favour? When he felt worse than he had felt even on those very first mornings at Oxford. A favour? When he was crying inside and scared that the panics which possessed him would bring back the loss of himself, the wipe out, the terror of paralysis and disappearance which he hoped he had conquered and left behind on a younger battlefield. A favour? When he so fiercely missed touching her, looking at her, making love to her, talking, joking, just being with her in the same room, in the same town, in the same country, and knowing that she was there for him as he was there for her. James noted his distress.

  ‘As I said, meaningless. Ham-fisted. Have another glass of wine.’

  James felt he had overstepped a mark.

  ‘I came back tonight fully armed to tell you my own news,’ he said. Joe looked up. ‘Trivial. But there it is. I won’t be coming up next year. It’s having to re-take those bloody Prelims. Frankly I can’t see the point. I’ll take them but I refuse to do any work for them.’

  ‘You might pass this time.’

  ‘Not a chance,’ James said. ‘I’ve scarcely done a stroke since I won a place here - what? - eighteen months ago. Frankly it was a waste of a place. I have no interest whatsoever in the academic life on offer. I enjoy one or two of the societies. I like the theatre and so on. I love talking to my friends, Brian, yourself. But I don’t need Oxford for any of that.’

  Joe was dumbfounded and impressed. How could anyone give up being at Oxford? Seemingly out of the blue, he said,

  ‘Is that the only reason?’

  ‘Shall we open the second bottle? Before it warms up?’

  The operation seemed to take a long time.

  ‘You’re quite right, of course,’ James said, standing above Joe, pouring the wine. He put the bottle beside his chair. ‘Very perceptive.’ Yet he was pretty certain Joe suspected nothing. ‘I just feel freer in London,’ he said, ‘and I don’t find certain things easy here.’

  James left a gap and Joe ignored it. Could it be innocence? James took a deep sip of the wine. ‘The fact is that although I like women and I liked Rachel very much, I prefer men.’ James took his time. ‘I am, in fact, homosexual.’ The word was pronounced with great care, even reverence.

  Joe nodded, somnambulistically.

  ‘You are the only one I’ve told. Brian knows, of course. Others may suspect,’

  Joe looked blankly at his wine for a few moments and then he lifted his eyes to meet James’s gaze. He saw the pain there for the first time, the extreme nervousness, and even in that first glance he gleaned something of the tortuous route which had brought James here.

  ‘I’m glad you told me,’ he said. It was good of you to tell me.’ He felt like a real friend now. And in some way, he could not analyse it, it made them equal.

  He took out his cigarettes, tapped them forward in the packet so that they jutted over the edge, leaned across and saw that James’s fingers trembled a little.

  ‘That must have taken some doing,’ said Joe.

  ‘It did.’

  Joe lit both cigarettes.

  ‘We’ll still stay friends even after I’ve left here,’ James said. ‘Oh yes,’ Joe said, ‘we will.’ He raised his glass and then drank.

  ‘We will,’

  ‘It’s very important,’ James said, taking care not to slur his words. ‘Friendship is the most important thing of all. Don’t you agree?’

  Joe liked to agree with James - but was that true? Friendship more important than love? How could anything be more important than love?

  ‘Save of course for love,’ said James carefully, ‘though love is very difficult. Real friendship, I believe, though not as passionate, can be longer lasting and just as enriching.’ He was tired, the fumes from the alcohol drugging his mind. ‘Real friendship.’

  Like ours, you mean, Joe thought, and he nodded, fee
ling warm in their friendship though on the horizon there was the chill realisation of an Oxford without James.

  ‘You’ve been a good friend to me, James,’ he said. ‘You really have. Thanks.’

  In the summer vacation Joe came back home for as short a time as he could. Wigton belonged to the time of Rachel which was gone for ever, how could he ever accept and absorb that, and Rachel still came there and had to be avoided. Avoiding Rachel was the root of those days. Wigton belonged to boys from school who were working now, real jobs, their roads forked from his and inevitably growing more distant. It belonged to a time so near he could reach out in his memory just a finger length and touch it like rubbing his hand on a sandstone wall. Yet it was so far now with the intervention of university and more, so much more, since his abandonment by Rachel, which meant, he felt, the end of love itself, and of all the decisions and instances and accidents in his life that had intertwined and led to the amazing thing, being in love with Rachel and being loved by her, and through her, finding such a sense of rightness about himself in the little town, at the school, despite all his failings and vanities. Now Rachel, and that love, were gone. His heart ached. The wound was too deep. The thought of Rachel was so tormenting and so painful in his mind day and night and there was no one he could tell. He had to lock it in, afraid that he would seem soft.

