Be Near Me (20 page)

'Not quite,' said Curtis, topping up the mug that stood on the grass next to my arm. 'Not her lip, Davvers. He "greases her nose" with the rhino-gomenol.'

'I dispute it,' I said.

'Don't be boring.'

'No, I'm disputing it. The stuff is on her lip.'

'Son of a gun,' Curtis said, before sloping off to his rooms to consult his well-worn Scott Moncrieff.

'He's right, my dear,' said Edward, after he'd gone.

'I know,' I said. 'But he didn't take the bottle.'

That is how it was with us: fifty years out of date. People at Oxford during my time didn't pride themselves on being original. Being wisely unoriginal was more in the style of the time. It felt so new for people to pick and choose the possibilities for themselves, and where they didn't choose to join their personal hungers to a movement—though many did, giving the 1960s its famous reputation—they became like Edward Hippisley-Cox, a very self-conscious, lurid amalgam of borrowings from the beautiful past. 'One is an A to B sort of person, darling,' said Edward. 'From Aubrey Beardsley to Anthony Blanche.'

'Oh, heavens,' I said. 'Proust is one thing, but
Brideshead?
'

'Don't be difficult,' he said. 'One discovers oneself to be nostalgic for nothing so much as nostalgia.'

In my day, groups at Oxford never gave themselves names but were given them by other people, often their opponents. One of the student radicals called us the Marcellists, owing to our irritating addiction to Proust's big book, and, exactly one day later, Edward arrived in the Junior Common Room to announce that the radicals and associated worshippers of Mao and haters of Lyndon Johnson were to be known forthwith as the Bombastics. To me it was an amusing Swiftian extravaganza, the Marcellists and the Bombastics. 'More like
West Side Story,
' said Curtis. 'They've taken over the goddamn Union with their gruesome red
book. Best place for them. They simply adore the Vietcong.
Quelle horreur.
'

As befitted his Eton background, Edward liked to drink only in the dingiest, most hangdog of Oxford bars. He liked places stained yellow with nicotine and full of darkened brass, as if to conform to some Baudelairean stereotype. That's why he favoured the Grapes, just off the Cornmarket. 'Hark,' he said one afternoon when a workman stopped at the bar. 'It's the People. Godders in heaven. Ask him if he's one of zem undergradders sponsored till the end of time by the National Union of Mineworkers.'

'Stop it, Eddie,' I said.

'Comely, comely, Anders, my delicious,' he said—that's how he spoke all the time, even to his mother—'we've got to get the laughers going before the old death cracks in. Mightens we scoff a glass of the old Pope's Chartreuse before you shove off to your boring concertina?'

One of Edward's great attractions lay in his mysterious, rather mature acquaintanceship with London. He was forever going up on the train with a fiver in his pocket. He came back speaking of Muriel's and dirty bars in Soho, and speaking about them, too, in the half-cocked Polari he must have picked up in those places. It was the sort of queer world I'd never considered. But Eddie kept us all informed, sneaking back to Oxford on Monday afternoons like a drowned ferret, his lips rather blue and his eyes empty of wonder.

'Your portraits are good, Eddie,' I said. 'You should do more of them. Make a bit of money. Get some of those London bods to have a look at them. You've got a touch.'

'Oh, darling,' he said. 'You're rotten sweet to say that, but it isn't true. I'll be painting my face from here to eternity, but that's about it.'

The Bombastics were up in the corner of the Grapes one night. Edward was swathed in fifteen miles of scarf, smoking Sweet Aftons one after the other like he was taking some vile medicine. He gazed semi-lovingly at the People as the smoke and the scarf unfurled. The Bombastics always had papers spread out among the beer jugs. They leaned over them, their faces burning with some great intensity or other. Some of that crowd later became known among the
Enragés
of 1968, but then, before Paris, before Berkeley, before Prague, they just ran action groups and committees and won their debates with enormous ease. It was obvious even to the terminally pretentious that these ruddy youths had the times on their side.

'Capture the horror,' said Edward. 'Over in the black corner there, the Ban the Bombastics.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Jolly serious.'

'Dreaming the good dream, my dear,' said Edward. 'Flying stolen helicopters for the Vietcong. Handing over the keys of the kingdom to dem dat's as black as the Ace. Oh, stoppers. Sinking a few punts in a tough stand against the Toggers.'

