by James Wood
“But you cannot fail to know, Tom, that she loves you and is concerned about your future? That is all. Just as Peter was—and, yes, I know that you and Peter had some problems. Several problems, perhaps! How I miss dear Peter … Sarah wants just the utter best for you, like any parent.”
I couldn’t help saying, helplessly, “But what is the best for me? What should I do?”
Jane said briskly, “Come on, Tom, we’ve been through this.”
“Not with Uncle Karl, not with him.”
“As soon as you abandon your laudable commitment to higher thought,” said Karl, “I would love to help you on your way. But I suspect that what you want is to sit in a room on your own, reading during the day and earning no money at all, and then, no doubt, oysters and champagne at night at the Ritz.”
“That sounds fine to me,” I said. “Plato by day and Alcibiades by night.”
“You remember, Jane, I spent those two years in Nice?” said Karl. “There was a beach outside the town I liked to swim from, I went there on Sundays. After their church visiting, the old Frenchmen, who were pure and freshly confessed from their church, real old Provençal types dressed in dark suits and white shirts, stopped at the beach on their way home to ogle the girls who were not wearing their bikini tops. Even on Sunday they were not very godly. Tom, you remind me of these men—I can’t for the life of me think why.”
Do I want incompatible things? In fact, it’s a better description of Karl, who is a considerable connoisseur of women. My parents often talked about “Karl and women” with the same kind of resignation that they talked about Durham weather. Karl married two more times after his famous wedding party in London, and is currently separated from his third wife, Antonia, whom I liked very much. I miss seeing Antonia in Karl’s flat. In each case, the issue has been his inability to refrain from extramarital activity.
I let Jane leave us early, so that she wouldn’t see me begging for money. Buoyed by the success of the evening, we warmly agreed to “do this again,” a repulsive charade in which we spoke to each other like mere lunching acquaintances. “I’ll phone you,” said Jane, as she kissed me with those lips.
Karl and I had brandy in his drawing room. A delicate ludic Klee looked down at us from above the marble mantelpiece.
“She won’t phone me.”
“You are too young to go through this, you realize,” said Karl.
I looked quizzically at him.
“Separation, divorce, ex-wives. Accept this from a specialist.”
“It was very sweet of you to invite Jane tonight. Thank you. Quite a shock.” I shook my head.
“Clausewitz’s most important principle. The element of surprise. He says it is the foundation of all undertakings.”
“I don’t think it’ll work, even on our tiny battlefield. I’m supposed to be winning her back, that was the arrangement, but she never sees me.”
“What were the terms?” Karl asked this like a lawyer, matter-of-factly and without any surprise.
“Oh, the usual. I have to be a better human being, and so on.” I laughed nervously. I didn’t want to tell Karl about the lying, about the real cause of our separation. I cherished his respect too much.
“Well, Tommy, I will do all I can. I will speak to her.”
“Thank you.”
“I would be doing nothing more than repaying you,” he said gently, with fondness in his eyes.
“Oh, that.”
It was true that I liked Antonia so much, and loved Karl so deeply, that when the familiar and expected news came from my parents—“Uncle Karl’s in the marital soup again”—I did all I could to convince Antonia of his immense goodness. She and I spent most of the summer of 1988 on park benches throughout London talking about Karl’s overpowering “sexual needs.” I hadn’t known that Antonia had told him.
“As I say, I will do everything that is in my power.”
