TWO
The next week passes in an oddly euphoric daze. I feel, for a start, so much better now that I know what’s wrong with me. My body even seems to have stopped pestering me with unpleasant signals; it’s as if it understands it can leave me alone now the medical profession has taken over. After all the delays and worries, a real sense of purpose arrives with becoming a proper patient with a proper, diagnosed illness. Even the inexplicable absence of my acquaintance from our shed somehow seems part of this same coolly logical process.
Thrust upon the gleaming linoleum rivers of the new NHS, I am kept so busy that at first that there is little time left for worry about anything else. There are further X-rays at the Radcliffe, thin screens behind which I must robe and disrobe for the benefit of cold-fingered but sympathetic men who wear half moon glasses. Nurses provide me with over-sweet tea and McVitie’s Digestives from their ward tins. Porters lend me their newspapers and seek my opinion about Arsenal’s chances in the FA Cup. There’s comradeship, too, amongst the people with whom I must share these long waits in corridors and in campfire circles set around smoky ill-proportioned rooms. Gas fitters with piles from down the road at Abingdon and lobster-handed women from Jericho who still take in washing despite their dickey hearts—people I would normally have been at a loss to say anything to—become colleagues in this new world. My being from the University doesn’t bother them. Illness is timeless, classless. Here, at the gates of pain and uncertainty, there’s no town and gown. That’s nice, so does that mean you’re a proper Professor? My son Nobby, now, he went on the trams… Between tutorials and sleep and eating at Hall, my life is taken up in waits and bus journeys and having my throat and chest examined, my blood, my stools, my mucus and my urine collected in vials. Now that I am truly ill, my old fear of all things medical is easily conquered.
In fact, I feel almost heroic. After all, do not the ill have a special window of understanding on the world? And I am grateful for the impetus that my condition gives to a long-planned project of mine. A book, not of history, but about history. One which examines, much as a scientist might examine the growth of a culture, the way that events unfold, and attempts to grapple with the forces that drive them. The Fingers Of History? The way that inspiration sometimes arrives when you’re least looking for it, I may even have stumbled upon a title; serious and relevant to the subject, yet punning at the same time on my own small moment of popular fame at page eight, bottom middle column, of Saturday’s Daily Sketch between 1928 and 1932.
After years of doubt and uncertainty, of grappling with that sense of being an impostor which has pervaded most of my life, I suddenly find that I am making good progress in writing the pivotal chapter about Napoleon. Was he a maker of history, or was he its servant? Of course, he was both—and yet it is often the little incidents, when history is approached from this angle, which stand large. Questions such as, what would have happened if his parents Carlo and Letizia had never met?—which normal historians would discount as ridiculous—suddenly become a way of casting new light. Would history have changed, or would someone else have risen in his place; a similarly great thinker, soldier and organiser who would also have underestimated the strength of British naval power and the savagery of the Russian winter? But the whole idea of a Napoleon with a different name, a different accent—taller and without Josephine—it’s like Charles Lawton playing a role meant for David Niven…
From Marlborough to Louis XIV, from Charlemagne to Attila, history is full of these figures. Yet it seems to me that their influence becomes stronger as history develops. Alexander the Great remains more a creature of myth, and he came from a tradition of military might at a time when Macedonia would have had to face the hostility of neighbouring Thrace and Thessaly. The time was ripe for a strong, expansionist leader, and we must not forget that it was Alexander’s father who originally planned the invasion of the Persian Empire. Strange though it may seem, it is possible to argue—I think, convincingly—that if Alexander hadn’t existed, someone like him would have risen to take his place.
A similar pattern exits, I believe, throughout much of history. Columbus was just one of several mariners who were seeking the backing of the Court of Spain for a trip westward towards the Indies. Pizarro’s extraordinary victories against the Incas can be explained more easily in terms of military technology than his own egotistical Christian certainties. Henry VIII was not the first monarch to fall out with the Pope, but other forces engendered his decision to split from Rome with more far-reaching repercussions. Even Cromwell arose from a group of men like him in attitude, single-mindedness and intelligence. Until he became remarkable, no one had noticed him.
Of course, the question of the role of the individual versus the economic, social and scientific developments of human history has always been in the balance. The core argument of my book will be that this balance has slowly shifted, and that, with the final tilt of the fulcrum taking place with Napoleon, then shifting still more with the likes of Bismarck, Lincoln, Mussolini, Lenin; and even—although I know I will need to be careful here—with John Arthur, the dominant individual is now the most important force shaping history.
Working on one or two outstanding points about the Egyptian Campaign after a satisfying morning tutorial with one of this year’s better undergrads, I feel that my life in Oxford is at last fitting into place. This, I imagine as my pen dances across the page, is how Gibbon must have felt. Sometimes, and not as is usually the case because I have simply run out of arguments and ideas, but rather because two or three of the things are clamouring for my attention, I even have to get up and pace the floor.
