Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  “I’m fine,” Gog says.

  He looks round helplessly at the stone walls of the university, which give him no answer. Then his eyes stray down a plunging alley to the slow river. Flow, flow, flow, all the day, tomorrow, yesterday, what matter? This year, last year, since the beginning until the end, for ever and aye, till all the seas gang dry, my dear. Time past, time present, time future, the same sluggish current, careless of the marking of the hours. The Wear of memory.

  “Did you have the time in the service to go on with that odd research of yours?” Miniver is saying. “What was it? I’ve still got a piece of it tucked away in my files. Gog and Magog. That was it. All that curious prehistoric British mythology, mixed up with some wild theory about populism. Nothing much to do with history. Or archaeology, I’d say. But suitable for somebody with an imaginative temperament.”

  “I have that all right,” Gog says ruefully, still looking down towards the river.

  “Miscast in academics, my dear fellow,” Miniver chatters on. “I always thought so. I know your pupils liked you. They found you very stimulating. But when all’s said and done, it’s research that counts. My few modest works on phonetics and dialect may not be very much, but, do you know?” Here Miniver does not so much ask a question as give an answer. “The Times Lit. called them seminal only last week.”

  “Seminal,” Gog says. “Yes. I’d like to get at the germ . . . the sap . . . of this.” He shrugs his arms vaguely at the river, the cathedral, the university, the city, the factory worker who passes in her turban and dungarees. “This . . . Why? Tell me why? What’s it all for, Cluckitt?”

  “Miniver,” Miniver says coldly. “A joke’s a joke. Professor Miniver, if you please, my dear Doctor Griffin.” He takes out a silver cigarette case, opens its golden interior, selects a cigarette for his mouth, and closes the case without offering Gog a smoke.

  “I’m sorry,” Gog says, menacing once more. “I’m not good at remembering names. And time. Only faces.”

  He examines again the lined, glossy face of Miniver, the eyes mere slits in the paunches under their dark brows, as Miniver lights his cigarette from a golden lighter. But Gog can find no evidence that Miniver is telling a lie. Miniver seems so certain that he has not seen Gog in years. And surely, Gog himself knows well enough that he is amnesiac and sick and dizzy. All truth is a question of evidence. And there is no evidence, except the evidence of Gog’s own memory since his waking in the hos­pital. And that evidence must be a mixture of the dream and the fact; it must be his recollection of the gone melting into his experience of the immediate; it must be his own remembered history confused with his research into pre-history.

  “A dish of tea?” Miniver says. “You won’t refuse that?”

  “I’m starving,” Gog says. “I’ll eat you out of house and home.”

  “I’m out of rations,” Miniver says quickly. “I have to hand them all over to the university. They don’t leave me a coupon for myself. But some bread, perhaps.”

  “Anything,” Gog says.

  He follows Miniver’s sweeping gown through the gate into the university, across a lawn, up a stone stairway into a panelled room that again seems familiar. As if compelled, Gog’s eyes search out a chip in the panelling surrounded by a darker stain.

  “A bottle of wine smashed there,” Gog hears himself say. “I threw it at your head.”

  Miniver seems startled at Gog’s remark, then recovers quickly.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your memory, then,” Miniver says. “Though you do bring up the past in a most disconcert­ing way. Some things, I’d say, are better left dead and buried.” He rings a bell set into the panelling. “Yet I suppose it’s a historian’s bad habit. Thinking what’s happened is more important than what’s happening. But I must say, I’d have thought the war would have cured you of that. It would have kept your mind on everyday things. What sort of a war did you have, by the way?”

  Gog cannot remember, so he says, “I lived.”

  “I’m glad you don’t want to talk of it, actually,” Miniver says. “I’m so bored of heroics. Or of heroes who got bored in some camp and never managed to do the heroics at all, so com­plain of it to me.”

  An old woman limps in, her face cobbled with warts, arthritic lumps on the knuckles of her hands.

  “Tea, please,” Miniver says. “And my friend here is hungry.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” the crone says. “I don’t promise.”

  “Who can, these days?” Miniver says.

