by Simon Mawer
“It’s Sheffield.”
“Whatever. Northern, that’s what it is. Gritty, darling, gritty. You should seriously think about the Royal Court.”
At the curtain call, Fando had carried Lis to the foot of the stage as though she really was disabled, and there were those in the audience who were fooled, one of them coming up to them next day as they walked together in the Cornmarket, on their way to a photo shoot for the student newspaper, to say how brilliant it had been and how she’d assumed that Eleanor actually was handicapped, so convincing was her performance.
After that encounter with fame they went to his rooms in college, in the Old Quad, with the Tudor gatehouse visible through the windows and the two-bar electric fire turned on to provide a focus of warmth before which the figure of Eleanor could disport itself, as careless but more articulate than Lis. She was wearing a red skirt and black tights and a black top. The skirt was a novelty, presumably intended for the photographer. Normally, when not dressed as Lis (whose costume had been a tattered and grubby nightdress), she wore jeans and assumed a vaguely military look. But now a photogenic skirt. Thus clad she set to toasting crumpets on the fire by hanging them on the grille with hooks made from paper clips. The hooks were James’s suggestion. “Typical scientist,” she said, but he detected a hint of affection behind the mockery. “Do you often have crumpets in your rooms?” she asked. She was on all fours before the fire. A small shriek of pain as she dropped a crumpet onto the plate and sucked her fingers.
“As often as I can persuade them to step over the threshold.”
Laughter, edged with something more than amusement. Appetite, perhaps. She rearranged herself on the rug—a length of gleaming black thigh—and began to apply butter. James poured tea from the brown teapot he had brought from home and that Eleanor had declared “very ethnic.” By mutual agreement they sat side by side, on the rug, facing the fire, hot butter on their lips and fingers. By mutual agreement they turned to look at each other and then leant forward and kissed. There was a little exploratory engagement of buttery tongues and the mingled taste of each other’s crumpets and Eleanor’s cigarettes.
“Mmm,” she said, as though to take the agreement one step further. Then she pulled back, took a puff from her cigarette, sipped her tea and might as well have been sitting in the café in the covered market. “We were going to talk about the summer vac,” she said in a faint tone of admonishment.
“The summer,” he repeated, thinking more about this spring, the here and now, and wondering exactly what had just happened.
“We’ve got to have some idea of what we’re doing and where we’re going, haven’t we?”
“Are we going then?”
“Of course we are. Aren’t we?”
“If you want to. I want to.” He had feared she might prefer to go to Paris or something, to dig cobblestones out of the Boul’ Mich’ and throw them at the battle lines of the CRS. But no, she’d already done that. Pavé was passé. Now she just wanted to explore Europe, Italy especially, and maybe even make Greece and see what conditions were like there where the Colonels reigned supreme. “Fascists,” she said disdainfully.
Alarm bells went off in his head. “You’re not planning—”
She laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t get you into trouble. It’s just that I’ve never actually been to a Fascist dictatorship. Except Spain of course, but that doesn’t really count any longer, does it?” And then she touched his wrist and said he looked terrified, but assured him that she would be as good as gold, which was not an element he was familiar with except to know that the only thing good about it, apart from its cost, was the fact that it was virtually inert. He doubted Eleanor would be inert.
They went on to talk about what they’d need to take with them, how much money, what clothes. Eleanor treated the whole thing as though it were a joke—”I can always sell my body if we run short of cash”—and yet there was a bedrock of seriousness about the discussion, as though they really were going to do this. So James talked about sleeping bags, a couple of changes of T-shirt, a second pair of jeans. Washing things and changes of underwear, of course. What else? And he suggested his tent. “It’s okay for two at a squeeze,” he added. He knew about these matters from weekends spent in the Peak District and the Lakes.
“Your tent? At a squeeze?” She had never slept in a tent.
“Never?”
“Well, not since my brother and I pitched one on the front lawn. That was ten years ago.”
“Front lawn? You camped on your front lawn?” To James front lawn implied back lawn and dragged along with it kitchen garden and orchard and probably, just probably, paddock. With a pony.
“Yes, you know—one of those green things. Or don’t you have such things up North?” She bit into another crumpet and told him the story. He was happy to listen, intrigued for the moment by lawns, front or back, as well as by the movement of her lips as she spoke and the butter that glistened on them. Apparently she and her brother had pitched the tent before having supper in the house and kissing their parents goodbye as though they were setting off for the South Pole. Darkness had descended on the garden and the tent. Inside, brother and sister had wriggled and fidgeted and tried to get comfortable on what had once seemed soft grass but now revealed itself as a bed of nails fit to try the patience of a fakir. Thus they had spent four sleepless hours before fleeing back indoors, her brother terrified because he had heard noises, Eleanor smugly triumphant because she had made them. “So, I am not,” she concluded, “sleeping in a tent, and certainly not squeezing into one with you.”
“That’s all right. I’ll sleep in the tent and you can sleep outside.”
