by D. J. Taylor
‘I don’t think he sounded quite as bad as last time,’ Giles said when she had finished, coming out of the kitchen with a bottle of wine – the last of the bottles his constituency association had given him on his defeat – in the slender fingers of his left hand.
‘What does he do all day in that shop?’ Amy demanded, not so much of Giles, who had begun to tug hopefully at the bottle with a corkscrew, but of the world at large, that great unseen audience which lurked silently in the dark garden and thronged the ceiling above her head. ‘Does he read books or dust the chairs? And Tamsin, or whatever her name is, what does she do all day? Hold his bloody hand? Read his Tarot cards?’
There was no answer to this. Later on rain fell and she went out into the drive, torch in hand, and, with water dripping onto her head from the leylandii hedge, set about burying the hedgehog.
The big news on campus next morning was of the student drowned in the lake. This, then, was the explanation of the bobbing lantern and the ambulance churning up mud as it sped to the water’s edge. More shocking even than the death, Amy thought, was the manner of its accomplishment. For the girl who had decided to end her life had simply walked into the water wearing a trenchcoat whose pockets were full of rocks taken from the Vice-Chancellor’s ornamental garden, like Virginia Woolf consigning herself to the currents of the Ouse. Here on the third floor of Arts Block Three the view from Professor Jamieson’s window was full of authenticating detail. There was still a boat out cruising the windblown surface of the lake; the landing stage where walkers threw sticks for their dogs was already carpeted with flowers.
It was about half past ten and the overhead lighting was more unflattering to the faces of the people beneath it than ever. Outside in the corridor students were queueing to receive end-of-semester grades, lobby for coursework extensions, unburden themselves of feelings of unworthiness, guilt and despair. Did universities have a beneficial effect on the people who studied at them, and the people who supervised them? Was there, when it came to it, anywhere else for them to go? These were not questions that would ever have occurred to Professor Jamieson, who had several copies of Lily Chen’s coursework strewn over his desk and was looking at them with unfeigned enthusiasm.
‘As you know, Amy,’ he was saying, in what she thought was a surprisingly good imitation of dispassionate neutrality, ‘we have a series of procedures that are brought into play should it turn out that two examiners disagree. Or, that is, if they disagree to such an extent that the whole basis of the undertaking is called into question.’
‘I take it that means the whole basis of the undertaking has been called into question?’
‘I think so,’ Jamieson said, with irreproachable seriousness. ‘Yes, I definitely think so. If you had given Lily – Miss Chen – let us say a fifty three or even a fifty two, perhaps one could let it stand. But a forty nine… That, I think, is really impossible to ignore.’
In the antiques shop in Camden Town Sam would be staring out of the window at the fine North London rain. Or would he? The problem with Sam was that he so rarely did what anyone else did. The stock response to the stock situation was completely beyond him. He was far more likely to be hurling Frisbees on Primrose Hill. With an effort she returned herself to the business at hand.
‘The reason I gave her a forty nine, Graham, is that she can hardly write English. I mean, I take it that students on the twentieth-century course are expected to make subjects agree with verbs?’
Jamieson raised both his hands to the level of his chin, in what was presumably intended as a gesture of self-deprecation but ended up looking merely odd. In the distance, by the lake’s edge, she could see a little drift of students, altogether dwarfed by the immensity of shrub and foliage, come to examine the floral tributes.
‘Why don’t we step back from this a moment, Amy, and look at the situation from Miss Chen’s point of view? Certainly, we have a right to expect our students to write in grammatical English. On the other hand, there is the question of the support that we, as an academic institution, owe to them. Now, I must say that having met Miss Chen in the course of my administrative duties I have always found her to be articulate and indeed enthused by her studies.’
Heads of department had to say these things. All their geese were necessarily swans. Were they any students anywhere, Amy wondered, who were dim-witted, uninterested and unable, or unwilling, to read the books? Forty years ago one of Jamieson’s predecessors on the faculty had written a semi-famous novel, supposedly set within the confines of Arts Block Three. Advertised as a campus romp, it was, she had always thought, a rather melancholy book, whose subterranean thesis was that the values supposedly trumpeted by universities were all too prey to subversion, that liberalism, when you came down to it, or when you established it in Arts Block Three, had its price.
