Brond (2 page)

We had come to the Professor’s from an uncomfortable room at the University where we had been listening to a talk on the Modern American Novel. Vonnegut, Ken Kesey, Richard Brautigan
– all the great names were there. When the speaker had answered the last question, the chairman said something and people applauded.

‘The only American novel worth reading post-1945,’ I said then to Margaret Briody, ‘is
Across the River and into the Trees
.’

I was trying to catch her interest. Those were the first words I ever addressed to her. By a happy chance, she had been seated next to me, and for more than an hour I had been deluding myself I
could feel her warmth spread between us and lap around my thigh.

Only moving around unobtrusively had kept me comfortable.

She looked at me seriously as if she were judging what I had said against some long perspective.

‘I’m sure that can’t be so,’ she said, an atavistic music of peat water rippling under her Glasgow articulation. (God protect you from a teachers’ training college,
prayed I in passing, and the inanities of a speech department.) ‘Although to be honest, I’ve never read any Faulkner,’ and as I wasted the moment on loving astonishment at her
ignorance, she turned to some chatterer on her other side.

The lecturer, a Liverpool voice with American back vowels as souvenirs of all those sabbatical leaves, was crying, ‘Drinkies time, Dennis? Hell, I could certainly use a drink. We leaving
for your place now, Dennis?’

‘The Professor’s actually. But yes now, we’re going now, Jerry,’ and a set towards the door began as Dennis Harland, lecturer in Old English, six feet topped by a narrow
skull and the blue eyes of a Midshipman Ready – if not Old certainly standard English – stopped in front of me. ‘Would you care to? A chance to talk over all Jerry’s given
us to think about. At the Professor’s.’

I was flattered.

‘Yes. Thanks very much.’

‘Fine. See you there then.’

Bobbing on the tide, I was more pleased than suprised to see Margaret Briody by divine right of those long legs join the group around Jerry, who was still audible later as I drank my second
glass of the Professor’s sour economy wine.

‘ “God, Lord David,” Jack told me he said to him, “haven’t you ever wakened up and yelled, Christ! I’m in love, I’ve possessed this woman?” and
Lord David hesitated, gave him that look, you know? and replied, “Well, my dear chap, I am maw-wied.” ’

Haw! haw! deep then and masculine from this son of the new world of exchange lectureships.

‘He gave me this book of his poems.’

Held up, bashful, proud, a slim volume with, yellow on green,
Cocksuck
, but he was opening it to give the Professor so it might have been Slowworm or Coachtrip. Cockroach?

‘Dedicated it to me actually. Well, not the book, of course, but this . . . this copy. He’s written here at the front.’

Impassive, the Professor studied the dedication and then held it up to give us a glimpse of the hasty slanted scrawl – ‘To Jerry, one of the gang – I think.’

‘I really value that. It’s the highlight of my last trip. I mean, it made the trip – I did feel that.’

‘Has Mr . . .’ the Professor wafted the volume in decreasing circles, ‘has— has he written anything else?’

As if he had been away long enough to mistake that kind of careful stammer for nothing more than diffidence, Jerry expanded: ‘Anything else! Jesus,
everything
else would describe it better
– but then I’m an enthusiast.’ He grinned boyishly. ‘After putting up with me all evening, you won’t need to be told
that
. He’s simply covered the whole American
experience. Past and present. Future too, possibly – that is if you believe Dexroth. He called the Epsilon sonnet sequence “science fiction made over into prophecy”. Wasn’t
that good?’

‘When I listen to remarks like that,’ someone said, ‘I get the feeling we’re being asked to pay a high price for the privilege of the Americans protecting us.’

The Professor laughed, and Jerry cried, ‘Christ! isn’t that typically English? Isn’t it time we stopped pretending to some kind of cultural superiority that hasn’t
existed for fifty years?’

‘Is that what I was doing?’ the same someone pondered ironically. The voice was deep but soft. I envied its certainty that everyone would listen. From where I perched on the
windowseat, I could see only one shoulder and a hand very white against the black leather of the chair. ‘ “Science fiction made over into prophecy.” Does that mean anything? Most
science fiction tries to be some kind of prophecy anyway, doesn’t it?’

‘Like – ah – Dr Who,’
the Professor volunteered
.

‘Who?’ Jerry looked bewildered.

