Engleby (14 page)

The newspapers were slow to pick up what was going on – or not going on. It was round the university and in the local press for several days before one of the national papers ran a sizeable story on page five.

I know the page number because I have the story on the desk in front of me in my room in Clock Court now, as I write.

‘Top girl student disappears’ says the headline. ‘Fears were growing last night over the safety of Jennifer Arklam, 20, a brilliant third-year geography undergraduate at . . .’

They did at least get the name of the university right.

‘Popular and lively Jenny, oldest of four sisters from Lynmouth in Hampshire, was last seen walking back to her house from a party in Malcolm Street, near Jesus College. Her boyfriend, Robin Wilson, a third-year student reading history in Claire College, said, “Jenny was very happy, she had no problems that I knew of. We are all very worried about where she is and I would beg her to get in touch if she reads this.”’

There’s then a lot of stuff about her family. ‘Richard Arklam, 52, an architect with local firm Boyd and Denning and housewife Lesley, 46, who hails originally from Newbury in Hampshire . . . Police found traces of the drug cannabis in Jenny’s room . . . “Brideshead” lifestyle . . . considering a re-enactment of her last walk . . . Police are anxious to talk to anyone who may have information about Jennifer’s whereabouts. See page 19: Students: the Hamlet years.’

Other newspapers began to follow. I think they like being able to print pictures of Jenny, and they have found a nice one of her laughing, taken on the lawn of the house in Tipperary last year.

One of the popular papers (one which mysteriously thinks itself above the others) sent a star columnist to interview Jen’s mother. ‘Welcomes me in . . . Friendly, typical middle-class mum . . . Bottle green midi-skirt and court shoes . . . Lovely, candid blue eyes . . . Slight ladder in her tights . . . “Jenny was always a star at school . . . so proud of her” . . . Childhood bedroom . . . soft toys and teddy bears . . . Quaver in her voice . . . Not giving up hope . . . Husband Richard puts his head round the door . . . Instant coffee, slightly soft Rich Tea biscuit . . . Talented draughtsman and pillar of local . . . Three younger sisters side by side on the G-plan couch, nudging and whispering . . . Have to have a heart of stone not to . . . Showed me to the door . . . Photo of missing Jenny . . . hall table . . . vase of tired tulips . . . But who can blame . . .’

I have gathered quite a file of cuttings from all the newspapers. I go through them with a blue pen and mark up the errors of fact and score them accordingly. I give one mark for getting wrong something they couldn’t really have been expected to know better – e.g. that Robin Wilson was her boyfriend. I give two points for an error that would have taken only a phone call to check – Lynmouth instead of Lymington, for instance, Geog for Hist, 20 for 21. And I give three points for errors that didn’t even need a phone call, things that are in reference books or are common knowledge – like Claire for Clare College or thinking Newbury is in Hampshire.

The most accurate, I was surprised to see, was the little pocket-sized
Sun
. Hardly anything it wrote was true in any significant sense of that word and there wasn’t much of it anyway, but the ‘facts’ – spellings and so on – were fine.

I showed my scores to Stellings, who told me a weekend magazine had once done a long article on his father, who is something in the British film business. It had taken them three months to interview him andother people about him, write the piece, check it, and get the pictures.

‘Well, it’s different for magazines,’ I said. ‘They’ve got time.’

‘Actually, there were quite a few mistakes,’ said Stellings. ‘My mother counted fifty-two.’

As the days go by, the story becomes an obsession. ‘Jenny: Latest’ say the news-stands and everyone knows what they mean – though the latest is always that they still don’t know.

There is a character known as the ‘ginger-headed man in the blue anorak’ who has featured in the last 48 hours. A woman on her way home after doing some office cleaning saw this person in Jesus Lane at the right time, about one-fifteen. The sighting was confirmed by a college porter on his way home via Maid’s Causeway at about one-thirty. This ginger man was seen to be behaving ‘oddly’.

The rozzer in charge, Inspector Peck, has asked Robin Wilson to make a television broadcast on Saturday, after
Grandstand
and before
The Generation Game
. Nice to see her; to see her it would be nice. (I do like a good chiasmus with my tea on Saturday.)

In a separate development, as the news bulletins say, it’s intended to re-enact Jennifer’s walk home from the party to her house. I don’t know who’s going to play Jenny. There was a dumpy little WPC who clearly fancied the part, but she wouldn’t be any good.

‘Ginger Man: Hunt Intensifies’, says the placard outside Bowes & Bowes.

Mr and Mrs Arkland are said to be ‘distraught’. Mrs Arkland is on ‘suicide watch’ according to the
Daily Mirror
. Today the
Sun
had a picture of Jen in a bikini. The
Daily Express
had an article headlined ‘secret sex life of missing brainbox’, in which two undergraduates – one from King’s, one from Downing ‘neither of whom wished to be named’ – were quoted as saying that they had (at different times) had sex with Jennifer and that she was a ‘warm and liberated lover’ (King’s) with a ‘fantastic body’ (Downing). There was a cross-reference to: ‘Page 22: The plague of student promiscuity by Jean Rook.’

She has become a different person.

Inspector Peck called a press conference this morning to say that his station had received an anonymous phone call which they were taking ‘very seriously indeed’. He says his caller was able to give information ‘that only someone who knew Jennifer well would be in a position to pass on. We are hopeful that he can help us further with our inquiries.’

Unfortunately he rang off before they could trace his call. He was said to have a strong Norfolk accent.

‘Is Ginger from Norwich?’ asks the placard for the evening paper outside Bradwell’s Court this afternoon.

An advertisement in the window of W.H. Smith promises: ‘Jenny: More Revelations in this weekend’s
Sunday Times’
.

