Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  ‘Mr Chambers will be home at five fifteen and he will take you to the pub,’ said Mrs Chambers, spraying furniture polish at a glazed print of a mountain sunset. Her premonition proved accurate and on the dot I spotted through the modesty glass of the front door the distorted form of Mr Chambers shimmering down the path.

  After exchanging his blue trilby for a beige one he walked us to his local, where he bought me half a pint of sterilised beer and sat us down on a severely upholstered bench. Between the horse brasses, various Rotary Club notices announced forthcoming charitable dos. Mr Chambers spoke softly so as not to disturb the other merrymakers, who sat in nylon blazers beside the hissing plastic-coal fire looking as though life had dealt them hands of disappointment and defeat.

  ‘They make you feel very hospitable here,’ fumbled Mr Chambers, removing a particle of dust from the gleaming table with the corner of a starched handkerchief. It was as if his mind had been flushed clean by a blue chemical block.

  There was no teaching at the university yet. Instead, something called freshers’ week was under way and everyone was registering, picking up timetables, choosing subsidiary courses, and finding their way about the campus. We had been encouraged to visit the freshers’ fair, an induction event taking place at the students’ union, the place, it was said, where you went to strike up new friendships, buy a scarf in the university colours, or ask for help if you were going bonkers.

  The freshers’ fair turned out to be a ramshackle event, with representatives of assorted clubs, from beekeeping, to history, to gay, sitting behind trestle tables around the walls of what was apparently some sort of dance hall or dining hall. Depending on just where you stood, the place smelt of shepherd’s pie or pineapple urinal deodorisers. Here and there hooray henrys in striped shirts handed out rugby leaflets, new students chatted to other new students, and predatory agents of the various churches smiled at you competitively. Under a wisp of bunting someone was trying to recruit aspiring journalists to the student newspaper. A headline on its front page showed that the bar had been set low: ‘Cybernetics annex flat roof “prone to leaks” says student’.

  I had never been to a freshers’ fair and, though everybody else appeared to know what was going on and what to do, I was at a loss. The rooms were lit by fluorescent lights, there were many people, and the hullabaloo was intense.

  The walls seemed to be inching in on me so I made my way to the upstairs bar, which at this time of day was dark and quiet. The carpet smelt wonderfully of sour beer. I ordered a pint and sat down on my own in a musty corner. On the table was a cheaply printed leaflet. ‘Would you like to help us start a university radio station?’ it said. Radio was something I was keen on. I had always fiddled about with reel-to-reel tape recorders and microphones and I loved to listen to radio features on the BBC. I had been captivated by Plain Tales from the Raj, a series of programmes featuring stories of British India told by the people who were there. I admired the birdlike skill with which the producer had systematically assembled each episode from thousands of little pieces.

  I was also deeply impressed by the poetic-montage features of a radio producer called, rather wonderfully, Piers Plowright. His haunting programme on the subject of death I have never forgotten.

  Since the age of thirteen I had made a recording every year of the Christmas Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge, which was broadcast live on the radio. After editing out the Bible readings, which I knew almost by heart, I would transfer the carols to a cassette tape. I continued recording the broadcasts until the demise of cassettes, when, with a heavy heart, I threw out more than thirty years’ worth.

  A related interest was sound effects, in which I took a great pleasure. I would annoy my family during episodes of Columbo by saying things like ‘Footsteps wrong as usual’ or ‘Funny how the sound of the closing front door is exactly the same as the bedroom door’. At other times I would announce, ‘That cat meowing is from BBC Sound Effects, LP 4, band 7a.’ I once gave a talk on the subject at school, to the frank bemusement and, I imagine, deep boredom of the class, for whom such details were irrelevant.

  Just a Minute was a BBC radio comedy panel game that I greatly enjoyed. At that time it was taped in a former underground cinema in Lower Regent Street identifiable on the radio by the occasional rumble of Tube trains. I went to many of these recordings while I was at school and once saw the music hall comedian Tommy Trinder make a guest appearance. Among the regular contributors were the actor–impresario Derek Nimmo, who always arrived in his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce; the chef-cum-MP Clement Freud, who tended to dismiss fans with a backhand brush-off; and Kenneth Williams, the actor, raconteur, and diarist. Unlike Freud, Williams was charm itself, especially with children, for whom he clearly had remarkable respect.

