He remembered the Diggers, who had dug up Richmond Hill. He thought of the enclosure of the Commons. He thought of Shelter, and the homeless, and vandalized council property, and large houses with burglar alarms and guard dogs and barbed wire around them, and of the beaches of the Riviera, parceled out and cordoned off and sold. Public and private. Locke—he thought it was Locke—had said that we make our stake to the land by working it: was that why he, guilty, owning far more than his fair share, tried ineptly to grow woody carrots? The stake is the labor. And those who do not labor, who do not dig and redecorate and plug up the holes in their leaking roofs, shall be evicted? He did not think that such a view would be very popular with his left-wing friends of the old days. But then, it was hard to know what they did think, what they did want. He had visited, some years earlier, a twenty-story council block in his own London neighborhood to collect one of his children from a schoolfriend’s party: the lift had been broken, the walls covered with graffiti, there was dog shit on the stairs (was it dog shit?) and broken bottles dumped in corners, the trees uprooted in the communal strip of garden, the communal flowerbeds trampled. Verminous one-legged cross-beaked pigeons scrabbled in the dirt and hung like thick bats or rats in the one surviving tree. Inside his daughter’s friend’s flat, it was cozy, neat, compact, bright, with spectacular views across London and the canal and the river. A question of perspective. At home, he discussed with Babs the contrast between the outside and the inside: ever-liberal, she blamed the oppressive architecture rather than the people, but a friend who had called by, a one-time progressive like himself, had said: “We must recognize that what belongs to everybody belongs to nobody. And nobody will care for it.”
And so it was. It had not always been so. Surely?
He thought of a Wellsian paradise, a Welwyn Garden City, with neat boxes. But people did not like that kind of thing. What did they want? It was not surprising that neither political party had a coherent housing policy. HOMES, NOT OFFICES, declared placards all over London, accusing property developers like Anthony Keating of the wrong priorities. And he could see that to be homeless must indeed be unpleasant. But why, he had once tentatively asked a friend who was complaining of the cost of bedsitters in Kentish Town, why do so many of the homeless want to live in London, where there are neither houses nor jobs? What is the attraction? You live here yourself, his friend, a sour and stubborn writer, had replied. Yes, but I no longer much like it, said Anthony, who was already contemplating the luxury of removal.
It seemed that his dislike was not shared by those who chose to inhabit, rancorously, decaying terraces, and to squat in derelict slums.
But other friends, in the past few years, had moved to the country, some driven by prosperity, others by failure. Most had acquired properties within reach of London: in Kent and Sussex, in Suffolk and Norfolk, in Oxfordshire, the Cotswolds, Wiltshire, even, by motorway, Wales. Some claimed they wanted to grow vegetables, others that they could not take the pace of London life. Anthony and Babs, then later, Anthony and Alison had been to stay with some of these emigrants and had contemplated the country life. What were they seeking, what were they fleeing? Were they fleeing a London that was going the way of New York—garbage-strewn, transport-choked, dirty, violent? Or were they simply seeking every Englishman’s dream: his own plot, his own castle, his own estate? The most successful had undoubtedly been those who had moved farthest: a journalist who had removed himself and his family to a house on a cliff in Cornwall, an ex-secretary who had gone with husband and child to live up a mountain in Wales, without electricity, gas, or running water, with a sheep, a goat, and hens. They had really moved themselves: they had not tried to compromise. Impressed by their success, Anthony himself had decided to move far afield, and had persuaded Alison to try the North, despite the problems of traveling.
There are not, after all, unlimited ways of spending one’s money, and Anthony, when he bought High Rook House, had thought that he had money. He did not want a Rolls or a yacht, he did not want an airplane, he did not even want to ski or to water-ski. So a country house had seemed a natural stage in his natural progression. In it, he would drink, eat, smoke, and sleep with Alison; from it, he would go for walks, perhaps with a dog. Or that had been the plan, the plan of expansion.