That prompted a punch, not very effective, which landed on James’s upper arm. He responded by grabbing her wrist. Another punch, another wrist held. There was a brief struggle in which elbows and knees were involved before they were kissing once again and Eleanor was saying, through teeth and tongue and lips, that perhaps this was not a good idea, that she just wanted to be friends, that there was someone else in her life and that was the trouble.
There was an awkward rearrangement of limbs and clothing. She smoothed herself down. “I’m sorry,” she said, more than once.
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” James insisted, although there was, in fact, a great deal.
“It’s just…” she said.
“Just what?”
“I mean, it’s difficult.”
“It seems rather easy to me.”
“Maybe it is for you. You’re a man.”
“Is it easier for men? Men have feelings as well, you know.”
“Do they? I thought they just had erections.”
He made no reply to that, understanding when it was pointless to continue. “You know when we took that curtain call? When I carried you to the front of the stage and showed you to the audience?”
“Of course I remember.”
He nodded, picking up the remains of her crumpet. “I think it was then that I realized how much I like you.”
Like you. A euphemism used in a time of hardship. There was a pause while he didn’t dare look at her.
“That’s very sweet,” she said. “But at the time I was a cripple wearing handcuffs.”
3
After the awkwardness of the afternoon tea and two more performances of the play, James and Eleanor settled into some kind of unspoken compromise. It involved a certain degree of physical contact—holding hands, kissing, perhaps a hesitant hand on a reluctant breast—but would go no further until…
“Until what?” James asked, emboldened.
Until she sorted herself out.
“That sounds very bourgeois.”
Once again sitting in his rooms in college, talking in that rapid, articulate manner she could adopt, she denied it. Her emotional difficulties transcended all matters of class. They could belong to someone from an impoverished Irish family in Liverpool or Birmingham just as well as someone like her w
ith her moneyed upbringing and her private schooling. Whichever way you looked at it, it was just nuns and priests.
“Nuns and priests?” Comprehension dawned slowly, for this was just another of those Oxford things—a peculiar ritual that might have meant something in the past but was now an irrelevance. So much of Oxford seemed irrelevant. “You mean you’re Catholic?”
“My parents still are, in their different ways. My father treats it as an elaborate legal code and my mother tries to wash her guilt away in a mixture of consecrated host and gin.”
“You mean you believe all that stuff?”
“Of course I don’t. I gave it up a long time ago. But it’s like being a Jew. You never entirely get rid of it.” She opened her hands as though to demonstrate her helplessness. Even James, brought up in a godless household, saw a weird significance in the gesture. As though she might be demonstrating—what was it they called the wounds of Christ?—her own personal stigmata. “Wounds may heal,” she said, “but the scars remain. With guilt still embedded inside like bits of grit.”
“What’s there to be guilty about?”
“You wouldn’t understand. You don’t have to be guilty of anything in order to feel guilt. That’s the secret.”
“That’s daft.”
“Daft it may be but that’s how it is—original sin. The most oppressive thought control anyone has ever invented. George Orwell’s Thought Police, centuries before he ever wrote about it. The Catholic variation is that you are the police as well as the criminal.”
“But if you no longer believe it, where’s the problem?”
She looked at him, head on one side. “You don’t understand, do you? That’s what I like about you. You see life in simple terms.”
“It is simple. It’s you who’s screwed up. You shouldn’t spend so much time thinking about things. Just let them happen. Religion’s no different from studying literature—you spend all your time obsessing about fictitious people and imagining they’re real.”
“You sound,” she said, “just like my father.”
“He sounds all right.”
* * *
And eventually, there they were, at her house in Surrey, in the stockbroker belt, with Leatherhead on the one hand and Esher on the other and Sheffield as far away as Patagonia. And he was about to meet both her mother and her father. Mummy and Daddy.
The father was a daunting man—big, loud, with a sharp look and a quick tongue. A lawyer, apparently. A barrister, a QC in fact, although James barely understood the difference between one type of lawyer and another except that barristers wore gowns and wigs, which always seemed bloody silly. Yet somehow he could see that Mr. Pike would not look silly in gown and wig, would not ever look silly in fact, but would be well practiced in the fine art of making others both look and feel immensely foolish. “So you’re the latest, are you?” he boomed. A bittern, James thought. A bittern booming. The same posture, hunched over his utterance, grasping his lapels, glaring at the witness.
“The latest?”
“Eleanor’s latest.”
She stood close to her father, hugging his arm. “Daddy, I keep telling you, he’s just a friend.”
Daddy’s gaze never wavered. “Well she would say that, wouldn’t she?” he boomed, and James laughed, recognizing the line in the way that one might recognize a Latin tag, with amusement but also with the faint sense of having passed some kind of test.
“Actually, what Ellie says is true, sir. We are just friends. Unless she knows something I don’t.”
Daddy liked the “sir.” It showed an appropriate measure of deference. He liked the recognition of his quotation, liked the humor of the response. “It is my experience,” he said, in the portentous manner of the judge he would doubtless soon become, “that a woman almost always knows something that a man doesn’t.”