  The old woman leaves. Gog has gone over to the chip in the panelling and is fingering it. “You know,” he muses aloud, “I remember even the wine. Pommard ’31. But I can’t remember why I should have lost my temper so much that I tried to stove in your skull with a bottle.”

  Miniver seems relieved at Gog’s forgetfulness. “You always did have uncontrollable moments, old chap. Still, I forgive you.”

  “Why did I?” Gog says.

  Miniver pauses, then seems to test Gog’s powers of recol­lection. “You . . . were annoyed at something I said in com­mittee about mythology being so hypothetical it didn’t need real people to study it. You took it personally. You thought I wanted you out of your job.”

  Gog hears Miniver’s earnest tone and knows that he is lying.

  “It was about Maire,” he says. “You know it was.” He remembers the conversation which he overheard in the car. “You were lovers.”

  Miniver scuttles over to the door, opens it, looks out, closes it again, and turns agitatedly to Gog. “I say, not so loud, if you don’t mind, old fellow. Walls have ears, and all that. You’ll compromise me dreadfully. This isn’t one of your southern universities, they’ve got the morals of rabbits down there. This is the north. A wee bit puritan, you know, but I like it. We don’t sleep with our colleagues’ wives up here. You can’t have it thought that Professors . . . I mean, I have a Chair . . .”

  “A throne,” Gog says. “A seat of power, Miniver?”

  “Someone has to run education. See the young don’t forget all the decency and wisdom of their fathers. And, candidly, I can’t think of anyone more suitable than myself to instruct them. They say, as soon as the Vice-Chancellor retires, and he’s past it, dear old boy . . . no disloyalty meant, of course, I’m merely stating the fact . . . when he retires, they say that I . . .”

  “Why does Maire want to kill me?” Gog says.

  “You do ask the most extraordinary things, my dear Gog. Kill you?”

  “Oh yes. Frequently.”

  “When I used to know your wife . . .”

  “We’re married, then?” Gog asks.

  “Of course you are,” Miniver says, surprised. “You seem to have great holes in your memory like a gorgonzola . . . oh, why must I torture myself with thoughts of those pre-war goodies? You forget all the important things. And you remember the unimportant, especially if they’re embarrassing to other people.”

  “Tell me about my past,” Gog says. “I don’t remember too well, I must admit.”

  “What is it?” Miniver asks. “A sort of amnesia?”

  “Yes,” Gog says. “Chunks of the past suddenly come to me. Rather vividly, as though they were happening to me now. But I’ve lost all sense of time. And there are great gaps.”

  “Amnesia’s like that, so a doctor friend once told me. You never forget everything. For instance, you’d still know a police­man was a policeman . . .”

  “True,” Gog says. “I knew that straightaway.”

  “And then you remember more and more daily. But it’s rather disconnected.”

  “Tell me about my past, then,” Gog says. “Let’s see what I can fit in.” Gog’s voice becomes hard. “And don’t you lie to me, Cluckitt . . . Miniver, I mean. Or . . .”

  “Please don’t threaten me, Gog. I know you were an amateur boxer in your youth, and you have just been trained to be a professional murderer for six years. But I’m not a Nazi with your bayonet at my throat. Doubtl
ess, your mind’s been spilling over with blood and slaughter and outrage for years. But it’s peacetime here. And it always has been. Ah, the tea!”

  The crone enters with a pot of tea and a plate full of sand­wiches, spread thinly with margarine and plum jam. She sets down the tray and leaves. Gog wolfs the food, while Miniver speaks.

  “I first met you, my dear Gog, when you came here to be a lecturer at the beginning of the thirties. Ancient and Roman and Dark Ages. British history up to the Normans. You were rather fervent, then. One of those lapsed Catholics flirting with com­munism, who were arguing in every corridor after the General Strike and the Depression. Except your communism was rather agrarian and backward – anarchism, really. You should have called it communalism, but you’ve never defined your terms very carefully. And you were a great man for tramping. All over the moors, you were. All the way to Edinburgh you went once. Then another time, down as far as York. You didn’t have what I would call an academic mind. Too unsystematic. Not scholarly, really. You’d always be enthusing over the last weird trifle you’d picked up. So your mind was a ragbag of the strangest sort, full of oddities which were doubtless asserted by ancient chroniclers and not invented by you. But they’d hardly be verifiable by modern standards of documentation. You grubbed around with the passion of those old antiquarians like John Aubrey. You really liked the gossip of history, its lust and its scatology, its funny stories and curious remnants, its byways and its teases. None of the hard slog after truth for you. Everything was grist to your mill, sagas, flints, hymns, tomb inscriptions, assertions by proven liars centuries after the event. You never had a dis­criminating mind, Gog. You were no scholar, though you tarted up your thesis enough with footnotes to get your doctorate. Just a fascinating magpie, you were. Your mind full of bright bits.”

