A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  James Frinton came thundering downstairs – not in school uniform, but in some arrangement of jeans and T-shirt. The smell did not noticeably strengthen. His clothes, however, were strange in a way I can’t now reconstruct. Perhaps his T-shirt bore the logo of a firm only a father could have dealings with, drill manufacturers or the skimmers of detritus. His clothes spoke to me of spiritual deprivation as clearly as his small brother’s gormless or pathetic failure to put on clothes other than his school uniform for the evening relaxation or festivity. In reality, their clothes should have spoken only of contempt for the idea of investing any thought in outer appearance. They were quite alike, I now think, those brothers.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ Frinton said. ‘Coming out with us?’

  ‘I thought Ogden told you,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Frinton said. ‘Ogden didn’t.’ Then he reconsidered the value of absolute and unexpanded truth. He said, ‘But Tracy did. I thought you’d be round later. Percy said he’d pick us up at eight. In his car.’

  ‘It’s twenty to eight now,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you’d better come in,’ he said. As if struck by a brilliant thought, he added, ‘Spike.’ He gestured lavishly up the stairs. The satirical edge was as much like him, the irremovable core of him, as his smell, though what or who he was satirizing with his contemptuous pronunciation of my name and a courtly gesture I don’t think he could have said.

  The brother was waiting at the top of the stairs: hovering palely like an orphan. There were not many voluntary visitors in that house. The spaces downstairs were public. That public, business life must always have been encroaching. ‘Shoo, flee, fly,’ Frinton said to his brother, with a wave of the hands. The hallway was lined with doors, somehow all shut, and the brother, scuttling off, opened one into a kitchen landscape of abandoned supper and unwashed plates. The door shut behind him. Frinton paused, assessing me. For a moment I thought we would wait there at the top of the stairs, in a gloomy space of ornaments and one photograph of the Frintons in a frame. Our indecision was dustily lit by a single light bulb. It seemed like a long time. He said, ‘In here.’ He opened another door. We went into the Frinton sitting room.

  It was a large room, which took its shape from the demands of other spaces. The curtains were closed, the gloom only interrupted by the light of the television. At one end was a dining table, long unused. It was half covered with papers of a business sort, invoices, correspondence, account books. No one had eaten there for weeks. At the other end of the room, squatting gracelessly on the floor in front of the dusty screen was a woman who must have been Frinton’s mother. She did not react to us entering. She was propped up with cushions in a sort of nest, her hair blonde and wildly curly. A comb had been run through the mess and abandoned. It sat like a piece of punctuation at the crown of it. She was far too close to the television. I had always been told by my father that it was ruinous to the eyes to sit less than six feet away. It was an act of the greatest naughtiness to sit so close that the screen crystallized into shifting squares of colour, like gazing so hard at a word, cabbage, for instance, that it became meaningless and bizarre. But here was Mrs Frinton, sitting so close to the television that it must have occupied the whole of her field of vision. It must have meant nothing. She was lost in it. A singer was performing in a glittering long dress, lit by a spotlight in a television studio. I could not hear what she was singing, as the volume on the television was turned down almost to nothing, but from her stylized and intense gestures, some statement about love and suffering must have been under way. The singer’s despair spread her hands wide; her fingers opened; she had known what love could do to a girl. Every few seconds Mrs Frinton reached out a finger towards the television screen, not quite daring to touch the anguished face. I wondered where Frinton’s father was, before the terrible answer came to me: he was in the pub. Of course he was.

  ‘Mummy really, really loves Eartha Kitt,’ Frinton said.

  I almost laughed. The idea of having strong feelings about this singer was so unlikely.

  ‘It’s best not to interrupt when she’s watching one of her videos,’ he said. I had been on the verge of sitting down, but I stood up again. ‘Come on.’

  We left the sitting room. We went into the kitchen I had glimpsed, where Frinton’s brother sat, surrounded by detritus. He, as much as we, was waiting for something. I did not know his name.

  ‘I’m Spike,’ I said. We sat down. The boy looked at me in something like terror.

  ‘It’s my brother,’ Frinton said. Then he went into a more urgent style. ‘How long has she been—’

  ‘All day,’ the boy said. ‘She was watching when I went out and she’s been watching since I got back.’

