by David Nobbs
My father had been dead for twelve years at the time.
'Oh, mustn't grumble,' she said. 'I'll get no visitors if I grumble, will I? Not that I get many anyway.'
'You get me.'
'Occasionally.'
'Mother, I come every week.'
Every week for the nine long years in which she has been in the home, clinging on to a life that she no longer enjoys.
'I should hope so. You know I can't go out.'
Mother is full of bitterness. She is angry with the God she has worshipped all her life for not sparing her from old age. She is angry with the University for not having a select home for the elderly relatives of dons. She is angry with my father for dying. She is angry with me for delivering to her only the meagre harvest that she has sown.
'Margaret comes once a month.'
'It's very kind of her, but I'm so relieved when she's gone. She will bend over very close to me to emphasise things, and she has very bad breath. I suppose it's cruel of me to say that, but if I can't speak the truth when I'm eighty-seven, when can I?'
After a brief pause, I moved on to safer ground.
'So what did you have for lunch?'
That is about as near as we get to intellectual curiosity in our conversations.
'We had pork.'
'Oh, very nice.'
Contrast that with my saying 'We'll see if it is' when the waiter said, 'Very good, sir.' I was not, when I was at the home, the Alan I was in L'Escargot Bleu. I was not really Alan at all when I was with my mother. I was a shadow. If I could have sent a hologram of me, I would have, and she wouldn't have noticed.
'Well, it wasn't too bad, I suppose, but the apple sauce tasted synthetic.'
I found it interesting that my mother used the word 'synthetic'. Little did she know that Kant, my hero, the author of Critique of Pure Reason, which I regarded as the best work on philosophy ever written, had created a very famous phrase, and one that had great importance in the development of what can loosely be called modern philosophy – synthetic a priori knowledge. The process of synthesis was a vital element in linguistic and moral philosophy – in fact, I was trying to suggest, in my book, that it had to be a German who invented that phrase, because Germans were the most thorough people on earth. Enough of that. My point is that the process of synthesising, the putting together of separate parts to form a complex whole, is by definition complex, and is a very advanced process in the world of thought. Then it came into the world of chemistry and of materials. We learnt to talk of clothes made of synthetic material. This material was created by experts and for good reasons. It was held to be superior to the simple natural materials. It used knowledge in order to make improvements. However, the word began to mean 'unreal', 'unnatural', 'artificial'. A word associated with high intellectual activity had gradually become pejorative, hence my mother's use of it to describe her apple sauce.
Why did I write that passage? To show you just how little of the real me was presented to my mother, how vast was the distance between us as we sat so close together in that stale hothouse. I said none of this to her. All I said was 'And to follow?'
'What?'
'What did you have to follow? After the pork?'
She looked at me strangely.
'Alan, that was several minutes ago. You haven't spoken for several minutes. Are you all right?'
'Of course I'm all right, Mother. I was thinking.'
'Oh. That.'
I think my mother believed that philosophy was a childish aberration that I would eventually grow out of, like a passion for horses in young girls. I don't think she considered that I was fifty-five. The only fact that mattered about my age was that I was thirty-two years younger than she was. I didn't think she really believed that she was eighty-seven. That was why she told me so often that she was.
'I know I can't be much fun for you but if you take the trouble to come you might at least say something occasionally.'
'Sorry, Mother. I'm a bit tired.'
A mistake. A tactical error.
'Why? Didn't you sleep well?'
I couldn't tell her that I had spent most of the night talking to a 24-year-old darts groupie in a cheap hotel room in London. Everything that happened in my life became just one more piece of evasion. The more I saw my mother, the greater was the gap between us. The more I saw Ange, the greater the chasm would become.
There weren't many questions I could dredge up when visiting my mother, so I had to be careful not to waste even one of them. With any luck 'What did you have to follow?' might yield a couple of minutes of peace while she described the inadequacy of her pudding, so I asked again now, 'So what did you have to follow?'
'Oh, apple tart and ice cream. I know I'm old-fashioned, but I think it's very common to serve ice cream with apple tart. It should be cream.'
The day my mother didn't find fault with something would be the day she died.
I hated her use of the word 'common'. I made the mistake of telling her so on one occasion, and after that she used it more frequently.
I told her about my trip to Manchester. I told her that my lecture had gone down well and that it had attracted quite a large audience. It was true, but in the face of her lack of response it came out sounding like boasting.