  Gog nods, his mouth full of sandwiches. He believes Miniver’s explanation. “Maire,” he mumbles.

  “Maire?” Miniver says. “I didn’t meet her till you resigned your post to marry her just before the war. You’d met her in Paris. She was half-English, half-French, and every ounce a devil. The eternal artists’ mistress, you know the type, Kiki without the blubber. Trust you to try to make a decent woman out of her, you always did have an appetite for the impossible. I remember her telling me about a disastrous time you tried to take her tramping in the Landes. Still, she liked you all right . . . a liking that soon ripened into love, when you inherited that wallop of money from your great-aunt. For all your love of the red flag, you didn’t turn down that legacy. It bought you Maire as a wife. She wasn’t your type, of course. But then you seem fated to create difficulties for yourself, even when none exist. There was a joke round here, that you were the only man who could walk under a clear sky and have a brick fall on his head.”

  “More about Maire, please,” Gog says. “It’s not every day I discover I have a wife.”

  “She’s a bitch,” Miniver says blithely, “but everything in a bitch one could desire. She has to torture, to see just how far she can go and then go further. Of course, you were the perfect victim for her. Long-suffering, blundering, lunging, strong, always interesting, but basically as sloppy as a bull-calf. She ran rings round you, Maire did. She lacerated you, used you. And you loved it. And her. I don’t have to tell you that. You remember.”

  “A little,” Gog says. “She comes back to me just as you say. Memories of her behaviour, mixed up with memories of my war experiences, I suppose. I see her or her chauffeur . . . she does have one, doesn’t she?”

  “Jules,” Miniver laughs. “A real rum do.”

  “That’s him. Or her, should I say?”

  “It,” Miniver says bitterly, “would be the most accurate term for Jules.”

  “Well, she or Jules is always sniping at me, or trying to do me in. I must put their faces on real snipers, who had a go at me in the war. But tell me, you and Maire?”

  “Let’s skip that,” Miniver says sharply. He drinks his tea and goes over to the tall windows to look out at the quadrangle. “I haven’t forgotten her, Gog. One doesn’t. There’s only one Maire. If there were two, the world would disintegrate. One’s as much as the human race can stand. Once she’s got her claws in you, you stay scratched. Though I can’t expect sympathy from you, of all people. Why should I?”

  “She has a weakness for intellectuals?”

  “Oh yes,” Miniver says ruefully, his back turned to Gog. “She won’t let anyone touch her, who can’t think or paint or something. She sees herself as a sort of creative goad. A scorpion to the lazy writer. She’ll sting him till he dies – or till he tries to work her out of his system by scribbling a masterpiece in his despair.”

  “And you? What have you done because of her?”

  Miniver shrugs. “She failed with me. I know dialects, but I’m no dialectician. She thought all my riddles funny like . . .” here Miniver slips into Cluckitt’s voice, while Gog watches him suspiciously:

  “Clink clank doon t’ bank,

  Ten against foor.

  Splish splash in t’ dish

  Till it run oor.

  “Answer: the milking of a cow. Or . . .

  T’ bat, t’ bee, t’ butterflee,

  T’ cuckoo, an’ t’ gowk,

  T’ heather-bleet, t’ mirensnipe,

  Hoo many birds is tha’?”

  “Seven,” Gog says.

  “No, two,” Miniver says. “The rest of them are insects or something, not birds. You may like peasants, Gog. But you totally lack all peasant knowledge. And cunning. How about this, then? If an’ herrin’ an’ an half coom ter three ha’pence, wha’ will an hundred o’ coal coom ter?”

  “I wasn’t ever any good at arithmetic,” Gog says.