I watch myself then, finally the legitimate scholar striding about his creaky Oxford rooms. Yes, this truly is the place I once dreamed of when I knew that such a thing would be impossible. The tiled fireplace is set beneath a dimly-seen picture of a long-demolished country house in Warwickshire this college once owned. Two but-toned-leather armchairs face each other across a faded Persian rug; they are so scratched and smoothed by ages of scholarly bodies that they always seems to be in private debate. The roof beams are low. In places—for I am reasonably tall—I have to stoop to avoid them. A small iron hook juts from one, and there is a story that a student hanged himself from it after being informed that he would only ever be average at Logic. The student is unnamed—after all, suicide is just another part of the academic tradition here—but he must have been very determined, and quite short. His tale remains almost as famous as that of the don of another college who, when being told that one of his pupils had committed suicide, interrupted the bearer of the news by saying, “No, don’t tell me who. Let me guess…”
Along with this study-cum-parlour, my college rooms consist of the bedroom in which Christlow greets me each morning, once a separate chamber, its undulating floor linked by a relatively new Eighteenth Century doorway. There is also a small gas stove and sink that hide around a curtained corner, and an even smaller room containing the toilet which smells sweetly of ancient misdirected piss. In these rooms, none of the furniture is mine, and most of the books on the sagging shelves were here when I first arrived; left as worthless by the previous incumbent although I—superstitious, respectful, lazy—have never been able to dispose of them.
If I wanted to, I could wear nothing but college gowns. Probably, if I asked Christlow, he could supply me with college underwear. My food is also provided; breakfast is brought up on a tray, lunch and collation are a sumptuous cold table in the West Room, dinner is served at eight amid the Victorian tapestries of the Hall. Tea and biscuits may be called for at all reasonable times by pulling a lever on the wall beside the fireplace. Decent sherry and port from my college’s vintage cellars, likewise. Champagne, even—and free for the two weeks before Lent following some ancient bequest. My shelves are dusted, my bed is made and changed, my clothes are whisked away to be washed, starched and ironed. Were it not for the distraction of the students (whom the more academic dons avoid) it would be possible for me to spend my entire time working, thinking, writing, talking—contributing to the steam of the great intellectual engine house that Oxford is supposed to be, and perhaps once truly was.
From outside, drifting through the open mullioned window, raising the corners of my freshly-written sheaves of paper, the warm air brings the chant and the tread of Christlow and his fellow EA members as they parade on the ancient grass of our college quad. The sound has become so familiar to me now that it is as soothing as the clock chimes, dove coos, the sigh of trees, hesitant piano scales, dim voices and the clatter of footsteps which fill the essential silence which underlies this great dreaming city. Settling down again at my chair, I gaze out at them, then glance briefly down at my watch, nursing the knowledge that I only have half an hour of the morning left before I must get up and keep yet another medical appointment. Recently, it is this need for urgency that has often produced my best, most precise work.
12 o-clock comes amid a stagger of bells, faint and loud; and with it only one extra sentence done—and that crossed-out. I’d intended to skim back towards the present from Nelson in Aboukir Bay, hinting at many links to come. But the sound of Christlow barking out instructions like a Butlin’s bingo caller, and the ragged movements that he elicits from an odd assortment of students, a few younger dons (who, of course, insist that they’re humouring him), college office workers and manual labourers, is too distracting, too here and now.
I weigh down my papers with a sea-smoothed stone, crack my fingers, and stand up. From marks on the cobweb walls of public toilets, the empty dust of old potting sheds, lost gasps of stifled satisfactions, to here… My few personal possessions seem out of place now as I look around at them. My hanging tweed jacket. My mother’s old honeymoon suitcase with its hasp forever padlocked that peeks from beneath the bed next door. Her photograph and that of my father, thin and stiffly posed, in a tiny silver frame above the fireplace. Another photograph, smaller still, of a handsome young man, dark-haired against a lifeless white background, whom some people, flatteringly, assume to be me. A few shameful Eric Amblers on the bookshelves amid the cloth and leather-bound weight of Tort’s monumental France and England in the Middle Ages and Stubb’s massive Constitutional History. A new Baird Dreamland De Luxe radiogram (my one obvious luxury) squats in a low alcove, its fat marquetry face leering like a Martian. Within its sliding doors, I keep my prized collection of records. Love Is The Sweetest Thing. Forty-Second Street. Blue Moon. Whispering Grass. A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square… I once attempted to argue the merits of modern popular music with Bedford-Moles, Regius Professor of Divinity at a neighbouring college. Nowadays, I simply hide them behind Furtwangler’s Beethoven.
Christlow’s exercises have finished without my noticing. But for the click of shears in the walled herb garden, the midday air hangs still over the quad as I cross it. Once out in the street, I check once again the address on my appointment card. Not the Radcliffe this time—and further down Abingdon Road than I’d imagined. Too late for a bus, and I’ll have to hurry if I’m going to walk.
12:45, P. Wiseman. Across the bridge, gull-like human cries and the reek of chlorine wash over me from the Open Air Baths. On the right, past Vicarage Road, I reach Saint Eustace Row, which is a lime-fronted edifice of old redbrick and rusted guttering that must be to do with one of the colleges. Here, I’ve floated up into some higher echelon where all the threads of medicine meet. Eventually, if you’re ill enough, you get to see the same specialists and going NHS or private no longer matters; the only difference is whether you get to chat afterwards over lunch at the club. Just the white plainness of this card, the fact that unlike some common GP, ward surgeon or anaesthetist, P. Wiseman doesn’t even call himself a doctor—let alone list his qualifications—tells me that.
I’m shown straight down a surprisingly modern corridor and up a staircase where numerous dead stags have stuck their heads through the walls. A MIND YOUR HEAD sign leads to some older part of the building past a rusted coat of roundhead armour that looks as though it’s been left there by its forgetful owner. Then a large door into an even larger room. I’ve become used to these twists and turns in Oxford: the rabbit-hole that leads to the ballroom, the hovel that backs onto the palace. I cross the rucked carpet and sit down on a big but uncomfortable wing chair to squint expectantly as P. Wiseman lights a cigarette from his gold case and the sunlight from the tall casement windows pours down around him.
