Semi-Detached (19 page)

But
would it be possible to meet them off duty? Ten years after I left the school,
I appeared in a
play in the West End. A stage doorman rang down to tell
me that Jeffers, a
school friend, had ‘come round’. Jeffers came in and
explained that he had been away, worked in the Far East and now, after some sort
of failed marriage, had come back to England. He had been walking down
Shaftesbury Avenue and seen my name up in lights. This was eerily ‘Somerset
Maugham’. We had hardly been close. And I behaved like most busy people in a
short story confronted with a
school chum. I fobbed him off by
smiling weakly. He seemed content but, as he was leaving, told me he was
thinking of looking up Jim Rennie, our economic history teacher.

Rennie
had been an enigma. In our early years at the school he was best avoided, striding
into assembly at
speed and handing out punishments to anybody who caught
his eye. (‘Proverbs, chapter one, by tomorrow morning.’)

Then he
took me for history. I told Jeffers how I remembered I had been late for the
first day of his first sixth-form set. When I apologized frantically Rennie
laughed at me. ‘We’re in the sixth form now,’ he said. ‘We can behave like
gentlemen, I think.’ He explained that when he had first worked at
the
school some time in the 1920s, he couldn’t keep discipline, so he had decided
to spare no one below the age of fifteen, but for us, now we were in the sixth
form we would be adults together.

Jeffers
agreed. He had been tolerant, wise and funny. He made us write a
list of
useful sayings in the front of our folders. ‘Life is real, life is earnest and
the goal is not the grave,’ and ‘Me and my dog got lost in a fog.’

‘Do you
know where he lives?’ I asked Jeffers. I began to see that he was a lot more
interested in tracking down this surrogate father figure than he was in meeting
me.

‘No,
but it must be up near Penrith. I can ask at the school.’

Rennie
had come from Cumbria. He had dressed in what I now realize were rather
beautiful tweed suits, like a Penrith solicitor. Penrith had been the source of
all wisdom, and it made sense that he would have gone back there. I wished
Jeffers luck, told him to call again if he wanted to get back together.

I didn’t
see Jeffers for another ten years. I was appearing at the Apollo in Oxford. The
stage-door keeper called down again. In a few moments Jeffers was sitting in my
dressing room. ‘You remember when I saw you last,’ he began. I nodded. I did. ‘Well,
I didn’t get back in touch because I decided to go to France.’ He paused and
looked distant. ‘But … well, things haven’t worked out over there and I’ve
just come back and I was in Oxford and I saw your name …’

It was
up in lights again.

‘You’re
still in the same line of business, then?’

We
talked for a
bit about mutual friends that neither of us had seen, and
after a while he got up to leave. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said in the doorway, ‘I
tracked down old Rennie. He was in Penrith. Rather lovely cottage. I went to
his door and knocked. He was perfectly nice, but …’ his brow darkened. I had
never seen this before, but it was quite a neat trick. ‘… but … he didn’t
remember me.’ Jeffers looked depressed.

‘Well,
I suppose he must have had hundreds of pupils in his time.’

‘That’s
what he said, but I said to him, you know, I was in your set for two years. Two
years, five times a week. He must have remembered me.’

Nothing
I said convinced Jeffers that Jim Rennie wasn’t engaging in some schoolmasterly
subterfuge. He shook his head and went off into the night and for all I know to
Zanzibar. I suppose I will meet him again in another ten years, backstage at
the Oldham Coliseum when I’m touring
The Odd Couple.

On the
last day of school ever, some of us went for a lunchtime drink with Roger
Perrin, who taught medieval history. He was another great teacher, who deported
himself like a
big-game hunter loping around after some comical prey. We
were his first set. His lips would twitch with amusement at the experiments of
Frederick II or the Chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth. It was rare at
that
stage to allow any intimacy. It was rare for teachers to even admit that
they drank beer. But this was the end of the seventh form. We were leaving with
Oxbridge success. Just those few pints of beer in the back room of a
pub
seemed the culmination of a
steady progression towards the outside
world, like one of those scenes from a
madhouse movie where the inmate
is taken to a
restaurant and shown a menu. ‘Go on, you can have anything
you want.’

