FOUR
Ernie Svendsen, with his suspiciously foreign name, his long nose, his thick glasses, seems an unlikely survivor of my kind. He puts it down to something that he has on Oxford’s Deputy Chief Constable, although I would have thought that would have made him a prime candidate for a hit-and-run car accident. More likely, he’s betrayed so many people that the powers-that-be find him useful. He’s known about me for years, too, has Ernie, although he has no direct evidence. I suppose I must be in a file somewhere, but in this as in many other ways, I lead a charmed life.
We meet at a park bench the next afternoon, during a break in the rain.
“Do you think they’ll let them stay together?” I ask as he tosses bread from a brown paper bag to the feathered carpet of ducks that have gathered around us. “Will they send him to the Isle of Man, the girls and the mother to the Western Isles?”
Giving me a pitying look, Ernie Svendsen (he swears his parents were Anglo Saxon) shakes his head. “It doesn’t work like that, my friend. Oh, they’ll get it out of him if that’s what they want. He’ll tell them anything—lies or the truth. That’s the problem they have to deal with. People always blab on so when you threaten them… I shouldn’t worry,” he adds, seeing the look on my face. “If something was going to happen to you, it would have happened already. Being who you are, I’m sure you’ll be safe.”
“I’m not who I am. I’m not anybody.”
“Then you’re doubly lucky.”
“I keep asking myself what the point is. I mean—why?”
The bushes around us look hunched and sodden. Which one, I wonder, would someone choose to hide in if they were watching us? Following people must be a messy business, shuffling about in the earth and the rain. Hanging at street corners, looking at the play of shadows on lighted windows. Studying us humans as if we were strange elusive birds.
“I think you’ve forgotten what it’s about, my friend,” he says.
“What?”
“Being the way we are—bent, queer. The guilt. The stupid scenes. You remember those leaflets…” Ernie smiles to the elderly lady who picks her way along the puddled path with her fat black Labrador. “You know, the promises of help, that we could be cured. Don’t tell me you didn’t secretly get hold of one of those leaflets they used to have at the Post Office. Don’t tell me you didn’t read it and want to believe.” He sighs. “If we could just press some button—pull out something inside us—don’t you think we’d all do it? Wouldn’t you take that chance, my friend, if you were given it? Isn’t John Arthur right in that respect?”
But that would mean re-living my life—becoming something other than what I am. Losing Francis. So I shake my head. And I’ve heard the stories. The drugs. The electrodes. The dirty pictures. Swimming in pools of your own piss and vomit. That kind of treatment that was available in these isles even before Modernism made it compulsory. “It isn’t John Arthur,” I say. “It’s all of us. It’s Britain…”
Ernie chuckles. “I suppose you’ll be alone now, won’t you?”
“Alone?”
“Without companionship. Without a cock to suck.”
I glance across the bench, wondering if Ernie’s propositioning me. But his eyes behind his glasses are as far away as ever; fish in some distant sea. Sex for him, I suspect, has always been essentially a spectator sport. That’s why he fits in so well. That’s why he’s survived. He doesn’t want a real body against him. All he needs is the sharp hot memories of those he’s betrayed. Crucified flesh. Blood-curdled semen. The wind crackles, rippling the pools that have gathered on the lawns, rattling the trees and the bushes. Spray of droplets patter around us.
“I’m really not interested in sex any longer,” I say. “So I don’t need you to set me up with anyone, Ernie, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just—”
“—Haven’t we all heard that one before!”
“Look, I don’t really care if you believe me. I just thought you might have some information about what happens to… To the Jews—and to people like us. Surely somebody has to?”
Ernie drags back his widow’s peak. “All I know is what I read in the papers, my friend. And what I see in the newsreels.”
“But no one’s ever come back, have they? I mean—from the Isle of Man. That’s what the big secret is. It’s no secret at all, although God knows what happens to them…”
“You can believe what you want. It’s what we all do.”
“I’m sorry I wasted your time.”
“That’s alright.” Ernie smiles at me again. “Nothing’s ever wasted.” His gaze darts across the silvered lawns, then he lets his cold fingers slide across the wet bench to touch my own. My skin creeps. Now, I really do wish that there was some button I could press. A way to cut this thing out of my life forever. “I understand how it is, my friend. We’re only human, after all. It’s always sad when you lose someone…”
His fingers give mine a squeeze. Then he stands up and shakes the last of his breadcrumbs over the ducks. They quack excitedly. Jewel-like water droplets are scattered across their backs. I watch Ernie as he walks off, splashing a short cut across the lawns and then around the sodden nets of the empty tennis courts. A factory shift hooter goes off. In the distance, like the turning of one vast clock, the bells of Oxford begin to ping and click and chime.
