A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Did you keep my letters, James?’ Tracy said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I kept yours. I loved your letters. They were so funny. I almost wanted to get on a train to come to visit you in Leeds, but then I thought, there’s no chance at all that Leeds is half as much fun in reality as it is in James Frinton’s letters.’

  She leant over and gave James Frinton an immense, wet, smacking kiss on his cheek. He turned and looked at her, amused.

  ‘Oh,’ Tracy said. ‘Oh, it is nice to have you here. The best letter you wrote me, you know, it was the one about – oh, what was it about? – the night out with the solicitors for the senior partner’s birthday. What was her name?’

  ‘Mandy,’ James Frinton said. ‘Get off, will you? We were supposed to call her Amanda, but everyone talked about her as Mandy.’

  ‘And in the middle you just said you didn’t think you were a socialist any more. In brackets. And I remember reading it and just giving a big scream. I was glad I was on my own. I was glad I hadn’t been reading your letters out loud to Mohammed, too. I loved that letter. But how could you think …’ Tracy picked up her glass, drained it, put it back on the table. ‘I won’t be a moment,’ she said.

  She went through into the bedroom. When she came back, two minutes later, she was naked. In her left hand, she held a few sheets of writing paper. She must have hoped to do something unforgettable, but it was she who was surprised. James Frinton, too, had taken all his clothes off. They were placed in a pile on the side of the sofa.

  ‘I wanted to show you that the painting couldn’t possibly be of me,’ Tracy said. ‘Look. Ginger pubes. Look. Black pubes. Not me. So what’s your excuse?’

  ‘I want to fuck,’ James Frinton said.

  ‘It’s normal in polite society to ask before you get it all out,’ Tracy said. ‘I wanted to read you something first. It’s a letter you wrote. I love it. Listen.’

  The two of them, naked, among all that stuff! The paraphernalia that Tracy had contrived and collected to show what she wanted to become, the stuffed toys, the silvery bottles and cocktail shaker, the trophy invitations, the books and paintings and the fur coat lying across an armchair. James Frinton and Tracy looked so innocent in their nakedness among all of it. They looked like victims. Their thin pale bodies, their touching little powdery puffs of hair here and there.

  ‘This was the letter I liked best,’ Tracy said. As she spoke, and read, she came towards James on the sofa, swaying. ‘Or one of the letters I liked best. The one after the Mandy letter. I was waiting for it. I snatched it from the postman’s hands. Dear Tracy, It’s so strange to have changed my mind. I think I was wrong all the time. I think I’m going to go on being wrong, but I know from now on I won’t stop myself finding out what’s right. That’s such a beautiful thing to open a letter and read. You could inspire people, you know, James. And then it has such a funny version of that time we went out with Euan and Eric to that Tory MP’s house, remember? When we took a bag of horse manure and a package with a clock ticking inside it? That was the best. It was so funny. Listen. I really thought there were better things to be doing on a sunny Saturday afternoon in April, and it was my birthday, too. The plan was just to dump the horseshit in the driveway, put the fake bomb through the letterbox, and scarper. I’d have been quite happy with that. But then bloody Euan thought there might be better possibilities. Off he goes round the side of the house and comes back with the news that there’s a conservatory with a door open. Why not go into the house and dump a sack of horseshit inside? In for a penny in for a pound, think I, and so there I am, celebrating my birthday by pouring half a ton of horseshit onto Sir Brindley Roth’s best drawing-room carpet. Maybe it was at that point, or maybe it was reading all about it in the paper two days later, that a thought comes into my little head. Is this the best use of my time? I mean, not that Sir Brindley and his lovely lady don’t deserve to come home to a big pile of manure. It’s so funny, all of it. I just loved your letters. In a way,’ Tracy said, plumping herself down beside him, ‘I wish we weren’t in the same place so that you’d write to me every day.’

  ‘I can write to you,’ James Frinton said. ‘I could send you a letter from Trinity to Lincoln. I could get the university’s internal mail service to deliver it.’

