Personality

by Andrew O'Hagan

  PART THREE

  1

  Michael Aigas

  I went to one of those universities where the English course is run by pop sociologists, clever, long-haired, Oxbridge men, the kind whose universe changed for ever the day Bob Dylan went electric, the ones who write unpublishable articles about the aesthetics of the leisure industry, tight-lipped, ambitious, tutorial-dodgers to a man, annoying in their zany socks and faded Nikes. These professors can be found in the corners of Northern pubs, on every side an adoring student desperate for a research assistantship at Rutgers. While the students get the drinks in, the great hero stares through the smoke and boasts of the books he has never read. I spent many a weary hour at those tables.

  ‘Moby Dick!’

  ‘That’s worth a double brandy.’

  ‘Titus Andronicus!’

  ‘Storm the gantry.’

  ‘Barnaby Rudge!’

  ‘Bottles of sherry at the Halls!’

  And back in some manky kitchen the real stuff would come out with the old punk records. The professor would proceed from single volumes to entire authors.

  ‘Thomas Hardy!’

  ‘Spark up that joint.’

  ‘Flaubert!’

  ‘Has anybody got any acid?’

  ‘Henry James!’

  ‘Is it okay if I crash here for the night?’

  It was during one of these sessions that I became an enemy of the people and ruined my chances of a First. (No one comes out of this story at all well, especially me.) ‘From a certain point of view,’ I said, ‘wasn’t every form of tactlessness a contribution to Modernism?’

  The professor almost froze mid-inhale. ‘Holy Christ, man,’ he said, coughing a lungful of dope smoke in my direction, ‘who invited F. R. fucking Leavis?’

  ‘You should try reading a novel now and then,’ I said.

  ‘For why?’ he asked.

  ‘For fucking pleasure, if not for instruction,’ I said. ‘I suppose it would count as a Fascistic act to expect you to avert your eyes from the mysteries of Abba for a nanosecond.’

  ‘Go to sleep, little baby,’ he said.

  I said, ‘Fuck you, Mr Semiotics of Tupperware. You don’t have a fucking clue. Those books you mentioned before – I’ve read them all.’

  ‘Nice one,’ said the professor.

  ‘Every one!’ I said. ‘Some of them twice!’

  ‘Well, you have nice dark eyes,’ said the professor.

  ‘Books matter to people,’ I shouted.

  ‘An interesting point of view.’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘Dream on, Michael. Books have nothing to do with people’s lives. The novel is dead on its feet.’

  I didn’t get to go to Rutgers.

  I came to London after graduation and found a bedsit off Kensington Church Street, a place of antique shops; there was a tree that came up to my window on the top floor and a caged lift down to the street. Early in the mornings I walked across Hyde Park to a swimming-pool at Lancaster Gate. There was no one to talk to and London was a mystery, but I loved those first times in the city, reading newspapers and going to lectures near the Albert Hall. I walked across the park as if it were made for the likes of me, people with nothing to do in the morning but contemplate what they might do next.

  In a suitcase on Portobello Road, I found a run of the literary magazine Horizon, and the man sold it to me (suitcase included) for twenty-five pounds. I would sit nearly every day eating a bag of apples and smelling of chlorine; my favourite spot was a bench across from the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens, and sitting there I must admit I was more attentive to the innovations of Cyril Connolly than Margaret Thatcher.

  I found a job in the Evening Standard. It said: ‘Assistant Editor Wanted. St Clare’s Review. Experience required. £8,000 per annum.’ My experience was two summers in a television shop back home and a love of jazz: I cheered myself up on the way to the stationery shop by wondering if I was maybe over-qualified for the post of assistant editor. I got a pass and went to the round Reading Room at the British Library. St Clare’s had been going since 1915. They used to run a home in Regent’s Park and they looked after the war blinded, giving them houses and holidays and things to fill their time.

