Engleby (33 page)

Anyway, work here is fine, though I don’t think that in the appointment of dons to college or university positions the ability to
teach
was considered at any stage. Most v ungifted in that dept, and manifestly more into their own work than ours.

I like work, but not carried away by it, not like some people.

Am not ‘in love’ either. Don’t have boyfriend. Am rather freaked out by sex ratio imbalance. You feel quite self-conscious in lectures being one of sometimes four girls among 50 boys. Also, many of the academic girls – or women as we call ourselves – are not that glamorous, to be frank, and attract zero interest from boys – so others of us feel need to show solidarity with them rather than flirt vacuously.

Boyfriend thing is certainly one to take very slowly. Unless bolt from blue. Am romantic enough to hope a
tiny
bit for such a thing. Also realist enough to know that I couldn’t feel much happier anyhow, so to some extent: what wd be point of Prince Charming? (Listening to Miles Davis at Jazz Club last week, earnest boy from St John’s said that most touching part of ‘someday My Prince Will Come’ was ‘slight illiteracy’ of first word of title, suggesting uneducated girl in Harlem standing on tenement balcony looking wistfully over broken neighbourhood . . . Could be.)

So where’s it coming from, this feeling, this funny low euphoria? A little bit from the town, I think. I do love the dirty brick of the miniature terraces and the mist from the river and the cold mornings, even now in May. And then the sudden huge vista of a great courtyard of King’s or Trin or Queens’, when everything that’s been pinched, and puritanical and cold and grudging and sixpence-in-the-gas-meter is suddenly swept away by the power and scale of those buildings, with their towers and crenellations and squandered empty spaces, built by men who knew that they’d calculated the mechanical laws of time and distance and that there was therefore no need whatever to build small.

Also . . . What? As Dad often says, I’m a ‘lucky girl’ – by which he means I have a good ‘temperament’. By this Jane Austeny word, he means that I am ‘naturally at home in the world’ while some people are ‘all across it’. Don’t know how scientific that is, but perhaps something in it.

I think I could put it more simply. I like being 19. I wasn’t that keen on being a child because I always felt I was missing out on things; and I know I’ll be no good at all at being 35 or 40 or – God help us – 50! But 19, 20 and so on seems to me wonderful. There’s nothing ‘they’ won’t let me do, and I occasionally think there’s almost nothing I couldn’t do.

Sometimes in my cramped room am so excited when I turn the light out by prospect of coming days and weeks that I can’t sleep. Must be careful. Pride before fall, Johnny Head in Air and so on. But can’t
help
being happy and am b**ed if will pretend to fashionable gloom.

That’s my girl. Interesting how she started off with all that show-offy stude stuff – ‘teleological’, ‘Hobbesian’ etc. – but her later entries were much more about sex and drugs. You grow up fast over those years.

But as Jen’s writing got cruder, I can’t help noticing, when I look back, that my own style has poshed up a bit. ‘I miss the eruptive blue ballpointed handwriting squeezed in so tight between the red feint rules.’ ‘The expanding town of Basingstoke seethed like Laocoön within its concentric ring roads.’

Bloody hell.

I see the blue pencil of Dr Gerald Stanley making a sarcastic wavy line under those sentences . . . Actually, come to think of it, he didn’t use blue pencil or red ballpoint, but black ink indistinguishable from that used by me and three-quarters of his students. A small thing, that lack of consideration and common sense, but in fact unbelievably irritating. It looked as though you’d scrawled graffiti on your own stuff.

The reason that my style has become less cramped, more expansive is pretty obvious, I imagine.

I’m happier. It took me a long time to recognise that that was the name of this feeling – happiness. It, as they say, ‘crept up’. By this I mean that when I first acknowledged to myself that there was a fundamental change – in the way I viewed the day ahead, the way I looked at myself and my life, the mood that had become established as my default – I simultaneously admitted that the change had been in place for some time. That’s what’s meant by ‘creeping up’, I think.

Margaret and I had a party last week to celebrate our officially moving in together. It was her idea. She wanted to make some sort of ‘statement’, I think; she wanted to be respectable and show her friends that she wasn’t a discard.

