Semi-Detached (34 page)

Eventually
I was to end up president of the ADC, and vice-president of Footlights too. I
became obsessed with running committees, organizing meetings and directing
plays, allowing time for a little acting on the side. I returned to my college
late at night, too late to see if Charles Lambert was still up, or any of my
college friends were hanging about in the JCR. I was hurrying on.

For the
time being, at the beginning of my second year I decided to put on
The Dream
Play,
Ingmar Bergman’s version of Strindberg’s rambling answer to
Peer
Gynt.
It was my duty to direct it. At the beginning of term, I held auditions
in a room in Emmanuel above the old hall, and for the first time, in 1975,
encountered the divine Charlotte Chesney.

It was
a long room with a slightly twisted floor. Two girls came in together. I wonder
if the distance contributed, because I can remember I had the leisure to assess
their calf-length tweedy skirts, their striped red and blue tights and their
startling manner. I would have been with Lawrence Temple, of course, who was
going to teach me about lights and staging and all the other skills that I felt
it unnecessary to learn before pushing myself forward to be in charge. He was a
London day school boy He must have known Charlotte and her friend Cassandra
already They were London day-school girls, in their first term, and despite
being convulsed with laughter (bold enough in itself) they seemed to me to have
at least two coats of sophistication that my suburban friends in college rather
lacked.

Charlotte
in particular had a strong, giggling voice which I found exciting for its
unabashed poshness. Medium height, dark hair and a snorting upper-class manner
— it was very sexy. They both wanted me to give them a part, which would mean
that I would be required to boss them around a bit. Yes. Well, I was up for
that.

There
weren’t all that many women around in Cambridge in 1973. All colleges were
single-sex. Girton, New Hall and Newnham were admittedly a single female sex
but they were deliberately situated a little out of town. Meeting women
involved a series of chivalric challenges — social braggadocio, followed by
acts of physical bravura. There were college bars (Caius springs to mind)
dominated by men from single-sex schools huddling in knots, clutching comfort
pints and swaying slightly as they cast agitated glances at the three per cent
of females lured into the place, but it was a bold move to cross the borderline
under these circumstances. Nonetheless I managed the romantic challenge of
chatting up a trainee nurse. That was the braggadocio. She invited me back to
the nursing home for the physical bravura. She took me round the back of the
building and showed me the twelve-foot wall and then disappeared to use the
front entrance. I scrabbled up, sprained an ankle, limped across a darkened lawn
and waited in the shadows of a fire door, before finally getting to share her
narrow bed.

It was
the sleeplessness of these arrangements that bothered me. There had been a
couple of perfectly nice, wispy girls, studying at the technical college, who
had made the mistake of acting on an invitation from a friend to visit him in
his rooms. Six or seven wild-eyed youths mobbed them in a tiny bed-sit,
laughing rather too loudly, smoking Number Sixes and passing a guitar around to
pluck the opening chords of songs they didn’t know how to finish. Gradually, by
a process of elimination, they dropped out to go to their own beds. The
engineers would have gone first with their early start, the English
undergraduates last, and after a raid at about four in the morning to steal
biscuits from a food cupboard on the other side of the college, a relationship
formed on the basis of utter exhaustion.

With Janis,
the exhaustion never stopped. She was such a tall girl. If I clambered into her
bed on the floor of the room she shared on the other side of Castle Hill, then
we had a sleepless night trying not to wake her room mate. If she came back to
Emmanuel it was usually a late decision, because, with some justification, she
remained uncertain of the extent of my commitment until we had both drunk
rather too much to cope. She had to climb over the gate into the back of the
college in a long printed cotton skirt and fell on top of me. In the morning
she went to classes. I had to stay in bed until noon.

I wrote
to my mother in the summer of my first year. I told her that I no longer had a
girlfriend. ‘She said she had always been out with nice people before,’ I
explained, sheepishly.

I was
surprised to find that letter. It was one of about six from my first two years,
folded away along with school reports from Conifers, hand-made birthday cards
and my three swimming certificates from Epping Junior, and collected together
in a Basildon Bond writing-paper box. I must have been replying to one from
her. Every single one of my letters begins, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t written for so
long.’ I was frightened to look at them. What self-perpetuated myths was I
going to destroy?

There
was nothing to fear, except perhaps their innocence. As I scanned their bald,
one-page accounts, only one directly addressed to my father, I recognized the
tone, because it was the same dose of filial reassurance that my son dishes out
to me today by mobile phone. I was working at my studies. I was proud to tell
them that my supervisor had called my essay ‘a monumental and sane piece of
work’. (On what, I wonder? I can barely recall the individual papers on the
History syllabus.) I was even arranging to get a travel grant to work in a
library in the vacation. What touched me, because my memory has suppressed
them, are the little nuances of, if not homesickness, then at least home-awareness:
my concern for my sister’s exams and my interest in the pets: ‘Have you got a
wig for the cat?’ I inquired. Epping was not as far away as I imagined.

16. Mr Big

At the beginning of my son’s
second year I had to hump the bass amplifier back to Cambridge, knowing
perfectly well that he never played the damn thing, suspecting that our
ferrying was wholly unnecessary and trying to persuade him to plan ahead a bit
more.

‘There
isn’t room for him to leave it,’ Jo explained. ‘His room has to be used by a
summer-school student.’

Did it?
Is that what happened when I was there? All that sort of stuff, the arrivals,
departures, even any memories of contact with home had withered. ‘No, no. He
must be able to store it. There’s a room somewhere where you put it, surely’

‘It’s
not like it was when you were there.’

‘There
are Chinese students now. You don’t think they take all their stuff back and
forth to Shanghai every term.’