I kept
in touch with Roger. He seemed an exception —able to free himself from the
conspiracy of ‘them and us’, perhaps because he had been young himself when he
taught me. He laughed about Mr Gilbert. He told me that the headmaster, Sale,
a man Roger admired, had tried repeatedly to sack Bilge but he had been
thwarted by the teacher’s unions. It was a telling moment, like being allowed a
glimpse behind the scenes.

Spud
Baron sort of remembered me too. I had hoped he would. Again, I was in a
show,
with my name up in hardboard. The stage-door keeper rang me. ‘Do you know a
Major Baron?’

I
cringed slightly. This was too dad-like. I remembered that he sometimes adopted
his military rank at ticket offices and in theatres.

But I
braced myself for affection. We were off duty. I assumed that he would greet me
and reminisce fondly, that he would drop his pretensions, have a
laugh
and we would talk as veterans. I was making Jeffers’ mistake. He never even
took his hat off. He sat
with his coat on his lap and hit the chair with
commentary, analysing my performance in perfectly complimentary tones, but
remote and smiling, no different in his manner from the classroom ten or so
years before. Can you believe that I wanted to take this short, aged, pompous
bachelor in my arms, acknowledge him on behalf of us all as the figure that he
had been to me and so many of my friends in those years? I wanted, somehow, to repay
the affection that he seemed to have squandered on us.

I wish
I had. As it was, I sat
there with a
helpless smile on my face,
utterly unable to get a word in edgeways, shook his hand when he finished and
let him bustle off. He’s dead now.

That
last day. though, had also been my last trip on the 339. There was a girl who
had split up with her long-term boy friend some weeks before. She was gorgeous.
She was intelligent. She was highly experienced. I had arranged to take her out
in London. This was irresponsibly mature. I would have to talk to her all
evening without other boys as props. But whatever happened I had to get back to
Epping, get changed into my loon pants and tie-dye vest, back-comb my hair and
then take the tube to meet her in Piccadilly. It was a three-hour commitment. I
needed to be on the two-fifteen bus. So I had to swig down a last half pint and
run for the damned 339, though even as I climbed aboard, I noticed that I
wanted to pee.

By the
time we got to North Weald on that trip — the last journey I was to take on
this route before I sat
on it now — I was the colour of a
five-week-old
corpse. Sweat was pouring down my brow Alone on the top of the bus, I writhed
in agony. By the time I got to Ongar, I had been in excruciating pain, my
bladder begging for release. As we crept through the bare countryside I nearly
fainted away. North Weald was as long as it is now; an endless parade of
rubbishy villas and nondescript airforce houses. The bus had never lumbered so
laboriously. It stopped at least four times. There was no way I could urinate
out of the window I couldn’t surreptitiously piss down the central aisle. As
the 339 swayed ponderously past the Battle of Britain airfield and approached
the edge of Epping Forest I could stand it no longer. I was within ten minutes
of home. I had waited for two years, pining after Helen. Here at last was a
legitimate toehold on her favours. I was within shouting distance of a
hand
up her bra. But it was no good. I was going to die. I rang the request stop
bell, leaped past the startled bus conductor and charged across the road into
the forest of ancient oaks. I stood there swathed in clouds of steamy relief. I
had had to go. That last journey had defeated me.

8. Weekend Hippy

My relief in Epping Forest
left me in a
state of ecstatic bliss. I was close enough to town to
hitch in and get the Central Line to meet the lovely Helen too. But it didn’t
work out. It may have been my stream of offbeat chatter which became a fire
hydrant and drowned her. It may have been the entertainment. Leafing through
Time
Out,
I chose the most pretentious film I could find. (She was after all
doing history and English A levels just like me.)
Time Out
failed to
mention that
WR: The Mysteries of the Organism
was borderline pornography.
As the lights went down, some respite from my jabber was provided by six naked
people breaking eggs over their thighs in an Orgasmatron. She was mature enough
to cope with it. I wasn’t. What if she thought I had taken her to this
deliberately? I started whispering my anguish from about five minutes in. (She
may have wanted to continue the relationship. Who knows? I never gave her a
chance to get a word in edgeways.)

