Therefore Choose (2 page)

In front of King's, George would cut left through to Free School Lane, then to the Downing Site, to Physiology or Anatomy, to hear about acetylcholine or Malpighian corpuscles.

Cambridge. What could be better? The only problem was physiology, and anatomy, and pathology, and … The problem was medicine. Did he want to spend day after day surrounding himself with disease, listening to people talk about their lumbago? Working in a hospital then, a surgeon perhaps, but he wasn't especially good with his hands.

George didn't feel settled in what he'd chosen to do. But the route he'd taken at school didn't fit him for anything else. Medicine wasn't so bad. He had a good memory, which seemed to be the necessary ingredient, and his courses left time for reading, and for writing.

When he was at school, he longed to be here, at Cambridge, but could not imagine it. As soon as he arrived, it became familiar, not because he knew its intricacies, but because it seemed right.

George and Werner developed their relationship mostly in English. Though George had made close friendships in his first two years, in his last year at Cambridge, Werner became his most intimate friend.

Werner had a sweet nature. He had a talent for immersing himself wholeheartedly in whatever he did. He immersed himself in Wittgenstein. Part of why George liked him so much, although he didn't think of it in this way at the time, was that he immersed himself in George. There was nothing overtly sexual, though what does one say when friends achieve the closeness of lovers? Werner let George know he was completely interested in him. He wanted to be with him, wanted to know what he thought, wanted to spend hours in conversation.

Werner was also a pianist. Sometimes George would go with him, to listen, in one of the common rooms where there was a decent piano that was kept in tune.

“Music would not be the same without Bach,” Werner said. “One could lose most of the rest, but not Bach.”

“Why lose them?”

“Pre-eminence is important. German culture is very substantial. In visual art we have Dürer, in theology Luther, in philosophy Kant and Hegel, in mathematics Leibniz, in physiology Helmholtz, in physics Planck and Einstein. It's only in literature we are somewhat behind. Our foremost man there is Goethe. He's good, but he is not Shakespeare.”

George wanted to laugh. “You make it sound like football.”

“One wants the best.”

“Not much chance for people like me, then.”

“Don't make light of it. One wants to get to the bottom of things, to the roots. That's the essence of German scholarship. That's what the great man does. Not frippery, like the French. And to know one has got there, and to say so. To say, ‘This is it.' The very foundation.”

Between lectures, sporadic bursts of reading, and occasional writing, George would walk round the town, not aimlessly, but not purposefully. It was something that he had done since he came up. Turn left outside the college, down to Magdalene Bridge. That was one of his routes. Brown water slid past below and people inexpert with poles tried to steer the punts they had hired. Wander into Magdalene to gaze at the beautiful Pepys Library, think of all those books that Pepys used to own, preserved here. Then back towards the centre of town, past the Round Church, the brotherhood of Knights Templar, Crusaders. Past Sidney Sussex, Oliver Cromwell's college.

Cromwell achieved things, thought George, things of substance … Up there to the left, King Street, the King Street Run, drink eight pints in eight pubs, the sordid side of Cambridge, written on the grimy wall of a pub urinal:
Don't drop your fag-ends down here, it makes them damp and difficult to light again.

Werner's ability to immerse himself, thought George. How does he do it? Why don't I have that? Application. Being a doctor must be all right, doing good in the world. Scientific medicine, antiseptic surgery, no longer the age of bloodletting. Dissect the whole human body. In the dissecting room, students grouped themselves around cadavers, paupers brought in to be preserved by having their blood replaced with formalin, unclaimed for burial by anyone, donated for medical students to learn anatomy. Donated by whom? By the state? The formalin and the human subcutaneous fat would get on labcoat cuffs, get under fingernails, get on the dissection guide, get on Abercrombie as he would prod at the body he was supposed to dissect, while between thumb and forefinger of his left hand he held a pair of fine forceps in which his cigarette was wedged.

The thorax. “So, you've dealt with the diaphragm,” said the demonstrator. “If you feel up there, into the rib cage … Mr. Smith! Yes, put your hand right in, don't be timid, you can feel the lower lobe of the lung, consistency of a woman's breast. D'you feel that?”

Induction into the brotherhood of medical practitioners.

Chekhov did it, became a doctor, thought George. Is there a better way to observe the human race, the rich, the poor, people at every stage of life's procession? Chekhov had no trouble selling his stories. Another rejection this morning. Been writing for what, three years? What have I got to show? Serious stories, only two, in never-read magazines. Chekhov wrote stories for newspapers, hundreds, things he thought were junk, to make money to support his parents because his father's shop failed. How did he get from that to being a genius? To the greatest stories ever written?

On an afternoon when the town was busy, George walked along Market Street, back towards his college. A woman with a canvas shopping bag was walking in front of him. She stopped suddenly, and to avoid bumping into her, George, who was not paying enough attention, stepped to his left and bumped instead into a ragged old man.