  ‘It’s only three hundred yards,’ Tracy said. ‘You could walk it and give me the message in person. Are we going to fuck now?’

  ‘I never saw those letters again,’ James Frinton said. ‘I’d love to read them. Can I borrow them? I’ll give them back safely.’

  ‘No, James,’ Tracy said. ‘They’re mine. It’s the rules of letter-writing. Now can we fuck? I may be wrong but it looks to me as if you’re getting a bit of a hard-on there.’

  ‘Two Tories fucking,’ James Frinton said. ‘It probably happens all the time.’

  Occasionally they saw each other. In that world, they were not in quite the same place. Tracy would have been taken to parties at the Union, that Victorian debating society. She would have sat through the odd debate, but she would never have been asked to contribute. In a couple of terms, James Frinton had made a few speeches. Even I heard about them, from the university newspaper. He had been asked to have dinner with one of Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet ministers, down to propose a motion about economic policy. He must have been clever and funny about the urgent need to privatize – what? The university, the army, the Queen, or something that afterwards was indeed taken out of the public sector, such as the railways or the post? Somebody noticed something about the boy with a northern accent at the end of the table. Somebody would have suggested that he run for some job or other at the Union, that he might like to pop in and say hello to the guys in Central Office – just tell them that Norman had said they should show him the ropes. That’s how it goes. Norman was the Cabinet minister. Tracy was an ornament and a spirited girl, good for a drink or a race backwards round the quad after dinner. She wouldn’t have been quite right for dinner with a Cabinet minister. As for me, I heard enough about them to realize that I didn’t want to see either of them any more. I didn’t see any difference between them and the famous skinhead at Merton, who had a swastika shaved into the back of his skull, or the boy in the Monday Club who wore a badge that read ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’. Those were celebrities in the university at the time. Tracy and James Frinton had passed into the world such people inhabited. The difference between them was not one I would have cared to understand. Only later did I understand the difference between their two existences.

  But all the same, despite that difference, they did find each other in the same place quite regularly – a party, a big dinner, a jazz concert, going round the job-interview circuit with capitalist companies known as ‘the milk round’, I don’t know why. At the end of their third year, after their final exams, they bumped into each other at a ball at Trinity, James Frinton’s college. He was actually on the committee. Tracy had been taken by a boy she knew, a fellow drunk from another college whose uncle was a duke. She couldn’t decide whether he was a prize or not. Quite soon she had left him in the drink tent with all the other nephews of dukes. She went outside to see if she could find anyone she knew. She could. It was James Frinton. I have no idea what these events were like. They cost over a hundred pounds a ticket. I had no dinner jacket, and no friends who would have wanted to go. So the only idea I have of it is from photographs, and from the glimpse of people going along, in pairs, or coming back, singly. I can see what the conversation would have been like between James Frinton in his dinner jacket and Tracy in a huge, midnight-blue rustling taffeta ballgown, which she’d paid for who knows how. I knew them, you see.

  ‘You’re already a little bit hammered, aren’t you, Tracy?’ James Frinton said.

  ‘James,’ Tracy said, leaning against him, ‘where’s your date?’

  ‘I sold her to the highest bidder,’ he said. ‘I had to pay for all this somehow.’


  ‘I hope you got a good price for her,’ Tracy said. ‘You’re the only person who calls me Tracy. I love it.’

  ‘I try to remember,’ James Frinton said. ‘Mostly I do remember to say Alexandra. But it’s nice to talk dirty to you when no one’s around. You’re looking radiant, by the way. What are you doing next year? I forget.’

  ‘Oh, marketing. Cheever and Spark. In London. Soap powders, shampoos and, for some reason, butter substitutes. God knows how I got it. You? Oh, I know – you’re going into journalism.’

  ‘You’re looking radiant, by the way,’ James Frinton said.

  ‘You already said that, but thank you. It’s my skincare regime,’ Tracy said. ‘You have to do it religiously. You should do it. Everyone should. It’s a three-part thing. Cleanse. Tone. Moisturize. Can you remember that? You’ll look much better at fifty if you do that twice a day now. Cleanse. Tone. Moisturize.’

