Engleby (21 page)

They asked me for the names of two referees so that I could be ‘positively vetted’. I offered Waynflete, my Nat Sci don, and, after some thought, the manager of the paper mill, John Symonds, who always seemed a bit shifty about my father’s early death.

After a few more questions they seemed to lose interest and I was allowed to go. It wasn’t the glorious opening to my ambassadorial career that I’d expected, but once I’ve sat the Foreign Office exams, which I do in early June, three weeks after finals, I presume the process will become less seedy. By the New Year I suppose I’ll be a Washington insider, lunching in Foggy Bottom, dining in Georgetown.

It’s 11 May, nine days before finals blast-off, and a strange tension hangs over the town. McCaffrey, my one-time King Street Run jockey, has returned from Newmarket and has been seen in the college library. (He’s doing a four year vet’s course.) Stewart Forres has come back early from the film festival at Cannes. Yesterday Stellings walked down to the Sidgwick Site but was appalled to discover how far away it was and, before his revision lecture began, accepted my offer of a lift back to college in the Morris 1100. The only way he can get himself to look at his law notes is by spreading them on the floor, standing on the desk and reading them through McCaffrey’s binoculars.

I finally lent him
Moving Waves
by Focus with a note telling him where the sublime moments were. ‘Track Five (“Focus II”) at 0.39 and at 1.35. Track Six (“Eruption”) at 5.08, 6.14 and 9.17 – when he bends the note. Skip the rest.’

He read it. ‘Christ, Groucho,’ he said, ‘you’re even more bonkers than I am.’

Anne and Molly, compelled to cook since Jen’s disappearance, have made two-gallon vats of brown rice and vegetarian stew to last them through the long barricaded days. They know they’ve left it too late to do all the work they should have done; they need more time – yet they also want the exams to come soon, to end the waiting.

I think we’re all wondering in different ways how Jennifer would have managed the countdown crisis. Would her instinctive balance have deserted her? Would her moderation have failed her at the last? Would she have thrown up her hands a week early, shouted Qué sera, sera and dashed off to the Mitre to get drunk? Or would she have toiled all night on methedrine and jumbled up her head with unassimilated bilge?

I think not. I think she would have found that middle way, turning up the pressure on herself a little (early nights and longer days) but retaining her perspective, the intuitive sense that never failed her: that always knowing the right thing to do. What a gift that is. Where does it come from? I don’t think you can learn it. I sometimes think that she and I were polar opposites. My life has been marked by an instinct for the
wrong
thing to do: yes, in any given situation you can trust old Toilet to take the duff option.

Folk Club was a rather muted one. Even the second-years have Part One exams, so the crowd was mostly first-years – or ‘schoolboys with a summer holiday’ as Dr Gerald Stanley once described his freshmen, putting them at their ease as only Dr Gerald Stanley can.

I’m not going to miss all this, am I?

I think about that as I lean against the sweating pillar in the college bar, listening to the music with a glass of red vermouth in my hand.

What I’ll miss least is the winsomeness, the use of citric humour as defence; the Maoist geographers, the smilers with the knives.

And yet I did warm to it. This town, it street names, its immanent past: the river mist in the beautiful courts of Queens’. What I liked about it was a version lived by others.

For instance, by Jennifer. I enjoyed her time here. I don’t think her view was blinkered or deluded; she was in most ways unillusioned, almost as much as I am. No, I think that to see it as she saw it and play it as she played it was reasonable. It’s a pity that it wasn’t a way open to me.

I left Folk Club early, in the middle of Split Infinitive (back by ‘popular request’), and took my car out into the evening. Within twenty minutes I was in high hedgerows, in the warm darkness. I stopped at a Wheatsheaf and took a drink into the garden.

Then I walked into the lane. It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.

I’ve tried this in the past. You need the air to be warm, not hot, but balmy with a smell of grass or hawthorn. You need the black outline of branches against a sky that, while dark, still has a blue shade to it. What you’re trying to do is get plugged into the depth of history going down through these villages, these houses, these lawns panting with their garden scent at evening.

