Engleby (34 page)

As for the story, there was a row in some grand college about its new Master, who was thought to have been foisted on the reluctant Fellows via the vice chancellor as some sort of political favour to the prime minister.

‘Yeah, it’s a sort of Maggie’s Mafia/Trouble in Paradise piece,’ said Tony Ball over a cup of office coffee and an Embassy King. ‘Maybe twelve, fourteen hundred words. Could be a page lead. Ever been there?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I spent three—’

‘Town versus Gown. The old farts choking on their port. Our readers love this kind of thing.’

‘Couldn’t I just go and find out what happened, then write it down?’

‘We might run a trail on the front. Dreaming Spires and—’

‘Technically, I think that’s Oxf—’

‘Establishment Blues.’

‘Might it be possible to just go and—’

‘Why are you making such heavy weather of this, Mike? It’s a bloody Corridors of Power story. Bog standard. Two Bloody Cultures. Twelve hundred words by five o’clock Friday. All right?’

It was almost twelve years since I’d been there and I was not prepared for its impact on me.

I walked down from the station, past a road I’d always thought was called Tension but now revealed itself to be called Tenison Avenue. Bloody silly spelling, as I think Tony Ball might have agreed.

I checked into the University Arms hotel and looked over Parker’s Piece. In the middle was the lamp post on which was written ‘Reality Checkpoint’ – scrawled, presumably, by some tripping third-year on his way back to Emma.

We knew nothing of drugs. I wondered how many of the bright-eyed boys – their parents’ treasures, the comets of their hope – were now in Fulbourn and Park Prewett, fat and trembling on the side effects of chlorpromazine: an entire life, fifty indistinguishable years, in the airless urine wards of mental institutions because one fine May morning in the high spirits and skinny health of their twentieth year they’d taken a pill they didn’t understand, for fun.

I had an interview arranged with one of the Fellows of the college in question at three, but nothing before then, so I went for a walk.

What was I hoping to find? The core, the truth. In any city I’ve always hoped to find the essence in some square or on some street corner; then I could stop walking and searching. The Marais, the Seizième, the Bastille, Pigalle, Les Halles . . . Make up your mind, I want to say, just let one of you be It.

I walked for an hour. Garret Hostel Lane, Tennis Court Road, Free School Lane . . . One of them must hold the key. Every few yards, there were churches. Yet I’d no recollection of that. How could I have missed them all? It was early March, but cold: not sharp, eartip-frostbite cold, but grey into-the-bone sepulchral cold. Many faces I passed in Pembroke Street were crimson, raw and watery-eyed; it looked as though almost everyone was crying.

I had lunch in the Mill, at the corner table overlooking Scudamore’s Boatyard, sitting on the very bench where my closeness had irritated Jennifer and Robin. I wondered what had taken place between them at the ‘reconvened summit’ at the Free Press.

My ordered sausage and mash arrived, the single sausage coiled on top, the potato an island in a sea of gravy. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t even living in the present. I was pushing, with all my might, at the thin door into the past.

It was so flimsy, so transparent. Why couldn’t I just go through it? Christ, how much willpower would it take? I could picture my brain cells groaning with the effort. Compared to all the things we can and do achieve, how difficult can this really be? To do what we know is possible: to be in time as it truly is – non-linear.

I saw Rob lean forward at the table, his cord Wrangler jacket riding up a little, showing two or three lower vertebrae of his thin student back. I saw Jenny’s bare legs, with their sharp knees beneath a floral print skirt. I reached over and put my hand on the bench, on the same place, on the same molecules of wood that her thigh had rested on. I felt them on the skin of my hand. Please, please, let me go back . . . Dear God, is it really so much to ask?

I was on time for my interview, and the don in question, a History Fellow, was helpful. He recommended other people for me to go and see; one of them, who knew the existing Master well but had no personal interest in the matter, was in my old college.

He even telephoned this man (Lightfoot: I remembered the name) to ask if I could go and see him. ‘Yes, that’s right. He’s called Michael . . . ?’

‘Watson,’ I said.

‘Watson, yes. About five o’clock? Yes, he says that would be ideal.’

I arrived at the college half an hour early and walked briskly past the porters’ lodge. I felt like an impostor. I expected to be arrested.

I kept a lookout for anyone who might remember me. Waynflete, Woodrow. Dr Gerald Stanley. Dr Townsend (fat chance). My feet took me to the staircase where I’d first been lodged. Nothing had changed. It had the same smell of overheated concrete and lino. The students’ names were painted white on black, with some of the signwriter’s guideline horizontals still visible. I went up to my room, but when I got there, couldn’t remember whether it had been on the first or second floor.

I felt encouraged by this, as though I was not utterly the captive of a temporal malfunction, and turned to go down. A girl in a duffel coat brushed past me and let herself into what might have been my room. Co-res. Of course. Right on.

I thought she would report me, sound her rape alarm, blind me with Mace. But she appeared not to have seen me. She didn’t even register my presence.

Back in my hotel room, I got on the phone and set up some interviews. Next day, I hit the dons: I dragged the rubicund fox-hunters from their cloistered wassails, marched them at gunpoint down the corridors of Tory power and landmined the shady groves of their academe. It was Town vs Gown, all right, and, boy, was I Town.

So I told Tony Ball.

In fact, all the dons I met were dyspraxic teetotallers with beards and a variety of uncompromising regional accents, like mine. All were helpful, off the record.

By noon, the story had fallen into place. You can tell when this has happened because you stop writing. The first person you interview, you can’t move the pen fast enough, because it’s all new to you. Gradually, returns diminish. When your pen is still, and you can pause to help the interviewee out with the names of his own colleagues he’s momentarily forgotten, you’re there. The blank page is the story done.