  The office I first came to smelled of lemon tea and carbon paper. I was interviewed by a Wing Commander Philip Rodney. He had maps of Kent and Sussex on the wall of his private office and slipped me a mint imperial during the interview. ‘There’s not a whole lot to it,’ he said, ‘though you will have to be good with the old boys. That’s a must.’

  ‘I haven’t really edited before,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, never mind that, it’s not The Times or anything of that sort. Just a bit of lick and stick.’

  ‘I would give it my best shot.’

  ‘Marvellous,’ said the Wing Commander. ‘You seem like a good chap. Can you start a week on Monday?’

  Before I stepped back into Marylebone Road I was taken around and shown more of the office. Philip was the public relations officer (the place was run like a battalion of the Kent dragoons under heavy bombardment at the Front, and I often told Sheila who came round with the tea-trolley she would soon be mentioned in dispatches) and he did the magazine and looked after publicity and clippings and stuff like that. There was a larger room attached to his office where the smell of carbon paper was at its strongest. This room housed Betty, an old lady with a turned-down mouth and round glasses, a really formidable, quite tiny woman from Hastings, who kept her Cairn terrier, Paul, in a basket under her desk and who was set in her ways to an Olympic gold-medal standard.

  Across from her, next to a large oval window, was a rather beautiful-looking woman in her mid-forties, Jennifer, who kept her hair in a wooden Celtic clasp and spike. Jennifer had an Amstrad computer on her desk and kept her files and headed notepaper in perfect order. She was married to Martin, the deputy public relations officer, whose own small office was just behind her desk, and she attended to him alone as if they worked for a different firm. Martin was an ex-para who had been blown up in Derry. He was blind and gentle as the air-conditioning, and he was mostly interested in computers and sailing. All day, he and Jennifer would hold a private confab, only broken when Philip required his attention, which wasn’t often. Martin had a talking computer and the office silence was broken by the sound of an Americanised lady’s voice which announced the letters on the keyboard as Martin pressed them. Sometimes, unexpectedly, the dog Paul would yap back at the disembodied voice.

  On my first day at St Clare’s I discovered that Betty and Jennifer hated each other. This was mostly Betty’s fault: she guarded her boss with a vengeance, and felt, in her old-age-pensioner way, that the younger woman and her husband were trying to make her redundant. Betty refused to use the photocopier, she wound sweet-smelling carbon paper into her typewriter for every letter, and she typed slowly and used Tippex before filing the second copy in a bank of hanging folders. Edwardian dust would float down to her desk every time they were disturbed. Betty came to work every day in a bad mood. She would open the post in silence and put to one side the things for Martin. By the time the lemon tea and biscuits came round, at eleven, she was sometimes ready to laugh at a joke, but mainly she cleaved entirely to her resentments, and was always on the look-out for trouble from Jennifer.

  Philip and Martin were the sort of men who claimed to want nothing to do with their guardians’ strife, but in some ways they kept it going, and benefited from it. In my first weeks at the office Philip told me to keep my own counsel. ‘They will fight over you and try to persuade you,’ he said, ‘but just remember your tasks, old chap, and leave them to it.’ I took his advice, but it wasn’t easy: Betty was nervous of me, I think, and she was always taking work off my desk. She liked to proofread the magazine – she’d been doing it for forty years – and was always inserting commas and consulting Fowler’s. She liked to make jokes about Scotland and the way I spoke; that was fine, anything to keep her happy
, but some days her relationship with the older St Clareites made it impossible to get anything done. I’d be about to ring Surrey to find out about some anniversary or sporting success for the Happy Events page, and Betty would appear at my desk with a mouth full of pinking shears, saying, ‘I’ll speak to Tom and Edna. That’s one of the things I’ve always done.’

  The magazine was a bit of an absurdity. I would often stay late in the office with the lights of Marylebone glowing outside, and I’d hang over the lay-out desk, sizing photographs, writing captions, forming headlines, for a magazine that nobody except me and Betty was really going to read. It was like one long Monty Python sketch, the magazine for the blind, and Betty sniggered like a schoolgirl one morning when I said I was planning to lay out the next issue upside down. St Clare’s Review went straight onto Braille, which Martin supervised, and it also went onto tape, read every month in a plummy voice by an actor Philip had known in the army.