And in that history you’re trying to connect to something that once was yours – to something purer, better, something that you lost. Or something, maybe, that you never knew but that you
feel
you knew.

Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs. It needn’t have been a ‘perfect’ afternoon (by which people usually just mean very hot); it doesn’t have to be Midsummer’s Day. Better if it’s slightly early, slightly late, if the village has an ugly pylon, roadworks or a ruined telephone exchange. Sometimes you can get more easily to the universal through something that isn’t typical. Something that’s
too
representative can blind you with its own detail – like a painting by Canaletto – and stop you seeing through it.

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.

I found I’d wandered some way from the pub and was standing by a high brick wall, from the other side of which music was playing. A little further along was a wooden gate with an iron latch; the bottom of it scraped on the ground as I pushed it, but opened easily enough.

I was in a large garden with a well-lit marquee. With my pub glass still in hand I walked slowly towards the party that was spilling off the wooden flooring of the tent, over the stone terrace and into the house through two open doors. Most of the people seemed to be about my age and I imagined it was probably someone’s twenty-first. Inside the marquee, people were dancing to a discotheque, pretty standard stuff, ‘Maggie May’, ‘satisfaction’. Over to one side was a table with a man in a white tuxedo who was in charge of drinks. I held out my glass to a silver punchbowl and he ladled me out some reddish liquid with fruit in it. I lit a cigarette and stood to one side by a thin pillar wound about with paper streamers. The boys had dinner jackets, but most of them had taken them off to dance and were in white shirts with bow ties dangling. In the dim light I didn’t particularly stand out.

The boys were boisterous as boys are on summer evenings, drunk. It was indeed someone’s party and he made a speech, interrupted by his ribald friends to whom he brayed back happily, then thanking his parents with a sudden change of voice into a solemn key that must have made them gulp.

I had a few more drinks and danced a little, not something I enjoy, but there was a sort of melee and I would have stood out too much if I hadn’t jigged around a little. One of the girls, a dark-haired one in a strapless scarlet dress, smiled at me as she shook herself, like a dog emerging from water.

The boy whose birthday it was went past me, glass in hand, and said, ‘Are you enjoying yourself?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Good.’ He patted me lightly on the back. ‘You’re quite welcome here.’

I went back to the pub car park soon afterwards, disturbed. I don’t like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.

Six

Stellings has got a small first-floor flat in Arundel Gardens, Notting Hill, sandwiched between a bongo player and a junior anaesthetist. So if one makes too much noise at night he can apply to the other for relief, I pointed out. And so he does. The anaesthetist, who lives above, is a party man with an uncarpeted floor; the bongo player below, who bongoes only for an hour each day at noon, has an Alan Greening-like pharmacopoeia. If all else fails, Stellings puts on headphones and listens to Abba, by whom he has become obsessed. He goes on about ‘Phil Spector wall-of-sound production’ and ‘lesbian Beach Boy harmonies’.

The street’s a bit run-down and Stellings’s flat’s only a few yards off the smoky throughway of Ladbroke Grove, but he tells me Notting Hill’s the coming place, next year’s Bohemia but with bigger houses – ‘the thinking man’s Chelsea’. I suspect his father bought the flat for him. In return, Stellings has to study at the College of Law.

Me, I’ve got this room in Paddington from which I watch the toms get picked up by the men in cars. The toms are mostly girls who’ve been moved on from King’s Cross, having arrived from some grimy Northern town where the mills have closed. They have swollen purple legs and dyed hair. Their skirts are too short and too tight because although they’re starving and they give most of their money to the pimp, they’re still fat. Sometimes, on my way home from the Tube, I give them cigarettes or drugs. I don’t want what they offer in return. Imagine. That broth of germs.

For dinner, I sometimes go to the Ganges on Praed Street – small, dark, hot. Or the Bizarro, with its pasta in red sauce and its chicken in red sauce and red-and-white check tablecloths. The Concordia, further down, has better food, but you really need to be with someone or you feel conspicuous. For drinking, there’s the Victoria in Sussex Place, but it has too many motor traders, so I go to the discreet White Hart at the end of a dark mews and drink Director’s bitter. The local Unwin’s is run by a lugubrious but watchful man from Stoke. I’m careful there.