I head back along the paths, as lost as ever. And I can’t help wondering if there will be a black official KSG Rover waiting for me somewhere soon. The uniformed man with his orders neatly typed on HMSO paper. The polite request and the arm hooked around my elbow and the people passing by too busy going about their lives to notice. The drive to a dark clearing in a wood, the cold barrel to the forehead…
As I make my way down Holywell to the Bodleian Library past the old city walls, the clouds in the west begin to thin. The wind picks and plays with rents of blue sky, dragging them out through the tangled grey like skeins of wool. The sun flickers. The streets and the rooftops gleam as if freshly varnished. The air suddenly feels warm. Steam begins to rise.
The Bodleian’s open until eight now in the summer. There are none of those funny and unpredictable half days—another advantage of living in Modernist Britain. The light brightens, the steam thickens. I dawdle along the narrow, unpredictable streets that wind around the backs of the colleges and give alternate glimpses of kitchen dustbins and Wren towers. I seem to be moving in a land of ghosts. A plump cat smiles at me before disappearing into the snapdragon and ivy along a wall. A woman with a face like the Queen of Hearts is shrieking from an open upstairs window over a brassy avalanche of pealing bells. For all that I can tell, she might be yelling, No! No! Sentence first—verdict afterwards.
But Oxford. Oxford! All the years that I longed to see myself like this, on my way to the Bodleian—the very picture of academic greatness! It was something that occupied me even when my mother was still alive and I was working on a much earlier draft of my book. Although I’d never actually been to Oxford then, I knew it as some far-off Avalon, all myths, rumours and dreaming spires. I saw the quads and the beautiful buildings, the books, the whispering corridors of learning, the bat-like dons, the twin shining rivers. Graceful and free of care, I wandered in my imaginings with the chosen few as we talked and disported ourselves in the fragrant clouds of this academic heaven.
In those days, the real Oxford was almost entirely a male enclave. In my daydreams, it remained exclusively so. For I admit there was a twinge of the erotic to my yearnings. I suppose that in part it was the unmentionably controversial ghost of Oscar Wilde. I knew, by repute, of the trial concerning his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, although I couldn’t imagine that they had actually done anything together. Apart from the Ancient Greeks, who were almost mythical anyway, I couldn’t believe that any two men had ever really grappled with each other sexually. Still, by some odd personal antennae I picked up an aura about Oxford that was far from incorrect. Of course the great, gay, decadent days of the twenties and early thirties were still to come, with a generation of promising poets like Rowse, Waugh, Green, Auden, Sitwell, MacNeice and Betjeman whom I followed when I eventually subscribed to publications like Outlook waiting in the wings. Now—all lost, mad, emigrated, imprisoned, dead by so-called suicide—they are said to have been deviant to a man, and their names are excised from the University records.
Long before that, working each evening after school in the front parlour of our house as my mother nodded over her knitting in her chair behind me, I knew that I was still an impossibly long way from Oxford. But nourishing my one great work, I never even bothered to think of setting some more realistic target and perhaps submitting an essay on local history to the Lichfield Mercury or Staffordshire Life. It was all or nothing—and perhaps in my heart of hearts I was happy enough with nothing. I worked at that table by the window after teaching the rudiments of English and History to classrooms full of lads whom I passed in the street seemingly moments later and with a wife and a pram in tow. As easily as some faintly flavoured and not entirely disagreeable medicine, my whole life was already slipping by.
One evening, I remember, the work at the parlour table was going particularly well. A chapter on Metternich that I’d written twice before suddenly came into bright focus—although I really can’t imagine why I even wanted to write about him. The hours slid by. It was suddenly late evening. My eyes were tired and it was getting hard to read by the light of the tasselled electric lamp. There’s always a pleasure in stopping writing before you’ve quite finished, in knowing that you have something to come back to. So it was with satisfaction that I cracked my weary fingers and turned around to my mother to comment on the faint but foul smell that I had suddenly noticed. She sat unusually still in the dimness of the room behind me. Her head was lolling, her fingers were clenched around the knitting needles and the ball of wool had rolled from her lap in her final spasm.