‘It’s a serial on television,’ Margaret Briody said, laughing, intervening innocent in the arena to draw the Professor’s offering of biscuits and cheese and embarrass me
on her behalf into a hallucinatingly vivid, brief memory of Jackie Kennedy.

‘Actually,’ the Professor took up the definition with surprising amiability, ‘it is by this time a series of serials. Do you see? Sets of episodes, each forming a story, and
each leading into a new set while all the time featuring the same central character.’

The incorrigible Margaret rang out, ‘We’ve discovered your secret vice – watching
Dr Who
.’

‘My grand-niece is devoted to it. But I don’t apologise for watching it. The format has some interesting conse— consequences. Take this latest episode. The Doctor is confronted
by an alien intelligence, a splendid villain. For him to overcome it entirely would mean it couldn’t crop up in a later serial of the series. So, at the moment he’s about to obliterate
it, his friends burst in with the best of intentions and inadvertently allow it to escape off into outer space. The intelligence which runs away, lives to fight another day – or aeon
rather.’

‘The point’s a nice one, Tom.’ The same deep soft voice sounded from the depths of the black leather chair. ‘Take the parallel case of our local theology. God and the
Devil are locked in perpetual conflict, but Dr God never manages to wipe Lucifer out. Just as well of course, or the world and all of us with it, moon too, sun and stars, would snuff out and be
done.’

‘I don’t see why the world should do that,’ Jerry grumbled. It was obvious he disapproved of this conversation but couldn’t resist trying to retake the high ground.
‘Get rid of the Devil and the world should turn back into Eden.’

‘I seem to remember, Brond,’ the Professor addressed the man hidden from me in the chair, ‘you inclining to the opinion that Satan made the material universe in a series of
feints, weavings and subterfuges as he defended himself against a vengeful Creator.’

‘I’ve never been persuaded,’ the hidden speaker said, ‘that God would not dispose of evil at once – if He could.’

‘Oh, great!’ Jerry said harshly. ‘So God’s a loser as far as you’re concerned. What happens then if Satan wins? Have you a theory for that?’

‘That would be absurd,’ the soft voice said dismissively.

‘For a man who wants to limit the divine power, Brond,’ the Professor said, ‘it hardly seems sporting to argue its omnipotence in the next breath.’

‘You misunderstand me,’ the voice said pleasantly. I could not see his face, but I imagined somehow that he might be smiling. ‘It’s my idea that defeat is what Satan is
after, not the destruction of souls and all that melodrama.’

‘The Devil wants to be defeated? But you’ve already said that he has the power to prevent God from doing that. Isn’t there a contradiction there somewhere?’

‘Not really. Satan sets out to torment and so God, who is good, is compelled to encounter him – when required. God has no choice, however weary He may be of the game. Satan has to be
defeated – but never is entirely. In which case, we owe roses and sunsets,’ the white hand tapped upon the black leather of the chair, ‘to Satan’s pleasure in being
mastered.’

‘It’s the wine Prof Gracemount serves that does the damage,’ Donald Baxter said and belched. ‘Cheap wine, cheap theology. If I could find a church that
served Château Lafite for communion, I’d become a convert.’

He lifted his pint and took a long slurping draw on it. I had to lean forward to hear what he was saying; the downstairs bar of the Union was crowded and everybody was yelling over the Country
and Western.

‘You look awful,’ he said. ‘You’re sweating like a pig. Gracemount’s wine has poisoned you.’

‘I didn’t feel like going home.’ My lips were thick and rubbery. ‘My digs, I mean. Not home. Long way from home.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘I don’t despise you,’ I said. ‘For being a conscientious objector. That’s your business. And anyway the war’s over a long time. That’s the way I look
at it. I don’t believe in wars myself – or violence. I’m a pacifist.’

Baxter looked offended. ‘I’m not a bloody pacifist,’ he said. ‘Never have been.’

I tried to get him into focus but his face ran like white fat melting against the smoke.

‘What about – what about all that stuff about being in a camp? What about all that crap about getting beaten up by the guards?’

The oldest student in the world scowled at me. ‘I refused to join the army. But it wasn’t because I didn’t believe in fighting for my country. Only I’ll pick the country.
Do you understand?’

I shook my head. The movement hurt; waves of pain came and went. ‘I don’t get a bloody word of what you’re on about.’