I occasionally have dinner with Stellings at the Standard Indian Restaurant in Westbourne Grove. You can eat yourself to a standstill for £2.50, though it leaves you feeling rather stunned the next day.

It’s eighteen months since we left university.

I’m not in the Foreign Office. Dr Woodrow called me in and said that in view of the attention paid to me by the police I was no longer considered a good ‘security risk’. He gave me to understand that that was particularly important in the kind of work I’d been considered for. I asked him if that was with the Secret Intelligence Service and he didn’t deny it. I felt glad to be out of it. I wouldn’t have minded being a real diplomat, an ambassador, but I didn’t want to spend the next twenty years pretending to be a visa officer while sniffing out details of Bulgarians’ sex lives so I could entrap them and blackmail them over to ‘our’ side.

As a consolation, Woodrow referred me to the university appointments board, who referred me to Gabbitas Thring, an agency that finds teaching jobs for grads with no better ideas. They in turn sent me news of junior ‘posts’ at St Dunstan’s in Croydon, or at Sycamore Trees in Guildford – which I, in turn, referred to the bin.

People drifted away after exams, many not bothering to finish the term. I went to say goodbye to Dr Townsend, my moral tutor, but he was out. I loaded up the 1100, checked the chimney and behind the toilet cistern, made sure I’d got everything and drove off.

I didn’t get a youknowwhat in the end, and nor did anyone I knew; the very few they gave seemed to go to people no one had heard of, from colleges I’d never visited.

For the first year in London, I lived mostly by dealing (I used to meet Glynn Powers when he was in from Leicester). Then one night at the Standard, Stellings introduced someone he’d met at a party who worked for some studenty magazine – mostly just lists of what’s on in the cinema, but with some reviews, interviews and conspiracy theory ‘news’ stories.

As I spooned out some lime pickle, I had a sudden idea. I volunteered my services as science correspondent.

‘Groucho’s doubly qualified,’ said Stellings, when he’d stopped choking on his poppadom. ‘Literature and science. Two cultures are nothing to him. A man for both seasons.’

The journalist, a ferrety little bloke called Wyn Douglas, looked doubtful, and muttered about trade unions.

I thought he was wondering if I was left wing enough, so I talked soothingly for a bit about Chile and asbestos poisoning. Then I paid for his chicken korma and pulao rice and mushroom-peas and two pints of lager – and for Stellings as well, in case Douglas disapproved of bribery or payola or something. (I got the money from a coat on my way to the hideous downstairs toilet.)

He said he’d ask the editor. It was true they were light on science, but really they were looking to hire more women.

I told him I’d write under a female name if that helped.

To my surprise, I had a call about a week later. They wouldn’t put me on the staff, but I was permitted to offer articles ‘on spec’. I toyed with various noms de plume. Michèle Watt. Nellie Bohr. Betty Bunsen. They went with the first one, though they misprinted it with an’s’ at the end, and so I became Michèle Watts.

It pleased me that my byline – my journalistic identity – was a misprint. Mike, Toilet, Groucho, Irish Mike, Mike (!), Prufrock, Michèle . . . I sometimes saw it as that evolutionary drawing of the crouched ape who by stages turns into an upright human. (Completely fallacious, of course, that drawing, suggesting that
Homo sapiens
descended from an orang-utan. We are not descended from him any more than a gibbon is
descended
from us. All we did was share an ancestor, at some stage, before the human and ape paths diverged. For a metre or so in the hills of the Ardèche, the rainwaters of the Rhône and Garonne are one and the same trickle, as I learned on an interminable ‘field trip’ from Chatfield. Then you can see them split, on that pebble – there,
that
one – so one rivulet heads to Marseilles and the Med, the other to Bordeaux and the Atlantic. You put your hand in and lift out some water, rearrange it: no, it’s the Med, thence Africa for you drops, after all, and you lot are off to New York City. Life, incidentally, is not like a watershed.)