So I set off to lunch at the Free Press, and on the way I found myself in Prospect Row, a narrow terrace. I didn’t remember this street much, but something made me stop. Had Stellings lived here one year? I had a memory of a door opening and a plain girl standing in the entrance.

The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.

I was starting to bleed.

It wasn’t me going back into the past and then reliving, doing better. It was the past that had broken through and was now enacting itself exactly as before, but doing it on me in my most reluctant present.

There was a small old-fashioned grocer’s shop, John Cook & Bros, with a pyramid of baked-bean tins in the windows. I found I was back not to my student days but to my childhood when England was full of such places, in every high street, grocers with slightly different specialities, this one for cooked ham, that one for dry goods. From the shop there stepped out a man in a white apron with shiny hair and – I blinked and checked, and it was true – a centre parting. He might have been Edwardian.

I moved on rapidly, abandoning the idea of going to the Free Press. I hoped to clear my mind by walking fast: Parkside, then Drummer Street and the bus station where I’d once seen off Julie when she’d been to visit me. I cut right, up Milton’s Walk, and emerged in King Street.

I paused. There was famously a choice of eight pubs in King Street. I picked the nearest one and drank two large whiskies, quickly. Then another.

It was important not to become too drunk. In order to open up the past, go back, relive and do better, one needed to be relatively sober.

I walked a short way and stood at the foot of Malcolm Street, where the press photographers had been coralled into their metal cage for the start of Jen’s Last Walk.

It was unchanged. I could see how the unexpected width of it where it met King Street had made an ideal base for the police.

Once more, I saw Peck talking confidentially to his lapel, raising his hand to a distant colleague on Jesus Lane.

I saw DC Cannon, all gingery self-importance, holding his arms out to the throng to keep them back.

Little WPC Kettle in her funny hat and plump black calves was walking up to the door from which Hannah, as Jennifer, would emerge.

With my eyes shut, I saw the evening mist, I felt the Fen cold, I smelled the smoke of student No. 6.

I pressed with all my mind’s imagining force against the transparent portal of time.

As I stood with my eyes closed in the afternoon, the door gave way and I was through . . .

But it wasn’t that night, the night of Jen’s Last Walk, the reconstruction, that came back to me.

It was a night exactly two weeks before, at exactly the same hour. For the first time since the day itself I seemed to have a clear picture of what had happened. I don’t know if it was a memory of fact; but it was certainly a coherent version of events.

I had parked the Morris 1100 – where else – on Park Street, opposite the ADC theatre. Having left the party, I got in and drove quietly round the corner into Jesus Lane, pulling over near a fine Georgian or perhaps Queen Anne building on the left, at the head of Malcolm Street. I turned off the lights, killed the engine and waited.

Occasional students – alone, in chatting twos and threes – drifted up onto Jesus Lane, laughing, separating, going home. The majority went the other way, left, from the party house, down towards King Street, the greater number of colleges lying in that direction.

Eventually, I saw a blonde head behind a cloud of vaporous breath, moving smartly towards me. I fired the engine, turned on the lights. She watched and waited, to see if it was safe to cross in front of me or if I was about to move off. Unsure, she stayed on the right-hand side of Jesus Lane and headed east.

She was opposite the main gate to Jesus, alongside yet another church, when I drew level and called out across the road through my rolled-down window.

‘Jennifer. It’s Mike. Can I give you a lift?’

She peered over the misty street, her eyes narrowing.

‘Who? Oh, Mike. Yes.’

She hesitated.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘It’s on my way. It looks freezing out there.’

She smiled in the light of the street lamp. I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking: it would look rude to say no. I’m quite happy to walk, but it would look as though I was snubbing Mike.

Turning her head to see if there were any other cars coming, she crossed the road, went round and climbed into the passenger seat next to me.

She closed the door with a bang. The car was filled with her scent and her clothes and her hair and the visible cloud of her wine and cigarettes and the breath of her living.

‘This is very kind of you, Mike. Are you sure it’s not out of your way?’ And her voice: contralto, as though suppressing laughter.

‘No, really. I’ve got to drop an essay off for my supervisor in De Freville Avenue.’

‘That’s just round the corner from us.’

‘I know. I was meant to hand it in today. I thought if I stuck it through his letter box he wouldn’t know what time it’d actually got there.’

Jennifer laughed as we swung up Victoria Avenue. ‘What a treat,’ she said. ‘A real car, with heating. I normally bicycle, but some bastard nicked my bike from outside Emma.’

‘Bastard.’

‘I’m getting a new one tomorrow. My dad’s coughed up.’

‘Brilliant.’

I couldn’t believe how fast the journey had gone. I drove as slowly as I could but we were already almost there. We went past the Fort St George to the right, the boathouses to the left, onto the bridge and all too soon we were at the junction with Chesterton Road. I had her all to myself. It was the best two minutes of my life.

Then Jennifer began to search in her bag, presumably for her front-door key. Although we were not yet in her street, she obviously didn’t want to linger in the car, outside her house, while she looked for it. She wanted to be ready to leap out. I found this irritating.

Then . . . And then I had no further memory – if memory is what it was.

The recollection – no, I can’t call it that – the narrative, the sequence of events that had come into my mind, was all quite clear up to the point we crossed the Cam. I could play it and replay it and it never varied. I remembered every word she said, the inflection of her voice, the super-friendly relaxation with which she overlaid her slight anxiety.

But at the moment the front wheels of the 1100 were north of the water – nothing.

I opened my eyes. It was two o’clock in the afternoon on King Street; the taste of Bell’s whisky was in my mouth. The present was back with me in all its inescapable banality. ‘The present’. God, I hate it. It has no depth of field; no context.