  No sooner had he got off the train and walked up to the Blackamoor than he wanted to be away again: it was all but unbearable.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  They took the lead and the slates to Longthwaite Road and turned into the lane where the men had the allotments, kept pigs, hens, pigeons, ducks, bred finches, grew flowers and vegetables. Diddler led the piebald slowly pulling the flat cart to where he had moved his caravan. The other horse was hobbled nearby. He called out to his wife to make some tea. Sam and Joe had almost finished stacking away the first load in the shed Diddler had borrowed for a while. He and his wife would live in the caravan until he got a place. There was a dilapidated old cottage along the Syke road that he could rent cheap: there was a garth came with it for the horses. It was just a matter of haggling.

  They were pulling down Vinegar Hill. The council had declared it unsafe and unfit for human habitation and the demolition men would be there on the Monday. Diddler had offered to help out by taking off the roof, and disposing of the slates and the lead. Since now and then he helped out the council with the dirty jobs, and also for the convenience of it, they had agreed immediately. Diddler knew that they had no idea of its value.

  ‘My pension,’ said Diddler, ‘the roof off Vinegar Hill! It was big, Sam. “Unfit for habitation”! Vinegar Hill was good enough for us, eh, Sam? That old roof would have lasted until Doomsday. But it’s mine now, so.’

  He had called on Sam for a hand. Joe was there, the last day of his brief visit before going off for a summer tour of Germany with the play. He was pleased to help, to get out of the pub, to put in time before he caught the sleeper to London and joined the others at Victoria Station in the morning.

  Sam and Joe worked together steadily. Joe collected a neat pile of slates and carried them across the scruffy thistle- and nettle-infested ground. Sam took them into the shed and stacked them with care to get in as many as possible. When the cart arrived, they stopped and all three unloaded it. Then Sam and Joe set to work again. Diddler went across for the tea. It was a warm day, cloud closed in, listless.

  They worked well together, father and son. To Sam it was a sweet interlude. He sensed it meant nothing to the boy other than a useful killing of time until he could leave and be as far away as he could be from what was hurting him. But there was a bond in the rhythm of the work, the passing of the slates, the handling of the lead; there was a nod of appreciation here, a touch of extra help given there. That was all, Sam thought, and it had to be enough. He wished it could have been more.

  Joe had promised to go down and see Alan and when the tea came he was already overdue and yet he paused, not wanting to be one who walked away when needed.

  ‘You’ll be late, Joe,’ Sam said. I’ll see you.’

  ‘Thanks, Joe,’ said Diddler. ‘Germany, Sam says.’ He grinned, that wide gumless grin which almost engulfed his face and had always triggered a return from the boy. ‘Germany it is.’

  ‘See you then,’ Joe said, and walked up between the allotments, gathering pace as he went.

  The men took up the fine china cups and drank the tea. ‘He’s on his own now, Sam.’

  ‘He’s been on his own a long time.’

  ‘He’s still the same Joe.’

  ‘Is he?’ Sam looked to the end of the allotment path: Joe was gone. ‘I can’t seem to get through to him nowadays.’

  ‘You’re in him, Sam. You’ll be there when needed.’

  Ellen laid out the clean shirts on his bed. He had been home for so short a time and now away again for weeks and saying he might then find work in London for a month or so before the next term. He was taking every shirt he had.

  Instead of going back into the new kitchen she stayed in Joe’s room and went to the window. On Market Hill before her she could see the whole of her life. The big house over there in the cliff of a terrace, the house in which Grace now lay, often too ill to move. Ellen would go there later on, as she did every day, for an hour or more, to sit with her and to let Leonard get out, go up the street.

  The Hill was empty now but Ellen could summon up her own life, the town’s life, just by thinking on it. The traders with their fast talk, the fairground in October, the games she played as a small girl, silly games really, just excuses to run around and chant verses and numbers, and Joe had played there too, rougher games but much the same, much the same, and time had passed by so quickly. She saw herself come out of that door to be married and then the war and Sam coming home, after it was all over, standing on the steps, grubby, unshaven, that quiet smile, alight with love, and Joe thrown high in the air.