A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  We walked along, the braying rich flailing around us. From time to time I cast a sideways look at Mohammed’s left arm. His rolled-up sleeve displayed the stem and thorns of his tattooed single rose.

  ‘What’s the strategy?’ Mohammed said. ‘Have you got any sense of that?’

  He was talking about the Oxford group.

  ‘I get the impression it’s more interested in gaining power and influence than smashing windows,’ I said. ‘The first thing they said – are you a member of the Labour Party?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ Mohammed said.

  ‘That’s what I said. I thought they were asking whether they could trust me, or whether I was just another bourgeois socialist who’s made his peace with multinational corporations and the stock exchange.’

  ‘But they meant it.’

  ‘Yup. They think it would be good if someone like me joined the Labour Party. In ten years, fifteen, people from our segment of opinion are going to be in a position to influence thought.’

  ‘Have you joined the zombies, then? Call yourself a democratic socialist? Vote for Roy Hattersley? What’s Joaquin say?’ It was one of the nice things about Mohammed that other people’s domestic arrangements appeared much of a muchness to him. For some time I had thought he didn’t know that Joaquin and I were going out together. In fact he’d known at the same time as everyone else. It hadn’t been that important to him.

  ‘There’s a rude word for the tactic. Entryism. I’d rather be smashing the windows of Carole’s café again.’

  ‘She deserved that. And Frinton and Tracy. Are they in the RCL too? What have they joined?’

  I didn’t know, but half an hour after leaving Mohammed’s bag in my room we were climbing the staircase to Frinton’s. I hadn’t seen Frinton since I’d got there. I’d thought I would go to see him, then Mohammed’s letter had arrived. I decided to save it until his visit. His outer door was swinging open. I knocked – knocked again more loudly. There was a conversation, or rather speech, going on inside. We went in.

  For a moment I thought we had come to the wrong room. I didn’t recognize the person standing up, making broad gestures with his arms. This person saw us. His eyes flickered between us and someone sitting in an armchair. His words bore no kind of relation to the scene. He made no acknowledgement that anyone had entered. He was talking at top volume about something being a goddamned lie. He was addressing someone called Martha, though there was no Martha in the room, only us and the boy in the armchair with one leg draped over the side. Mohammed and I stood apologetically. For the first time I felt like a supplicant in Frinton’s presence.

  The speech came to an end. The boy who had been speaking made a huge gesture of dissatisfaction. He had been facing us, but now he acknowledged us. Only now did James Frinton turn his head. He smiled. His charm, afterwards so famous, was a work in progress. I got the impression that there were always people knocking and entering. James’s smile was the one he produced for everyone. It swept over us like a searchlight.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, but only after a moment. ‘Spike. Mohammed. What are you doing? I didn’t expect that at all.’

  ‘Thought we’d surprise you,’ Mohammed said. But in fact Mohammed had written to James Frinton. I had sent both Frinton and Tracy a note through the internal mail. Neither of us had had an answer, but we hadn’t attached any importance to that. We had been Spartacists together.

  ‘This is Simon,’ James Frinton said. ‘He’s going, though. I was just hearing his lines. He’s George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Everyone else on the staircase is out doing important stuff. It might as well be me. Go on, Simon. Push off, there’s a little love.’

  ‘Bye, Jimmie,’ the actor said. ‘Coming to Claudia’s bash, I expect.’

  ‘Not sure,’ James Frinton said. ‘Developments, as you see. See you later.’

  The actor went away, leaving James Frinton with the developments. He got up and hugged first Mohammed, then me. What were we doing there? It was great to see us – of course he could see Spike any time, but it was always great to see Mohammed. (I think as he started to talk he had remembered that I was at Oxford, too. He hadn’t seen me since A levels at school. That was a world away.) We’d have a cup of tea and then what? The pub, a pizza? He was at our disposal.