  The other departments were staffed mainly by ex-army officers and women in their sixties. There was an officer-corps mentality in the canteen, and some of the women brought knitting to work, and you half-expected them to shout you out for air-raid drill at the drop of a stitch. I was soon having what appeared to be over-the-desk affairs with all of them. Minnie Hopfield worked in Legacies. She was nearly seventy and she travelled in from Putney every day. To Betty and Jennifer’s horror – and Philip’s and my delight – she swore like a darts fan and smoked like hell. And yet she was Home Counties posh in the way most of them were: she loved a nice glass of wine, home-made jam, she’d been around the world, and she was ultra-aware of the poison upstairs in our office. ‘Jolly well keep your distance from all those nutcases,’ she once said. ‘They’ll drag you into every fucking thing if you’re not careful.’

  ‘Why doesn’t Philip put a stop to it?’ I asked.

  ‘More trouble than it’s worth,’ she said. ‘He’s a gentleman, and he just wants to sit in his office with the door shut and read the Telegraph.’

  Minnie told me the charity was insanely rich. Ex-servicemen had been leaving money to St Clare’s since the 1920s, but the generations who were blinded in war were dying out, and the money, which had been brilliantly managed by a series of chief accountants (the real bosses of the organisation), was just growing and growing with nowhere to go. ‘It sounds fucking perverse,’ said Minnie, ‘but the folk upstairs were almost excited when the Falklands happened, I swear. Don’t get me wrong, dear: nobody wants a young fellow to lose his eyes, but the charity is dying and it will have to do something. The idea of some new people to benefit did seem, well … it created a bit of excitement. Make no mistake about that.’

  I told her she was a terrible person.

  ‘That’s as maybe, but as Elsa used to say’ – Minnie had been friends in the 1940s with the actress Elsa Lanchester, and she thought that Elsa had been through everything, being married to Charles Laughton and all, and would quote her on any subject, no matter how unlikely a preoccupation for a Hollywood actress – ‘as Elsa used to say, “One can’t feed hens if there’s no hens to feed.”’

  However sublimated, this point had been thoroughly absorbed into the mind of the charity by the time I arrived. I would sometimes run into Sir Edmund Noble, Admiral of the Fleet and Chairman of St Clare’s, as I walked down to the strong room to find some photograph of the wounded at Passchendaele. He was a tall, lean gentleman, high-toned and watery-eyed, and he would stop in front of you as if waiting for a salute. ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ I remember saying one of those times.

  ‘Are you civilian?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said, feeling a bit of a let-down.

  ‘And Scottish?’

  ‘Indeed, sir. Scottish. But I can’t help it.’

  ‘No need to help it, my boy,’ he said (he didn’t care for jokes). ‘Some of the best men I’ve ever met. Good people. You’ve a lot to live up to.’

  ‘Well, thank you, sir.’

  ‘Not at all. Well, on your way. We won’t win the battle standing here.’

  Edmund Noble was the man who told Thatcher he could organise a flotilla of ships for the Falklands in forty-eight hours. He had done so, and was known at St Clare’s for being closest to those young men, the few we had, who were blinded at Goose Green and on HMS Sheffield. He was always asking us to prepare for future casualties. ‘Never go to sleep on the job,’ he said. ‘There’s poison gas out there, and barbarians not afraid to use it.’

  Betty wanted to be my friend once she was sure I wasn’t going to take sides with Jennifer and Martin. I sometimes took Paul the dog for a run at lunchtime, that won her over, and then she giggled up the sleeve of her cardigan one day when I was sorting out the wallets for the audio tapes and accidentally told Jennifer I didn’t much fancy the Welsh. ‘Why ever not?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re always moaning,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ she said, turning into her husband’s office and closing the door at her back, ‘we know you needn’t be Welsh for that!’