'I thought of stopping off in London, but I decided not to. I hate London,' I lied. I didn't enjoy telling lies and as I told this whopper I sighed – another tactical mistake.
'I know these visits are painful to you, but you needn't make it so obvious,' said my mother. 'I can't help being dull. I can't help being eighty-seven. I didn't ask to be eighty-seven. I didn't ask to sit here alone all week.'
I couldn't let this go.
'Mother,' I said through gritted teeth. 'You wouldn't be alone all day if you took your meals downstairs with the others.'
'I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear to watch that Purkiss woman using her knife and fork wrongly.'
'Mrs Purkiss has dementia, Mother.'
'She used her knife and fork wrongly before she had dementia.'
Mrs Purkiss's real crime, in my mother's eyes, was not her dementia but her living in Cowley. Mrs Purkiss was lower class.
So my mother took her meals on her own, and sat on her own, except for a smelly hour with her friend Margaret once a month, and two hours with me week after week after week after week after week.
At last I felt that I had been there long enough. A quick peck, and out I walked into the glorious fresh air of a wonderful world that contained Oxford, and Gallows Corner, and Ange.
Would she come next Tuesday? I realised that I had escaped from the tense atmosphere in my mother's room to face six whole days of even greater tension.
She came. I met her at Oxford Station. Her hair had been done all spiky, she was wearing jeans and that awful Townsend Tissues T-shirt. She wasn't going to get a drink at the Randolph and we wouldn't be going down the road for dinner at Le Manoir aux Quatre Saisons.
We had a quick kiss, a bit gauche on her part as well as mine, but I had the impression that she was really pleased to see me.
There was quite a long wait for the taxi, and I was worried that somebody I knew would see her, but when I didn't see anybody I knew I was disappointed. How ridiculous.
The taxi driver was Eastern European, and I could see that he was disgruntled because the journey was so short.
'I'm not going to be dropped in Chipping Camden just so that you can get rich,' I said.
As we entered Paternoster Quad, which is one of the most beautiful quads in all Oxford, she said, 'Blimey. Is this your gaff?' and linked her arm through mine. I felt quite proud, also very embarrassed and rather annoyed at being manipulated. For years I had felt no emotions at all. Now I was being swamped with contradictory ones.
We passed a group of students whom I didn't know, but they must have known who I was, and they couldn't hide their astonishment. One of the older dons, Damien Finch, tried to keep the astonishment out of his famed mellifluo
us voice as he said 'Good evening, Alan. Isn't the light stunning?' He paused in his stride, forcing me to say, 'Damien, I don't think you've met Ange Bedwell, have you?'
'No indeed, I have not had that pleasure,' he twinkled. 'How do you do?'
'Hiya,' said Ange.
I led her up the stone staircase to my rooms on the second floor, and opened the heavy oak door. I was immediately conscious of the smell, a mixture of dust and books and age and socks and celibacy. Two sides of the room were lined with bookshelves. A large table was piled with books and papers. There were more papers on an antique desk. There was a window seat under which yet more books were stowed. Two leather armchairs and an occasional table formed the tiny bit of the room that was for social purposes.
'Bleedin' 'ell,' she said. 'All them books.'
'I've got lots more that there isn't room for. Sherry?'
'I'd rather a beer.'
'Beer. Yes, of course. I got some in.'
I found her a beer. As I poured it I said, 'You got time off work, then?'
'Up to me, innit? I'm a temp.'
I nodded, as if to suggest that I knew what a temp was, but it wasn't easy to fool this girl.
'You don't know what a temp is, do you?'
'Not exactly, no.'
'You don't know nothink, do you?'
'It's beginning to look that way. Me and Socrates.'
'A temp's someone who's booked through an agency and works for a firm temporarily. That means I can take days off when I want to. I do a bit as a barmaid down the Black Bull as well, when that old bag who hates me isn't doing the lunches. I can't get over all these books. Tax dodge, are they?'
'They're my most treasured possessions. They're my life. Do you read books at all?'
'Funnily enough, I do. I like a good read. On trains, etcetera . . . red books.'
'Sorry?'
'I read books with red covers. Well, the way I look at it, I don't know much about books, right? I wouldn't know if I was going to like a book or not till I'd read it, and then it's too late not to read it cos you've already read it. So I read books with red covers cos they look bright, right? It usually turns out OK. I reckon it's as good as any other way.'
'So you take the dust jackets off to see what colour they are, do you?'
'No, cos I don't buy books. Can't afford to, can I? I borrow them from the library.'