Once inside the Bodleian’s musty maze, I set about the tricky business of obtaining some books that might tell me something concrete about recent Jewish history. First, I must reach the front of the queue at the Arts End. As I wait, my sense of pointlessness becomes stronger than ever. What am I doing here with so little time left to me—looking at books? Now, surely I should be able to shake off the habit.
The librarian behind the high desk has dark curly hair and a matching beard; he looks faintly nautical. After scanning my request form, he reaches into this jacket to swop his glasses and re-read it more closely.
“Just wait for a moment will you…” He spins off through an arched doorway inscribed Medio Tutissimus Ibas, whatever that means.
I gaze about at the wood-pillared walls, balconied with books, the ornate Tudor ceiling. All around me, the Bodleian buzzes like a busy railway station between trains. The general public are freely admitted now—although, of course, that no longer means tramps—and I, a don, must fill in form L4450-A(C) and wait my turn like anybody else. To anyone with any knowledge of Oxford history, a far greater sacrilege is the sign beside the bust of Wellington that points towards Lending. The Bodleian, as a copyright library, has kept its books strictly within its walls since it was founded in 1602. Not all that long ago, they were chained to the shelves. Even Cromwell was refused permission to lend a single volume to the Portuguese Ambassador.
“We can just let you have a few of these. We simply don’t keep Hansard for the years between 1918 and 1933…” The librarian is back. Wheezing behind him with a trolley is a red-faced messenger boy—who looks about eighty. “I’ve ticked them off on your list. These ones here…” He shoves a pile across the counter. “They’re only for use within the premises. This lot, you can take out. In fact,” he continues, helpful, most un-librarian like, “I’ve already franked them to save you having to trek over to Lending. If you’ll just let me have your identity card…”
Dodging the cross-fire of black looks from the long and restless queue behind me, I stagger to a vacant desk. Smoke-signals of dust rise in the evening sunlight falling from the widows as, one by one, I flick through books that even now MUST NOT BE REMOVED FROM THE PREMISES. Mostly, they are official documents, census data, White Papers on Racial Minorities and Economic Development In The Scottish Highlands, Government leaflets with titles like What To Do If You’re A Jew (report straightaway to the Duty Sergeant at your local Police Station—“don’t worry, he’ll have dealt with your problem many times before”) and the more rarefied The Question of Deviancy. None of them tell me anything I don’t already know.
The few older pre-Modernist books I’ve requested that have actually come through the system lie at the bottom of the pile, and sit there oddly. The Forged Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion. The Story of Jewish Bolshevism—A Warning To British Women. Adcock’s Britain In The Twenties. When I try to open the first one up, I realise why. Two thirds of the book’s pages have been neatly excised with a knife. With the next, after the censor plainly grew tired of obliterating most of the print with long black stripes of his pen, it’s the entire second half. The Adcock, which looks thicker, in fact contains nothing but a wad of old card indexes. I glance around me, expecting some kind of reaction, but the other people are busy at their desks, or chatting. A couple of schoolchildren even appear to be playing tag around the periodical shelves.
I’m quite beyond work, and the closing bell will be going soon anyway. So, after checking that they’ve got something inside them, I grab the books I’m allowed to borrow and head for the main doors. Outside, in the bright warmth of this suddenly rainless evening, preparations for Midsummer’s Eve are starting on the shining kidney-stones of Radcliffe Square. A temporary bandstand, and bunting that has hardly had time to come down since Oak Apple Day, are going up again now that the rain has ceased. Next Monday, four days from now, there’ll be children in green frocks and sashes, roast bullock, mummers, gaudy morris dancers and a fair on Merton Fields with swing boats, beer tents and grinning curates joining the jigs now that the Archbishops have blessed these extra pagan celebrations.
The books I’ve brought with me are a bigger burden than I’d imagined, in part because I’m almost sure that they’ll be useless—otherwise, why was I allowed to see them? By the time I get back to college I’m so tired that I feel like the dying man I am. The quad smells rich and earthy. The sodden grass is lurid green. I stumble as I step up into the cloisters, nearly falling headlong.
I gaze at my scattered books, trying to summon the energy to bend to the worn slabs that commemorate the corpses of ancient fellows. By the time I’m ready to do so, Cumbernald, the college principal, has emerged from his office nearby.
