Engleby (2 page)

The big one leafed through my papers again. ‘Your personal report,’ he said at last, ‘from your teacher . . . Did you have difficulties with him?’

I hadn’t been aware of any, I said.

‘Is there anything that you’d like to ask us about life in college? We try to make everyone feel welcome.’

It seemed wrong not to ask something; it might look as though I didn’t care. But I couldn’t ask any of the things I really wanted to know. In the silence we heard the college clock chime the half-hour. I felt them both looking at me. Then I felt a trickle of sweat on my spine. I hardly ever sweat normally, and it gave me an idea.

‘What’s the thing with laundry?’

‘What?’ said the big one, gruffly.

‘Do you have . . . Well, like, washing machines? Is it done centrally or do I take it somewhere or what?’

‘Gerald?’

‘I’m not quite sure,’ said the younger one.

‘Each undergraduate is assigned a moral tutor,’ said the schoolmasterly one. ‘A Fellow of the college who can help you with all your personal and health questions.’

‘So he’d be the one to ask?’

‘Yes. Yes, I imagine so.’

I thought that now I’d broken the ice, it might be good to ask another question. ‘What about money?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘How much money will I need?’

‘I imagine your local authority will provide a grant. It’s up to you how you spend it. Do you have questions about the work?’

‘No. I read the prospectus.’

‘Do you find the idea of Chaucer daunting?’

‘No, I like Chaucer.’

‘Yes, yes, I can see that from your paper. Well, Mr Engle . . . er . . .’

‘Engleby.’

‘Englebury. You can go now, unless . . . Gerald?’

‘No, no.’

‘Good. So we’ll look forward to seeing you next autumn.’

I didn’t see how they could let me go without telling me how it had gone. ‘Have I won a prize?’ I said.

‘We shall be writing to your school in due course. When we’ve completed the interview process. It’s an exceptional year.’

I shook his offered hand, waved at the seated one and went out, down the oak stairs. What a pair of frauds.

In the evening I tear a ticket from a book and take it to the college dining hall, which was designed by Robert Adam. You have to buy a book of thirty-five every term; you don’t actually have to use them, but the cash you pay in advance keeps the kitchen going. I’m wearing a long black gown over my jeans and sweater and there are candles in sconces on the painted plaster walls. We stand up when a door behind the top table opens and the Fellows of the college come in to dine. The Master is an oceanographer, who once drew maps of undersea mountain ranges. He knows how Australia was once attached to China or how Ghana sweated in the foothills of the Andes. I think he imagines that New Zealand once broke free from Germany.

The crystal glasses glitter in the candlelight. They drink wine. We drink water, though you are allowed to ask for beer if you like. Stellings is the only man to do this.

‘A pint of ale, please, Robinson,’ he says to the stooping butler. ‘Beer for you, Mike?’

I shake my head. Stellings brews his own beer in a plastic barrel. He calls it SG (short for student’s gin: drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence) and once forced me to drink it, even though it made me sick, with its powerful taste of malt and raw alcohol, which he achieves by doubling the sugar input recommended on the side of the kit. There is no bathroom near his room, so I had to vomit into a plastic watering can on the landing.

I sometimes don’t take dinner in the dining hall. I’ve found some places I like better. One of them is a pub, a walk of ten or fifteen minutes away, over a green (there are a lot of greens or ‘pieces’ as they call them here), down a side street, up a back street. The beer there tastes much better than Stellings’s homebrew. It’s made by a brewery called Greene King. One of the King family, they say, is a famous novelist. The lights here are low, the floor is made of wooden boards; the other people are not from the university. They are what are called ordinary people, though each person is really too specific to be ordinary. It’s quite dark, and people talk softly. Although the barman knows me, he doesn’t intrude. I often have a baked potato, or a cheese and ham pie, which is messy to eat because the melted cheese is stringy and there’s so much of it between the layers of filo pastry.

I also drink gin and vermouth, mixed. I like red vermouth better than white. When I’ve drunk two or three of these, I feel I understand the world better. At least, I don’t mind so much that I don’t understand it; I can be tolerant of my ignorance. After three or four, I feel that my ignorance is not only tolerable, but possibly in some way noble.