  ‘The old story,’ Frinton said. ‘She gets to the end of the tape, she rewinds, she watches it again. Mummy,’ he went on, turning to me in a sociable, kind, amused way, ‘really loves Eartha Kitt.’

  ‘I can see,’ I said. I looked at the clock above the door, but it said twenty past three. The hands were not moving.

  ‘What time is Ogden coming?’ Frinton said, interpreting my gaze. Without waiting for an answer, he added, ‘You done your homework?’ roughly to the brother. The door opened. There was Mrs Frinton. I had had my ideas of what a pub landlady might look like – ideas from conventional representations of confidence and the unwavering stare, the finger pointing at the door in a way that brooked no opposition. The word brassy would have been of use. Mrs Frinton came in, a round assemblage of shawls and soft, pastel-coloured woolly garments. Her eyes shone with tears and transcendence. She had gone through a marvellous emotional experience and she wanted us to know about it.

  ‘Was she good, Mum?’ the younger Frinton said anxiously. He didn’t know who I was, but he wanted to put up a good show in front of me. He was pretending now that she had been watching it for the first time, innocently and with a decent degree of interest.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Frinton said. ‘Very, very good.’

  ‘Mummy’s a big fan of Eartha Kitt,’ James Frinton said again.

  There was embarrassment in the air. I felt the need to establish that this was quite an ordinary thing to be interested in. Across from me, Frinton’s brother had spilt some water on the table. He was trying to see if he could guide it into the shape of a country, a continent, or perhaps just a square, pushing it with the edge of a table mat. Somehow I went on speaking and fixating on the shapes the water was making.

  ‘I’ve never really seen her,’ I started by saying. ‘At least, I have seen her. On the television. I’ve glimpsed her. I’ve glanced at her. I might even have seen the programme you were watching, Mrs Frinton. But I don’t think I would have enjoyed it as much ‒ no, I mean … What I mean to say is that you only enjoy something as much as you obviously do if you pay a lot of attention to it, so that you’re not really aware, I guess, of what’s going on around you. Is that right, Mrs Frinton? I’m definitely sure that I’ll pay a lot more attention to Eartha Kitt the next time I see her on the television, Mrs Frinton. Have you been a fan of hers for a long time?’

  I said this sociably, to bring Frinton’s mother in, but she only said, ‘She helps me with things. When I’ve had a bad day or two.’

  The countries made of spilt water were growing larger on the table. Frinton’s brother was shaping Frances, Germanys, Spains. His head and James Frinton’s were both down in steady concentration. James Frinton was looking at his watch. I was aware that the Frinton smell was not coming from Mrs Frinton either. She smelt of soap and some brownish, spice-warm perfume. The source of the smell must be behind another of those closed doors.

  ‘My father is just like you,’ I said. ‘Not that I really know, we’ve only just met, but I can tell, Mrs Frinton, my father is a bit like you. He has these enthusiasms ‒ he likes ferns. You know ferns? The green things in forests. My father grows them and he always likes to look at new types, new specimens, and t
hen he’s just like you, totally absorbed in what he’s doing. You don’t try to speak to him if he’s converting spores or propagating roots. I could go in and say I’m leaving school or I’ve got a girlfriend or I’m marrying a girlfriend or my girlfriend’s pregnant even, and he wouldn’t say anything or hear at all because he’d be thinking of how to deal with this very tricky customer of a fern, and I suppose that’s how the world goes on, advances, I mean, though, you know, the single fixed obsessive concentrating on the one thing, whatever people think of them and whatever’s happening around them doesn’t matter at all. I mean my father only knows it’s time to eat because the clock says it is, and I suppose it’s like that for you, is it, with Eartha Kitt? Do you only like her or do you like other singers too, because I know my dad has a record somewhere of ‒ of ‒ I forget her name ‒ Bobbie Gentry. I’ve never heard him play it, it must have been my mum’s but she left it, I expect that must be it, or Dusty Springfield, do you like her, Mrs Frinton, or is it only Eartha Kitt? I must take a look at Eartha ‒ it’s an interesting name, isn’t it? I expect you know whether it’s her real name, named after the Earth itself, is it, or just a stage name? She growls, doesn’t she, like a cat, a big cat, a kitt, is that it? Well, good for her, and I hope you go on with your enthusiasm for singers like her or is it just her? Good for you, Mrs Frinton.’

