Engleby (18 page)

Something unstable and vulnerable about Charlie. Donnish joke about his room number involving Auden play title,
The Ascent of F6
. Sense he not happy at all, though smiles a lot.

What will happen to all these people? Previous generations did great things in politics, diplomacy, medicine, industry, ‘the arts’ – became great and good as though by natural progression, birthright.

All people I know resolute that they will do
no such thing
. No one will have ‘nine to five’ job. Can’t imagine anyone I know here appearing on television in 20 years’ time to offer expert view on – anything. Just not cut out for it.

I wonder why. Drugs? Partly, but we’re not all out of it all the time. A generation thing, I suppose. We are a lost gen. (Rather than lost Jen, ha, ha.) Before us, the hippies; after us, perhaps keen people in suit and tie who will go straight to work in Con Party research and American banks. Poor us, lost souls. Maybe from ashes, one or two prophets or meteors? S. Forres in films? Him apart, wipeout. Hannah maybe, cd be head of Oxfam or something. Doubt she will make it as an actress – between you and me, dear D . . .

Here are my resolutions for 1974, a little late:

1. Work six hours each day in organised way. Not drive self stupidly. Not be downcast if don’t get youknowwhat. Not end of w; in fact probably blessing in d.

2. Settle on subject of long essay for finals. Irish Q? By end of Jan latest.

3. Close watch on Robin situation.

4. No other men, no slip-ups.

5. Not lose temp with Nick for non-payment of rent, noncontrib to kitty etc.

6. Go at least four soc mtngs per term, even tho no longer sec.

7. Telephone home at least once a week, if line mended.

8. Give up smoking cigs completely. Dope only on Sat eves.

9. Volleyball or similar at least 2x per week.

10. Go to Well Woman drop-in clinic asap.

(Bit of a fraud, number ten, as already have appnt on Fri, but couldn’t think of anything else, but fewer than ten looked too pleased with self ).

Oh, I know. Get part in another film (pref without taking clothes off . . .) Apparently when Nick explained feminist political slant of rape scene to his father, he (father) said: ‘For, or against?’

Now must go and cook dinner.

What can it be like to live like that?

In Jen’s defence, I suppose you’d have to say that it was an unusually arid time of year and there was no one else about. The best diarists sound vacuous when nothing happens.

I put the diary back behind the cistern, safe from Mrs Lumbago’s short reach. I had a bath and listened to
The Archers
(still too much of that Ulster barmaid) and then got in the car.

I drove fast in the Ely direction and followed signposts anywhere, thinking about Jennifer’s father. My father never owned a car, but if he had I doubt whether he would have driven me back to university in it. He wasn’t interested in education, perhaps because it had done nothing for him.

My father was in the North Atlantic convoys in the War. He never talked to me about it, except once, when he’d had too much to drink at the social club that served the paper mill. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but his friend Ted Green had introduced him to a drink he liked called a ‘mother-in-law’ (stout and bitter) and he must have had half a dozen to judge by the state he was in. Six pints is a lot of beer if you’re not used to it, not much if you are. He wasn’t.

I was only about eight so I don’t remember much of what he said, but I was left with a sort of overall impression. The ships were grey and everything was hard. Even in the place where you slept there was this steel bulkhead full of rivets just above your face. Though the waters of the sea were cold, it could be stuffy and imprisoning in your windowless quarters with the smell of the other able seamen and their feet. You heard the sound of the great engines turning and smelled the oil. The food was regular and hot but lacking taste, repetitive as the weeks went on at sea. The watches were interminably long and cold. You looked eternity in the eye, where time stopped moving on the waves. There was trade in polo necks and leather waistcoats. Much of the convoy was lost to sight in the mists so you often couldn’t see the ships you were protecting. On the bridge they knew; by the ping of radar, the squawk of radio, they kept tabs on their charges – those vulnerable milch cows, the priceless laden females in the rolling herd. You longed for landfall, anywhere, somewhere there might be colour, something more than the grey of steel, the gunmetal grey of waves, the navy blue of uniform, the thin grey of mist.

A British merchantman was holed and sinking. My father’s ship,
Peerless
, changed course to give chase to a German frigate they had no chance of catching. They were fearful of U-boats. The big guns fired and the noise was unearthly in the boundless mist. When they got back alongside the merchantman they found that many of the crew were in a blazing oil slick on the water, dying of cold, dying by fire.

My father shook his head when he came to this part, I remember. He seemed galvanised. I’d never seen him more alive. He was outraged by what he recalled, thinking the Germans had deliberately set the sea on fire to burn their enemy.

He stood in front of the fireplace in the sitting room, swaying a little on his feet, jabbing his finger at me.

Although I knew it had been a bad experience, I felt envious of him for what he’d seen. Maybe he was a little proud of it too, though he couldn’t explain why. He couldn’t share or offload any of that stuff. He didn’t have the words for it, he just didn’t know them or couldn’t put them in the right order, and his failure seemed to make him angry.

It may have been that night that he first beat me. Just from a fury of frustration. I don’t think he was ‘damaged’ – merely inarticulate. He had to get this thing off his back, he had to show people, show himself, how bad it had been. So breaking some taboo – beating a nearby child – was a simple way of showing that he knew what life was
like
beyond limits.

At least, that would be the smart ‘psychological’ explanation. In ‘psychology’, there is cause and effect. Everything is made to connect, as though there were Newtonian laws not only of celestial motion, but also of human motivation. For instance, Law One: All actions attract other actions in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them.

Personally, I think my father was just a) not a very nice man; and b) drunk.

Then he got a taste for it. Not because the ‘taste’ was the inverse shape, therefore the natural expression of, the ‘trauma’. No. But because he enjoyed it.