  ‘Cleanse. Tone. Moisturize. I’ll try to remember,’ James Frinton said. ‘But what about exfoliation?’

  ‘Exfoliation,’ Tracy said, getting through the word with some difficulty, ‘is bollocks. Don’t tell Cheever and Spark I said that. I want to go off into a corner with you.’

  ‘Will a dance do?’

  ‘No, James,’ Tracy said. ‘It has to be a corner, a nice dark corner. Promise me. When I look at you I can’t remember who it was I came with. It was somebody, I know. Do you like my dress?’

  ‘Not that much,’ James Frinton said. ‘I look forward to tearing it off you, a bit later.’ He smiled. She was in the glowing, wide-eyed phase of drunkenness that is only sometimes recognizable as drunkenness at all; he had his hair smoothed down, a new white shirt and a dinner suit only six months old, shining with cleanliness. Anyone would have thought them engaged in the most charming and well-schooled cocktail-party chatter.

  ‘Shall we make a date?’ said Tracy. ‘Half past three behind the Stranglers’ tent?’

  ‘We don’t need to,’ James Frinton said, with the utmost old-fashioned charm. ‘We are going to be drawn towards each other by irresistible gravitational force.’

  How to account for that irresistible gravitational force? In reality, gravity is a weak force, and puzzles physicists. From time to time Tracy and James Frinton did come together. There was no resisting it. At least, they did not resist it. They were never an item, a singularity, to use another term from science.

  Then they were in London. Living within walking distance of each other, too.

  ‘This flat suits you,’ James Frinton said.

  Tracy had got lucky. She was sharing a solid, respectable mansion flat in an Earl’s Court block. As if in an extension of university existence, people dropped in without notice, and a couple of times, one of those people was James Frinton.

  ‘Well, your flat is quite nice too,’ Tracy said primly. James Frinton was living behind the exhibition centre, in a flat that had been carved out of an old house during some previous boom.

  ‘I miss that painting you used to have,’ James Frinton said.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Tracy said. ‘Oh, that nude. The college demanded it back. They were rather strict about it, darling. Do you want a drink? I was going to have a whisky.’

  ‘It’s too early for me … Oh, what the hell?’ James Frinton said. ‘Give me two fingers of Scotch, dollface.’

  ‘I’ve got something much naughtier,’ Tracy said. ‘Ludo and Blaise, they’re rather party animals and they keep something in that little Indian box for a wet afternoon.’

  ‘Who are Ludo and Blaise?’ James Frinton said. ‘Oh, the flatmates. I keep forgetting. Do you have threesomes?’

  ‘Of course,’ Tracy said. He knew perfectly well that Blaise was her boyfriend. ‘They’re so sweet. Do you want some?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about but, no, I don’t think so,’ James Frinton said. ‘Save it for your fast set. I’m just a boring younger brother that you were at school with. Think of me like that.’

  ‘You’re so adorable,’ Tracy said. She picked up the little Indian box from the table. She disappeared into her bedroom. James tapped his feet. He might even have whistled a few notes. In two minutes she returned, abstracted, a wild look in her eyes. She ran her fingers through her hair. ‘You never wrote to me,’ she said. ‘You said you were going to write more letters to me and you never did.’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ James Frinton said reasonably. ‘I wrote you a long letter about all the goings-on in Central Office last summer. I know you got it. I’d love to see all those old letters again – the ones from before Oxford too. Have you still got them?’

  ‘Somewhere,’ Tracy said. ‘I packed them up and put them in a special file I remember. I read them all over again before I moved here – they were such fun. James Frinton the Trotskyite, destroyer of worlds. They’re in a box somewhere – under the bed or in the wardrobe.’

  ‘Do go and dig them out,’ James Frinton said. ‘Darling. It would be such fun to see them again.’