“I’m glad you could make it,” he says, spectacles glinting as the ormolu clock pings one. “I’ve been following the progress of your tests, and I think it’s about time that you and I had a little chat.” Pause for a smile. “About things.”
“It’s been,” I shrug, sweaty and breathless, “a bit of a shock to me.”
“Bit of a shock?” He nods thoughtfully. “Yes, yes. And you’re what? Sixty Five?”
“Sixty. My birthday’s next month.”
“Mmmm.” He glances down at his tear-off page-a-day calendar SUPPLIED BY BRIGHTON PHARMACEUTICALS as if he doubts me. THURSDAY 13 JUNE 1940. The letters seem to glow in the sun, so brightly rainbowed at their edges that I wonder if this isn’t some other new symptom I’ll have to try to explain. There’s a day’s motto, too—Fata Obstant—which means nothing to me, not knowing Latin.
Then P. Wiseman begins to tell me about my disease. About how each cell in my body is a single entity; and how I am comprised of a whole vast nation of such cells, all of which are working busily together. They live and they die and proceed about the business of their lives much as I proceed about my own. And each of them has a blueprint that it passes down to its offspring which contains details about who they are, and which particularly fleshy city, factory, warehouse, sewerage works, temple, library or brothel they’re supposed to belong to. But sometimes there is a delinquent, an errant messenger. It thinks it has a role greater than that properly granted to it. And it makes others in its likeness, and they in turn procreate and pass on this false message, and grow and spread.
I nod occasionally, and ask one or two questions. None of this biology seems to have much do with me. Soon, I find myself settling sleepily into these words and the soft wood-and-leathery aura of this Oxford room, which is like so many others that I’ve been in. P. Wiseman, he could be studying the behaviour of the electron or the Siberian squirrel for all you could tell. There are no changing screens here, no implements, no kidney bowls, no bloody wads of cotton wool. The volumes along the wall are Carlyle, Boswell, Dante, Euripides. There’s a long photo of the arms-folded rugby team of one or other of the major public schools. A decent painting of a middle-aged but still glamorous woman in a blue evening gown. Another photo of P. Wiseman himself shaking hands with Deputy Prime Minister Arkwright on the steps of some stately home at the beginning of some conference. Outside, framed in redbrick and ivy, lies a striped and mown lawn much like my college’s own quad. It’s the same manicured green square, I sometimes think, that you’d find at the heart of every Englishman…
“So I should give up that pipe, Brooke, if I were you.”
“What?”
“Your pipe. You have one sticking out of your top pocket. So I assume…”
“Right.” I reach up and touch the smooth wooden bowl. The feel of it is pretty much the only pleasure that I’ve really ever got from the thing, anyway, and it never did do much for my scholarly image.
“Try these.” He waves a fresh-lit Players Nation, which leaves a sky-writer’s vapour trail behind it. “Or you could try the new Lambert menthol-tipped.”
“The thing’s been making me cough anyway.”
“I’m not surprised. You people are down past Brasenose, by the way, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Never been there much myself, you know. I’m a Magdalene man. Still tend to stick to the older colleges.”
By that, P. Wiseman means medieval, rather than plain old Elizabethan like my own. He stares at me, probably wondering whether to start asking if I know so-and-so, or have I heard the news about old-whatsit getting the clap on a fact-finding trip in Gujarat. Perhaps he thinks we might talk as intellectual equals. But you never know what to expect these days, the way Oxford has become: filled with people like me.
“Still, Brooke, I’m sure your lot keep busy.”
“I’m working on a book at the moment, actually,” I hear myself saying.
“Hmmm?”
“About historiography—the actual study of history itself. It still remains a neglected subject.”
“I’m sure. And what line do you plan to take?”
“Basically, that the real influence played by the major figures of history—people like Napoleon, Alexander, even Buddha—has increased over the centuries. I mean, that the whole equation isn’t static.”
“Interesting. I’m no expert, but that’s pretty much the history-as-process line, isn’t it?”
“Well—”
“—But it’s always seemed to me that the argument you’re taking is based upon a fallacy. What you’re describing is simply the fact that more recent figures are better documented, and therefore seem to us to have a greater substance. I mean, we know too little about the real Siddhartha to know whether he actually had much personal influence on Buddhism. You could say much the same about Christ…”
I stare back at him.
“But we digress.” P. Wiseman taps out his cigarette in his cut glass IMPERIAL CHEMICALS ashtray with his surgeon’s hands and lights another from the flame—invisible in this sunlight—of an onyx lighter. “As I was saying, Brooke, I’ve been following your case, and giving it quite a lot of thought. Outwardly, you’re still in good enough health. I can see that. But as I think I explained, this tumour in your right lung has been growing for some time. With the problem of metastasis—I mean, of course, lymphatic spread—I really don’t think that there’s any need to operate.”
Not even any need for an operation! A stupid bubble of joy rises up from my stomach, then dissolves.
“Just how far has it spread, then?”
“Along the spinal cord, I’m afraid. Into the liver. The other lung, too. Possibly elsewhere…”
I nod slowly, remembering a potato I once found at the back of my mother’s larder. It had gone to seed, shooting out pale runners along the walls and behind the shelves.
“I’m sorry, Brooke,” he adds, realising that I hadn’t worked this out before.