  Betty was almost levitating with pleasure. ‘You silly sausage,’ she said. ‘Her mother’s Welsh.’

  ‘Oops,’ I said.

  Later that day, Betty came to my desk with a cake she’d taken from the canteen. ‘That report you wrote about the Brighton reunion,’ she said, ‘it’s the first reunion report that wasn’t boring in years. I liked the thing about the end of the pier from Trollope.’

  ‘A bit cloggsy,’ I said.

  ‘That’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we can cope with one clever clogs about here. Here’s a present for you. Now don’t be getting used to it.’

  Betty had lost what she called ‘my chap’ many years before and she would mention him often but never explain. His name was James and they weren’t married – not enough leave, I suspect – and by the time I knew her Betty had spent many years both tidy and alone, giving a succession of small dogs the greater part of her love. She had got into the habit of her unhappiness, so you couldn’t be surprised at the way she protected her resentments and her old way of doing things, and yet unexpectedly, now and then, she would get the giggles, you’d see a flash of goodwill, and for a second it would refresh her whole face and the atmosphere around her, bringing to mind the girl she must have been with James.

  ‘Do you look like your mother?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was adopted as a baby.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No need. They’re great, the parents I’ve got. I just don’t know who the real ones were or what they looked like.’

  The years of living too much in her own head had put something coarse into Betty’s notion of intimacy. ‘Did they abandon you?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve never asked.’

  ‘“Abandon” is such an old-fashioned word. It probably doesn’t mean anything much.’

  ‘Well, it means something,’ I said. ‘It’s really what people mind about. It’s what music is nearly always about – abandoned by this or that, a woman or a man or your parents or God.’

  ‘I don’t know any songs about being abandoned by God,’ said Betty.

  ‘Neither do I.’ We laughed. ‘Shall we write one, then?’

  Betty laughed about four weeks’ worth of laughter.

  ‘I don’t know what happened to my real parents,’ I said. ‘It’s never really bothered me. I suppose they must have their own story.’

  Betty frowned then shrugged and the moment passed. ‘I’d better get back to these galleys,’ she said. ‘Those typesetters aren’t worth their wages.’

  I was also spending time with the St Clareites, walking with them in the countryside, supervising bus runs to here or there, going to reunions, refereeing blind sports, and I became close to some of them. Most had been young men when they were blinded; the last time they had seen the world it was full of smoke and flying dirt, but now they wanted to be guided to peaceful places. St Clare’s had taught them Braille, it had given them work, pensions, holiday homes, c
ommunities – but it couldn’t return them to English normality, the things they craved most and loved.

  My job on those days out was to be the eyes, and there is one day I remember better than the others. I was leading a group of veterans of the old stamp, eight of them, half over eighty-five (veterans of Ypres, the Somme and the Dardanelles), three from Dunkirk, and one younger man, Ronnie, blinded by shrapnel during Suez. All of them loved the South Downs. It was something to do with their sense of England: the loveliness of the Downs themselves existed in their memories, but they were also conscious of the sea beyond the cliffs, and of Europe out there. The men seemed pleased to be with one another in the open air and away from their wives for the day, and it felt strange to be thought of as their leader, aged twenty-four, describing the many shades of blue I could see, picking up stones and grass for them to touch and flowers to sniff.

  I had named the group the Rodmell Fusiliers, and devised a system for getting them across the Downs: it was to use a clothes pole, with me holding the front of it, Ronnie at the back, and the veterans of the trenches and Dunkirk between us, holding on to the pole as we marched up the South Downs Way. On each trip with this group, I added more stuff I could say, just to make the afternoon work better. I had passages from The Old Yarns of Sussex and pamphlets on botany and I would recite poems to liven up the journey over the fields. One of the older men, Archie, had known some of Rupert Brooke’s companymen, and walking one foot in front of the other we would go quiet listening to what he remembered.