“Watch where you're fuckin' going,” the man said.

The old man staggered, looked as if he might fall.

“I'm sorry.”

“Fuckin' toff.”

George was five foot ten. The man was a head shorter. He recovered, glared.

“Fuckin' undergraduate. Think you own the place?”

“I'm terribly sorry. Are you all right?”

“Do I look all right? Sod off.”

George was not a toff, but he was shocked at how the man spoke to him, a man who looked as if he would soon be donating his body to science, to be perfused, preserved, dissected. Would that make a story? Class antagonism, shame, the dissection room.

Why am I in medicine? thought George. Because I don't have the courage to cast off and write. I say it's what I want to do. But I don't do it. At least I can earn my living by doctoring. Lots of people have done that, got qualified, earned their living, then decided to write: not just Chekhov, but Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, Alfred Döblin. After the soft consistency of the formalin-preserved lung, the human condition.

Now in his last year at Cambridge,
George had found he could keep up with the cleverest people, and he'd started to construct for himself a certain confidence, a trait his upbringing had not endowed him with. What was it they said? An Oxford man enters a room as if he owns it. A Cambridge man enters a room as if he doesn't care who owns it. Or was it the other way round?

In George's first year, everything had an excitement to it: a room in college, an atmosphere of intellectual engagement, meeting new people. Some of the people were of a kind he had never encountered before. On his staircase, Fothergill was in the room opposite. He was reading Moral Sciences, the Cambridge name for philosophy. “I'd be more interested in Immoral Sciences,” he said. He was amiable enough and — never listening to a word George said — would chatter if they happened to emerge from their rooms at the same time. Mainly what Fothergill chattered about was sex. “If you could have a woman who really loved you, or a tart who really knew her job, which would you choose?” Fothergill's only other topic was his horse, kept in livery somewhere at an inconvenient distance. He was one of those people who go automatically from public school to Cambridge without any interest in what university is about.

In the room above George on the staircase was Spavins, a lugubrious man, who wore a cardigan, and whose hair was already thinning although he couldn't have been much more than twenty. He was reading Theology. George thought he must want to become a bishop.

But on the top floor was Bailiss, reading History, heading — as he hoped — for the civil service. George and he became friends as soon as they met. He was one of those people for whom Cambridge seemed the natural element, energetic though never seeming to be in a hurry, knowledgeable but often making fun of what he knew.

“Don't call me Bailiss,” he said. “And I won't call you Smith. It's too much like school.”

Peter Bailiss was interested in politics, but he spent a good deal of time delving into odd sects.

“The Muggletonians,” said Peter. “There's a fine name for a group.”

“I've never heard of them.”

“I grew up as a Quaker,” said Peter. “The Muggletonians tell everyone that they should be egalitarian and pacifist. But they hate the Quakers, who believe much the same thing. They refuse to proselytize, so it's astounding there's any left.”

“Why are you interested?”

“These political movements, utopians really. They're curious distillations of the way people think. People get an idea about how to live and then they take it as their right to tell other people what to do.”

“Isn't that what politics is about?” said George.

“And what about the Oxford Group? They've got it down to four principles, or is it three? ‘Absolute chastity, absolute purity, absolute truthy.' There's a chap on the other side of the quad. He's one of them. You must have seen him. He doesn't walk so much as scuttle: not very tall, short dark hair, always wears a suit. If you listen to him it boils down to not doing anything rude to yourself in bed at night.”

“I don't think I've seen him.”

“They want to take over the world. First they're going to get hold of all the top people, to induct them into the Principles. That's why that chap's at Cambridge: to nobble future cabinet ministers. Problems of the world? Solved.”

“You're looking for something to join and haven't quite found it yet?”

“Sometimes I think about the Party,” he said. “But they've not got it right either.”

“The Party?”

“Communist Party … I mean, Marx is right that there's an essential bit about relations between employers and workers. But then they want to kill all the class enemies: ‘You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.' Violence justified with a metaphor from cooking breakfast.”

“Is that what they say?”

“You've heard them. Makes them feel they're in the right, for when the Revolution comes.”

What George felt was that he'd come from a backwater.

“The Communists hold quite good meetings. D'you want to come to one next week? About what's going on in Spain.”

In first-year Physiology, George had found he had to do practicals: perform experiments in the form of class exercises. People were paired off, and George's partner was Douglas Hinton, a rather intense person who would peer at George across the top of his spectacles. George was rather awed by him, but the two of them got on. George sensed that Douglas was somewhat lonely, and that he valued the friendship. He knew what the experiments were about, and would show George the manipulations. Then they'd call the demonstrator, who'd ask a few questions, get out his list, and tick their names off. Then they could go.