Other times, I go into the middle of the town. There’s a bright Greek restaurant there, where it’s embarrassing to be seen alone – but I like the food: they bring moussaka with rice and with chips and with Greek salad and pitta bread with olives and hummus, so if you’re hungry it’s a good place to go. Sometimes I don’t eat for two or three days, so I need to load up. With this Greek food I drink white wine that tastes of toilet cleaner, and they go together well.

I also take drugs. I’ve tried most things. My favourite is opium, though I’ve had it only once. It’s really hard to get hold of and involves a palaver with a flame and a pipe. I bought it from a boy who got it from a Modern History Fellow in Corpus Christi who had recently been to the Far East. The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable. If while you were under its influence someone were to tell you about Zyklon B and your parents dying and life in a dementia ward or Passchendaele, you might be able to understand what they meant – but only in a hypothetical sense. You might be interested by this idea of ‘pain’, but in a donnish way. I mean, I’m ‘interested’ in the special theory of relativity; the idea that there’s a dimension in which space rolls up and time distorts and you come back from a journey younger than you left is certainly intriguing, but it doesn’t have an impact on me, day by day. That’s what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.

I mostly smoke marijuana, which I buy from a boy called Glynn Powers. I don’t know where Glynn buys it, but he has several kilos of it in the built-in bedside locker in his tiny room in the new Queen Elizabeth block, a short walk beyond Fellows’ Pieces (i.e. grass area reserved to dons). The block was opened by a princess only three years ago and in the entrance hall of the building, next to the commemorative plaque, there’s a picture of her standing in one of the little cells, smiling at the president, with the bedside locker in view behind them. The brickwork of the wall is exposed because they discovered when the building was completed that the size of each room was smaller than the minimum required for single human habitation by the Department of Housing. By removing the plasterboard they were able to add just enough volume to go legal.

In his bedside locker, Glynn keeps polished scales and brass imperial weights.
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin
: you have been weighed in the scale, balanced and found wanting. Not that I’d argue with Glynn Powers or tell him he was wanting in any way at all. He wears a leather jacket with a thin fringe of tassels halfway down the back; he has a thick, trimmed beard and a motorbike. I have neither. He is studying Engineering. He doesn’t smoke himself, which I find sinister.

And tonight is Folk Club, as I said. This happens in the college bar, because you can’t have folk music without beer – in this case Double Diamond or gassy Worthington E. Brian, the professional barman who does the first two hours (after which the students take over), offers a free pint if you can drink one in less than five seconds. I have seen it done.

Bicycles start to arrive at about seven. There are striped scarves, coats; small, cheap cigarettes; most of the boys have hair to their shoulders, much of it grown out from a previous schoolboy style, so they still have a parting in the undergrowth. There are printed posters in the quads and linking passages. Hobgoblin, they announce. Avalon. With support: The Tim Wills/Steve Murray Band. After the interval: Lyonesse. With special guests: Split Infinitive.

When there are enough people in the bar, I move in among them. It must once have been a cellar, I suppose. The walls are white brick. They start to sweat.

I’ve drunk some gin in my room and have taken a Nembutal, which makes you feel detached. I’m smoking a cigarette. I really love cigarettes. I like the moist fragrance of the ones you roll yourself and I like Rothman’s King Size, advertised by a man’s hand emerging from a sleeve with gold hoops to grasp a gear lever. (Why is the pilot or naval officer still wearing his uniform in his car? Is he trying to impress an unseen woman? Is the gear lever a symbol? In which case, shouldn’t it be
her
hand on it?) I like the small piece of paper, like a miniature bookmark, that you pull up inside to arrange the fags in a little castle shape that makes it easier to extract the first one. (Now I come to think of it, this is one of the most courteous, customer-loving things any manufacturer has ever done. To go to the trouble of folding in this thin strip of paper, just so the smoker shouldn’t be irritated by trying to fish the first one out of a tightly packed bunch and risk squashing the others . . . Ingenious, thoughtful and quite irrelevant after the first cigarette, whose absence leaves space for the remainder to be slipped out easily. One day an accountant will calculate that the infinitesimal saving of not including the strip, magnified by the huge number of packets sold, will enable the companies to make an extra one thousand pounds a year profit, and they’ll stop doing it. For the sake of one thousand quid.) Another thing I like about smoking is allowing a small amount of smoke to escape from my lips then reeling it in again with a fast and deep inhalation. I like Gold Leaf, which used to be advertised on television by a man on a hillside with a red setter, or was it a spaniel? I like the mildness of Piccadilly. I like the toasted taste of Lucky Strike and Chesterfield and the way that French cigarettes hit the back of the throat like a blowtorch when you inhale. The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