I thought it was a bad idea. For a start, I’m keeping my flat in Bayswater; I’m only moving a few shirts and a toothbrush up to Holloway. Second, I thought that if husband Derek gets wind of it, he’ll stop the payments for his daughter.

I pointed this out to Margaret and it went down very badly indeed. The sincerity of my interest in her was called into question. She more or less implied that if I ended up footing the bill for someone else’s kid – so what? That’s what you did if you were ‘serious about a relationship’.

It was our first argument, but obviously a big one. I went off and thought about it for a few days (the paper had sent me to Manchester anyway). One of the things about never having any money as a child is that you really want to hang on to it when you do finally get some. I didn’t think I was particularly mean as a rule, but paying for wife-beater Derek’s kid . . . That just didn’t seem right to me.

On the other hand, I was happy with Margaret and I did like Charlotte. She reminded me of Julie at that age – obviously – though, to be brutal, she was not quite so gormless. She had a variety of friends from the local comprehensive whom I also – Christ, I must be ‘mellowing’ or something – rather liked. They tore through the flat, stripped out the fridge, took my cigarettes, misfired round the toilet, ‘borrowed’ Margaret’s videos, grabbed tins of beer and left. But I felt there was no harm in them. I admired their rush.

As for Charlotte . . . I think I liked her clothes as much as anything. The effort she put in to looking good each day: the ribbons and the torn jeans, the lace mittens, the combat gear from Lawrence Corner at the foot of Hampstead Road, the black-rimmed eyes, the puffed-out nylon skirts and coloured basketball boots . . . And she was fun to talk to, when she could be bothered. She was very forthright, swore like a hooker and was experimenting with some sort of consonant-free London dialect. I went for her in quite a big way.

So I said yes to Margaret: yes, I’d take the consequences of a move and yes, let’s have a party. We cleared most of the stuff out of the living room into Charlotte’s bedroom and set up the record player. Margaret bought food from the large supermarket near Highbury Corner and got to work: sausages, paté, French bread, stodgy stuff to soak up the cases of Spanish wine I got from Oddbins.

Margaret asked about fifty people, many from the office. Tony Bollock, of course; the woman’s page staff en masse; her sister Brenda and her obese husband from Little Chalfont. Lots of people I knew by sight from various pubs and bars in Fleet Street.

We had invitations printed with some embarrassing words devised by Margaret. Something about ‘shared life’ or ‘new beginning’. I honestly forget.

I invited a few people from my old mag: Jan, Wyn Douglas, Bob Nixon the crime reporter; Shireen Nazawi, the EFL-speaking interviewer. I thought about asking Stellings and Clarissa, but I knew they’d hate it.

Then I wrote off to some of the friends I’d made through interviewing. Naim Attallah, for instance. (I did find out who he was in the end. He was a Palestinian steeplejack who’d chanced into a jewellery business called Asprey, then bought a run-down publishing house.) He wasn’t free to come, but he sent a card and a gift voucher to Margaret from his shop for £100.

I really wanted to ask Ralph Richardson, but alas he had died. In 1983, I think it was. I remember hearing the news on the radio while I was in the bath. At the time we met, he was pretty much the first person who’d spoken to me in a month.

I asked Ken Livingstone, but he didn’t reply; he must get a hell of a lot of invites. Of course I asked Jeffrey Archer. And not only did he come, he also brought a magnum of champagne and made a short speech in our honour. I recognised one of the jokes from a Foyle’s lunch, but he’d worked on the delivery since then.

The whole thing was more than just the usual pub bores on free booze and a change of venue. It felt like an event and it went on till three in the morning.

It certainly felt like an event when I was woken at seven by one of Charlotte’s friends blundering in. Margaret brought me aspirin and tea in bed. (I’m very much in her good books now.)