I lick my lips. “How long,” I ask, “have I got?” It’s one of those clichéd lines you can’t avoid in these circumstances.
“At the very best, two years. Possibly less than one. I’m afraid you’ll need to make plans straight away…”
But I’m floating by then. Everything else that P. Wiseman has to say to me is lost.
In fact, I’m very annoyed with myself by the time I finally step back out into the sunlight. I’m even annoyed with myself about feeling annoyed. So stupid, stupid. The idea that you might eventually die is something that you get used to as you grow older, but actual death is quite different. Death that could stop you seeing this year’s Wimbledon. Death that makes it pointless to buy a decent pair of shoes that’ll last you through next winter.
Somehow, I hadn’t realised that having lung cancer meant not just being ill, not just having my life shortened, but really dying.
I feel so angry.
Back in my rooms, I crouch over my desk trying to hammer out the many extra words, lines, sentences and pages that I know I must complete if I am ever to finish The Fingers Of History. But the process seems meaningless; a few more phrases thrown on the dungheap of all the other rubbish that’s been written. What’s the point of analysis? Napoleon existed, but now he’s gone, and we’ll never know what he was really like. And even if we did, what difference would it make? There would still be the horrors the Peninsular Campaign, the retreat from Russia. They’re written in blood, not in ink. If I’d been there, yes, then, it might have been different. The little Corsican was clever and charismatic, but surely anyone could see that he was a disaster in the making for all of Europe? Knowing what I now know—perhaps even being something like the person I now am, risen to my bogus position by terror and revolution in that strangely similar period of history—I would have killed him with a pure heart as he strode along the simpering lines of minor academics at some pompous ceremony. Then, where would history be? Changed for the better, by my own bloody hands…
By late afternoon, my head is buzzing. I snap at Christlow when he peeks around the door to ask if I’ll be eating at Hall tonight, or perhaps just a few slices of smoked ham and a crusty cob on a tray up here? I don’t feel hungry, and the sour taste in my mouth that I’d been putting down to Four Square Ready-Rubbed or a summer cold has grown stronger. Is this another of the symptoms that Wiseman mentioned? What exactly does happen when a tube of flesh starts to entwine your spinal cord?
Pulling on my jacket, purchasing twenty Navy Cut Unfiltered at Dobsons on the corner, breaking several matches, then taking long, bitter drags, I find myself wandering the city as evening floods in. For a while, I hardly notice where I am. There are bell towers, of course, copulating heaps of bicycles, ramshackle third-year student digs and bursting-at-the-seams secondhand bookshops; things to step around or fall over. People are heading home from work, getting on with the tricky business of being satisfied, healthy, ordinary. Alive.
Now, I can easily see the futility of all the pages I have written; even if my supposed book were ever finished, then got around the censor and was deemed correct and saleable and was actually published, the thing would still be worthless. I can see, too, the insignificant and easily-filled space that my whole life will soon leave. A few clothes hanging in a wardrobe, an old suitcase beneath a bed, some marks on a toilet cubicle wall…
I decide, once I’ve taken my bearings by Tom’s Tower, to call in again at the Gents by Christ Church Meadow. It’s not far; basically, I’ve been wandering in circles. The worn stone steps set with black and white mosaic, the welcoming doorway with its municipal crest, the smell of male wee and toilet block, all greet me like an old friend. The War veteran is just finishing mopping the floor, whistling tonelessly to himself after a long day wrestling with John Bull’s crossword. I notice for the first time as he wrings his mop into the bucket that he only has one hand.
My feet leave a trail across his clean wet tiles, and he watches as I select the middle cubicle and push in my halfpenny and close the door and slide the brass blot. Nearly two weeks now, but there’s still no further mark on the green-painted walls. Dot, dot, dash, dash—then somehow, it all stops at the time my acquaintance made his usual thumbnail invitation the Sunday before last.
It’s a mystery, although I’ve lived long enough to have experienced this sort of thing before. These ritual appointments never do last. People change. They get sick of themselves. Their wives find out. They suddenly decide that buggery’s not really them at all. They get beaten up, arrested, fall for someone else with a tighter bum, or move areas. You can’t expect Christmas cards. And I’m grateful, really, that this parting of the ways has coincided so well with my own sudden mortality—and a final realisation of the essential pointlessness of sex. But I’m also worried for him.
I come out of the cubicle again, realising that I haven’t done anything, or even bothered to flush. The veteran glances back over his shoulder as he gives John Arthur’s photo over the urinals a final wipe. I press my hand to my stomach and mutter something about feeling ill, and how it’s passed now. Take care, he mutters—or something like it as the soles of my shoes tick across the tiles. Long after I’m outside, his gaze still seems to follow me.
The sound of voices and the smell of cooking drift through half-open suburban windows as darkness thickens and I wander further out from the city. All these streets. All these houses. Here, at the centre of a front lawn, someone has laid out the Empire Alliance circle-cross in house leeks and saxifrage. A child, ready for bed in her nightie, parts the curtain of her window and gazes out at me. Her lips are moving. Mummy, who’s that funny man?
I am weary. My whole body is stiff and cold as I walk past parked and uniform rows of Morris Ladybirds, the “people’s car” which is manufactured in vast quantities just down the road at Cowley. They all look like jelly moulds. I turn from the little lawns and fake-castellations of semi-detached and semi-skilled Lancelot Street onto the wider middle-management and mock-Tudor expanses of Falstaff Road. The street lamps nod their heads wisely. A cat yowls. A baby cries. A dustbin lid bangs down in an alleyway.