Luckily he had not bought the dog. He had not had time to get around to buying an expansive expensive meat-eating dog.
Unexpected illnesses often strike their victims as punishments for known or unknown crimes.
I wonder what mine was, thought Anthony. He really did not know. Getting out of his depth, perhaps? Trying to be a heavyweight, when he was by nature a lightweight? (The reverse journey of Donnell Murray, Alison’s husband.) Not recognizing his own limitations? Biting off more than he could chew? These variations on the same theme were the only thoughts that occurred to him. Would it have been better, would he have been happier, if he had stayed on in his old frivolous job, messing about, reading novels and gossip about old friends in The New Statesman and the Sunday papers, getting older, more ironic, more cynical, more amused by more things and less touched by anything, apparently successful, drinking too much and trying to eat sensibly? He had thought so, at times, during those sickening months when the interest rate soared, when rents were frozen, when politicians were declaring open war on property developers, denouncing them as the scourge of Britain: he had wished himself back on the sidelines, wished himself free to smile ironically as yet another secondary bank collapsed, yet another solid-seeming empire was transferred into the hands of the receivers. And yet, all in all, he did not yet repent. It had, at the very least, been interesting. And even now, even at this late day, it might all work out for the best. And why, anyway, fear the worst so much? The worst was what had happened to Len Wincobank, and Len Wincobank seemed to be surviving well enough. It would be interesting to see what had happened to Len. Anthony had never visited a prison. He did not like to admit it to himself, but he was secretly curious to see what it was like. It is not every clergyman’s son who has an opportunity to visit a good friend in jail. The wider horizons he had sought were wide indeed.
Meanwhile, his own fortress, so dearly purchased, was to him not unlike a prison, he reflected, and as though to prove the point a mouse, well-known haunter of dungeons, ran over his hearth rug. It appeared not to notice him, as he was sitting so still. He was not much afraid of mice, but was momentarily glad that he did not have anyone with him, to whom he would have to pretend not to be at all afraid. Odd creatures invaded a country house. One night there had been a bat in the bedroom curtains. And the bath was always full of spiders. At first he had taken them as bad omens, and had feared to wash them down the plug, but there were so many of them that they had deprived themselves by their multiplicity of any special significance, and now found themselves heartlessly washed away.
When he and Babs had first got together all those years ago, he had discovered that she shared his greatest private fear: a fear of moths around the bedside lamp. Screaming, her head under the pillow, she had implored him to do away with them. He would retort, in cowardly fashion, by turning off the lamp, hoping the moth would fly off to the moon, or into a lighted corridor. But although he never screamed as she did, he knew that she had found him out, and had ceased to respect him, because he was afraid of moths.
The most depressing country-dweller that Anthony could think of was his old friend Linton Hancox. He thought of him to cheer himself up. He had been at school with Linton, and also at college. Twenty years or so ago, it looked as though Linton was going to do well for himself in life: he had been a bright boy, a pretty boy, a scholar, a poet and classicist, had done well for himself with scholarships and prizes, had had poems published young in distinguished journals, had embarked on research, had seemed sure of a readership, a lectureship, a professorship, a slim volume, a fat volume, translations, collected works. He had married a pretty girl, had produced pretty children. For years, he seemed to be about to be doing
well, safe in his academic world, with his good degree: it had been years before Anthony had begun to realize how unmistakably the water was running out of that particular pond. How could one go wrong, he had thought to himself when he thought of Linton, with a good degree and a good post at Oxford? So he had thought, from the shifting rapids of the BBC.