‘Let me ask you a question, Graham,’ she said. ‘Is anyone here ever allowed to fail anybody?’
But Professor Jamieson was too old a hand to be fooled by this kind of ploy.
‘I had hoped,’ he said wearily, ‘that we could have resolved this. Clearly we cannot. Miss Chen, I may say, has submitted a formal complaint alleging bias. She also claims that you made an insensitive and belittling remark with reference to something she had written about E.M. Forster.’
‘All I said was that if she was going to write about Forster’s novels, she might at least get the titles right.’
‘Has it never occurred to you, Amy, that the Miss Chens of this world – any student, if it comes to that – need careful handling?’
‘When I was at Oxford,’ Amy said incautiously, ‘the Miss Chens of this world would have been given six penal collections and then sent down.’
After that it was agreed that there was no point in going on. They arranged to meet two days later in the offices of the Dean, where the whole question of Miss Chen’s coursework and, by implication, Amy’s fitness to judge it could be gone into at greater length. Having established that the matter was out of Jamieson’s hands, Amy cheered up.
‘Graham,’ she said. ‘Have you ever read Wonderland?’
‘You’ve got me there. Is that a new one?’ Contemporary literature was a closed book to Professor Jamieson.
‘The novel by Martin Cartwright. The one set here.’
‘Oh that. No, I don’t think I have.’
‘You ought to read it,’ Amy said, greatly daring. ‘It would tell you something about yourself.’
‘Ah, literature,’ Jamieson said, who had his whimsical side. ‘So often thought to be heuristic. So rarely up to delivering the goods.’
Afterwards, cycling back down the hill into a vicious wind blown south from Jutland, she could not quite work out why she needed to make a principle out of Lily Chen. There had been other Lily Chens over the years, and she had let them go: a boy, once, who had done no work for three years, and with whom she had remained on the friendliest possible terms; a girl who had copied page after page out of Terry Eagleton’s After Theory and been let off with the mildest of cautions. Why should they be allowed to prosper and Miss Chen sink into the icy depths? Reaching home at twelve to discover that Giles had gone to his office and that the dog had been sick on the floor of the utility room, she was gripped by a sudden access of resolve, as painful and unsettling as a tumble into a nettle-bed. She would abandon the afternoon’s marking, go up to London on the train and roust out Sam from his antiques shop. No sooner had the idea formed in her head than all the disadvantages that attended trips to London clamoured to supplant it, but she fought them off, cleaned up the dog sick, left a note on the kitchen table for Giles, which said simply, but, she thought, rather enigmatically I HAVE GONE TO LONDON and then stepped smartly outside before she could have second thoughts and caught a bus into the city. It was growing colder, and the people in the streets had that dull, exasperated look so characteristic of the East Anglian winter. Quite often, going up to London on the train, there was someone else she knew, some colleague traipsing
up to deliver a paper, some mother of a child from one of the several schools Sam had attended in the vicinity until the educational process grew weary of him. This time, ominously enough, her carriage was almost empty and she spent the journey staring out of the window at the dun-coloured meadows and the pools of stagnant water that ran away on either side of the track, anonymous and alone.