‘I could believe that,’ Donald Baxter said. ‘That’s why I don’t explain any more why I didn’t let them call me up. Who would know what I was talking about?
What’s the use in this country?’

Before I left the Professor’s, things became a little blurred. I seemed to remember Professor Gracemount talking about being in Czechoslovakia. He had been in charge of
some examination – for the British Council? did that make sense? – and a young Czech girl had come to see him. My brother has to pass this exam, she had said to him. It’s very
important to the family. It’s very important to me. We would do anything to make sure he passed. I personally would do anything to make sure he passed.

I could
see
that girl. She was wearing a long cotton skirt with the kind of bright pattern a peasant in a movie might wear. I could see the way she licked her tongue over her upper lip when she
murmured ‘personally’.

Had the Professor told that story? Was that the kind of story he would tell?

I wasn’t sure.

Yet I could remember everything the Irish lecturer from Stirling had said. He had started just after the Professor finished. It had been a long speech, but he had delivered it with great
gusto.

‘What size was Shakespeare’s London or Plato’s Athens?’ he had asked rhetorically in a rolling brogue. ‘Or take Kierkegaard who was followed by jeering children
through the streets of Copenhagen. Isn’t it wonderful that a philosopher should be as public a figure as that? But it’s not astonishing if you get the scale right. Those places
weren’t conurbations. They had nothing to do with the nightmare cities of twenty million inhabitants we’ll have by the end of the century. Why, Stirling at the moment has more of a
population than Oslo had when Ibsen was scribbling. Yet I don’t expect to find some kilted Henry Gibson clutching a manuscript of
A Doll’s Hoose
when I drive back tonight. Not a hope,
not the measliest little chance of it. Why? Because you need not just a town – although you
do
need that – a town with its human scale – but a town that’s also a capital
with a capital’s sense of bearing a place in the scheme of things. The human scale Joyce going to George Russell’s door at midnight to knock and talk philosophy at him as an
introduction. Or encountering Yeats – and Joyce, remember, young and unknown – and telling him, ‘You are too old. I have met you too late.’ Dublin in 1903, you see, was a
small town. But it was a capital too – and that’s the point. In Europe’s eyes, a provincial town; but in the eyes of a sufficiency of its citizens, a place where a nation’s
destiny was being reforged. In 1903 who would have imagined that Dublin might be of more significance than London or—’

At that, however, Jerry, who had given up showing people his copy of
Cocksuck
and grown morose, twanged loudly, ‘Talking of Dublin reminds me of a joke. Do you know what happened to the
Irishman who tried to blow up a bus? Do you, eh? Anybody? He burned his mouth . . . on the exhaust pipe, do you see?’

‘In Ireland,’ the Irishman said, ‘we have Kerry jokes. If it’s joke time, I’ll tell you a Kerry joke. A Kerry man got on a boat and as they sailed across the blue
blue sea there was a cry, “Man overboard! Man overboard!” And then the captain shouted, “Throw over a buoy!” So the Kerry man picked up a boy and threw him overboard. A
two-legged boy that was, do you understand? a human boy. The captain rushed down from the bridge and shouted at him, “You damned fool, I meant a cork buoy!” “Alannah! captain
dear,” said the Kerry man, “and how was I to know which part of Ireland he was from?” ’

He told the joke very slowly and in a flat monotone quite unlike the animation of his earlier manner, but when there was practically no response he didn’t seem at all disturbed. Only as
the pause lengthened uncomfortably, at last a little smile broke at the corners of his mouth.

‘It is odd, isn’t it,’ Dennis Harland intervened, his Midshipman Ready blue eyes twinkling, ‘how every community chooses a butt for its jokes? From a little piece of
research I did recently, I discovered that most of the jokes about Scotch meanness were originally jokes told by other Scots against the Aberdonians.’

‘Or the Poles in America,’ someone else said. It was the man hidden from me in the black leather chair. The deep soft voice had the same effect as before. Effortlessly, it made you
pay attention. ‘The Irish joke and the Polish joke – when I was in America, I decided they were interchangeable.’

‘Goofy Newfies – that’s what they call us at home in Canada,’ a big red-faced character leaning against the wall said.

Since I didn’t recognise him, I took the excuse to lean forward and touch Margaret Briody on the arm. ‘Who is he?’