Passion
had surfaced with astonishing virulence around the age of fifteen. Girls, who
had been avoided, swept into the schoolboy consciousness much like Airfix kits
five years previously. One minute we had been happily indifferent to their
existence and the next minute they were an all-consuming obsession.

At the
beginning of the sixth form, newly kitted out in blazers and flannels to
differentiate ourselves from the hairy-suited lower forms, divided into sets
instead of classes and tentatively discovering each other’s Christian name, a
group gathered in ‘six thirty-two’ every lunchtime and break. The
headmaster directly referred to the ‘unpleasant sound of cliquish laughter
emanating from one of the classrooms in the new block’. There were other
sixth-form gangs: better-heeled smoothies who seemed to have money and the
demeanour of a
junior sales team, or geeky chaps who hung around the
library to do crosswords, but we were the ones who felt most pleased with our
own company. ‘The Clique’ — Gotley, Macey, Tompsett, Squire, Roberts, Holloway,
Jimpson, Jaques and the rest — shared a
considerable passion for ‘progressive
music’, animated discussion about the existence of God (a
number
discovered Christ along with deodorants) and meeting girls. Tantalizingly there
were two girls’ schools within a condom’s throw of our school. And in the very
earliest days of the term it was announced that there were going to be ballroom
dancing classes.

The
first lesson had an explosive erotic charge heightened by a
strong smell
of floor polish. A veritable rack of girls, in dark uniform short skirts, knees
together, trembling with anticipation, were lined up in front of us in the
Memorial Hall. The portraits of a dozen ex-headmasters looked on helplessly as
‘madame’ flounced down the centre of the Memorial Hall, clapped her hands and announced,
‘Now, boys, step forward and choose a partner.’

There
was an undignified scuttle towards Louise, who had the shortest skirt. ‘Come
on. Come on!’ She clapped again. I offered a
hand to my sixth-form
feminine ideal. Janet was blonde, with a fringe and a
snub nose. She was
also an identical twin.

In the
1980s, when I directed a
production of
Twelfth Night,
itself
about identical twins, I felt I needed to get the cast to search out their
memories of infatuated love. ‘It’s what this play is about,’ I explained. ‘You
remember: sitting in class, unable to concentrate, mooning after that girl you
took to the disco.’

Orsino,
Viola and Olivia stared blankly at me.

‘You
know, you do … you must have done this: when you couldn’t bring yourself to
telephone; when you wrote her name in your exercise book. When you got like
Donne, and you just glued eyes together.’

They
exchanged looks. ‘No,’ said Viola. ‘No, I’ve never felt anything like that.’

The
others shrugged in agreement. (In the end, it wasn’t a
hugely successful
production.) But I was mystified. I fell in love all over the shop in the lower
sixth. We all did: silly schoolboy love, with yearning and sleepless nights and
that fluttering feeling in the thorax when you’re thinking about
her in
class.

‘Are you
with us, Rhys Jones?’

‘Yes,
sir. Sorry, sir.’

After
the first few dances, treading on her toes enough to get. myself noticed, and
after a
bit of pairing off with a few others, just to check them out,
Janet and I became regular dance-partners. It was a particularly clammy-handed
moment when the tables were turned. (‘Now, girls! You choose.’) But Janet
walked across the parquet and asked me for the first foxtrot.

My
friend Fischl took up with Janet’s identical twin sister, Clare, which was
handy. because I reckoned I might need someone to talk to. Clare looked
startlingly similar to Janet. (They were both in school uniform, but even in
the little details that girls fiddled with, such as the length of their skirts
and the way they tied their ties, they were of a
piece.)