‘Yeah,
yeah. The storage room’s full. It’s too late now’

It was
the principle. ‘You have made this up. As if I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Your mother and I have now had to have an argument. I know what goes on.’

But I
was grudgingly there to help. I was prepared for atonement, except that I
needed to retain my own ground. He became itchy when we got there and stood to
one side with his hands in the front pockets of his jeans, the thumbs on his
belt, looking tense.

‘Lunch?’

‘I’ve
got people to see.

‘I’m
not coming all this way…’

We ate
in the Loch Fyne franchise. He telephoned Rupert, and Rupert said he’d come and
meet us there. We talked about his term in the stop-start way of fathers and
sons. He was serving in the college bar.

‘That’s
the limit of your extra—curricular activity?’

‘There’s
too much work for anything else. I’m on the college catering committee, but
last term I had a meeting on the Sunday night, and my supervisor told me that I
had to make a choice between architecture and college politics.’

‘After
one meeting?’

‘That’s
what I thought.’

I poked
my halibut. His life was at the college and in the Architecture department.
They worked until nine at night. When they weren’t in their studio they were
hoarding time to prepare for their studio. It was better to change the subject.
I recognized that I was veering into a middle-aged paternal foolhardiness. I
could feel it welling. It needed self-control.

The
books about this are always written by the sons: little Edmund Gosse, junior
Samuel Butler, delinquent John Betjeman, adolescent Nick Hornby The poor,
stupid, emotional, domineering, wet, weak-minded patriarch is dissected from
the pitying child’s angle. Did any one of those arrogant young bastards have
any conception of the base and violent feelings that fathers have?

We
walked away back to the college after lunch. Rupert and George became animated.
We turned right at Fitzwilliam’ cake shop and along past the Museum of
Anthropology, which I had always proposed to visit some day They drifted on
ahead, talking and giggling animatedly. They were making plans. George, in
fact, was perfectly happy, perfectly integrated, perfectly independent,
perfectly satisfied. I dragged along, ten steps behind. Then I left them at the
college gate and went around the back to collect the car.

Sometimes
I wonder if they feel that I betrayed them, my own old, original college
friends. The people I seldom meet again with whom I wandered around Woolworth’s
and Burgess’s, had coffee in the Copper Kettle and went to the Arts Cinema late
at night to watch Fellini’s
Satyricon
— all those vital, critical
pleasures of quality nothing time. But if we got back together now, how would
we revive that? ‘Let’s go for a walk down to Woolworth’s like the old days.’ ‘Let’s
play three chords on a guitar for hours.’ ‘Let’s actually do absolutely fuck
all for an afternoon except walk down by the river and make remarks about the
tourists.’ Today, if I want to catch up at all, I have to make an appointment.
It would be so much simpler if we all still lived in one square mile.

Charlotte
was playing ‘the daughter’ in
The Dream Play.
We rehearsed it all that
term. Jane Rogers, now a novelist, was quietly impressive as the mother figure.
My directorial contributions were to arrange people prettily, design a surreal
album-cover poster, order colour gradations in the costumes and leer coyly at
Charlotte. We had our dress rehearsals in the concrete theatre in Christ’s. It
seemed to go together briskly I suddenly thought of something I had overlooked.
‘How long is it then?’ I asked Lawrence Temple, my helper. ‘Where should we put
the interval?’

We
looked at our watches. It had lasted about forty minutes in total. The whole
play was shorter than an average first half. We went straight ahead without an
interval. It should have been a key part of my expensive, state-subsidized
education. Nobody has ever complained about a play being too short.

Charlotte,
who remains a friend, came to stay over this last New Year and told me what
happened next. (I would say ‘reminded me’, but it was all new) ‘Finally, in the
pub the night before the last night of the production, a group of people were
discussing what to give you as a present.’

‘As a
present?’

‘Well,
you had been the director. And Rose Bechler said, “Well, I know what he’d like
as a present, but that’s sort of up to Charlotte.”‘ (This sounded unexpectedly
erotic.)

‘But
what did you say?’

‘Well,
I was …’ Charlotte pulled her lips down and shrugged her shoulders. ‘I didn’t
think anybody else would have spotted it.’

So,
engineered by Rose, Jane Rogers, Johnny Brock and Andy Finkel (who is now
Turkish correspondent for the
Times),
Charlotte and I were set up to ‘get
off together’. And later that night she took me back to Newnham.

I
remember that the procedure resembled a slightly ritualized James Bond feint.
The porters just weren’t there at the desk very often. Charlotte went on ahead,
checked the way was clear, and I sneaked in, in plain sight. We turned right
and scuttled down the corridor in an exaggerated hush.

I liked
Charlotte’s room. It had a high, institutional ceiling and a settled, rather
ordered atmosphere, with a velvet cover over the bed, a kettle in the hearth
and teapot on a trivet. There was some sort of undergrowth in a pot too —a
plant, in fact. There was plenty of junk in my room, but nothing that needed
tending. Just being in her quarters constituted a little invasion, staying
seemed like a conquest of alien territory. It was feminine. It was a carefully
arranged and detailed room with patterned fabrics. She kept things in little
hand-chosen antique boxes brought from home. I say that it was feminine — it
clearly was — but only feminine in a Virginia Woolf, masculine sort of a way
There weren’t any teddy bears or rag dolls in Charlotte’s room. Charlotte had
strong ideas about taste and ornament, which were new to me — not the Laura
Ashley, that was common enough, but the aesthetic touches; the patterned stuff,
the wooden stuff, the textile stuff. I was only gradually to discover that
these were not chosen at random. Her taste was important to her. Rather vitally
important to her, I was to find out.

‘But
then you went to America on tour with
Romeo and Juliet.
And you
instantly started messing around.’

‘We had
only had one night together.’