That’s life. Christ, what else can you expect? The human being is genetically 98 per cent identical to the chimpanzee. The human being is genetically 50 per cent identical to the
banana
. Of the genes that make us up, the vast majority – ‘junk’ genes – do nothing at all. They’re just hitching a ride.

Homo sapiens
, according to current evolutionary theory, exists principally as a container for inactive bacteria which have been successful in the struggle for survival.

Laws of Newtonian elegance can’t apply to human behaviour. Bananas aren’t motivated by ‘cause and effect’. Ask one.

I got up early and readied the 1100 for a drive: oil, water, air, expensive petrol from the garage in Jesus Lane. I was in Reading by late morning and went to see my mother at the Waverley. She was able to offer me something called an ‘open sandwich’ – a halved slice of French bread with shiny ham, cottage cheese and pineapple – on the house. We had it in the lounge bar, where self-conscious businessmen ordered gin and tonic and food whose name was given in French, which neither they nor the waitress understood, while ersatz music fizzed from a wall-mounted speaker. My mother ate nothing herself, though she drank a tomato juice. She looked thin and tired. I gave her ten pounds I’d taken from a coat in the corridor outside the toilets, and I could tell it made a difference.

I needed some music to listen to in the car, so I went to the shopping centre and slipped a cassette of
Madman Across the Water
by Elton John into my coat pocket, then conscientiously bought a disc-cleaning cloth at the till. I couldn’t face going back to Clock Court and all that, to a town without Jen, so I drove west on the M4, listening to ‘Tiny Dancer’, which Stellings had tipped me off about. He also rated ‘Come Down in Time’ from
Tumbleweed Connection
, but thought it spoiled by ‘silly vocal phrasing’. ‘silly’: not much of a critical term, is it? But it’s only pop music.

I drove on through ‘Levon’ and ‘Razor Face’. My direction? Anywhere. Because one is always nearer by not keeping still. At Newbury, I remembered Jen’s mother, left the motorway and skirted the town, wondering which bit she had, in the newspaper’s words, ‘hailed from’. Is that hail as in stones, I wonder, or as in fellow-well-met? The ring road took me to the south, over the Hampshire border (Newbury was, to be fair to the reporter, pretty close to Hampshire – just not
in
it), where I followed signs for Winchester. I kept driving. In Romsey I bought a map which told me, as I was fairly certain anyway, that I was almost in Jennifer country.

Soon it was dark and I was in the high street of a town called Lyndhurst with a vast timbered hotel, the Crown, to my right. I drove beneath the arch into a car park. The desk girl was reluctant, puzzled by my lack of luggage, but could scarcely claim that such a barracks was full. They wouldn’t bring dinner to the room, so I had to have the oxtail soup and some sort of meat pie with carrots at a solitary table in the dining room. The beer was keg fizz, so I got my reserve bottle of Johnnie Walker from the car and drank in my room till I fell asleep.

It was only a few miles to travel the next morning. In Brockenhurst I bought a toothbrush and paste and cleaned my teeth in the toilet of a café. The landscape became gorse-covered, the soil looked peaty and was dense with bracken. There was a hamlet called Goose Green. The wayside inns had facetious tourist come-ons. I went under a railway bridge and came into Lymington.

What did I expect? I hadn’t pictured it clearly, except for one thing: it would be the town version of herself. The buildings would be Arkland-shaped, the streets would be redolent of Jennifer. It would breathe her presence.

I parked on the severely sloping high street. People greeted one another, stopped and talked. No one knew me. No one came up to me and said, ‘This is Jentown. We’re all so happy to live here.’ I was invisible.

I saw it all through her eyes. The weathered red brick with the faded lettering of long-gone enterprises: ‘Rand and Son, General Drapers, Ladies and Children’s Outfitters’, and next to it another clothes shop with union flags on poles at 45 degrees, like something from Victoria’s jubilee. And halfway up the street a detached Queen Anne building, fortnightly home of the Rotary Club, a solicitors’ office. Doubtless her father had dealt many times with them as client or antagonist. On the railings in front was a poster for the Lymington Choral Society. Had what that girl Susan called her sense of humour limitation extended to Lym Chor Soc? Had she sung her off-contralto in the second row?

At the summit of the street was a bell tower with a clock, part of the church. I scanned the war memorial next to it. Almost one hundred Lymington men had died in 1914–18, mostly in the Hampshire Regiment, but no Arklands (the first name alphabetically was Backhurst, F. I remember such things easily).

I walked round the graveyard for a bit. The tombstones were lichened-over and illegible. Many were tilting or fallen. ‘Remembered Always’ they claimed, but it wasn’t true. You can’t recall someone whose name has worn away. In the far corner was a pile of chipped and broken headstones ready to be carted off. Newer burials were marked with small tablets flat in the grass, though you had to walk over the old graves to reach them. There was no escaping the arithmetic of the dead and the fact that the cemetery with its horse chestnuts and holly trees was unable keep up with them.

I couldn’t sense Jen in any of this. I walked on, down an alley beside the cricket pitch and the town football club. There were obscene graffiti on the fence.

What is a town then? How should I know? Where did she live, where did she walk? Little Jen, did you linger in the doorway of Fox & Sons estate agents, wondering, like me, how any grown-up ever found the money to buy even these poky bungalows? Did you hang around the Pick’n’Mix in Woolworths? Where was the action, where the clubs, the discos, pubs you went to with the girls from school? Where was your first kiss, grope and party?

Did you walk on Thomas Street and survey those Georgian brick buildings? What are they? Retirement homes, museums? Or were you like most kids indifferent to your surroundings – oblivious in your hurry to excitement?

I wandered on and on, expecting to see a schoolgirl in the derided games clothes or an undergraduate on holiday in corduroy skirt and boots. Then I was tired.