I’ve been to see my doctor. I’m suffering severe headaches. I don’t feel well at all. I can’t do any work. It’s impossible to concentrate.

Dr Vaughan has a surgery on King’s Parade, near the Copper Kettle. In his waiting room there are college oars mounted on the wall. On them are the names of the colleges whose boats he rammed or sank or something.

Vaughan is famous for the fact that the university’s most renowned philosopher died in his arms. I think this is a strange thing for a doctor to be famous for. Saving him, maybe, or reviving him . . . But not showing him the door.

I have to wait a long time. Eventually the receptionist says I can go in. I think Vaughan went to the same med school as Dr Benbow from Chatfield. They have no bedside manner. I doubt whether either has ever been to a bedside, unless it was to issue a death certificate.

I once asked Vaughan for sleeping pills but he told me to take more exercise. That’s why I started going to Alan Greening in the Kestrel.

A boy called Rough at Chatfield went to see Benbow and told him he thought he must be gay because he couldn’t stop thinking about boys. Instead of passing him to a counsellor, Benbow sent him away and said that every time he had an impure thought he should go and play squash. It didn’t help. (Though I’m told he won a squash blue in his second year at Oxford.)

Vaughan told me to sit down, then looked at me angrily.

‘What sort of headaches? Whereabouts?’ He seemed to be implying that I was making it up.

‘Here . . . And here . . . And here. Intense.’

He shone a light in my eyes and ears and asked about my bowels.

‘Have you had your eyes tested lately? Do you masturbate? Do you drink alcohol?’

‘I think it may be that I’m worried about a friend of mine.’

‘Stand up. Do you have adequate light in your room?’

‘Could I have a prescription for some pills?’

‘Certainly not. You can buy some aspirin with your own money if you want to. Don’t drink beer. You can go now.’

But it’s bad. I feel a sort of lassitude. As well as the pain. I also feel everything’s my fault. It’s like how I used to feel about the old men in the poorhouse. All this stuff is my responsibility.

I’ve started driving out to those villages again, like I did before I knew Jen. I take the 1100 out from the Queen Elizabeth car park and just drive. Grantchester, the Wilbrahams. Over Wrought. Middle Class. Nether World. It doesn’t matter how much I drink or how much I smoke I just can’t stop the pain in my temples.

Whoosh goes the chestnut-amber tide up the side of the straight glass as I tear the cellophane from a silver packet of Sobranie Virginia.

I sit at the bar and drink and smoke alone and I often think about my father for some reason. I wonder what it’s like to be dead.

I didn’t feel much when he died. I didn’t cry, though Julie and my mother both cried a lot. I didn’t like him very much so it was hard to mourn him. Perhaps there’s something wrong with me that I didn’t cry.

What I felt was this: that his dying made a mockery of his life. The plans, the photographs, the ‘future’ – all the stuff they lived by. It was a delusion, wasn’t it? See them in that black and white photo there, young and looking forward. What on earth was all that about, when this banal brutality was what all along lay in wait? When I look back on his life and what he thought he was up to, I feel . . . Embarrassed. Embarrassed by the extent of his self-delusion.

There was an interval after the funeral before the headstone arrived and my mother wanted me to mark the grave. People might otherwise think it was just a bit of builder’s earth or a giant molehill or something. It might get washed away, like the grave of that girl in Hardy. In our small shed, I made a cross by breaking up a wooden apple crate. My father didn’t have the tools for me to do a good job, but I managed two rough strips and wrote his name in ballpoint on the crosspiece, which I then hammered with an old nail onto the upright. It’s pretty simple stuff, death. Say what you like about death, there’s nothing fancy about it. I took the apple-box cross off to the graveyard and stuck it in the open earth a few inches above where my father’s body was decomposing.

There was that poem by Catullus that we had to translate for the scholarship to Chatfield.
Soles occidere et redire possunt
. The sun can set and rise again. But for us, once the short light is snuffed out, there is just one long night to be slept through. Catullus’s response to this was to call for more sex while he was still alive to have it. That seems reasonable – and it sounds more profound in Latin. The other way of looking at it is that since the
lux
, the light, of our living is so
brevis
, short, compared to the
perpetua
, everlasting,
nox
, night, that is
dormienda
, to be slept through, then it’s pointless to worry ourselves about what we do in it. What is a moment in eternity? Of no account. Of no account at all.

Time makes us pointless. If time is as we envisage it, our lives are not worth living. Time is probably not as we envisage it – sequential. But since we are incapable of viewing it in any other way, it might as well be.

If the colour green is
truly
red but to every living creature it is experienced as green, then green it might as well be.

And if the natural selection of mutations made by random errors in cell division has given us a conscious mind that cannot understand – no, cannot
conceive
– one of the dimensions it inhabits, we might just as well be dead.

I hope for reincarnation when we and our conscious mind have evolved a little more, say ten million years from now.

I do believe in reincarnation for the simple reason that I’m certain that I personally have lived before – and within the last century, which is worrying.

I don’t want to come back again
that
soon. Christ.

Of course I think of Jennifer a lot too. I’ve been reading her diary and it’s almost like having her back. You can hear her voice, that sense of her trying not laugh out of politeness to the other person.

Oh yes . . . That diary. I only meant to borrow it then sneak it back, but of course now the house is crawling with policemen I can’t do that and I’m stuck with it.

On Saturday I went down to the college television room to watch Robin Wilson’s appeal for information. He sat behind a table, somewhere in London, I presume, with a bank of bright lights shining on him. He still had his Che Guevara moustache, but I noticed he had had his hair cut from shoulder-length to just covering the ears. I thought this was a pity, as though he was saying that long hair – other values, the counterculture – could be chucked out when the world got tough, when it got
real
.