I was born in Lichfield—which, then as now, is a town which calls itself a city—in the year 1880. It’s middle England, neither flat nor hilly, north or south. And so far from the sea that there’s one of the stone markers nearby asserting that it—and not Meriden, Banbury, or even Hexham as James I once claimed in his cups—marks the proper centre of England. Barring Doctor Johnson being born and a messy siege in the Civil War, nothing much has ever happened there.
Thinking about it all now, the way that things have turned out, my parents were pioneers of much that has since happened in Britain. They owned their own house in one of the newer and more decent terraced developments that were then springing up around Stow Pool and behind the Cathedral. Inside toilet, running hot and cold, built-in stove, decorated picture rails. I really don’t know exactly how they came to meet each other and get married. They always seemed unsure themselves—it was just one of those things that happen to you, like the job you ended up doing, having a minor operation, or losing your hair—although they agreed that it probably had something to do with a shared distant relative. They were both of good Midlands stock; my family tree soon gets lost in meandering repetitions of Johns and Marys, Smiths and Coopers, carpenters and stockmen. Of course, there was talk about some great old house and all the wealth that a scandalous uncle had squandered. There always is. I can even remember my grandmother who lived in Malvern claiming to have been a childhood friend—at least a schoolmate—of Edward Elgar. Not that she really knew who he was when I questioned her, other than that he had done well for himself.
I remember the rainbows of light that the glass pendants of the parlour lamp used to throw across the wall. A single child, I also remember feeling bored at home and looking forward to and then enjoying school, although somehow wishing there was more to it. I wanted to know about kings and queens, volcanoes and other planets, sea monsters… I had little time for passing around jars filled with object lessons—a bit of honeycomb, a monkey’s femur—or copying letters onto a slate, or ploughing through shared copies of Little Black Sambo and Down On The Farm.
My father worked for Lichfield Corporation. He had a title that changed once or twice amid great glory and talk of more ambitious holidays, but he was always Assistant-this and Deputy-that—one of the great busy-but-unspecified (“Well, it’s quite hard to explain what I do unless you happen to be in the same line yourself…”) who now so dominate this country. Basically, he was an accounts clerk, and when he came home each evening, he smelled of underarms and India ink and rubber. Once I was old enough to make my own cheese sandwiches, my mother took a job at Hindleys’ Cake Shop on Bird Street. Dough and raisin buns—another smell that returns to me. She’d often bring home squashed battenburgs like broken bits of board game, or the stale and fly-blown remains of the hollow wedding cakes that were displayed in Hindleys’ window for a month or two. Here’s a treat for you, son… A crunchy spiral of icing. Little diamonds of angelica that looked and tasted like snot.
Even then, long before I had the faintest idea what sex was, I knew that I was different. It always seemed as though I was stuck in some odd pattern, clothed and yet naked like that Emperor in the fable, in a way that other people either ignored or simply didn’t see. My mother snapped at me when I tried to question her about these feelings. I suppose that at that time, seeing me perhaps as too frail—but not in the physical sense, you understand; but not quite mannish enough, somehow too sensitive—she had her own worries, although they were probably as ill-defined as my own. My father just hummed to himself and got on with his job and his garden and his spreading commonwealth of allotments around which he would trundle his wheelbarrow until he died of a heart attack on the little hill up Gaia Lane. A fall of flowerpots. The children sniggering at the funny man with the quivering legs until a travelling newspaper salesman happened along. He tossed out the rest of the pots and wheeled my father way all the way up to St John’s Hospital. But he could have saved his time and gone straight to the Maddox’s the Undertakers in Market Place. My father was already dead.
Still, my mother and I had his pension and his life insurance; there again, we were ahead of our time. And we had the house. We were never that stretched, and those complicated holiday trips to grey corners of the English coastline had never been much fun. By this time—I was eleven—I’d already decided I wanted to be a teacher. Until I passed into Secondary School from Stowe Street Elementary, I was always one of the brightest in my class, and I fondly imagined that I’d continue to hold my own in this slightly more elevated company. Egged on by my insular sense of superiority, even a County Scholarship to Rugby seemed within reach. And from there, yes, I was already dreaming of the Magdalene Deer, sleek bodies bathing in the Cherwell at Parson’s Pleasure, Jack Marvel in Quiller-Couch’s The Splendid Spur, the bold laughter across Tom Quad of a thousand half-baked-and-headstrong Oxford heroes.
My later years in school, though, were a slog. I sensed already that I was hitting a permanent ceiling—that, without my having had much say in it, my life was already determined. Partly from struggling to keep pace amongst cleverer lads (all prototype bank managers, chartered accountants, KSG high-ups and solicitors) who could easily outdistance me, I fell ill with something that may or may not have been scarlet fever. On my long stay away from school, a boy called Martin Dawes who I had little liking for but was supposedly a friend would call in each afternoon to deliver school books and sit with me. Whilst up in my room, he would slip his hands beneath the sheets and the waistband of my pyjamas and toss me off—as if that, too, was a message that needed to be delivered from school. Of course, I was deeply grateful.
Later, towards the end of my school years as I grew fitter and more resigned to my fate, there were the usual abrasions and obsessions. I recall a schoolmaster named Mr. Lockwood once helping me—for a whole good and glorious hour, it seemed—to don my cricket box as I struggled to hide my growing erection. It only occurred to me later that his breathy attentions were slightly unusual. But Mr. Lockwood had gone by then; he’d dissolved into the scholarly mists, leaving only a faint odour of unspecified scandal in his wake. And so had Martin Dawes, whom I never really did get to like despite everything. Still, as I took and passed my Highers and then scraped my Second Class Teacher’s Certificate and left school and found a job as an Assistant Master at nearby Burntwood Charity, as I reached the tender age of seventeen and became what was then looked on as a man, these few moments remained almost the sole fuel of my masturbatory fantasies.