  At our disposal. A chilling phrase of society and politesse – I hadn’t anticipated James Frinton’s change of expression. There was nothing until that phrase that couldn’t be explained away, that wasn’t compatible with James Frinton exactly as he had been. The grand room was just the college he was at. The flailing actor had taken him as his victim. Even the clothes he was wearing, the tweed waistcoat and trousers and thick shirt with rolled-up sleeves, could just be a change of style. We all wore different clothes from time to time. Some of the Spartacists dressed like farmers and went to folk nights at the student union. But the expression at our disposal was not something we had heard James Frinton say before. It had not been wished on him.

  ‘How long are you here?’ James Frinton said. ‘Are you staying with Spike? When did you get here? I’ve got a lot of plans for you, this weekend. Ogden’s not here, is he? Not a complete reunion?’

  ‘Have you seen Tracy?’ I said. It was a kindness on my part. I thought it was the question that Mohammed was holding back from asking.

  ‘Seen her, yes,’ James Frinton said. ‘Half Oxford’s seen her. A bit of a spectacle. Last time I saw her she was drunk. And the time before that. And the time before that.’

  ‘She likes a drink,’ Mohammed said bravely. ‘So what’s it like here? You’re only here for the library, right.’

  ‘No,’ James Frinton said. ‘I’m not just here for the library. There’s other things. It’s bollocks, the whole thing. It’s mad. But there’s a reason people want to come here.’

  ‘That’s what Spike said. He’s here for the library. What’s so great about the library?’

  ‘Don’t ask me to pass judgement on the whole place,’ James Frinton said. ‘I’ve only been here three weeks. It’s beautiful to look at. You can have some fun here. That’s all I know.’

  ‘I’ve been here an hour and I’d put a bomb under the place,’ Mohammed said. I gave a faint cheer. ‘This fucking library – who’s allowed in it? I tell you who’s allowed in it – people who’ve got into this fucking university. Who gets into this university? Rich kids, mostly. That library ought to have its doors open to anyone who wants to read a book. They ought to be teaching kids how to read and lending them any book they want to borrow.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ James Frinton said. ‘There might be a few logistical problems with that. It’s a lovely idea. Do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s all have a lovely cup of tea.’ I meant it to sting. But James Frinton was at our disposal. He had made himself available. He had plans for our weekend.

  Talking to Joaquin about the weekend, thirty years before, when Mohammed had come to Oxford to see us, some things had become clearer. The dog had abandoned us, running deep into the forest after a fox or some other powerful scent. I expect he knew his way home. The day was a hot one. We were following the line of the Wall without any shade or shelter. Both of us had our shirts off, our walking trousers rolled up around our knees. The waist of Joaquin’s was dark with sweat. We were glad to have filled the rucksack with litre bottles of water. The more I walked and talked, I began to draw energy from the effort of my own expounding. There was no reason why we should not have walked for ever, northwards along this forgotten border to the Baltic, to turn and walk back again until we hit the border of what had once been called Czechoslovakia. The blood and the joy of action arose from action. The meaning and the joy of talking came from all the talking we did. That day, in the sun, it made perfect sense.

  ‘It’s all changed so much,’ Joaquin said. ‘When I see that man, the Home Secretary, in the newspaper
, or I hear him explaining, so gently, gently, sensibly, nice, on the Today programme that, yes, Mishal, you say what is true, but I tell you, the people of this country they want to have strong borders, only strong borders when we leave the EU, choose our destiny, shoot foreigners, okay? When I hear that shit, I only hear the Home Secretary. I don’t hear the boy used to come round with you and Ogden. I don’t even remember that boy. He’s gone.’

  ‘I’m just trying to remember the last time I saw any of them,’ I said. ‘Ogden, it was in Weimar.’

  ‘I read that piece in the newspaper Ogden wrote,’ Joaquin said. ‘It was so bad. And him it was who wanted to be politician, supposed to go out and rule the world. Prime Minister by the time he is forty and here he is, writing little, little pieces, A gay guy like me knows how things really are, okay, for newspapers that nobody reads. And those others.’