I gently bent the conversation towards my bedsit on the Finchley Road. I would have Karl round for dinner, I said, except that it was too horrible where I was living, and Jane’s flat was no longer available to me. Now we were back on familiar terrain. We both knew the rules, and followed them. How awful is this place? asked Karl, and I made it sound a bit better than it was, in order to seem nobly stoical, the opposite of a beggar. At which point, Karl said, “Now don’t obscure things from me, Tommy. If it is not a viable place to inhabit, you can always come back here. I have assured your mother this.” And I, restless in my seat, with mixed feelings about the knowledge that Karl and Mother were discussing me, said that I didn’t need to stay with Karl, but I was worrying a bit about the rent. “Well, why did you not say so?” said Karl, thus releasing both of us from further discussion. The cheque, I know, will appear in the post in a few days’ time, posed to look like a stray thought, a wisp of generosity unrelated in any way to our conversation last night. It will be for vastly more than it ought to be. And it will be the third such cheque I have taken from Uncle Karl since the funeral. Commit a sin twice and it will not seem a sin …
18
BUT NOW I MUST explain the terrible events of last Christmas, and how Jane and I came to separate. After my September visit, I didn’t return to Sundershall until the day of the annual Christmas Gathering. (My mother has always called parties “gatherings”; it’s a way of making them sound less secular. Her strict and ascetic parents used the same word for all social events and she can’t abandon the habit.) Last year’s Gathering was momentous, because I inadvertently confessed my atheism to my father.
Jane and I drove up for the Christmas week. Uncle Karl was due in three days’ time. We arrived late, an hour before the party, to find my parents running around, preparing things. Or rather, my mother running around. Every two or three minutes she came into the sitting room, but she seemed really to want to move from room to room talking to herself. Father, who had surely done nothing to help in the preparation, strode in and stood by the fire, smoking a small cigar and striving to mimic his wife’s frowning, in the interests of harmony. Whenever Mother disappeared, his face had its usual easy and genial aspect; as soon as she appeared in the room, he busied his face to match hers, and studied the fire as if he were in charge of it. Amused, I sat and watched this performance. He looked very well.
One of the villagers, Mary Surtees, looked in, and Peter stood to attention and said, “Jane, you remember Mary, don’t you? She is Our Lady of the Waters tonight—she’ll be slaving away at the washing up.” Then Mother entered.
“Dearest, I’m not fooled by you,” she said, with a laugh. “What have you lost in there, a ring?”
“Eh?” said Peter.
“You seem terribly concerned about the fire. Have you lost something in it?”
Peter went after Sarah, feebly offering to help, and then returned to the sitting room.
“Everything all right?” he asked us both.
“Oh yes. I need a drink, though,” I said.
“Ha! You’ve brought a little bit of London with you to our modest village party,” said Father, with a satisfaction that immediately set me on edge.
“How come?”
“You’ve passed my test. I’ve noticed that the more sophisticated a society, the more people say that they ‘need’ things, which is always in inverse proportion to their actual needs. Whereas up here, in our humble little village, our people say they want things when they really need them.” I was annoyed by Father. I suspected him of preparing this observation in advance; it sounded almost memorized. I felt that his observation was doing double duty for him: while subtly criticizing me, he also wanted my approval, wanted to sound “philosophical” with me—not just the clever parish priest who should really have retired by now but the owner of a “proper mind.” And why the sarcasm of “our humble little village”?
“Is that so?” I said heavily. “Well, Dad, if it makes me seem purer, I can tell you that when I entered the room I only wanted a drink. But now, thanks to you, I really need o
ne.” I said this cruelly. Father’s face went red, and seemed to swell into sadness.
“Oh, Tom—” he said, while I poured myself a punitively large scotch, and ignoring my father, asked Jane what she wanted. The bell went. Excusing myself, I went to the door. It was Colin and Belinda Thurlow, rawly punctual as ever. Behind them appeared Timothy Biffen, who was a younger colleague of my father’s in the theology department when Peter taught at the university. Timothy is in his late fifties, but is boyish with thick hair. His habit of wearing summer clothes throughout the year—thin open-necked shirts, light linen trousers, flippant and airy shoes—gives him an eager, frivolous aspect, almost like that of an unsuccessful playboy, quite at odds with his intellectual reputation, which is ferociously abstract and theoretical. Peter liked him, had liked him when Timothy first arrived at the university, “with the ink still drying on his utterly incomprehensible Ph.D.,” as he put it once. Father was interested in him because he was the only member of the theology department about whose religious beliefs one could not be certain. “I think he doesn’t believe. But he wriggles like a puppy. Impossible to pin the fellow down. One day he’s hot, the next he’s cold.”