I change brands a lot. I’m smoking white-tipped Kent tonight and have a pleasant taste of tobacco and red vermouth, which I’ve bought from the bar. The boy on the bar doesn’t know how much to pour, which is all right because he’s given me a full wine glass, into which I have put ice. I’ll try to make this last an hour.

On the sofas and armchairs there are piles of coats, and as the evening goes on and people dance, there are also sweaters, jackets, bags. I can see Jennifer and Molly and Anne, and I keep a close watch on them. Avalon have a violinist and a girl with very straight long hair in a crushed velvet dress who sings with a warble in her voice.

I imagine these folk songs go back many years, into some oral tradition. I make a note of some words. ‘I have for to say,/My own true love,/Is gone far away/In the [inaudible] lights of noon./And weep shall I never/Keen no more/’Neath the mantle of the moon./ So fare thee well and fare thee well/Said the sailor to his lass/For the silvery light of the Hebden Down [?]/Has brought us to this pass, kind sir,/Has brought us to this pass.’ It’s hard to hear exactly what she sings because the drums are so loud. I don’t think the first bard envisaged a mike with a grey blanket in the body of the bass drum.

I’m now propped up by a sweating pillar . . . I’m watching. My body stays supported. ‘’Neath the mantle of the moon, kind sir . . .’ I shall return to Folk Club, to the present moment, loud and smoky, but for the moment I let myself go.

I have a car which I keep in the car park of the Queen Elizabeth building, which is reserved for the Fellows. Sometimes the porters glue pieces of paper with strong reminders (and a split infinitive as a matter of fact) to the windscreen to dissuade me from parking there. I peel them off.

Then I drive out to one of the villages. They have three-digit fingerposts dug into turf in the triangle where the roads meet. They have milestones leaning back a little by the hedgerows that in summer are heavy with hawthorn and cow parsley. They have war memorials (which I, perhaps alone, read) and brick-and-flint churches. They have pubs. Above all, they have pubs, and the beer in them doesn’t come like the stuff in the college bar from a metal cask, pressurised by the addition of carbon dioxide, which makes it taste of chemical soda water. In these pubs the untreated beer is drawn by a hand pump from the cellar through a long thin tube and makes a whoosh as it swirls up the glass, chestnut-amber, then falls as the handle is returned to its upright; then surges again, sparkling to the rim as the handle is pulled a second time; stops with a thin white froth, then receives a final half-squirt; after which the base of the glass is wiped on the towelling mat where you leave it for a moment for the beer to catch the light from the false-antique light brackets of the Wheatsheaf, the Green Man, the Red Lion – a place where anyone can go, where social ties are cut, so you’re frictionless, you’re no one.

Does it sound as though I’m trying to keep something at bay here? Perhaps, but I don’t know what.

Occasionally I stay the night, but not because I’m worried about driving. They normally have a room or two: damp, with a candlewick bedspread and a bathroom at the end of the landing. It’s not an idyll. I don’t bother with breakfast. I just want to be on the road. Undergraduates aren’t allowed cars, but I joined a golf club called Royal Worlington (I never go there) and that was enough for them to make an exception. They encourage sport. My car’s a bottle green Morris 1100, bought fourth-hand for £125, most of which I earned by working in a factory. It’s never broken down, though once the exhaust pipe fell off and I had to wire it back. I drive all over eastern England, in fact. Sandy, Potton, Biggleswade, Newport Pagnell, Huntingdon, Saffron Walden; even up to King’s Lynn or Lincoln. There are houses on modern estates, houses by the side of the road, houses up drives with laurel hedges.