  I slipped the leaflet about the new university radio station into my pocket.

  Freshers’ week continued to pass slowly in a muddle of library tours, solitary pizza meals, a talk from the gowned sub-dean about the love of learning for its own sake, and a growing feeling that I had fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole. I spoke to almost nobody.

  As an insulin-controlled diabetic it was important for me to sign up with a doctor to arrange my prescriptions so I went along to the university medical centre, which had a tank of warm-water fish in its reception and its own cottage-hospital-type ward upstairs. There were leaflets about VD, and posters asking for healthy student volunteers for a ‘research project’. A bearded fellow with his leg in a cast told me, ‘I did that. It’s money for nothing. All you do is masturbate into a yoghurt pot.’ It sounded a ridiculous way to make a living.

  We had been told to report our presence to the art department. Art being perceived, possibly, as an ‘unclean’ subject, the department was situated on a separate site half an hour from the main campus. It was a pleasant stroll down the steep hill, past the Edwardian terraces and the hospital where Douglas Bader had had his legs amputated.

  Like the main campus, this one was entirely self-contained. Enclosed by monastic shrub-sheathed cloisters was the sharply trimmed lawn of a central quadrangle. Off the quad were two or three departments, including art and food science, a subject that I never quite understood though I think it has something to do with the development of chemically engineered cheese and extruded snacks.

  I walked the cloisters, a circuit I was to take many times over the next few years, till I reached the department’s administrative section: two or three offices clustered behind a pair of rickety double doors smeared with the painty finger marks of bygone students. In one of these rooms sat a secretary. I stepped forward, submitted my details, and a box was ticked.

  The Professor of Fine Art was to give an introductory talk and an excited gaggle were arranging themselves about the studio on clattering metal chairs. Distant echoes of last term’s linseed oil filled the air and everybody but me was dressed in paint-splashed overalls. Most, for some reason, were wearing builders’ boots. They all smoked roll-ups, a club badge like the crest on Mr Chambers’ blazer pocket. In my jacket and V-neck sweater I must have looked like a representative of the local golf club.

  The professor was a ghostly presence, so lukewarm that I remember almost nothing he ever said, though I do recollect the smell of his pipe smoke, which filled the corridors whenever he was there. He did no teaching that I recall.

  After his trifling introduction we were spoken to by one of the lecturers who came up on the train from London most days to supervise the teaching of first-year students. This man was Austin Randall, a painter just out of his twenties who had been a student in the same department not long before. A tall figure with a hunch, Austin smoked incessant roll-ups, had brown dirt under his fingernails, and spoke with a distinctive whistly delivery. He often seemed to be going somewhere with what he was saying but the trouble was that when he got there you wondered why he had bothered. ‘There’sss sssixsss sssortss
s of ssshapesss, I sssupossse,’ he said, ‘and sssixsss sssortsss of sssurfacccesss.’ Many students took such fatuities for pearls of wisdom. Austin’s paintings looked to me like occupational therapy.

  Playing Robin to Austin’s Batman was a young woman called Fleeta Swit, who detested me from the start. As I would learn, Fleeta, like Austin, expected students to paint in a style resembling as closely as possible her own. She produced an unvarying stream of brightly coloured circles and squares, and if you decided that you might have an idea of your own — having been drawing and painting since you were a boy — you were shot down in flames. At the time I impugned, and I still impugn, the seriousness of Austin and Fleeta as teachers, as painters, and as people.

  The best painter in the university was a man called Terry Frost, who had the titles Artist in Residence and Professor of Painting. He had a grey military moustache and zingy clothes, and was great friends with Roger Hilton and Mark Rothko. Frost was the only artist I have ever met who seriously wore a beret. He also wore huge spectacles that made him look like my grandmother. His work was beautiful and he made no qualitative distinction between figurative and abstract art, excelling in both. His paintings revealed those of Fleeta Swit to be frail derivations.