“The Jews Of Germany. The Community Of Lodz And Its Region. Baedeker’s Scottish Highlands and Islands, 1934. My Struggle,” he says, scooping up my books with his long brown hands, frowning and inspecting the spines. “Hmmm, I’ve read that one—man’s totally mad. Good job old Kaiser Willy’s got him back in clink, eh? Bit far away from the Holy League, though, Brook.”
“Believe it or not, I need to keep my mind active,” I reply, tired and tetchy as he hands the books back to me.
Cumbernald smiles and raises his arms in mock surrender. The sun, reddening the few remaining clouds as it begins the long process of setting beyond the college tower, gleams on the bald dome of his head. He’s a tall man, is Cumbernald. He radiates smooth affluence and efficiency. Some part of me always yearns to thump him.
“Glad I caught you like this, Brook. Been going through next term’s curriculum and we need to talk. How about the Fellows’ Room—say, fifteen minutes, when you’ve caught your breath?”
I open my mouth to say something about being tired, pressure of work, the fact that I probably won’t be much use to him anyway in the next academic year on account of my dying. It comes out as a simple, pliant yes.
Having fortified myself with two fat bitter tablets and tumbled down book-lined shafts and through rooms and along corridors that grow big, then small, I’m sitting with Cumbernald in the big wing-back chairs of the Fellows’ Room half an hour later. The soot-stained Cotswold fireplace between us is filled with a display of orange-red roses so bright that they seem to give off a warmth.
Cumbernald offers me a Balkan Sobranie from a burr-walnut box decorated with our college arms. Tarum Per Cornua Prehende.
“Can’t help noticing that you’ve been looking a touch under the weather, Brook.” He lights up, then twirls the stem of his port glass. “Nothing serious, I hope?”
I gaze back at him as I light my own cigarette with its gold tip, its pink paper, its mouldy scent of bazaars, puffing the smoke into my cheeks and blowing it back out, my face reddening as I struggle not to cough. Although I’m eating more than I did before, food has become tasteless. And such is the gap between my belly and my trousers that I’ve started wearing braces, unfashionable though they are. My ribs are sharp, like coathanger wire. My long face looks narrow and hollow.
“I’ve been slightly ill. You know how it is—summer cold. Bit of a dickey tummy.”
Cumbernald blinks slowly and nods. Oxford’s a big city these days—so thank God and John Arthur for the anonymity of the NHS where you can be decently ill without people finding out about you.
“Personally,” he says, “I’ve always thought this place was unhealthy. Too low, too many rivers. Just think what it’s been like this week—you should see the college cellars! Totally flooded. Everything gets trapped by the hills, and now there’s all this extra traffic. Foul, terrible air…”
“Actually, I quite like it.”
“You haven’t been at Varsity as long as I have. And you look like someone who needs a break. Me, I’m off to Tuscany straight after Mods. I time-share a villa near Sienna with a professor from the new National Fascist College at Ravenna. Fascinating man—you should hear him on the Battle Of Aegospotami. Knows Mussolini personally.”
“I was thinking of going up to the Scottish Highlands,” I say, feeling a brief pang at the thought of warm scented pines, the blaze of sunlit marble; all the people and places I’ll never get to know. “It’s been many years since I was there. I’d like to see how it’s changed.”
“Fresh air! Scotland! Well that sounds… Splendid. Let’s just hope it doesn’t rain. Meanwhile, Brook, what I’ll do is to bypass you…” Cumbernald makes an aeroplane movement with his hand to demonstrate, “in the initial assessment and marking processes when we get the papers in. Later on in the summer, perhaps you could moderate?”
“That would be fine,” I reply, thinking back towards the eye-fizzing task of last year’s marking; and wondering what gaffe I made.
We nod at each other in an excess of agreement. I take a sip of the splendid port and grind out my largely unsmoked Sobranie, depositing a grey worm of ash on the carpet.
“About Michaelmas Term,” Cumbernald continues, shifting on his lean buttocks and re-crossing his legs to reveal a surprisingly brown length of shin. “I was thinking of giving you the Enlightened Despots again. Mind?”
“As you know, it’s my speciality.”
From there, we move our way through other bits of responsibility. How to keep Badman from rattling on about Thermopylae. Whose turn it is to do the weary trudge through the early middle ages. Names of students are exchanged, although I’m not sure if there’s a moment when we both recognise the same person. Like most inferior academics, Cumbernald had pushed his way into administration. Yet he has risen ridiculously far, ridiculously fast. I can’t believe the Oxford of old would have put up with someone so obviously second rate. He welcomes, for a start, people like me. They bolster his own inadequacy.