  “Ashes,” Miniver says, “is the proper answer.”

  “They’re too smart for me in the country,” Gog says. “I admit it. That’s why I admire them.”

  “They don’t work out the riddles there. They learn them from childhood. We think they’re smart, because we hear them for the first time. Like Maire did. But I was merely parroting the smartness of some rustic Sphinx centuries back. And Maire soon found out and got bored with me. As I wasn’t original anyway, she didn’t stimulate me to anything. Except sloth.”

  “Thanks,” Gog says. “I appreciate your frankness.”

  Miniver turns and raises one brow slightly, so that Gog can see a gleam in the ball of his left eye. “Since frankness is at a premium today,” he says, “why are you here?”

  “I found myself in hospital recently,” Gog says. “Hit a mine off Edinburgh after the last day of the war, I suppose. I don’t know how long I lay there. It may have been months. I didn’t remember anything. Some instinct made me begin to walk. Towards London. I gather that the Labour Party has got in by a large majority. The people at last rule in Westminster.”

  “The people rule in Westminster?” Miniver begins his jeer­ing laugh that sets his whole tiny frame shaking. “You really are incurable, Gog. Your myth about the people. Who are the people? They’re not what you’ve always thought they were, a lusty, brawling, anarchic, kindly, bawdy bunch of red-blooded peasants, somehow cooped up by a ghastly mistake in tenements and terraces and semi-detacheds by the foul fiend of industrial­ism. In fact, your friends the Communists would have put you straight in front of the firing squad for thinking heresies like that. You wanted the worker to go back to being the Merrie England peasant, while the Communists wanted just the opposite, the worker to march on as the factory proletarian. And they were certainly righter than you were, with your nostalgia for the non-existent. The English labourers were always a cowed, beaten, lick-spittle race of serfs, who’d much rather tug their forelock at the squire than raise a club against him. Look at all the English peasant revolts. They never came to anything. Every time the King said, ‘Go home,’ like in the Pilgrimage of Grace, they downed their billy­hooks and went and were hanged at the King’s leisure. They hardly ever killed a gentleman. In fact, gentlemen usually led them whe
n they revolted. Leaders are born, you know. It’s in the blood. This isn’t a countryside of rioting revolutionary labourers. It’s died-in-the-wool conserva­tive. And quite right, too.”

  “The people,” Gog says. “They fight the government. They always have and they always will.”

  “Nonsense,” Miniver says. “They can’t govern themselves. If you didn’t have laws and police, the people would all murder one another. I’m sorry, old man, but a few people are born to rule and the rest to obey. And it’s as well to recognize that fact, because fact it is. My family, for instance, the Minivers, we were sturdy yeoman stock, never serfs. And when they dissolved the monasteries, we got our chance, got some land, and became gentry. I will say one thing for the Papists, your old people, they were useful in getting together the land which we took over. The people round our place know us and like us. They trust us. If you say Miniver in our village, it means genera­tions of kindness, firmness, order, trust.”

  “Generations of exploitation, abuse, hate,” Gog says. “It’s your version of the people which is unreal, Miniver. They have to hide their true natures from the likes of you. It’s so much more convenient for you to believe the play-acting version of the grateful rustic. Oh, we’ve got our Uncle Tom Cobley and all!”

  “I agree that’s all over, and the more’s the pity,” Miniver says. “I’m a realist. In fact, now people of my sort are con­sidered as lower than vermin by the government, it’ll have a shot at putting us down. Except, of course, it’ll fail. You mark my words, the Labour government won’t put us down. Who else will act as unpaid Justices of the Peace? Who else will run the shires for next to nothing? They’ll have to keep us on, because the country’s too bankrupt to pay a salary to our inferiors to take our place. You can’t afford not to use noblesse oblige, Gog. Who else will do something for nothing?”

  “The people’s government will get rid of you.”

  “Even if they did, it’d be like the end of the monasteries all over again. A new class would rise and take our place. Yeomen into gentry, profiteers into lords, politicians into patricians. The people govern at last, Gog? You know in your heart of hearts they don’t. It’s merely a new government and it’ll be like all governments. It’ll carry on much as before. Because govern­ments can’t govern themselves.”