A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  ‘But she had forgotten that Kate liked to make a parade of her analysis. It was all part of Kate’s belief that she was interested in other people. In reality Kate wasn’t interested in other people. She was only interested in herself, and showing off how much she had understood about other people was just a way of exhibiting her own wonderfulness. She hadn’t mentioned Euan in her speech, or anything other than how happy she was. Now she started to perform her incisiveness. She wondered whether Tracy was really having such a good time. She worried about Tracy. She felt that she was always on the verge of doing something to please other people, to fit in with them. Those kids she had hung round with, did they really admire Tracy, see what a fantastic person she was? Or did she have too much to bear in that situation? All that talk – the books she read, the arguments they started up. All that wasn’t over for Kate and Euan but, you know – said Kate – the time comes when it all starts to sound a bit like students rabbiting on. There isn’t going to be a revolution. The time comes to grow up. Tracy just had to find herself now. She was lucky. She’d gone through the time of pleasing other people, of pleasing men with the right thing to say. Gone through it years before most people did. Now she could leave home. She could become anything she wanted to be. No one at Oxford would have any idea about who Tracy had been. She could just turn herself into someone new who didn’t give a shit about what people thought of her.

  ‘The spliff was finished. Not everything Kate said made sense. But they pulled each other to their feet. They went back to dancing. Tracy thought she was right. Up until that point she had kept an eye on everyone, wondering what they were thinking about her dancing, whether she looked right in the dress she’d chosen – there was no one else there in a tight dress, let alone a black one. Now she kicked off her shoes and set about it. From that moment she was free. At the end of the evening she got into a car with a boy she’d met an hour before. She drove with him to Manchester. It was a hundred miles from where she lived. Where her parents lived, I mean. There was a bit of a row about it when she got home five days later.

  ‘My brother. Nobody knows what happened to him that summer. He had a job in a solicitor’s office in Leeds from the day after his last A level to the day before he went to university. I don’t remember how it was fixed up. My mum and dad wouldn’t have done it. You were in James’s year in school. You might have heard people talk about what our home life was like. I think we were both embarrassed about it, to tell you the truth. And here I am, living the same sort of life now. If I had children, I’d expect them to be embarrassed about this place in their turn. And independent. James fixed it up for himself. Went off. Lived in the back bedroom of a shared flat. I don’t think he knew anyone in Leeds or anyone he worked or lived with when he turned up. It must have been there that the damage was done. Who were those people?

  ‘My brother. In May we couldn’t get through a meal at home without my brother jeering at my dad, explaining how justice should be done in the future in society. It quite often left my mother in tears. You know, I think he believed in revolution, socialism, all that. Kate and Euan, he knew them too. I know when they were students they were signed up to some loony-left organization. They grew out of it, of course. Everyone does.’

  I said nothing to Pete Frinton’s easy belief that adulthood consisted of renouncing your principles. It was quite likely that Joaquin at some point would get up and walk away. This belief, that the passion and intensity of adolescence has a date stamped on it, like a borrowed library book, had infuriated me when I was an adolescent. I couldn’t see why you can’t maintain that fury for justice and right – for isn’t that every child’s first complaint, it’s not fair, a glimpse of the inequalities of the world? The idea that that solipsistic cry at six grows into a demand for social justice at sixteen makes perfect sense to me. The further claim, that the journey always progresses with an understanding of the world and an understanding of other people, and the dulled subject votes Conservative at thirty-six, is a supercilious explanation. Rationalizing after the fact. If it ever happens – and I think some of those placard-bearers were always really Tories – then all that has happened is that the subject has got hold of a little money. And wants to hang on to it. No: it doesn’t always happen. And yet there was a word that every new acquaintance of Joaquin and mine disavowed, apologetically said they wanted to use when they talked about us: ‘I’m sorry, but I always think of the pair of you as boyish.’ We believed much what we did when we were boys together, sixteen and twenty-two. We had light hearts, a little savings, no children and no debts. We looked to the world like boys on a hot day swinging from trees, boys falling with a cry of joy into rivers.

  ‘I came to your house once or twice,’ I said. ‘I actually remember you, I think. There was one time, I was leaving with your brother, and your mother suddenly said something very strange.’

  ‘That wouldn’t surprise me.’

  ‘She said, “Why don’t you take your brother with you? Only don’t bring him back at one in the morning covered with love bites.”’

  ‘That sounds like something she would say. Of course she was talking about my dad, really. The coming back covered with love bites, I mean. His evening off he spent with Wendy. That was his girlfriend. It was a hard school for the emotions we grew up in, James and me. We were too much admitted to my parents’ bedroom – not literally, I mean. We just knew far too much about what went on between them and what had stopped going on between them. My mum told us everything. And all that love, it got ladled out onto us. A lot of fondling and cuddling and crying and her making us promise that we would never do to our wives what Daddy had just done to her. I don’t want to call it abuse. All that love pouring down on us. It did its damage, though. We both got away.

