Engleby (3 page)

Who are these people? I ask myself. Who on earth are they? I carry golf clubs in the boot of the car and sometimes stop and play a few holes when I see a course. Usually, the club secretary is unfriendly and the green fee is expensive.

. . . And now, back live, we have special guests Split Infinitive. No one can hear themselves talk. I see Jennifer crane up to Nick, who bends his head to bellow in her ear, but she pulls away and smiles and shakes her head to say she still hasn’t caught what he had to say, and he shrugs, as though to say it wasn’t much anyway, which I can believe. Molly, Dave, Julia and several other people I don’t know are dancing. When I try to move over to the bar to get another drink, I find my shoes have stuck. The rubber of the soles makes a sound like tearing paper as it pulls away from the soaked floor. The air smells of beer and sweat and No. 6.

It’s cold outside where people in unironed tee shirts go to cool off and find the moisture dry on their faces. The breeze comes through the funnelling passage and makes your chest ache. Folk Club. It’s the best night of the week.

I went to a meeting of Jen Soc the other day. It was in Jesus, where I’ve never been before. There were queues to see a play called
The Crucible
. I think the charter of every college obliges it once a year to stage either
The Crucible, The Threepenny Opera
, or
The Good Person of Szechwan. The Crucible
’s about a group of American Puritans called Goody this and Goody that; it has self-righteousness and modern parallels. Students like it because it makes them feel enfranchised.

Jesus is unforgiving. Lose your bearings as you come in, and you’re in trouble. Other colleges follow a pattern: a wooden door within a larger gate off the pavement by the street. But Jesus is unique; it’s more like going to a school set in its own grounds. Next to one of the games pitches is a half-timbered pavilion.

By the time I found the room in a creeper-covered courtyard such as Billy Bunter might have lived in, the meeting was under way. I crept in to see a vote being taken on what our line was on Allende’s Chile, whether we should vote aid to Nicaragua, if the sub should go up to fifty pence a time and if so whether this should include wine or only, as now, coffee and biscuits. I was for wine, perhaps from Chile, but didn’t think I should say so at my first meeting, especially since on the way I’d drunk two pints of Abbot’s Ale at the Footballers to wash down the blue ten-milligram pill I take each evening. Then there was the question of the summer outing and where this should go. Managua, it seemed, was out of the question, but Paris was a possibility. Several boys complained that they didn’t have enough money; they did this in such a way as to make Jennifer (who’d suggested Paris) sound like Marie Antoinette. The word ‘working class’ was used by one, of himself, and caused a warm ripple; I sensed at least two of the girls edge in their seats towards the boy who wouldn’t go to Paris.

After the meeting we hung around and talked and worked through the coffee and the biscuits. Jennifer remained relaxed and indiscriminately friendly, despite the Paris thing. I wondered what her room was like. What was her life like? Lymington High School. Did her parents still live there? Where exactly was Lymington? She was wearing new flared jeans over leather boots and a grey polo neck in what might have been cashmere. In fact, it wasn’t quite a polo neck; the collar fell away at the front, as part of the design, like a small hood in reverse. I don’t know what that’s called; but it showed the skin of her throat, which was slightly flushed. Her hair was fair and wavy, but quite fine; when she pushed it back behind her ear on one side I saw a couple of small moles beneath her ear, just above the grey cashmere. She was gathering papers into her bag and saying goodbye to people; her bag was of dark tan leather with a suggestion of the cartridge belt or Sam Browne.

Sometimes I imagine what it must be like to be in a young women’s college. This is what I think it could be like:

It’s teatime on Friday in November. Mist is coming off the river and is drifting up towards the Victorian buildings where the girl students live, a short distance out of town. The road is lit by the lamps of bicycles; cars pass at their peril, slowly, because the pedalling girls, some frizzy and stout, some slight and eager, the girls with their lights front and rear, are the queens of the highway.

In the college, the kettle’s on and the curtains are drawn since there’s no daylight left in the Fens. East of the town, there are no hills until you come to the Urals, so they say, which explains why it’s so cold, because there’s nothing to stop the wind from the Russian steppe. This is one of those things they tell you when you first arrive, and you’re meant to pass it on or tell your family about it in a letter. It’s like a shibboleth or password, to show you’re local now.

Back from games, the girls are flushed; their faces are red from the Ural wind. Red Russian wind from communist mountains, from the giant Soviet factories. Some girls are returning on foot from town, where they’ve been to the University Library or to the shops. Jennifer is running down the corridor, lively with the sense of her good fortune. Her friend Anne’s a Northern girl, dark. They’re having tea now in Anne’s room, which has a gas ring. Molly comes in with cake she bought in town: a sponge cake with cherries. They sit on chairs and floors and beds. There isn’t much room, but there’s always music on Anne’s cheap record player at this time of day: a balladeer, a minstrel, shock-haired with a guitar – afternoon songs for girls in jeans with coloured silk scarves knotted or held with silver woggles from Morocco. They wear little make-up; Anne has small round glasses. Cat Stevens is the singer. It’s said the
Jewish Chronicle
had an article wondering if his real name was Steven Katz. He
looks
quite Jewish; he could be.

They ought to work, but they have to go to dinner in the dining hall at six-thirty and by the time they’ve finished tea it won’t seem worth opening books for half an hour. So they talk instead. Jennifer’s reading Carlos Castaneda, Anne has
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
hidden under a pillow. Anyway, they’ve already been to lectures today in History, Physics and Anthropology, and to supervisions with a don. They talk and talk over the music. Molly’s family is from Portsmouth. She talks of her boyfriend and whether he’ll come to visit; her breath is warm with tea and cherries. Will he at least come to the summer ball? The other two are sympathetic. Boys are difficult to understand, in their opinion. They’re like stage flats: colourful, exciting. Flat.