It was in the late sixties, when everyone else was beginning to do better, that Anthony began to notice that Linton was doing worse. They did not meet often: at the infrequent parties of a friend who kept up with both, accidentally on a train or at a theater, by design, once or twice, at each other’s house, for a drink or a meal. Babs had a soft spot for Linton because he was—or, as they learned to say, had been—a pretty boy. But even Babs began to remark that Linton was becoming rather sour. His sourness took a common—but to Babs and Anthony (unworldly innocents), a rather surprising—course: he began to complain about falling standards in education, about the menace of trendy schoolteachers who couldn’t even teach children to read, about the dangers of assuming that all learning could and should be fun—odd remarks from one who had always been rather confident and casual in his own life-style. These remarks about education were paralleled by remarks about the state of poetry. Linton’s own poetry was, naturally, academic, intelligent, structured, delicate, evasive, perceptive, full of verbal ambiguities and traditional qualifications; his reaction to the wave of beat poets, Liverpool poets, pub poets, popular poets was one of amusement, then of hostility, then of contempt tinged with fear. Anthony and Babs could not sympathize with this, for they were themselves vaguely and carelessly progressive, and any creative or literary talents that Anthony had ever had had been for the popular low-middle-brow, rather than for the elitist genres. They simply could not believe, either, that Linton’s fear of an anticlerical conspiracy, an anti-intellectual lobby in high and low places in the educational world, had much justification. And if it had, they didn’t care: their children jostled their way easily through state primary schools and into a disparate mixture of comprehensives, dying grammar schools, colleges of further education.
But Linton, no doubt about it, was a changing man. In 1970, when Anthony was already an apprentice property developer, the two of them met accidentally in a pub in Covent Garden. Linton said that he had just moved with his family to the country: would Anthony and his family like to come for a weekend? It was one of those casual invitations which become, through some strange shift of power, impossible to refuse, so, three weeks later, Anthony and Babs and two of their children set off for Oxfordshire, to the Hancoxes’ place in the country.
It was very depressing. The cottage was in a small, straggling, insignificant, not unattractive village, and it was old and should have been picturesque: it had a garden sloping backward onto a wet field with cows, it had a low roof, and an old stable door, and old walls made of wattle and daub, and a large open fireplace with a chimney corner in the main living room. It was picturesque enough for both Anthony and Babs to be able to cry, without implausibility, “Oh, how pretty, how charming,” but each could feel the other’s heart sink. It was old, but it was shabby, cramped, and ill-organized: there was enough room for the four adults and their four children, but only just. Unfortunately, the weather was poor, and the cottage was bitterly cold, full of an icy damp: being old, none of its doors or windows fitted, and the chill oozed in from the fields and the garden. The dining room was so cold that Anthony could see the backs of his hands turning blue as he ate the exceedingly tough partridge that seemed aptly enough to represent country comfort.
Linton’s wife, Harriet, was depressed. Anybody could see that. Linton was more angry than depressed. The next morning, after a freezing night in a sloping bed beneath a sloping ceiling, which Anthony spent in his socks and a jersey, Linton took Anthony on a country walk—one of those walks which ends badly, in mud, at the end of a plowed field from which there is no egress save into another plowed field occupied by long-horned and hostile cattle: there is always something lowering about being forced to retrace one’s steps, and on the way back to the bridle path, which they had lost, a man on a tractor shouted at them that they were walking on private property, and to keep off.
As they walked, Linton talked about his students. Or undergraduates, as he unfashionably persisted in labeling them. They were very, very dim, he told Anthony. They had been appallingly badly taught: Cambridge Latin was in his view a disaster. None of them had any solid grounding in grammar, none of them could write a prose even to old O Level standards, they had all been corrupted by vague “classical studies” and thought that if they knew a few Greek myths and could recognize a piece of Ovid or Homer and make some approximate sense of it, that would do.
It sounds depressing, said Anthony, politely, trying to pull his borrowed Wellington boot out of a deep puddle of mud, in which he had accidentally stepped. Rooks and seagulls rose, cawing, from a brown expanse, as they approached.