  Years later, perhaps ten years after this, James Frinton would start to be famous for his personal charm. Those who had close dealings with him shook their heads afterwards. They wondered at the fact that, through sheer politeness and apparent interest in them, he had persuaded them to do something they had previously ruled out. So often, people said, they had left a conversation with James Frinton, the Home Secretary, with the exhilarating illusion that they and he had agreed something harmoniously. And then a subsequent telephone call from a ruthless, charmless underling. It became apparent that the human warmth of James Frinton was something he performed. What was so often called his charm had to be analysed. I had seen only small unremarkable glimpses of that charm at school. He was not much more likeable than anyone else. It was at university that he developed that smoothness. Even now, in his first year in London, it had not yet attained perfection. People saw through it from time to time. This was one of those moments, and even Tracy, mildly drunk and somewhat addled in the middle of a Sunday morning, saw that he was not entirely saying this out of warmth and love for her. That affected turn of phrase, Do go and dig them out again, that debutante’s imperative form of the auxiliary verb, Do, was not James Frinton’s own turn of phrase. The vocative Darling sat strangely on his tongue. I dare say in saying things that he had heard others say, he discovered, stumbling over it, that he was the wrong sex for the phrase. His charm failed.

  ‘I’m not going to give them back to you, James,’ Tracy said. ‘I know perfectly well you’d rather I didn’t have them. I’m not going to show them to anyone. You needn’t worry.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ James Frinton said. He tried to laugh. ‘All I meant was that I’d love to see them again some time. It was such fun, that time before we went to university. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I was going out with Mohammed,’ Tracy said. ‘And you were in Leeds, working. And not having much fun, according to your letters, anyway. Go on, James. Piss off. I think I want to take some drugs on my own. Off you pop.’

  He didn’t piss off; he didn’t pop off; he stayed. They had sex all afternoon. (Ludo and Blaise were looking at horses in Oxfordshire.) From the outside, anyone could see they were drawn together. They had an understanding of each other that easily burst into flame. They made each other laugh. They knew what the other wanted. There was not much to be said for Blaise in bed. He lay there on top of her. He buckled away unrhythmically. From time to time he would put both his hands on her tits; rotate them; push himself up while his entire bodyweight rested painfully on her thorax. It was over quickly. That was all that could be said for it. So the connection between her and James Frinton was easily explained. Passion and understanding will do it.

  But at this distance it seems to me that James Frinton was not driven by passion, though he certainly liked Tracy. He might have chosen to seduce her once. It might eve
n have been a thing that suited the three-year stretch of university, finishing quickly afterwards as circumstances changed. The recurrence of it, every few weeks for three years, seems uncharacteristic of him. I believe there were two reasons why he easily gave in to the pleasure that these encounters undoubtedly contained. The first was some sort of experimental spirit. He wanted to see what became of a person subjected to a particular process. The experiment had begun at university, but the important question must have arisen – what would happen to this process outside the institution, once loco parentis had walked away, and what would come to be called a safe space had been dissolved? To understand that, he needed the privilege of intimacy. The process was one of progressive intoxication. You could map out Tracy’s progress through the substances, until she met one that had a progress of its own to chart, through the bodies of its adherents.

  The advancing stages of Tracy’s discoveries were a mirror of James Frinton’s advancement through the ranks of society. In his three years at university, he went from post to post, society to society, rising in visibility from likeably incompetent student actor to treasurer of the political society to president of the junior common room and, finally, president of the debating society, the Union. And at the same time a kind of progress inwards: private dining societies in white tie, invitations out to lunch with people’s rich uncles, a seat next to a Cabinet minister in town, a quiet trip up to London on the first cheap train to set out his stall in somebody’s private office. Now, with a job on the Globe, it was all beginning in earnest. One day it would all be made beautifully clear by some investigative journalist or authorized biographer. The stages were like Tracy’s journey. What at first was thrilling, audacious, unimaginable, a shock quickly became banal. The extremity of the situation was absorbed into the life. At the beginning Tracy would decide to get high; James Frinton would take steps to go to meet the government chief whip, or a leader writer on The Times. After a while those were not diversions from the mainstream of their existence.