'The whatters?'

'The Torpids Boat Race, my dear,' said Edward. 'You really must keep up, Anderton. Life is rotten slow.'

Oxford invented gunpowder, bottled ale, the Church of England and gilded youth. It also invented the MG car. But its
greatest addition to the glory of nations, in my view, was Geoffrey Nashe, my favourite tutor at Balliol and the greatest Frenchman England ever produced.

Nashe kept a set of oak-panelled rooms filled with first editions and daft French postcards. Outside of religion (which he laughed at, thinking it 'all poppycock and painted idols'), he was to become my captain in all issues relating to the mind and how to capitalise on a little devoted reading. When I first came to him, he had just published his monumental work on the strategies and manners of the mob during the French Revolution. It made him famous, the first sign of which was a sharp increase in the amount of sherry he doled out during our weekly tutorials. He was small in stature, about sixty-two I'd have said, with silver hair that seemed slick and moulded like a helmet over his head. Everything about Nashe was the opposite of hostile: he wore round tortoise-shell glasses, a succession of green cardigans, he liked booze and was forever shaking his watch at his ear, waiting for time to move on and jokes to improve.

Nashe took what you might call the anti-Carlyle view of history: it wasn't the bigwigs that concerned him so much as the ones wearing aprons stained with blood and sweat. This was clear from his interest in the flower-sellers and butchers of the French Revolution, but, even more so, from the way he spoke about himself and his own background. Those years with Nashe left me with a full picture of the great historian's personal England, a place which, in his animated telling, could seem to outline all the parameters of English life, a view which included, I'm afraid, the notion that the better part of civilised experience began with the boat to France.

He grew up in the riverless town of Tunbridge Wells, and he used every square inch of it—the blackberry thickets, the efforts of the Luftwaffe to bomb the town, the speech of his mother's friends, their sensible shoes, their gins and tonics at five o'clock, their water colours of Scottish glens—to describe a notion of middle-class contentment that he made seem a matter of history to me, my childhood's holy details having temporarily faded in a blur of ambition, the prevailing upward draught of the scholarship boy. 'I am attempting to illustrate a society both immensely self-confident and largely immune from class conflict and social tension,' he would say, before going on to give a short history of the manufacture of Romary's Water Biscuits in Tunbridge Wells. That was how he did it—'they were the very cream of middle-class biscuits'—and more than any single thing in my life it was Nashe's method that revealed to me the raw material of history and the inconspicuous material of oneself.

Nashe spoke about Sussex as if it were Babylon, which I suppose it was from the perspective of Tunbridge Wells. He had strange cousins, the Pemberton-Aulds, who did nothing all day and who had ignored the war playing cards in Lewes, and he expressed their decadence as a matter relating to the downfall of the English counties. Not that he was at all socialistic. He adored privilege, counting it among those traditions that enlarged the life of good taste, but he was one of those, unlike me, who held his public school (Shrewsbury, in his case) personally responsible for what he called 'the British tendency to ridicule passion'. He sometimes mentioned the host of satirical young men—'the
Private Eye
crowd'—who came through Shrewsbury and Oxford in the years just before me. But more often he told the story of Daniel Plunkett, an Irish friend from school who had murdered his mother and tried to put her dead body over the cliffs of Howth in a faulty car. Just as Nashe wasn't a socialist, he wasn't a Freudian either. 'Too programmatic,' he'd say, before outlining, in his anecdotal way, the general faults of mothers and the shocks of the Irish legal system.

'Aha!' he said one morning in his Balliol rooms. 'The mind of the college was expressing itself the other evening.'

'How so?' I asked.

'I brought my friend to dine in college. You may have heard me speak of him, a gentleman by the name of Plunkett. He killed his mother over a quantity of money. She was a terrible wretch and an hysteric, poor woman. Yet he was a joy at high table. I might say the other fellows were mightily alarmed in the first instance, yet by the end, when a discussion of Harold Wilson's penal policy took hold, my friend rather distinguished himself and I can report that everyone was frightfully keen on more brandy.'

'Good heavens,' I said. 'A murderer in the SCR.'

'Yes,' said Nashe. 'Quite distinctive.'