* * *
Dinner that evening was a ritual fraught with the possibility of solecism. Her mother was a pinched woman with heavily applied makeup and suspiciously brassy hair, whose eyes settled on James like two iridescent beetles, watching him carefully to see how he maneuvered his knife and fork, how he used his napkin, how he broke his bread and which way he tilted his soup bowl. “That’s an interesting accent you have,” she remarked when he dared speak. “Do you come from Manchester?”
“Sheffield.”
Her mouth compressed, as though he might have got it wrong. “Eleanor said Manchester.”
“I suggested Manchester, Mummy, ages ago.”
“Sheffield is in Yorkshire, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. And Manchester is in Lancashire, on the other side of the Pennines.”
“The Pennines,” the mother repeated, as though he might have said the Urals or the Carpathians. “And what do your people do, James? On their side of the Pennines.”
Your people. As if he came from one of the great families of the North, Percys or Nevilles, wild people leading bands of kerns and gallowglasses and forever waging wars against their neighbors and the Picts over the border. “Both my parents are teachers.”
“Oh, indeed, are they? Amble forth?”
James looked blank. Amble forth? Was that what she imagined Northerners did? Did she think they ambled forth into the Peak District or something, like the ramblers on Kinder Scout in the 1930s? He felt that he had been put to a further test and this time had failed. “I’m sorry, I…”
“Friends of ours have children there. The Remnants.”
“Remnants?”
“An old recusant family. Obviously not.”
James looked even blanker. It was safe to say that he had not understood a word of that particular exchange. Remnants? Recusants? Ambling forth? The woman seemed to live in an alternative linguistic universe.
“Mummy, James’s parents teach at a grammar school,” Eleanor explained. “Not bloody Ampleforth.”
“A grammar school? Where they teach—?”
“Grammar,” said James.
* * *
It was with some relief that he accepted the barrister’s invitation to join him in his study after dinner to try his favorite malt whisky. You couldn’t argue that the family stinted on alcohol. Before dinner it had been G&T; during the meal they had consumed three bottles of a red wine called Aloxe-Corton which had been quite good; and now it was a malt whisky that had lain in casks in a dank cave in Scotland since before James was born.
The barrister sat in his large, leather wingback chair while James pressed himself defensively into the corner of a button-back Chesterfield. Once they had dispensed with the formalities of sipping and exclaiming and agreeing that this golden elixir ranked amongst the finest experiences a man could have, the barrister regarded James with beady and judgmental eye. “So are you two sleeping together?” he asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“My daughter. Eleanor. Are you sleeping with her? It’s a plain enough question.” How to describe the expression on his face? Bleak? Accusatory? Adversarial?
“No sir. Of course not.”
“What’s ‘of course’ about it? Doesn’t every young man want to sleep with every young woman? According to the papers the younger generation does that kind of thing all the time, apparently to the exclusion of everything else except smoking pot. Surely all the journalists can’t be wrong.”
“I can’t answer for my generation.”
“But you can for Ellie and you.”
“What I said before: we’re just good friends.”
“Ha! You sound as though you’ve just been caught in her bedroom with your trousers round your ankles.”
“But it’s true.”
“And is that the limit of your ambition? Mere friendship?”
The barrister’s eyes, James decided, were considerably less blurred with alcohol than his speech. He was probing with intent, edging towards some kind of judgment about James’s suitability as company for his daughter or, more probably, maneuvering into a position to warn him off. You’re not worthy, are
you, young man? Something like that. You don’t have the right background, the right accent, the right parents and prospects.
“Well, I’m very fond of her, of course. But there’s another man around, isn’t there? Kevin, I mean. He sort of gets in the way.”
The barrister smiled knowingly. “Ah, yes. Kevin.”
“Ellie still seems a bit in love with him.”
“Does she, indeed?”
“And I think it better to let her get over that.”
The barrister sniffed. Perhaps at his whisky. “Do you want some advice? No, I don’t suppose you do. The young never want advice from their elders and betters, at least not until they’re on remand and trying to convince a judge that they are of good and upright character and should be granted bail. But I’ll give you some nevertheless.” He sipped and savored for a moment, contemplating the texture of his words. “Women are fantasists. That makes them good historical novelists and bad witnesses. Love them as much as you want, but don’t ever make the mistake of believing what they tell you. Especially anything that my daughter says.”
It was a joke. James laughed to demonstrate his acute sense of humor. Ellie’s father frowned.
“I’m not joking, young man. Believe me. She always lived in a fantasy world as a child. Dragons and elves. Hobbit stuff. Tolkien. I used to go to his lectures before I saw the light and changed to law. Bloody idiotic, all that elvish nonsense. Most children grow out of it, but not Eleanor. Wouldn’t take my advice and read law. Instead she wanted to wallow in Romantic poetry and feed her imagination with all sorts of nonsense. And then there’s the politics. Another fairyland. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Pah! So don’t believe a word she says about Master Kevin. Or anyone else. She’s a delightful girl but she’s a fantasist.” He reached for the decanter and poured James a further two fingers of the precious whisky. “Now tell me about yourself. A scientist of some kind, aren’t you? I like scientists. They make good witnesses. And defendants.”