Camden, when she reached it, seemed even nastier and more untidy than on her last visit, and the schoolchildren gathered in the entrance to the Underground station like creatures from another galaxy. What did they want? And what was to be done with them when they grew older? She had a vision of two of them walled up behind glass in some foreign museum under the rubric specimens of English youth, London, December 2012. The antiques shop proved not to be down the side street where she thought she remembered it, but at the far end of a tiny, sequestered square where so many black refuse sacks lay piled up in mounds that they could not possibly have all belonged to the buildings round about and must have been brought in from outside. The twilight was coming on now, and a part of her did not want to go into the shop, feared what she might find there, would have given anything, in fact, to have been able to jump into a taxi and have herself driven back to Liverpool Street, to have left the moral dilemmas which oppressed her to the characters of the books on which she lectured. On the other hand, was there any guarantee that the authors of these works knew any more than she did? She took her hands out of her coat pockets, stared into the shop window – depthless and atmospheric – and was rather relieved to find Sam sitting on a stool next to a pile of dinner plates and an ostrich egg on which the plump faces of their majesties King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra had been blandly superimposed: less disconcerting-looking than usual, she thought, but with a bizarre hairstyle, cropped to the skull on one side but with queer, luxuriant fronds hanging down on the other. When he saw her he got down off the stool and stood awkwardly with his hands by his sides, rather if, she thought, he was a boy scout waiting to be called to attention, and she was struck by how unutterably incongruous her life had become, that you could live for nearly five decades, cultivate the most sophisticated opinions about art, taste and morality, have a complete set of the Scott Moncrieff Proust at your bedside to comfort you, and end up married to a Conservative MP who had lost his seat and staring in the dim interior of a shop called Alice’s Attic, wondering if your only son, who looked as if he had been half scalped, would deign to speak to you.
‘I thought I’d come and see you,’ she volunteered. ‘I was just standing in the kitchen at home, without very much to do, and I thought I’d get on the train and come and see you.’
‘That’s nice,’ Sam said. Some of the clumps of hair at the back of his head had been dyed an unlikely shade of blue, she saw.
‘Where’s Tamsin?’ she asked, thinking that if Tamsin had appeared in the shop she would happily have thrown the ostrich egg at her.
‘Gone to a sale in Palmers Green, I think.’
A customer coming into the shop might have relieved some of the awkwardness, but Alice’s Attic did not seem to run to customers.
‘Sam,’ she said, not untruthfully, ‘whatever you might think of me, it’s very nice to see you. But I haven’t had anything to eat or drink since this morning, so would you please make me a cup of tea?’
Later on, when she thought about it – travelling back on a train full of tetchy commuters and then in the skidding taxi – she realised that in the context of her recent dealings with Sam, it had not gone altogether badly, that he had not, as had sometimes happened in the past, talked arrant nonsense, that he had listened to her questions and returned answers that were broadly coherent, that on a scale of ten an informed judge would probably have awarded the conversation six or even seven. On the other hand, as she discovered when they sat eating supper in view of the dark, cheerless garden, it was difficult to explain exactly what part of the encounter she had found encouraging.
‘How did he seem?’ Giles wondered tentatively. He was much less emphatic these days.
‘I don’t know. How does anyone seem? He was quite chatty – for Sam. He’s had his hair cut in some weird new way.’
‘And is he actually living with… Tania, is it?’
‘Tamsin. It would be a very odd set-up if he weren’t… Jesus,’ Amy said suddenly, the mountain of reasonableness she had built up for herself over the past three hours instantaneously collapsing into runnels of sand. ‘He’s twenty. He ought to be at college somewhere, not working in an antiques shop with some raddled old hippy chick who looks like something out of the Incredible String Band.’
‘Do you think we ought to tell Tony?’ Tony was, or had been, Sam’s psychiatrist.
‘It can’t do any good. But yes, we probably ought to.’
Two other significant things happened that evening. The first was that she found the Prime Minister’s Christmas card torn up and flung in the waste-paper basket – flung, she thought, with a kind of ostentation that could only have meant that the flinging was a message to her. The second was that she went up to the book-room and looked out a copy of Wonderland in an old Penguin edition with a florid inscription – To darling Amy with fondest love from James – on the title-page (and who was James? She could not even remember) and spent the next hour or so skimming through its parched and curiously friable pages. The reading of it came as a shock to her – not because, as she had dimly anticipated, it was a much more ground-down affair than the jaunty encomia of the back jacket led you to believe, but because the people at large in it – the randy academics, the guileless women they were bent on seducing – were so entirely different from anyone she had ever met. They were not innocent people, and they were not neutral – they were Marxists, and Feminists and Materialists and (a few of the older ones, anyway) Existentialists, and sometimes devious with it, but there was a kind of Romanticism about their efforts to preserve a tiny, uncontaminated corner of the academic world where, untroubled by questions of profit and loss, they could attempt to be themselves. On the other hand, Amy thought, if there was one thing that nearly three decades of adult life had taught her, inside a university and beyond it, it was that you should be deeply suspicious of Romanticism.