  Terry Frost had a favourite aphorism. ‘Life’s a bowl of cherries,’ he would say, and he said it often. Sometimes I felt he was saying it because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He was a great family man and years later his son Stephen Frost would make his name as a comedian.

  The most intellectually interesting member of staff was Tony the technician, a practical man with grown-up children. His job was to help around the rabbit warren of studios, which were divided up by year. He put up partitions between one student painter and the next, or fixed things that broke. I spoke to Tony as he prepared my space by erecting panels and securing them to the floor. ‘I’ve been here fourteen years,’ he told me, a nail between his teeth, and I’ve seen everything. The first year exhibition: really interesting, it all looks exciting and different. Second year: less so. Third year: hard to tell one painter from the next. Final show: everything exactly the same.’ Tony was Professor Emeritus of Having Your Head Screwed On and I think he alone amongst the staff noticed that there was something awry in me.

  Among the new students were two Bobs. Bob Strange was aptly named. He dressed very oddly and had a pudding bowl haircut and vast unflattering glasses. His portfolio was full of drawings of classical sculpture. He smoked miniature cigars, which he would pierce with a cocktail stick when they shrank too small to hold with the fingers, enabling him to suck out the final minim of goodness.

  Possibly because he was strange, Bob was one of the few people who did speak to me. One day he showed me a stick of chalky pastel. ‘It’s called sanguine,’ he said earnestly, looking slightly crackers, ‘It produces a blood-red line.’ He had unusual fixations, on one occasion showing me a pamphlet about a dead Catholic friar who was said to have had bleeding lesions on his hands corresponding with the crucifixion wounds of Jesus Christ. I was sceptical; he didn’t push it.

  The other Bob was Bob Scotland: tall and tremendously self-confident, with no boundary between his chest hair and the stubble that darkened his chin twenty minutes after he had shaved. In one incomprehensible exercise that we were made to do, a huge roll of paper was pinned along a wall and we were instructed each to paint a vertical line on it. I made the tiniest mark I could, up near a corner. Bob Scotland splashed a four-foot-wide black strip down the middle, obliterating the lines of many of the other students.

  The weeks passed. Everybody else seemed at ease. They compared paintbrushes, chatted, or invited each other to parties. Before long some were arriving in the studios hand in hand.

  I was feeling strange. Though used to my own company, I hadn’t made proper human contact for too long and the hard edges of the days made me long for some softness. I eyed various girls in the studio. They seemed either unavailable or unattractive. There was Bernice: rather masculine and gruff in her denim fisherman’s smock, always smoking; there was Big Lil, who drank pints and had a huge face; there was pretty Sue, who, when I tried to say something amusing, rounded on me, catching me completely off guard. ‘What the hell,’ she snapped, ‘is that supposed to mean?!’ What had I said wrong? My favourite was a beautiful young woman called Alice, with strawberry blonde hair and a terrific smile. But she was going out with, and presumably staying in with, a fellow from the typography department, the son of a man who read out the news on television. Each time I tried to catch her eye she blanked me. The position was hopeless. I wondered what Katy was doing. I was homesick.

  That evening, I returned to the Chambers’ house, where Mr and Mrs Chambers had dressed up for an evening out.

  ‘I was reading in the Post about someone that’s defamed the Thomas Moore statue,’ said Mr Chambers, squeezing his lapels like a barrister.

  ‘Defaced, do you mean?’

  ‘With pink paint.’

  I was puzzled. ‘Which Thomas Moore statue?’ I asked.

  Mr Chambers plainly thought I was slow. ‘At the university. The Thomas Moore statue.’

  I realised he meant the Henry Moore sculpture that stood on the main campus not far from the library. Some angry students had daubed it with poster paint as a sign of their seriousness. The grounds staff had to spend more than five minutes wiping it off with a rag.