Sometimes, locked in the upstairs toilet with its freezing seat and ever-open window as my mother shuffled about down in the kitchen, I would dutifully try to incorporate women into my pink imaginings in the vague hope that they would make me feel less guilty about the act that I was performing. But at some vital moment, their chests would always flatten and their groins would engorge as they stepped towards me, cropped and clean and shining, bearing in their golden-haired hands the ever-more elaborate straps and protuberances of pseudo-cricket boxes. But then, what did I know about women? From the look of them, and were it not for the occasional classical statue, you’d have imagined that the bosom was a single fleshy appendage. And as for what went on in that smooth marble space between their legs… I was as innocent as most people were then, and knew little enough about the functioning of even my own anatomy. The ability, for example, to pull back my foreskin from the glans of my penis was something that I imagined as a cross I had to bear; my own special deformity.
It was thus at some expense and considerable embarrassment that I took the trouble of going down to Birmingham one summer weekend to purchase some photographs in the hope that would give me a clearer idea. I had convinced myself by then that, with the right knowledge of the female anatomy, I would finally understand. But when I opened the envelope back in my bedroom that night, I found that I was shocked, confused, embarrassed. Breasts, I knew about—at least in theory. But this was the holy grail? I immediately renounced all thoughts of sex and resigned myself to a lifetime of selfless celibacy.
A week later, I was back on the train to Birmingham, and then along the same smelly Digbeth streets, shaking with nerves as I entered the plain-fronted shop offering Novelty Art-Works and Souvenirs. I explained that, man of the world that I was, my lady friend had expressed an interest in acquiring a similar set of photographs to the ones that I had purchased; but this time, of men. I had glimpsed the things, tantalisingly, the week before, sliding about in one of the long felt-lined drawers that the shop’s proprietor had opened. Thicker arms, smoother bellies—and could that really be the casual flop against a hairy thigh of an actual penis? Reptile-eyed, unspeaking but for the matter of money, the proprietor handed me an envelope. Several days later, in a fit of self-disgust, I destroyed these, too. But by then it was too late. Things were as firmly set in my mind as they had long been in my body. I was—now that I finally got around to looking up the name in one of the bigger medical dictionaries that dared to include such monstrous afflictions—a homosexual; an invert.
That, in the personal history of what I term my pre-Francis days, was the sole extent of my sexual development. There were no mad choirmasters, no smooth-talking deviant older friends, no ambushes by rapacious tramps, no bumps on the head sustained while bicycling, or desperate anonymous letters to Baden-Powell. There was just me and my guilty semi-celibacy, and helping my suddenly frail mother look after her house, and watching the lads I’d known at school grow up, leave home, marry, start families.
Just as I had resigned myself to puzzled but inactive deviancy, so, by the time I was in my early twenties, I had also come to accept my position as a Second Class Teacher for the Senior Standard Threes at Burntwood Charity. Even getting promoted to First Class Teacher seemed unlikely, at least until the tyrant His Majesty’s Inspector Mr. Rathbate retired. My horizons were limited. South Staffordshire, then as now, was predominantly a mining and agricultural community. Despite the regulations, many of the children were no longer attending school by the age of ten, but assisting their mothers and fathers in a trade. Some of those who did bother to stay on until thirteen did so because they were intelligent and hoped to transfer into Secondary or even Grammar school. Others remained because they were too retarded to do anything else—Billy Choggin, I remember, was only thrown out from behind the desk where he sat hunched and picking at his warts when someone realised he’d turned seventeen.
In the articles with which I began my career in the Daily Sketch nearly thirty years later, I gave the impression that John Arthur was one of my brightest and most ambitious pupils, a little comet trail across the pit-dusty Burntwood skies. Thanks to numerous flowery additions by the Sketch’s copy editor, I also stated that he was pale-skinned, quiet, good-looking, intense, and that he possessed a slight West Country accent, this being the time before it had changed to the soft Yorkshire that we all know now—all traits which would have got him a good beating up in the playground—and that, on summer evenings after school when the pit whistle had blown and the swallows were wheeling, he and I would walk up into “the Staffordshire hills” and sit down and gaze down at the spires of Lichfield, the pit wheels of Burntwood and the smokestacks of Rugeley from the flowing purple heather.
Now, after all these years of practice, those pretty images have become like the tales of your own infancy that you absorb as a child, and become vivid, treasured memories. It’s been my party act, too, a fundamental part of my life, ever since my name—or at least that of Geoffrey Brook—was mentioned by John Arthur as a childhood mentor in his maiden speech before the old House of Commons. So, yes, I do remember the boyhood of John Arthur. He really is there in that classroom at Burntwood Charity with all the other children and the smell of chalk dust and unwashed bodies, the whispers of tension and the straining of the clock as they await the Friday evening bell and the glorious afternoon that shimmers outside to enfold them. His hand is raised from the third row of desks, his sleeve slipping back to show a thin wrist to ask a more than usually pertinent question before I start to ramble on about one of my many pet subjects. That is how I recall him.