  ‘Not everyone was like Percy Ogden. He was just a narcissist, thinking about where he could put himself, how he could listen to the sound of his own voice. A gay guy like me.’

  ‘The narcissist. He always has to find out that his love is unrequited. Trying to love someone who never loved him. Himself. I love myself so much because I hate myself. Poor Tracy. Her I am sad for.’

  We fell silent for a while. The rhythm of our steps was enough. After a while I passed a bottle of water to Joaquin. He swigged from it.

  ‘The one thing about James Frinton changing like that. He never tried to change the past, as far as I know.’

  ‘Like God,’ Joaquin said joyously.

  ‘Like God?’

  ‘That’s the one thing God never does in the Bible, go back to change things that have happened. James Frinton and God!’

  ‘I mean he never lied about his past.’

  Everyone else was lying about where they had come from. I don’t think he ever did. Apart from the Spartacist part, of course. There was a strange little business when he made us tea that once. He said, after a minute, ‘You’re in luck. I’ve still got some of Mummy’s fruit cake on the go.’ His mother had got her act together. She had done what mummies were expected to do at that time. She’d made him a big fruit cake to take to university. The idea was that you would meet somebody. You would ask them back to your room, and be able to offer them not just a cup of tea but a slice of delicious homemade fruit cake. Without this, how would you ever make friends? Frinton’s mum had made him a fruit cake – I can’t imagine all the poring over recipes, the anguished weighing of currants and sultanas, the tears when it looked as if it wasn’t going to work. He got it out of the tin. There was about a quarter left. She’d tried to ice it, but there was just a fat blanket of shop-bought white icing laid over the top, pressed down with fingers whose prints you could see. She’d decided, with all the mother-love at her disposal, to decorate it with glacé cherries, one at each hour of the clock. At least, I suppose so. There was only one left on the remaining quarter of the cake. The cake sticks in my mind. He was quite proud of having it. It reflected well on his mother. That was the most important aspect of it. Frinton wouldn’t have pretended a bought cake was his mother’s creation. The other thing I remember is that Frinton asked us if we would like a slice of cake. He cut three slices, one of which had the glacé cherry on top. It sounds a bit childish, but I was honestly shocked when he took the slice with the cherry. He did it quite casually.

  ‘Oh, for fuck sake,’ Joaquin said, when I had told this aspect of it again. ‘That is the most important thing? Really? The thing he did with the cake? He took the cherry?’

  ‘He’s greedy,’ I said. ‘I think he’s learnt to hide it in every way apart from one, the most obvious way. That glacé cherry was his to take.’

  And then we had gone to see Tracy. I never saw Mohammed again after that weekend he came to visit. I don’t think it was anything to do with me. In fact, I don’t believe, at this distance in time, that he was visiting me at all. He came that weekend for Tracy and he cut himself off from all that lot because of her. Her rooms were open to the world. Music of some operatic sort was playing, filling the staircase. The three of us went in, led by James Frinton. The rooms were so lived in, so full of comfortable and ostentatious knowledge. They were unlike my room, bare, with a single poster, twenty books, and the contents of two suitcases not filling the wardrobe. This room had a table with drinks on it – bottles of gin, whisky, vodka, brandy – and cushions, throws, a banana palm, a huge voluptuous nude in oils over the fire. Mohammed went over to the mantelpiece. It was thick with invitations, cream and white, scribbled on with the italic hand of privileged education.

  ‘Are these, what, birthday parties?’ Mohammed said. ‘People send you invitations? Like when we were seven years old? No one’s sent me an invitation like this ever, I don’t reckon. They’re not even like party invitations, they’re like wedding invitations, like once-in-a-lifetime, pay to print them, sort of thing …’

  He trailed off, picking one off the shelf.

  ‘We’re not in the right place,’ he said. ‘This isn’t right. These aren’t for her. Someone else sharing this room with her it must be. Or, right, has she, I don’t know, taken all these invites, nicked them from some stupid posh girl as a joke? Why’s it say Alexandra? Look, “Alexandra darling, do come,” it says. I want to get out of here.’