I had an uneasy feeling when I read the
Daily Telegraph
, though. Police in Fulham had discovered the badly decomposed body (well, skeleton, I imagine, really) of a woman in a ditch by a District Line railway cutting where the Tube goes overground somewhere in the West Brompton area. They think the body may be as much as eight years old, but they have established that it is that of a missing 29-year-old German called Gudrun Abendroth. She worked in the A&R department of a Frankfurt record company, but had at the time of her disappearance been lodging in London, in Tournay Road, SW6.

Although the photograph was blurred, there was something in her face that looked familiar.

I was, mercifully, too hungover to be able to place it and too busy to brood on it.

Nine

One of our Victorian Linotype machines broke down last week and we urgently needed a new part before Saturday. They eventually found what they needed in a printing museum in Burnley and bribed the curator to let them have it for a week or two while we looked for an iron foundry to cast a replacement.

There’s a secret room on the top floor where they keep half a dozen examples of a machine called a Tandy. These are small electric typewriters which, instead of paper, have a screen where you can read back what you’ve written; they also, amazingly, have a jack you can stick in a phone socket. Press ‘Go’ and the machine then transmits what you’ve written down the line into a computer in the office, from which it can be retrieved, messed up by the sub-editors, and printed.

We’re not officially allowed to use a Tandy, because if they found out what we were doing, the union of upmakers, stonehands and Luddites would shut the paper for good. Steven Stringer, a foreign-desk sub, once changed the light bulb on his desk lamp and we lost that Sunday’s paper in the resulting wildcat strike. It was a job for a member of the relevant union – Cosanostra or Natsopa – and the senior light-bulb changer is paid £75,000 a year, which is £2,500 more than the editor of the newspaper.

I know one of the compositors quite well. Terry, he’s called. We’ve been to Upton Park a couple of times to see the Hammers. You’d think he’d be working on a Saturday, what with it being a Sunday paper. Sixty of them are paid, but only forty exist and only twenty need to turn up. Terry, being a senior guy, also gets one of the twenty ‘ghost’ pay packets, which he takes under the name of Billy Bonds, the West Ham captain. So he’s paid double. For not turning up. And they’re on double time anyway, because it’s a weekend – even though it’s the only day of the week a Sunday printer works, and it was always, by definition, going to be on a Saturday. So he’s actually paid quadruple. The meat pies and the programmes and the Carling at the Boleyn Ground are therefore on him. He can’t believe how little I’m paid (£26,800); he won’t let me buy anything. He puts his big soft hand over mine when I go to get my wallet out and says, ‘You’re’avin’ a laugh, Mick. On your wages?’

We have to get back sharpish to Fleet Street after the game, because that’s when Terry makes his real money.

As the bundles of printed newspapers come out on the conveyor belts, a fair number go into unmarked vans belonging to Terry and his brother-in-law Ray. These then go off to a depot on the Essex marshes where they’re put in smaller vans and delivered to newsagents. Ray is a builder, but also draws a wage from my paper as a compositor – under the name of Trevor Brooking.

Terry becomes quite anxious at this time of day on a Saturday and I tend to leave him to it. He invited me to ‘sunday dinner’ once at his home near Epping. I calculate that he must be earning £120,000 a year from the paper alone, but his house, though well equipped, wasn’t much bigger than our place in Trafalgar Terrace. ‘You gotta be a bit discreet, Mick,’ he said. ‘People don’t don’t want you to wave it under their noses. Bloke opposite, see that little’ouse there,’e’s a barristers’ clerk. Same difference.’ After lunch, Terry drew the curtains and showed me some slides of his place in Spain, with its underground car ports, heated pool and uniformed staff of four. He has them wear the old claret and blue, though I don’t think they have any idea that it’s the West Ham strip; they think it’s the eccentricity of the English milord. ‘’Ere, Mick, this one, she’s called Manuela or some bloody silly name. Looks a bit like Ronnie Boyce, don’t you fink?’

In fact, I do secretly use a Tandy on some stories. Like last week, when I had to go back to my old university. Tony Ball sent me off to the top floor to be inducted into the secrets of the machine. I had to carry it home in a Tesco bag so as not to excite suspicion and was warned never to bring it within a mile of Fleet Street. If it broke, I was just to chuck it away.