The fact is, I’ve always enjoyed being a teacher. I still do. It’s just that I’m far happier talking about the failures of Captain Franklin or the flower-like symmetry of the Henry VIII’s coastal forts than I am building up the fat blocks of information that are supposedly the foundations of a proper education now; the sort of thing that’s so well defined that every ten year old in the country is probably reading the same page of the expurgated Gulliver’s Travels at exactly the same time. Still, I like to think that it was a different John Arthur who misremembered the name of Griffin Brooke and his leapfrogging enthusiasms when his power finally touched me. Someone who understood love and knowledge.
Too weary to stop, trailing cigarette smoke, memories, abstractions, I wander these new suburban streets. Here in Oxford, despite the many ways that my external life has changed, everything else about me seems much the same. I still yearn for closeness and understanding. I still play, despite the grasshopper weaknesses of my mind, at being an intellectual. I still feel, far too many times and in far too many ordinary situations, clumsy and foolish and naive. I’m still waiting, really, for my life to start. Now, it will soon be ending…
The thought slides off me, still too large to comprehend. I sense my consciousness cowering like a trapped animal before it, twisting this way and that as it tries to get out of the way. My thoughts go heedlessly back towards John Arthur, and then my book, and then the subject of next week’s tutorials. Anything, in fact—anything—other than the one big, overwhelming truth.
Past a space of fenced building sites. 8/10 WEEKLY OR £50 DOWN. GUARANTEED MODERN HOMES. NEARLY EVERY HOUSE HAS A GARAGE SPACE. Illuminated artists’ impressions of fireside families, bay-windows, honeysuckle walls, cats sleeping on doorsteps. Then Gladstone Drive, where the posters are made real. Perhaps a recently-constructed Disraeli Road also lies around the corner. Perhaps Disraeli’s accepted now just as he was in his lifetime; scarcely a Jew at all with his clever flattery of making an Empress out of our dowdy old Queen, his canny embracement of Christianity. Who knows? These things change so quickly.
I pass illuminated porches bearing individual name-plates—CHURCH HOUSE. DAWRIC. THE WILLOWS.—in wrought iron, chinaware or poker-work. It’s quiet now, although scarcely past nine and only just getting fully dark. The houses have a sleepy look. Their curtains are drawn. Faintly, like the movement of ghosts, I can see the shimmer of television screens. The people of Greater Britain have taken so quickly to these flickering dreams. Rooftop aerials point towards the new transmitters with orderly precision. The shop windows of electrical shops along every high street are filled with invasions of greenish-grey Cyclops eyes. Each night, the walls of millions of darkened lounges fill with the shadows of marching bands, high-stepping dance routines, the rheumy leers of northern comics.
A footstep scuffs in the street behind me. The sound is so unexpected that I turn and look back. There’s silence now. Whoever it is has stopped, and for a moment the street seems empty, the pale concrete road shining beneath the lights and the gathering stars. Then I see where the figure is standing, far too squat and large in the shadow of a parked delivery van to be my slim-bodied acquaintance. A chill sense of watching fills me and a loud pulse begins to beat in my ears as I walk towards it. The thing seems deformed; hardly a figure at all—in fact, nothing but a postbox. And all around me there is only silence. People shut indoors, and living their lives.
I walk on more briskly. The sense of being followed is still hard to shake from my shoulder. OBERON DRIVE. HAZEL OAK ROAD. I’d be lost by the winding samey look of everything, were it not for the fact that these particular streets are familiar to me. Once or twice before, and equally furtively, I have walked these pavements. Beyond that patch of grass where BALL GAMES ARE PROHIBITED, and a stand of oak trees which must have shaded generations of cattle when this was all fields, lies the home of my acquaintance. His two girls will have been put to bed by now, today being a Thursday and their needing to be fresh for school tomorrow. I’d like to think that he and his wife are more cultured than to empty their minds with Jack “Mind My Bike” Warden, The Clarksons, ITMA or whatever is on television tonight. We’ve never discussed such things, but perhaps they tune instead to the Third Programme on their radio-gramophone and settle back to Malcolm Sargent conducting live from the Albert Hall. A chance, as The Swan Of Tuonela plays, for my acquaintance to talk about the way things are going down at the Censor’s Office, and then to plan for the weekend; how they might take the Sunday excursion train and spend the whole day together on Lambourn Downs. My acquaintance, he could easily skip his usual lunchtime trip to the pub, his afternoon in the garden, his evening constitutional walk…
My footsteps drag now. My lungs and my throat throb and ache. A few bedroom lights are showing in the houses, then puffing out. Already, it’s later than I imagined. The tellies have shrivelled to a white dot, the concert halls have emptied, and all the Jims and the Betties will soon be abed; merrily, guiltlessly, fornicating. Yet, twisted angel of death that I am, I feel a sense of watching from those curtained windows.
Number 4 Portia Avenue’s black-and-white gable looms into view: the privet and the long strip of drive that lead towards the side of the house where, in these days of ever-growing prosperity, a Ladybird car will probably soon replace the sturdy Raleigh that my acquaintance currently cycles to work on. Old Fatguts can’t last long now, love, and then it’ll be me in that office. My name on the frosted glass… The windows of his house, too, are darkened. But, unlike the others around it, they are also uncurtained. And, in this flowing summer darkness, there is something odd about the look of the panes, and even of the flowerbed that separates the house from Number 6 next door. A few weeks ago, I’m sure, it was filled with a military row of tulips. Now it seems messed, flattened.