  Perhaps you have never found yourself speaking like this, going on from point to point, making no sense. The feel of panic when speech must be made but that one is not at all the person to be making it. And yet the words go on. It happened when I was sixteen, in the kitchen of the Frintons. It has happened once or twice since. If people can be divided into two (but people cannot be divided into two, can barely be divided into seven billion), then you might say that they divide into those who fall silent and those who start to speak. I am someone who starts to speak. Now I know that about myself. I forced myself to finish. I had surely finished with a question, but no answer came.

  Like any well-mannered hostess when presented with a blundering guest, Mrs Frinton changed the subject.

  ‘Your father doesn’t want you to be late back,’ she said to James Frinton. ‘He wants you back before closing time.’ The way the Frintons divided the day was quite new to me, not by mealtimes, work commitments and the nine o’clock news, but by opening and closing times. And yet it was my father, and not the Frintons’ mother, who committed suicide in the years after this conversation.

  ‘We’re going out for a little drive,’ James Frinton said. ‘Just that.’

  ‘Don’t let your father catch you coming in at one in the morning,’ Mrs Frinton said. ‘You’ve got school tomorrow.’

  Mrs Frinton was detached from reality. She knew it. This last observation was produced with some ebullience, as of a clinching, little-known fact.

  ‘Coming in at one o’clock,’ Mrs Frinton went on, ‘you’ll wake your father and your grandmother, and your brother and me.’

  ‘And you’ll wake Eartha Kitt,’ I said. I don’t know why I said this. I immediately wished that I hadn’t. One of those spontaneous stupid remarks that come from nowhere and last for ever, giving pain whenever it is recalled. I was making some silly observation in my own head about Eartha Kitt being so constant a presence in the Frintons’ flat that she might as well be thought to live and sleep there. But Mrs Frinton’s ebullience was punctured. She looked at me with puzzlement and pain, as at a cruel piece of mockery. It is still giving me pain, years later, that sentence. Outside in the car park, a horn sounded, a twilit, melancholy sound echoing between the brick enclosures of the quiet suburb. We were summoned.

  ‘That’s Ogden,’ Frinton said. ‘In his car. We’ve got to go.’ He wouldn’t look at me. I’d said something wrong, and I knew it. I thought he was delaying the schoolboy snap of rage only until we had left his mother, who was most under attack from my remark, but I underestimated him. If he was going to respond, he would respond later, perhaps hours or days later. That was his measured style: he filed things away. We said our goodbyes and started downstairs. A bright thought occurred to Mrs Frinton. She called after us, ‘You should take your brother out on one of these jaunts! Take him! But you’ll have to promise something – not to bring him back at one in the morning, covered with love bites!’

  We carried on walking. Mrs Frinton’s remarks bore no real relation to the actual or possible world. Neither Frinton nor his brother made any attempt to reconfigure the group as it stood, one part of it at the head of the stairs, one opening the door into the quiet world of the empty car park. A single car was there, a dark green hatchback parked without reference to the parallel lines and boxes painted on the asphalt. Inside, Ogden’s face loomed against the windscreen. The dashboard light had been switched on. Behind him were Tracy Cartwright, Mohammed and Eric. Eric, in the outside world six foot four, was hunched up somehow, his face forced between the two seats in front. The car was not large, but at that point in our lives, it was quite normal to set off with four in the back, squeezing together, joints and forked limbs fitting together and jolting, shrieking. It was just what you did. We opened the door, said, ‘Hi,’ briefly. I pulled the car seat forward so that Frinton could clamber into the back. Frinton laid himself across the three of them before somehow squeezing into a space that wasn’t there before between Eric’s hard angles and Tracy’s softer corners. A giggle came from Mohammed, a groan of performed pain from Tracy. I sat in the front seat. I fastened my seatbelt.