'Go on. Don't stop. I like listening to you.'
'What is all this listening lark? Are you taking the mickey?'
'No. Honestly.'
'Nobody ever wanted me for my mind before.'
'You see, Ange, I am becoming increasingly aware of the limits of my awareness. I am wearying of the burden of my increasing knowledge of my ignorance. The more I think, the more aware I become of the validity of more and more arguments against what I think.'
As I stood by the window of my rooms, nutty dry sherry in hand, I was all too aware that I was pontificating again, even if I was pontificating about the difficulty I had in pontificating. I wanted to stop, but I couldn't. It was the only kind of conversation I knew.
'More and more qualifications occur to me. Sometimes so many aspects of a subject occur to me, and those aspects have so many interdependencies, and all these aspects and interdependencies are subject to so many qualifications of increasing complexity which in turn are subject to further qualifications of even greater complexity – and I am trying to simplify this – that in the end it becomes very hard for me to finish a sentence. This is happening to my Ferdinand Brinsley Memorial Lecture. Is it not therefore becoming inordinately long, you may well ask.'
I have to say that it didn't look as if she would ask me that. She was looking at me but I had no idea whether she was concentrating. I was unstoppable now. I was in full lecturer mode. Oh dear.
'No, because the more qualifications that I make, the more impossible it becomes to say anything at all. I've already crossed out whole sections. The longer I work at it, the shorter it becomes. The culmination of my career, my very final lecture perhaps, will consist of an hour's total silence, warmly applauded by any students bright enough to appreciate the hard road that led to that silence.'
I turned to look her in the eye and began to speak about her, and, as I did so, I could sense a warmth coming into my voice, a warmth to which I was quite unaccustomed and which seemed to me to take the curse off my donnish tones.
'But you're not like that, Ange, you're not limited or conditioned by what has gone before or what'll come after, by what other people have thought or will think. You're fresh, original, unselfconscious. You live and think for the day. That is pure. That is beautiful. That is what I want. Talk some more.'
There was a moment's silence, quite a long moment.
'Tell you what,' she said. 'I couldn't half knock a hole in a curry.'
She didn't half knock a hole in a curry. Her appetite was prodigious. We strolled back arm-in-arm. I tried to look small and unobtrusive as we slipped past the Porters' Lodge. A crescent moon rose over the gabled roofs of Paternoster Quad. Ange drew in her breath and said, 'Fuck me, Alan. Fancy living here.' I made a mental note to stop taking it for granted.
When Ange said 'Fuck me' she was expressing surprise, not issuing an instruction. It is just as well that she wasn't issuing an instruction. You are entitled to wonder why I knew that I couldn't take advantage of this amazing opportunity to lose the secret shame of my virginity. I don't know that I can fully explain it. There was fear, yes, that was natural, given my inexperience, but I don't think it was a crippling fear. I don't think that I expected to be unable to perform, although I had no way of telling whether I would be any good at it. I had in fact felt a pretty fair erection in the middle of my lamb biryani. There was embarrassment at the thought of my middle-aged body against her young one, but not so much, because after all I did eventually . . . but I anticipate. The whole question of the difference in our ages was an obstacle, but not one that couldn't be scaled, or we would never . . . but again I anticipate . . . I mustn't rush this. And that was an element too. I didn't want to rush things. To wait fifty-five years and then be in a hurry, it wouldn't be seemly. Also, I didn't think my cramped bed in my college rooms was the right place for something so momentous – and, yes, intercourse would have been momentous for me, if not for her! No, I was a respected and respectable figure here, an upholder of values. Yet, on its own, in the twenty-first century, that also was hardly a sufficient reason.
The truth, I think, is that each of these considerations contributed in part for what may seem to you to be my extraordinary behaviour, but if there was any one real reason, it was this. My life was concerned with meaning, with defining meanings and finding meanings. My relationship with Ange had not yet become sufficiently meaningful, and for me, a committed philosopher, there could be nothing without meaning, and, above all, nothing as important as a sexual relationship without meaning. And that, I hope you will agree, is a reason more flattering to my dignity than the others.
So it was that we lay, for a second night, fully clothed beside each other upon a bed, and talked. We talked quietly. I didn't want the people in the rooms above and below to hear us, although nocturnal talk was the very stuff of Oxford life and we would not have been likely to attract much attention. We talked and snoozed and talked and slept and talked.
'Ange?' I whispered as our high pitched college clock, known the world over as Little Nelly, chimed four o'clock.