My feet crunch on something sharper than gravel as I find myself walking up the path to my acquaintance’s front door, which I never imagined I would do outside my dreams. Many of the windows have been shattered, and a fat iron padlock has been fitted across the door’s splintered frame. There is a pervasive, summery smell of children’s urine.
I see, last of all, the sign that the Oxford Constabulary have pasted on the porch. TAKE NOTICE HEREBY… But this sky is incredibly dark and deep for summer, and even the streetlamps are out; I can’t read further than the Crown-embossed heading. I slump down the doorstep, scattering empty milk bottles, covering my face with my hands. At long last, it all seems to come to me. This. Death. The end of everything.
When I look up some time later, I realise that a figure is watching me from the quiet suburban night.
“I know,” it repeats. “This must be a shock to you.”
I nod, scuffing the heel of my hand as I struggle to my feet.
“Knew them well, did you?”
“N—not exactly.”
The figure, smaller than I am, clearly female, takes a step across the crazy paving. Housecoat and slippers. A steely glint of curlers. “Come on, then. I’ll get you some tea. We’re only next door…
“I’m Mrs. Stevens,” she tells me, wisely keeping her first name to herself as she potters about with the teapot and the kettle in the blinding brightness of her kitchen.
“My name’s Brook,” I say. I can’t see any point in lying.
“I check the doorstep each day for the post,” she says, twisting off the tap and giving her mottled fingers a shake. “Pass it on to our local bobby, although I’m sure he doesn’t know what to do with it either. You’d think they’d know better, wouldn’t you, than to keep sending letters? I mean, him virtually working in the Post Office and all. You’d like it sweet and strong, I expect?”
“Please.”
I watch Mrs. Stevens as she warms the pot, then ladles in the tea. The kitchen, now that I can make out more of it, is surprisingly big. Windows on two sides, one with a fan-extractor. A white enamel machine that I suppose must be a refrigerator hums gently to itself in a corner. A cuckoo clock ticks above the sink. The tiles and the work surfaces shine.
“When did it happen?”
“It would be…” Mrs. Stevens tilts her head and squints up at the ceiling. She must be close to seventy, but a part of her still seems girlish. “The Sunday before last. About six o-clock, I’d say it was. In fact, pretty much dead-on, as Les and me had just finished our salad.”
“They took them all away?”
“All of them. The pity of it really.” She stirs her own tea and passes me mine. Blue willow-pattern china. “Them young girls.”
“Nobody did anything to stop it?”
She gazes across at me, and licks a brown line of tea that’s gathered on her small grey moustache. “I’ll tell you what they were like, Mr. Brook. In every way, I’d have said, they were a decent couple. Only odd thing I remember now is they sometimes used to leave the light on without drawing the curtains so you could see right in… The lassies were nice, though. They fed our cat for us when we went up to Harrogate last year, although of course the poor thing’s got run over since. Probably that dreadful new road, trying to get back to his old hunting grounds. Silly puss…”
“You were saying.”
“There’s not much to say, really, is there? The way things have turned out. Shameful, though. Lets down the neighbourhood, especially what’s been done to the house since they left, mess and bricks through the window. But you know what the kids were like. Knew them well yourself, did you?”
“He was just an acquaintance. I hardly had any contact with the rest of the family.”
“Like I say, they seemed decent as you or I. Made no fuss when my Les was putting up the summer house at the back and got building sand all over their roses. Laughed it off. I remember him saying, Mrs. Stevens, it just doesn’t matter. Put my Les’s back out, though, it did. He’s upstairs now. Asleep, most probably. Separate rooms, we are, since he had that trouble.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Stevens. But when they came to the house, was it the KSG or did—”
“—and you’d never have known, would you, to look at her?”
“Her? You mean…?”
“Ah…” Mrs. Stevens slaps her hand flat down on the table and leans forward, her brown eyes gleaming, almost childlike in her excitement. “So you still don’t know the truth of it? Well, that’s understandable, I suppose, cos, just like they say, you really never can tell. I mean, even you—I’ll be honest, Mr. Brook—it crossed my mind till I got a good look at you out of the dark. You can’t be too careful, can you?”
“No. I suppose not. I’m sorry, Mrs. Stevens, but I’m still confused.”
“Her real name, it seems, was something Polish before she married. All xs and ys and zs. Her parents came over here after the War, changed it to something proper.” She hurrumphs. “Hood, I think it was—but even that doesn’t quite right, does it?”
“I suppose they were thinking of Robin.”
“Robin?”
“Don’t mind me, Mrs. Stevens.”
“Not that I’ve got anything against the Serbs in their own country.”
“You mean Poles?”
“Yes. And a few of them over here—it’s understandable that they want to come, isn’t it—just as long as they don’t make themselves a burden, earn a decent living, talk like we do and don’t bother our children and keep themselves to themselves and make a proper effort to fit in.”
“So what was the problem?”
“She was a Jew, wasn’t she. All these years they’ve been living next door and acting all normal and hiding it from us. I mean, it’s the deceit I really can’t stand. And he must have known. Must have been in it with that job of his, and helped her fake the papers when they married. Her with coming round through that door in a sunhat sometimes to give me a few extra cuttings for the rockery Les was working on.” Mrs. Stevens raises her shoulders and shudders theatrically. “To think of it. It’s the dishonesty. And her nothing but a dirty little Jew.”
The cuckoo clock whirrs and pings. A wooden bird with glass eyes sticks out its head and stares down at us for a moment as it toots breathlessly. Eleven o-clock already.
It’s far later than I’d expected.