Jennifer has enough friends in her girls’ college not to mind about boyfriends. Anne sometimes tries to make her more interested in them because she finds Jennifer’s detachment unconvincing. She doesn’t want to admit how much she herself thinks about men, or more particularly, a man,
the
man – a being as yet so incompletely imagined that all aspects are provisional, except one: he’s male.

There are noises in the corridor. Laughter, crockery, music suddenly through an open door, which is then banged shut.

The lives of these young women make a sort of harmony. Their goodwill towards one another sets a tone in which intimacy can flourish; they’re happy.

Dinner bell rings. Lights fade . . .

That’s what I think it might be like, but I don’t really know.

Perhaps all that mist and goodwill, that music and cake . . . It’s just
sentimental
.

The truth is probably more like this:

Anne, Molly and Jennifer are, like all women, weirdly obsessed by appearances – looks, colours, fashion, surfaces; they have no interest in ideas or deeper truths, only ‘style’ and status and the rapacious purchase of goods to underline them. Their cordiality conceals a sense of bitter rivalry that they’ll carry to their deaths, without ever acknowledging it. Anne and Jennifer pretend to care about Barry or Gary or whatever Molly’s boyfriend is called, but what they’re really both intent on is finding a richer, handsomer and better man of their own.

They have no genuine interest in one another, because they are beings who live close to the ground. For all the lecture notes they’ve taken today, they’re really machines for surviving in the competition for resources. Carrying the species in their wombs, they have to be.

Maybe that’s a little too much the other way, a bit severe. I wonder if we can ever know what it’s like to be someone else. I doubt whether even Jennifer or Molly or Anne
really
know what it’s like to be themselves. They probably take the crucial things for granted – because they’ve never known what it’s like not to have them. What they talk about, or try to change, or think of as being important, are really trivial things, I expect. They’re like a cat who wonders about its tail or eyes without knowing that the really distinctive thing about it is that it’s feline.

I don’t imagine they can help that. They can’t see it any more than I can see what’s peculiar about me. One thing I feel reasonably certain about, however, is this: that these girls are better adapted than we are. They have balance; they have a flair for living.

Most nights, I go out alone. There’s this hotel called the Bradford where the barman’s a transvestite. I quite often look in there for a drink. Come to think of it, the barman in the Waterfall is also a transvestite; at least, he has a wig and make-up, though he does wear men’s trousers. No one seems to comment on the fact that the barmaid in the Bradford is obviously a man, but I quite like it. There are a lot of pubs in this city. There’s a tiny one called the Footballers just near the one I mentioned before, where I go for dinner. In the Footballers, the landlord sleeps on the floor behind the bar all afternoon and you have to wake him up at six o’clock when he’s meant to reopen. His dog does a trick with bottle tops.

After the Bradford, I usually go to the Kestrel, where American aircrews burned their names into the ceiling while they were stationed nearby in the War. There are too many alcoholics in the Kestrel for my taste. What is an alcoholic? Someone who’ll steal money from his only friend to buy a drink because the drink is more important and he’d rather lose the friend. I can’t admire that.

A pair of goofy scientists came swaggering into the Kestrel at lunchtime one day many years ago to say that – just an hour earlier – they’d figured out the shape of human chemistry, of the molecule itself. I don’t think the boozers in the Kestrel were impressed. I don’t think this discovery was an answer to any of the top one hundred questions the Kestrel regulars would have liked an answer to – even if you allow for the fact that numbers one to fifteen were probably ‘Whose round is it?’

That’s part of the trouble with science. It doesn’t always help. I don’t find it useful to know that particles may appear in different places without having travelled the distance in between. I don’t find it enlightening that the only truthful way of thinking of Herr Schrödinger’s cat is as being simultaneously alive and dead. In fact, I don’t believe it is the only truthful way of thinking of it. It may be the only logical way of thinking of it, but that’s a different matter, isn’t it? The real problem, though, is that I don’t recall asking after the welfare of his cat in the first place.

‘Here, this’ll interest you . . .’ I used to dread what was to come when someone said that to me as a child. Or worse still, ‘Have I told you my cat story?’ ‘Do you have a dog story?’ I felt like countering. Or rather, ‘I’ll tell you what
would
interest me. Then you tell me if you have anything in that line.’

Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years; they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your feet . . . A vole. It’s a remarkable thing in its way, a vole – intricate, beautiful really, marvellous. But does it . . . Does it help? Does it move the matter on?

When you ask a question that you’d actually like to know the answer to – what was there before the Big Bang, for instance, or what lies beyond the expanding universe, why does life have this inbuilt absurdity, this non sequitur of death – they say that your question can’t be answered, because the terms in which you’ve put it are logically unsound. What you must do, you see, is ask vole questions. Vole is – as we have agreed – the answer; so it follows that your questions
must therefore all be vole-related
.

After the Kestrel, I sometimes drive out to one of the villages, it doesn’t matter which one or what it’s called – it might be Great, Little, Much or Long Standing. I listen to the car radio, which has been adapted by a garage to take audio cassettes, and I put the music up loud and think of Julie, my younger sister. She’s keen on music, though of course we don’t like the same things because she’s only twelve. T. Rex, she likes. ‘She’s faster than most,/And she lives on the coast.’ Get away, Jules. When she was very small, we used to put the record player on and make her dance. She used to like that. She wasn’t much good at dancing, she just used to jump from one foot to the other in a short dress and you could see a big bulge of nappy under her navy blue woollen tights; but she had this look on her face, as though she was surprised at her good fortune in being alive at all.