I feel at ease with him, because Timothy, playing up to his reputation as a secularist surrounded by believers, adopts a somewhat risque manner with me—he likes to discuss religious matters in a deliberately “brutal” and chilly way, as if he accords their claims no real respect. This made him a pleasant sight to me, as he took off his cold coat to reveal the customary light clothes underneath.
Mother appeared, welcomed the Thurlows and Timothy, and then whispered to me that Terry Upsher was sitting in the kitchen and that I should go with Jane to pay our respects of the reason. “Just for a second. That would be polite.”
I had not talked to Terry when I was last there in September. Under a strong light in the kitchen his dark temples seemed littered with grey hairs, and his rough chin with white spikes. He was standing at the sink.
“Mary cannat stick the washing, so I’m doing it. She’s got hands that are that precious she won’t put them in the water,” he said mockingly, in his high quaver.
“Sherrup,” said Mary. “You’re a proper blather you are. You asked yourself over so’s you could get your hands on a proper meal for once.” And as she spoke, she seemed to be preparing his supper, putting various foods onto a dinner plate.
“Don’t witness her,” said Terry to me, “she’s the one what’s blathering.”
In all the years I had known Terry, I had never thought of him as the possessor of sexual desire at all. He had for so long been effectively married to his deaf old father. That Terry might be chasing the plain and always very single Mary Surtees, and that this was bringing both of them pleasure, made me oddly depressed.
I introduced Jane again. She had met Terry before, but her presence made me awkward. She has very little experience of anyone outside her social class. Faced with Terry, she tended to speak more loudly, as if he were an uncomprehending foreigner.
“How long you up, then?” asked Mary.
“Just a week this time,” I said. “How’ve you been, Terry?”
“Middlin,” he said. “I’ve had pains in the arm, well, ever since me da died, and that was twenty-three months ago, and Dr. Khan … well, the part of it is, the doctor thought the arm was hurting me so much through stress, and he said I should have a holiday.”
“It’s a good idea,” I said.
“I can tell you that doctor should find himself a holiday. Eee, vision him doing my job, vision him doing this garden at the vicarage, or any of them gardens, his hands are codsoft. Stress! I said to Mary his head should be checked.”
“He’s coloured, mind,” added Mary, from the sink.
“Mary hinny,” said Terry sarcastically, “now, you’re s’posed to say he’s with the ethnic minorities or they’ll come and get you in your bed.”
“Well, that doesn’t make him more white, does it? D‘you think a doctor who isn’t English can understand us prop’ly? They don’t have medicines like us.”
For some reason, made uncomfortable by the turn of the conversation, but also wanting to be part of it, and eager to please, I said:
“They don’t have medicines like us, but they certainly have lots of stress! Millions of people shouting all day at each other, hot weather and all that. The Third World, isn’t it?”
Mary giggled and Terry loudly grunted and said, again: “Stress! It dries me up hearing that. By the way, I’m building a shed for yor da, he asked us last week. Proper thrushed wood.” The front door bell rang.
“What does he want a shed for? In the garden? I haven’t heard anything about it.”
“I diwent kna. He said he wanted to store books down there.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Mary. “Books!”
“Actually, it seems quite likely,” I said.
“See,” said Terry to Mary. “It’s definite, the books.”
“Gerron and leave us alone.”
The oven was filling the room with a woolly heat; I would have loved to have put my head on the table and slept while Terry and Mary talked around me, it would have been a falling into the easy gentle bake of childhood. But I felt that Jane and I were intruding on them, and that our absence would be noticed. I said goodbye, Mary brightly said, “Tara now!” and we returned to the sitting room. As we walked along the hall, Jane pulled me aside, and whispered:
“Why did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Why did you encourage that racism and ignorance by lying like that?”