  I said nothing. Mohammed was in the wrong place. Soon events would set the mistake to rights. But he put the invitation back where it had been, behind a lump of crystal. His hand rested on the crystal. It was that stone called Blue John that you could pick up in odd places in the countryside near where we had grown up. Something must have been recalled to him. I could reconstruct it easily. They had spent the whole summer together, those two. We had all done the same thing at some point: a day out in the hills. At some point one of them had overturned a rock. There was a wound of blue crystal in the limestone. You took it; you put it in your rucksack; you kept it as something from that day. This was Tracy’s room. Mohammed remembered this exact stone, where it had come from. Still he was in the wrong place. The crystal had come in handy to hold an invitation upright, an invitation from a pair called Stella and Johnny.

  ‘I suppose we’d better wait,’ Mohammed said. He sat down on the sofa, pushing cushions to one side. ‘Do we have to have that on? I can’t stand that crap.’

  James Frinton bent down. He turned off the cassette player – what people called a ghetto-blaster, back then. There was a lightness, even an amusement, about him. I thought he knew that Tracy’s rooms were like this. The silence was abrupt. In the quad below an aggressive call came, some sportsman hailing another.

  ‘I think she might be—’ he started to say. The door to the bedroom opened. Tracy was there, yawning.

  ‘You woke me up,’ she said. ‘I was doing my reading, or trying to. And then I thought I’d have a lie-down. I’m so knackered. Mohammed. Spike. What are you doing here? What a joy. And James Frinton too. You should have—’

  ‘I wrote you,’ Mohammed said. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’m here now. Look at you.’

  ‘Give me five minutes,’ Tracy said. ‘I’ll be with you in five minutes. James, what happened last night? Were you there till the grisly end? I love, love, love that bar. I don’t even know whose bash that was. The one we went to after the politicos. Somebody scribbled it on my wrist in the middle of a lecture. And I went and there you were too. Give me five minutes.’

  She floated – I think I can say floated – back into her bedroom, leaving the door open. We stayed in the sitting room, not talking, listening to Tracy. She was calling out the odd remark to us, or muttering curses to herself. The tap in the bedroom ran; an aerosol sprayed lengthily; she opened and shut the doors of wardrobes, the drawers of cupboards.

  ‘I won’t be a second. I’m a quick dresser. I’m not ironing anything.

  ‘I should be writing my essay, really. I haven’t even made a start on it. Looks like an all-nighter.
>
  ‘It’s Sophie’s fault.

  ‘Do you know Sophie, James? Awful girl. Dragged me out three nights running. I love her really.

  ‘This is such a strange place. I don’t know what I’m doing here. It’s like I’m here observing this strange tribe ‒ I want to take my notebook out or something.

  ‘It’s so nice to see you three. I’m so happy you’re here ‒ it’s like old times.

  ‘Where is that fucking thing?

  ‘Almost done, almost done, almost done.

  ‘There’s something on tonight in college. I was looking for an excuse not to go, and now I’ve got one, I’m so happy. You three and a pizza and a good old gossip. I can’t tell you how nice. And now …

  ‘Ta-da,’ Tracy said, standing in the doorway, her calves crossed, like a pantomime boy’s, her arms upright, like a star making an entrance. Her whole essence had somehow changed, but how? It was just clothes and hair. She had always been passionate and chaotic, had always declared herself in theatrical ways. That was just the same. When I think of her now that she has been dead for thirty years, I think of a girl with wide eyes, stretching back on the sofa at Joaquin’s to knead her bare feet into my side; a girl glittering with a joyous rage, lifting a bag of flour with both hands to throw it into the stalls, a girl saying ta-da in fancy dress with her arms upright in a doorframe in Oxford. It was all performance. She was always there with her arms and hands above her head. That gesture, of her arms above her head, was the thing about Tracy that would never change – everything else, her name and her beliefs, would change in a heartbeat. But when she came into contact with another human being who had once been important to her, she was afraid. She raised her hands like Eartha Kitt about to sing.