Cycling up the hill to the university for the meeting with the Dean, past grey, Titanic lorries that loomed up unexpectedly from out of the mist, she found that there was a paragraph forming in her head which could be used not exactly in her defence but as a way of assimilating the events of the past few days, in so far as they could be assimilated. It went: all this, all the endeavours on which we are so optimistically engaged, are effectively meaningless. If Miss Chen, against whom I have no personal animus, is allowed to come here and buy a degree, without having the ability to read, much less comprehend, the books she is supposed to be studying, then why shouldn’t anyone? As for the idea that what we do here has any relevance to the world beyond the window of Arts Block Three, that literature, as it is currently taught, is an ameliorating force, that it is a source of moral rejuvenation, that it encourages us to see ourselves in perspective – that it possesses all those wonderful sanctifying qualities we are constantly told about – then let me tell you that the experiences of the past week suggest that literature has no bearing on whether I feel happy, sad or anything else, and certainly no effect on my ability to cope with the impediments that life strews in my path. She thought that this was putting it rather strong, but never, she realised, had she felt keener on putting things strongly.
In the end all this, all this unabashed cultural extremism, went unsaid. For the Dean’s office turned out to be empty, its door open, its complete edition of the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography laid out invitingly in its double row, but the long sofa on which supplicants were invited to state their cases quite empty, and the birds flown – if, indeed, they had ever perched there in the first place. She had been there ten minutes and had time to read a whole article about Stefan Zweig in the London Review of Books wh
en there came a shuffling noise in the doorway and she looked up to see the burly, chronically put-upon figure of Dorothy, the Dean’s secretary.
‘Are you waiting for Maurice and Graham? I’m afraid neither of them’s here.’
‘Why not?’ Amy demanded, more petulantly than she meant to. ‘Why aren’t they here?’
‘Actually,’ Dorothy said, coming into the room and shutting the door with an adroitness that belied her all-in-wrestler’s physique, ‘they’re with the V-C.’ There was a pause. ‘I think they’ll probably be there most of the morning.’
Amy cocked an eye. This was too big to be ignored. Much bigger than the Registrar being arrested in the nightclub or the cannabis patch in the woods. Happily Dorothy was an old friend. They had shared bottles of water after the charity fun run and criticised many an outfit worn by the Public Orator’s wife. After she had made a pretence of tidying the Dean’s pristine desk and returned the copy of the London Review of Books to its proper place, she said:
‘Actually it’s a disciplinary matter.’
‘To do with whom?’
‘Professor Jamieson.’
‘What’s he done?’
There was a pause while Dorothy searched for the appropriate quasi-legal phrase. ‘Apparently he is supposed to have forced his attentions on one of the overseas students.’
‘Anyone we know?’
‘I believe,’ Dorothy said, indicating both that the conversation was at and end and that Amy could consider herself lucky to be divulged even this much, ‘that she’s called Lily Chen.’
Lily Chen, Amy thought, Lily Chen! What havoc have you wreaked in the breast of occidental man since you first flew in from the University of Taipei, or wherever it was? Such unprecedented news demanded a response, and so she left the Dean’s office, in all its anti-septic splendour, and marched off to the cafeteria in the shopping mall which occupied the campus’s central square in search of a cup of coffee. Outside the foyer they were holding a vigil for the girl who had drowned herself in the lake, and there were students standing about in groups holding placards which said REMEMBER VIOLET. All this, too, seemed incongruous. Nobody was called Violet these days, nobody, and somehow the placards seemed to emphasise her detachment from the world and the forces that had led her to do away with herself. But all this was serious, Amy thought. Whatever Jamieson had got up to, or perhaps only contemplated, with Lily Chen was squalid, or offensive or laughable, but there was no getting away from the placards. When the university reassembled after the Christmas vacation somebody, she knew, would have created a shrine by the water’s edge with pictures of Violet laminated at the campus coffee shop and doggerel poems written by people who had known her.