“How was I lying?”
“You don’t think like that, so why play along with them?”
“Look,” I said, “it’s complicated. I always have played along with them, as you put it, it’s how I’ve survived here, how I’ve grown up here. I’ve needed to fit in, I’ve needed a bit of camouflage. When I was little I used to put on a Durham accent when I got on the bus and asked for my ticket—you know that, I’ve told you that many times. Otherwise I would have been attacked.” Jane surprised me by strongly gripping me.
“Oh, Tommy, please don’t hide yourself, darling—from me or from anyone else.”
“I’m not hiding myself. This is myself.” We were teetering on the brink of an argument.
“God, I hope not,” said Jane, giving me a kiss, and closing the hostility. “All right, are you ready?”
“I am.”
We went into the sitting room, which was now full: Muriel Spedding had arrived, Mr. Norrington was there, Miss Ogilvie, the Thurlows and Tim Biffen of course, and Susan Perez-Temple, and Canon Palliser, and several others.
A discussion was in progress. The theme seemed to be town versus country, corruption versus simplicity. Father had obviously mentioned again his little distinction between wanting and needing.
“London, of course, is hardly British anymore,” he was saying, with his usual confidence. “It’s a European city, its corruptions are Continental, except perhaps around King’s Cross—which will, ah, remain forever England.” He pursed his lips.
“But there’s a difference between country and town just between Sundershall and going into Durham,” said a woman called Marian Rance. “I can sense it immediately when I go in to do my big groceries.”
“Oh, really, I meant a country and city division in the classical sense—north and south, that kind of thing. Sundershall is still remote enough from London that some of the villagers, as you well know, Marian, have never been to London,” said Peter.
“But, Peter, there are perfectly rational economic arguments for that,” said Belinda Thurlow.
“Yes,” said Marian firmly, ignoring Belinda and pressing down on her argument with Peter, “but you don’t need to go to London to get a sense of this corruption. As I say, just the ten miles into Durham is quite sufficient. That awful bus station.”
“Don’t get me started on the bus station,” said Susan.
“Well,�
� said Peter in defeat, “you may be right, but it’s really the gap between the capital city and the rural provinces that is the classical division—eh, Colin?”
But before Colin could speak, Marian said, “Well I wouldn’t know anything about that,” in a tone of slight affront, as if Peter himself, by mentioning London so persistently, had become an example of that corruption.
As Colin began to speak, Timothy Biffen approached me. Quietly, he said, “Who is that bloody woman? She’s like the cook in Proust who always thinks of the monde as the demi-monde. Bloody hell.” Timothy liked to drop swear words into his conversation, but when he said “bloody” or “bugger” or “shit” he did so with a fatal hesitation, surrounding the word with slightly more attention than it deserved.
“It would take a long time to tell you,” I said.
“How’s the Ph.D. coming on?”
“That, too, would take a long time to tell you.” We moved towards the drinks trolley. I could see, at the top of Timothy’s open-necked shirt, that his chest was hairless. The skin was like taut dirty cloth, indeed it was barely distinguishable from the thin grey shirt.
“Frankly, I’d welcome a bit more corruption up here—beginning with our esteemed theology department,” said Timothy.
“Oh yes?”
“It’s full of little shits who think that there are only certain legitimate subjects, certain ways of dealing with them—Incarnation, Paul, the Hard Sayings, Logos, blah. I’m trying to get a little funding so that I can spend a few months in France to work on my Pierre Bayle book, and every time I bring it up they all put on their mitres and chasubles, as it were, and go into session, and then, bang, I’m turned down again. Why don’t they see that I have very little interest in the bloody Letter to Titus,” he said bitterly, as if speaking to himself.
Instead of discussing Timothy’s book, I said, surprising myself, “You know, my father has always thought very highly of you, and always used to talk you up to me when I was younger.”