  ‘Here you all are, then,’ Ogden said, starting the engine. We set off.

  ‘Told you,’ Mohammed said.

  ‘I knew he would,’ Eric said. ‘I never had any doubts.’

  ‘Knew who would what ‒ me?’ I said.

  ‘They were betting you wouldn’t come,’ Tracy said. A shiver ran down my neck. A finger was being run down the side of my head. I couldn’t see, but it must have been either Tracy or Eric. ‘I knew you’d come.’

  ‘We all knew he’d come,’ Ogden said. ‘We never had any doubt. Where are we going?’

  A howl burst into my ear from behind, a world-destroying cry only slowly turning into a noise – sbro … It died down. Ogden looked at me, a direct, open, confiding look. He smiled.

  ‘Greasbrough,’ he said, crooning a little, like a gentle reminiscence of the howl years later.

  It burst out again from behind – ‘GREASBROUGH’ – with James Frinton’s full force.

  ‘We’re obsessed with Greasbrough,’ Ogden said. ‘Yes, we’ll go through it, some time tonight, I promise. Greasbrough! You can call your borough anything, and you decide to call it Grease. Imagine living there, and having to spell it every time you wanted to ask a girl round.’

  ‘Or a boy,’ Tracy said.

  ‘Or a boy,’ Ogden said. ‘We’re not going there straight away, though. The Spartacists asked us round. I thought we’d go there first. Do you know the Spartacists? You, kid? Eric met them first, and me too. Do you know who Spartacus was? They named themselves – their movement – after him.’

  ‘Ancient Rome,’ I said.

  ‘The Spartacists – Kate and Euan and Joaquin if he’s there – they’re our friends, they’re on the right side. Do you go to the library? The central library? You know the ones who stand outside on a Saturday morning?’

  I knew the Spartacists now. The Ogdens were about to introduce them to me, but it might so easily have been the Spartacists who introduced me to the Ogdens. The central library of the city was a white stone art-deco palace of monumental grandeur. It was a centre of life in a way difficult to imagine now. (I think it has recently been sold off by the local council to Chinese property developers keen on turning it into a hotel, one of seventeen planned or in existence in the city centre.) It was normal to go there to work, to read, to escape from home. Outside the library, on the pavement by the entrance, the sellers of radical newspapers often stood. I was one of those boys who take out five books e
very week and return them seven days later, perhaps having read two to the end. I thought I knew not only the Spartacists in general, but perhaps the very ones Ogden was talking about. I had seen a short woman, with long, untidy blonde hair, in what we then called an Afghan coat. She was sometimes accompanied by a shambling large dark man with hollow eye sockets. He always wore a green military jacket from some army-surplus store. They were selling their newspaper. I must have known it was a radical publication, produced as cheaply as possible. I might have thought of buying a copy, of getting into conversation with them. Ogden had mentioned three names, but I could only remember ever having seen two at once. Through that conversation I would have been introduced to the network of groups, campaigners, radical bookshops, men’s groups, free sheets, radicals, protesters, pamphleteers, terrorists, squatters – students in short ‒ that made up the life of the mind in that provincial city. They might in time have heard the name of the school I went to. They could have introduced me properly to their friends in the sixth form there, Ogden, Mohammed, Tracy, Eric, Frinton. Which is to say that my inclinations of thought were and are like water. They would always have flowed quite quickly to the same point through quite similar routes, downwards. I would always have found myself in the same place, knowing the same people. Radical thinkers are not like the uninflected children of the bourgeoisie, in their crippling and yet unspoken ideology. If you take three dull children of a provincial bourgeois neighbourhood and choose to introduce them in turn to religion, to the harp, to long-distance running, you will produce three people quite different in temperament, in habits, in the final shape of their lives. It hardly matters what you do to try to shape the lives of the radically minded. Their lives will flow, despite any impediment, to the same point, as our existences in the thirty-five years since those first meetings must show. I am talking about the lives of Percy Ogden, who was born to lead a political life, and Frinton, of course, and Eric Milne, and the rest, including me. I would always have met them, and Joaquin and Kate. My life would always have followed its particular path. Nothing could have prevented it.