  ‘My brother’s a mystery to me. I would say that I’m probably a mystery to him too, except that you don’t need to wait for me to confess anything before you know everything about me. I ran away from university, never finished my degree. Twenty years in Germany, first in Bavaria. Then here, mostly stuffing my face and pouring drink down my throat. That’s Sybille’s summary. It’s not hard to understand. But the thing our childhood taught us both is you don’t share stuff. I’ve wondered what happened to my brother that summer working in Leeds. Was it somebody? I don’t think so. That’s not his style, to be persuaded of anything. I think he was alone quite a lot, and thought things through. He came to a particular conclusion. I know he wrote a few letters to Tracy. It seems incredible now, a teenager sitting down and writing letters on paper with a pen to another teenager who was only living fifty miles away. That was actually how things were. In any case the answer might have been in those letters. I don’t know what happened to them.

  ‘My brother changed in a single moment. I know roughly where and when it happened. My parents couldn’t drive him to Oxford – my father couldn’t take a day off, he said, and my mum could barely drive. So James put whatever he needed in two suitcases and a shopping bag. He took the bus to the station. When he left home, he was wearing what he always wore, a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, trainers, a windcheater. The T-shirt would have had some band’s name on it. He got on the train – it wasn’t full at that time, late in the morning. Some time after Nottingham, he went to the toilet at the end of the compartment, taking the small bag with him. He locked the door. He undressed. He put his wallet and his keys on the shelf by the window. His clothes he let drop on the floor. In the mirror, a thin, determined boy in underpants and socks. He opened his other bag. He started to dress. It was a green tweed suit he’d bought in a Leeds second-hand shop, some cast-off from the widow of a duke’s gamekeeper. He had a graph-paper shirt from M & S, a plain tie, a worn and scuffed pair of brown brogues. His socks weren’t quite right ‒ they should have been loud and red, like the tie he now put on. Instead, they were the black socks he always wore with trainers. He would have to do something about that tomorrow, but tomorrow would not be the first imp
ression. He picked up the old clothes. He opened the narrow window in the toilet. He forced them through. The T-shirt and jeans and windcheater scattered in the backwind of the train and were gone. There, somewhere between Nottingham and Birmingham, the clothes – the outer signs of what had been James Frinton lay on a railway track for a while. James Frinton as he would be from that day onwards made his way back to his seat. A middle-aged woman sitting opposite him gave him a puzzled look. But then she went back to her book, unable to place the immense change that had happened in the last few minutes. Most people are not that observant.

  ‘So he turned up at Oxford like he meant to go on. All the other kids would have been coping with embarrassing parents, dressed up, hoicking pot plants out of the back of the hatchback. James Frinton got out of a taxi in an old-fashioned tweed suit, tipped the driver to bring his two suitcases into the porter’s lodge. He was ready to go. He made an impression. He went on making an impression. That’s why he’s Home Secretary, you see.’

  I, too, had gone by train to Oxford, probably arriving on the same day. I remembered it perfectly well, for a reason we went on talking about for a week. Some kid turned up who hadn’t been offered a place. He’d pretended he’d been accepted to his parents – he’d told them that the college had phoned while they were out. Everything else had inexorably followed, until it was down to the college to turn the three of them away. The scene was occupying the porter’s lodge when I turned up. The parents had the exterior trappings of wealth: a Range Rover with the hapless boy’s initials on it, RVW1, stood in the car park. An opulent gift, a reward when he had told them he’d got in. Of course their son must be on the list. In the end the Senior Tutor was sent for, I believe. They drove away. I don’t think my arrival made much impression.

  ‘What happened to you?’ I said. ‘Ending up here, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, nothing interesting,’ Pete Frinton said. ‘My brother was the brilliant one. That’s what everyone decided. Me, I had a year abroad that never came to an end. I met Sybille – a little town in Bavaria. Actually, she was still at school when we started seeing each other. It made a bit of a stir in a small town like Bad Schlangau. In the end it was easier to start again, somewhere else entirely. And that’s all there is to say about me.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Joaquin said. He was extended full length on the sofa by now. The walk had been a long one. At nine o’clock, after three beers, he was dropping with tiredness. ‘I see you have said that before. The brother of the Cabinet minister, he says this to the people who you know maybe come here to find, you know the journalist, he arrives in Berlin, he finds his way here, hello, hello, I wonder, is it good to talk today maybe, you know, and so there is all there is maybe to, well, there is nothing to say about me the brother of the Home Secretary the Tory or if I can say go back and I never talk to anyone like.’

  He snapped into wakefulness. He gave a wide clean smile, as if he had fooled both of us, and had not been saying anything.

  ‘We might have an early night,’ I said.

  ‘You go to bed when you like,’ Joaquin said. ‘I’m just getting started. What’s the time? You’re crazy. It’s nine o’clock. I don’t go to bed at nine like an old person.’

  ‘Well, don’t go to sleep on the sofa,’ I said.

  ‘We go to bed early round here,’ Pete Frinton said. ‘I think everyone does. Sybille always was a lazy cow, but it’s unusual she’s not in bed and snoring her head off by ten. There’s nothing much to do round here, you see. I can’t understand why I don’t remember you. Where did you go to university?’