  ‘We go ballroom dancing on Monday,’ said Mr Chambers, swerving suddenly into a new lane. ‘That’s why we’re dressed in our refinery.’

  It seemed to me that I couldn’t last long at the Chambers’ without being driven crazy. I felt I was in a different country, one with a similar language but a mysterious culture and no etiquette book.

  After buying a bag of chips and eating them on my own in the silent dining room I went up to the bedroom. Net curtains covered the window and a decorative fan was arranged behind a print of orange horses galloping through the surf. Like the famous dolly–zoom shot in Hitchcock’s Vertigo the room seemed to be changing perspective in a way that was hard to understand. It was very warm, and I couldn’t turn down the radiator. I noticed a ringing in my ears.

  Things seemed to have gone wrong somewhere. I was a facsimile of myself. An impostor. I was maintaining an exhausting camouflage, a mask. There was a veil between me and everyone else. The real me was hidden. Always had been hidden. Few spoke to me and though I made some bungled attempts to start up conversations, they petered out. I felt completely alone.

  I decided to go out. Going out was better. I took a bus into town and walked along the main road towards the river. It was pelting down and the streetlamps were reflected in the varnished road, the spiderwebs heavy with rain. I reached a squat brown-and-cream church bleached at intervals by the headlights of passing cars. On the board was a notice: ‘SOMETHING IS MISSING FROM THIS CH__CH: U. R.’ Above this it said, ‘Church of St Jude, Patron for the Hopeless and the Despaired’. I tried the door but unsurprisingly it was locked.

  I wandered back into the street, which was shin-deep in the fallen leaves of the September plane trees. In the gutter lay the body of a ginger tomcat, eyes open, a thread of blood darkening the pavement beside his mouth. Hit by a car, I suppose. I walked past an empty café, past a door with a sign reading ‘Dom Polski’ and past a long industrial building with hundreds of chamber pots stacked in the window. Mock-antiques for export to the USA I imagined.

  I went and sat in a huge ugly pub called the Janus. I had a pint of beer that made me shudder and watched the minutes tick slowly away. Everything in the pub was big: the tables, the pattern on the carpet, the noise coming out of the jukebox. It was a hall of mirrors.

  Being a university town the usual uncouth toilet graffiti was augmented by more erudite benefactions. Over the toilet roll holder in the cubicle some wag had put: ‘Sociology degrees. Help yourself.’ Above this was neatly written: ‘He was oppressed, and
he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth!’ Beside this it just said, ‘BUM’.

  I could see the past with knifelike sharpness, but not the future. I wished I could feel happy or excited about something. I went to the telephone box in the vestibule, where I tried to ring Jon back home. There was no answer. A couple in the corner seemed to be talking about me so I left the pub and boarded a juddering bus back to the house, letting myself in with the key on the Lions Club key ring that Mrs Chambers had given me. It was just gone nine o’clock. I got into bed and fell asleep to the sound of a buzzing streetlamp.

  *

  I wasn’t sure how long I had been awake, but a hard moon was silhouetting the weft of the curtains. I’d been having a nightmare, which had faded, leaving me with only the horrible feeling attached to it. I got up and looked into the blue deserted road.

  Solitude had been my refuge from loneliness, which, it seemed, came most when I was with other people. But the strain of getting through each self-punishing hour had exhausted me. I had imploded. I was down a black hole, thinking only of myself, because I had to survive. I was swimming in armour.

  The abrupt changes of the past few days, the new town, the new routines, the incessant new information, the endless decisions and demands, the overstimulation, and the flubbed social overtures were all too much. I burst into tears.

  My psyche, which had been frail for some time, was starting to come apart in my hands. Rooms were not really shrinking in on me: I was losing touch with reality.

  In the morning, through a towering effort, I made it into the university. There were a few days left of self-regulated freedom before the official start of the academic year the following Monday. I had reached a turning point, the point at which relief from the suffering had become the vital thing. What I did that day is lost to me but at some moment I decided to stop, or anyway did stop, taking my insulin. The consequences of this I understood.