'I hope he has learned his lesson,' I said.

'Naturally,' said Nashe. 'And I hope we have learned ours. It is not the first time the murder-minded have scaled the college walls. Only a few yards to the west of here there was once an inn called the Catherine Wheel. It was there that the Gunpowder plotter Robert Catesby told of his intentions to
Robert Wyntour. And these things still go on. A couple of your clever accomplices are said to have cut up some new turf from the gardens over the wall'—he meant Trinity—'and they carpeted the JCR with it. Caused a terrible fuss with the janitorially-minded.'

The intermingling of history and autobiography was essential to Nashe, and yet one always felt it was the personal part that struck him as carrying the larger portion of educated wisdom. 'I hear you are still thriving as a social phenomenon, young Anderton,' Nashe said at the end of my second year, when I sat in his easy chair to read out my essay. 'Let's dispense with the essay for now,' he added. 'What have you been doing? Still stealing cigars?'

'Sorry?'

'Come now,' he said. 'From the Master's Mondays. The whole point of them is to steal the old leaf, is it not?' With this he opened a drawer of his desk and smilingly passed me a cigar and some matches.

'Heavens,' I said, 'this is festive,' as he poured a couple of sherries.

'Indeed,' he said. 'And those young friends of yours, the Rhodes Scholar and the other one from out of college—are they well? I hear you have now completely conquered Proust.'

'Just a wheeze...'

'Not at all. A jolly pursuit. Good young men, I gather. It's bracing to see young men of that sort still pounding the quads, their faces shining with ... what might one say ... with polished ungodliness.'

'Yes.'

'But not you, Anderton. You're still for God, aren't you? You're still with the old team?'

'Yes,' I said. 'It would appear to be the case.'

'It would appear, yes.' I remember feeling exposed in some way. There was nothing sinister in Nashe's words. He was just being a historian. But I felt uncertain.

'Shall I read my essay?' I said.

'By all means,' said Nashe. 'You are a free man, Mr Anderton—
l'homme disponible.
Ever ready to fill the gap, what, what?'

I blushed, I'm sure, and lowered my head. But my answer was in the essay before me, which started with an account of my Lancashire ancestors and the trials of English faith. By then Nashe's method had turned me into a new version of myself, or was it Proust, or the rhythmic bleating of Hippisley-Cox and Curtis? It's really impossible to tell. Oxford had me. The room filled with smoke and the sherry was perfectly sweet.

And then, a season of pain. In that parish house in Scotland, I often sat in the bedroom at night staring at the bright window, thinking of those young people and their easy, terrible laughter. And sitting up, hearing the trees at the end of the lane performing their dark susurrations, my mind would go beyond them to the places of my own youth, Oxford in those long-ago dreamed-up summers and the words I could still see carved into the bricks on the outside wall of Staircase XI:

Verbum Non Amplivs
189

'A word and no more.'

Conor.

I first saw him at the back of the Grapes, lifting a pint jug to his fresh smile amid a group of leather jackets. He was a beautiful listener, an almond-eyed person with a head of chestnut hair. Edward was with me that night. I'm afraid my friend was railing against the grammar of the Civil Rights leaders, flicking his white hand in the direction of the Bombastics, and when I looked up I saw Conor sitting among them. What can I say? I ordered more drinks and watched him over Edward's shoulder, the way he picked up papers and smiled his self-possessed smile in the amber light. And then, not for a second stepping out of his world, he looked at me. The look was both casual and piercing. I imagined a world of opportunity in that look. The pub bustled with its smaller concerns, while Conor, the man at the end of the room, his arms enfolding himself in mirth, looked at me again, inhabiting every quiet hope I had.

Hippisley-Cox continued his banter at my side, but I didn't hear a word he said and he faded out, like a distant piano. I could feel the glorious young man at the ends of my fingers and in the gin scorching my throat. I looked at him again.

He turned to rub his shoulder, and seeing his hand on his jacket, I suddenly wanted to be his jacket or be the cotton of his shirt. For nearly forty years I have thought about the amber light and the smile on him that evening. For I loved him the second before I saw him, just as one does with love: we know whom we love before we find them, or think we do. We feel we have waited for such a person, and when we see him, he is perfectly familiar.