  ‘I went to Oxford too,’ I said. ‘I went at the same time as your brother and Tracy. I never saw them, though. It was how much they changed. I remember that. I hardly ever saw them after I got there, just in the street from time to time. Your brother was better at stopping and having a friendly chat than Tracy was. I don’t know why.’

  ‘That’s it exactly,’ Pete Frinton said. ‘Having a friendly chat – he was always good at that. I don’t want to sound embittered, and he’s my brother after all, but the last couple of times I saw him, I wondered whether there was any difference for him between seeing me and Sybille and seeing a long-standing constituent. Every time he sees her, he asks her the same thing. He makes me translate it, about what she thinks of – oh, I can’t even tell you the question he asks, it’s so far away from whatever Sybille thinks about. The famous Frinton charm. It’s probably quite good if you only meet him once. That first day at his college was like a first meeting that went on for three years. It would probably only have worked at that point in time, the early 1980s. There was a sort of movement among young men to dress up as if they were fifty, and to admire some pretty dull things. They called themselves “young fogeys”. There was all sorts of dressing up going on. Even at the university I was at, I had a friend who everyone called Daiquiri. Used to go round digging out platform shoes and flared trousers from charity shops and jumble sales a decade late. When they first saw my brother, in his bright green scratchy-looking tweed, those neat John Lennon NHS round glasses, his very sharp haircut slicked down with Brylcreem, I know what they’d have thought. They’d have thought here was someone ahead of the game, in tune with the time and the place he was coming to.

  ‘He must have felt as if he’d made quite a success of Oxford. Well, he did. He made a completely different person out of himself. He ended up president of all sorts of things, university societies. The story that ends up in all the newspapers – the one of how he mistook the famous philosophy professor for a tramp and gave him fifty p for a cup of tea. Not everyone thinks it’s that funny. Well, I think in reality it wasn’t charming vagueness. I believe he probably did it for a bet. He got to feel he could do things like that sometimes. He’d built so many bridges that he could afford to burn a little one, here and there. The success he made started the very first night. There was a drink for the first years.’

  ‘I remember those drinks,’ I said. ‘I went to the one in my college. It was the noisiest room I’d ever been in. Eighty people, braying away. I was quite a confident person, I’d always thought, but …’

  ‘My brother was confident,’ Pete said. ‘For some reason the confidence he’d developed was attractive rather than daunting. Probably everyone he knew at Oxford has worked out since what he wanted to achieve, but only because he achieved it, or almost. Those desires weren’t transparent at the time. He seemed genuinely interested in meeting everyone. He moved on to talk to someone else. They felt pleased to have been singled out for five minutes by the bloke in the tweed suit. “Were those your parents this afternoon? What are their names? Your father – he looked quite at home. Are you one of those old Oxford families? Isn’t there a pub where they’ve been stapling ties to the walls for decades? Is your father’s tie up there? Admit it!”

  ‘He fitted right in. He was a little pet, at first. They fed him, and he grew. Then he ate them.

  ‘Three days later – my God, he was a star by the time those seventy-two hours had gone by – he went up Turl Street, asked a question at the porter’s lodge in, what was that college, I can’t even remember, Trinity, Lincoln, what was it called? He found his way through two quads to a staircase with the word “CARTWRIGHT” painted on a board at the bottom. The porter he got the information from, he’d remember my brother next time. The charm he’d cultivated! Those days, in the old colleges, there was a thing that people did. They had a double door. You left one open, the inner one shut, if you didn’t mind visitors. If you were working or in private, you shut both of them and no one would bother you. James was climbing the staircase. He could hear music all the way up. At the top, Tracy’s room had both doors wide open. Motown was pouring out. There was a boy lying on her sofa in his underpants. Tracy on her desk, by the window, in her bra and pants in the dust-strewn sunshine, dancing to “Where Did Our Love Go”. James knocked on the open door with a bright smile. Tracy leapt down and rushed to him.<
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  ‘“This is divine,” she said firmly. “How sweet of you to come straight away. I’ve been simply longing to see you. Now I do hope you’re going to stay and have some gin. Last night we went to a howlingly drunk cocktail party – this university society called the Campaign for Real Gin. Glorious, isn’t it? They had sponsorship and we stole all the sponsorship. I think the sponsorship was just bottles of gin and a poster. We left the poster. Have you had your gin today, darling? Marcus says – this is Marcus – Marcus says a day without gin is like a year without sunshine, is like Laurel without Hardy, is like the Bible without Leviticus. So sweet. Now – let me take a look at you …”

  ‘She took a look at him. He took a look at her. Perhaps she had prepared this speech, or something like it, to impress the little man who had argued with her about ideology and read Marx with her that she was no longer there for him. But she got through about half her speech before she saw that the James Frinton in her room had undergone a change, too, that, like her, the prospect of Oxford had persuaded him to become a different person. Clothes, hair, accent, manner, behaviour, belief, all that surface was changed. Nothing of them remained except the steady assessment of the gaze, and what they had both gone through together.

  ‘“Look at you,” she said. She stepped back. She reached for a silk gown lying on the back of an armchair. “I’ve been waiting for Marcus to go, actually.”