“Bit of a problem with Roberts, you know,” he says after peeking around the wing of his chair to scan the scattered occupants of the others, who are mostly ancient, draped in the shadows like mouldering coats, to make sure that no one can overhear us. “Evidently he wrote a book back in the twenties about the economics of the Roman Empire. Argued that the colonies were a drain on Rome, rather than supporting it. Big factor in the downfall—you know the kind of thing. Then he keeps going off into the same rubbish about Britain. Even crops up in his students’ essays—although of course we can’t expect the dear things to know any better unless we teach them, can we?”
“I’d be surprised if Robert’s book was still available.”
“But that’s not the point, is it?” Cumbernald lights another Sobranie, and leans forward like a spiv with the cigarette cupped inside his hand, smoke jetting from his thin lips. “Remember Hobson…?” His voice trails down to a whisper at the hint of a discredited name. “And Brooking? Gone, of course. But you know. Move with the times, Brook. History changes…”
The tall glass-cased clock on the plinth behind us begins to whirrr and gasp, almost as if it can’t quite bring itself to pronounce that it is now ten o-clock on Thursday the 20th of June in the Year of Our Lord, 1940. The curtains have long been drawn. The porter’s men who serve us from antique silver trays wear swallow-tail coats that haven’t changed in centuries. Time stands still here; you could walk out into the cloisters and bump into Samuel Johnson, Edmund Halley, John Keats…
“Then there’s that whole unfortunate business of the Ford Lecture. The way I see it, Brook, it’s just silly to argue that King Louis’s decision to expel the Huguenots was—what was Robert’s phrase?—‘quasi-racism’. I’m sure that the only way to look at that whole incident now is to emphasise both the benefit it gave to France by encouraging the growth of the middle classes, and also the great good that the influx did to the Lowland countries and Greater Britain…”
Thus we continue through dizzying twists and turns as we re-write what we know of history, marked by the clock’s reluctant chimes. When my curriculum seems to be settled at last and some hitherto-unknown part of me is aching for another dose of the bitter fat pills that I’ve left up in my rooms and my throat is raw from a suppressed cough, Cumbernald leans over and lays a restraining well-manicured hand upon my shoulder as I attempt to get up.
“Oh, and there’s one other thing I’ve been planning, Brook. A little project of mine…” He steeples his hands and smiles. “It’s something in which I just had this feeling you’d be keen to assist me.”
“I’m sure I am,” I mutter, thinking how nice it would be to foul up one of Cumbernald’s stupid projects by dying in the middle of it. Last year he arranged for us dons to attend an excruciating series of talks by “ordinary people”.
“I don’t think there’s enough of a link been made, Brook, between science and history…”
I nod at that, mannequin that I am. I can’t even be bothered to tell him that he’s plainly got the wrong man. All I know about science is Archimedes’s bath, Pythagoras’s triangle, Newton’s apple.
“So I’m planning to widen the curriculum a bit in that direction. And cross-college, too. Well, I did try old Hazlitt here. You can imagine what he was like…”
“I’m sure.”
“So I’ve been on the, ah, blower to Frank Stanyard, and he’s recommended this young don of his. Name of Bracken. One or two things he’s doing are rounding off and apparently he’s absolutely chomping at the bit to get his teeth into something new and involving. Not an Oxford man, either. Did his degree at Warwick of all places—didn’t even know they had a university there.”
“It’s one of the newer ones.”
“Still, that’s the Midlands, isn’t it? Where you come from. Common territory. Thought it might help things along.”
“When do you want me to meet him?”
“Soon as poss if you don’t mind. You free tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Fine, fine. I’m told he works mornings in one of those ghastly new buildings along Parks.” Cumbernald smiles at me. “About ten o-clock, eh? I’m sure he’ll be expecting you.”
For the first time this summer, I leave my bedroom window open overnight as I wrestle with sleep. I hear the faint drippings and stirrings of the oak in the quad, the call of an owl. I hear the tick of a bicycle, whisperings and footsteps, a car’s engine, the clattering hooves of a cart. I hear a woman’s voice crying faintly and rhythmically in either pain or love, and the steam whistle of a night train. And beyond that, beyond my own breath and my heart’s agitated beating—beyond everything—there comes a dull, persistent roaring as of the churning of a vast engine, the breaking of a grey, unmeasurable sea.