“Why do seagulls get so far from the sea?” asked Anthony. But Linton was not to be deflected from his grievances by country lore. As they trudged coldly back to the cottage, he continued to berate society, which had thrown away its cherished values for a myth of egalitarianism, for a nonsensical fantasy of a popular culture. His views seemed to have aged ten years, rather abruptly. And although Anthony himself had abandoned the television world in a state of disillusion and dissatisfaction, he found that he felt even further away from Linton’s curious nostalgia than he had felt from the liberal good intentions of a progressive popular institution peddling progressive popular views. The golden age of solid education which Linton evoked, to the mocking cries of bleak rooks, had not been like that at all, as he recalled. Linton himself had complained bitterly—surely it had been Linton—sitting up late one night over a bottle of cheap wine in Balliol, describing his walking holiday in Greece, twenty years ago: Linton himself had complained that the trouble with conventional teaching of classics was that it gave one no feeling that Greek and Latin were real languages, with a real literature—that the most important thing of all was to realize the beauty, the significance, the intelligence, the message, of Plato, of Thucydides, of Lucretius, that there was more to the classics than grammar, what a pity it was that so many schoolchildren were turned off the classics by too much insistence on grammar . . . .Yes, that had been Linton.
Linton’s views had aged; so had his appearance. Without consulting Babs, Anthony could tell that this upset Babs even more than the cold bed. Linton had grown fat. It seemed impossible, for he had been a slender young man, with hair like curling tendrils of vine around his classic forehead; but now he was fat. He had a pot belly, and a double chin, and his hair was thin and cut short; yet he did not look comfortably plump, as do those who have grown fat by cheerfulness. Rather, he looked as though the thin man were still hovering inside him, anxiously: misery rather than happiness had inflated him, and it did not suit him, he had not the natural build, the natural weight, to carry this excess. It sat on him uncomfortably, like a sad growth.
Anthony found himself hoping, as they walked up the back drive through fitfully cultivated and dying pallid yellow seeding lettuces, that there would be a large stiff drink waiting for him. But he somehow knew there was not. And there was not. Though Linton had once been one of the lively lads, the likely lads, far from averse to a bottle or two. Instead, there was a glass of beer, a drink Anthony found decreasingly adequate, and a meal of overgrown sprouts, Walls sausages, and baked potatoes. The potatoes had been excellent, though Anthony could hardly bring himself to eat his, so well did they serve as handwarmers, as they sat at the polished spread of country-auction-late-Victorian-gateleg table, shivering, as the air sighed its way in through the cracked windows.
Country life. In the evening, Anthony insisted on going down to the pub, somewhat against his host’s inclinations, and managed to buy half a bottle of Scotch, discreetly, while Linton was parking his car: he felt safer with a bottle in his pocket, and managed to get a much more
comfortable night’s sleep, despite the fact that he had inflicted a nasty wound on his leg while trying to help Linton to fill the coal scuttle for the stove from the coal shed in the pitch dark.
On the way home to London, after listening to their children’s complaints about how mean and awful the Hancox children had been, he and Babs vowed, with a shiver of horror, that they would never be seduced into trying to go and live in the country—or if we do, Anthony had added as a proviso, if we do, at least we’ll do it in some style.
Brooding, now, over his stylish country house hearth, Anthony thought about Linton. He realized clearly now, as he had not perhaps then, that Linton had been delivering an unfair attack on the quality of education. What had happened to Linton had been part of some much larger trend. Poor Linton had had the historical misfortune to be gifted in a dying skill, and to have been insufficiently aware of the shrinking domain of his own subject. Nobody wanted to do classics any more: there were no promotions possible in his field. He had come to a dead end, having chosen what seemed, initially, a well-structured and secure career. No wonder he defended himself by carping about the state of education as a whole, by blaming his undergraduates. And, no doubt, his undergraduates were less gifted than his own generation had been, for nowadays the bright and gifted ones chose on the whole to do other things. There were empty places, Anthony had read, in most universities, for classics scholars, because nobody applied: those who applied were those who had little hope of getting in on a more popular course. So no wonder Linton found his pupils unsatisfactory. Most were duds.
The Ice Age Page 8
