Engleby (32 page)

‘How interesting. I believe it’s awfully hard work.’

‘Yes. Yes. And . . . Er, my sister’s in brewing.’

‘Which side of it?’

‘Accounts.’

‘It’s such a volatile market, isn’t it, wines and spirits? There are so many conglomerates, aren’t there, but I believe many of the independent breweries have done well recently.’

‘Yeah, well I think the real ale thing’s helped a bit. And you know—’

‘Of course. How clever of your sister. And is she married, did you say?’

‘Not yet. She—’

‘Sensible girl. Career first. And are you a Berkshire family on both sides?’

I did my best to make Mum and Julie’s life worthy of this apocalyptic degree of interest. After a while, I half began to believe it myself, as the Englebys, in my account, emerged as yeomen of Mercia, devoted to their victualling heritage. Still, I was relieved when at about nine-fifteen some more people arrived.

I didn’t catch many names, but there were I think four more couples, making eleven people in all, with only Engleby unpartnered. The men all had the same haircuts: shorter than mine, with straight edges, dark gloss and burnish. They had suntans and made candid eye contact with one another. Most wore suits and apologised for having come straight from work; they loosened their ties and showily threw the first drink down their necks – presumably to prove they were at home chez Stellings and no longer in the office. They talked mostly about sport and cars. The women were without exception good-looking. All were thin; most were in dazzling colours – puce and amber and lilac – as though they were stating some primal confidence. Their hair, too, smelled of salons and looked brittle and dry, though gleaming. They all had slim legs covered with some fabric I’d never seen before: like nylon, but finer. I orbited round with a B&H on the go, and occasionally got a word in.

For dinner, we went downstairs to a long table with a floor-length white cloth, candles and bowls of tall hellebores at intervals. I know they were hellebores because I heard Clarissa say so when one of the women asked.

I was put between someone called Laura and someone called Cecilia. The layout of the table meant that I couldn’t really see through the flowers to anyone opposite and in any event they would have had to shout. So I talked to Laura for about twenty minutes, then to Cecilia for about twenty. Then when I swivelled back to give Laura her ration, she’d turned to her left. I switched back to Cecilia, but she too had turned the other way. So I stared straight ahead while the first course and the main course came and went and the maid filled and refilled my glass with white burgundy, then claret.

Then I had another right-and-left stint.

What did they say?

One had three children and told me about the schools they attended and the schools they hoped to send them to after that. She asked if I had any children and I said no. Then she told me which of her children were good at which subjects and which were having extra tuition. One of her daughters was also good at the violin, whereas her son was mad about football. Then she talked of the reputations of various schools that her children were not going to but which friends of hers had children at. She also talked of a new school that had just been started – somewhat too late for her elder children, and her youngest couldn’t be moved because he was happy where he was – and how she thought it might be a great success because there would always be a need for good schools.

I agreed with her emphatically – as though she’d been only halfhearted in her own belief – that there would
always
be a need for good schools.

Something odd was happening in my head. Although I was receiving a large amount of random information, I didn’t feel I knew any more about anything. On the contrary, I felt that, as far as data in the brain were concerned, I had suffered a net loss.

‘And where did you go to school yourself?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Where did you go to school?’

‘Eton.’

‘Really? My brother was there. What years were you?’

‘Sixty-six to seventy.’

‘Which house?’

‘Collingham.’

‘I mean, who was your housemaster?’

‘You wouldn’t have heard of him. Which house was your brother in?’

‘H.R.T.’s.’

‘Right. I didn’t know anyone in that one.’

‘No one! Gosh, I thought only the scholars didn’t mix.’

‘Well, I was a scholar, you see.’

‘So why weren’t you in College?’

‘I . . .’ I took a long pull of white burgundy.

‘
I
know. You were an OS, weren’t you?’

‘Yeah, that’s right. An OS.’ I had a brainwave. ‘And I met Stellings – James, I mean, at university. We were in the same college.’

I thought I’d got away with it. I don’t know why I told a lie. Maybe I couldn’t face talking about Chatfield. Or perhaps my brain had just been scrambled by the occasion. As soon as I could, I turned to the other side.

This neighbour, she told me, had only one child, but had had six au pairs. She herself had returned to work at a bank – which was where she’d first met Clarissa, as it happened, when she was working in the mergers and acquisitions department – and so it was very important that the au pair should be a good one, since neither she nor her husband (who was sitting next to Clarissa and talking far too loudly as usual, she was sorry to say) was at home very often. He (the husband) had taken a bath, by all accounts, over some long term financial guesswork that hadn’t come off, but had turned it all around in the last six months to the extent that he’d been headhunted and was now on ‘gardening leave’. In his new job, he was going to be remunerated on an ‘eat what you kill’ basis.

So, I ventured to suggest, the au pair crisis must have eased off a bit.

Far from it. Things had gone from bad to worse. The Latvian was lazy, the Czech was greedy and the Pole took money from Laura’s (possibly Cecilia’s) purse. We tried a bit of a Czech/cheque/check thing here, but it didn’t really catch fire, possibly because it was the Pole who’d been the tea leaf. So we quickly got back to the child, who was now at a nursery school, which was a blessing.

Was it the new place, I wondered, the one that had just started?

It turned out that it was indeed the new one, and it was every bit as good as they’d hoped. They took such a lot of interest in the children. And it gave them a head start at big school. Talking of which, there were any number of possibilities for the little fellow – possibilities which we went on at some length to review.

My head cranked from side to side, ten minutes here, ten minutes there, like watching Wimbledon in slow motion. I began to feel that I was no longer making sense. The more I heard, the less I knew. Someone had put their fingers in my brain and uncoupled the trucks.

When the au pair one came back for a fourth knock I could see the dumb pain in her eyes.

I had imagined that at a ‘dinner party’ you talked to your friend, the one who’d invited you, and maybe his wife, and who knows, a couple of others and the whole thing became a sort of convivial, pooled chat. Like a pub or a café.

I hadn’t thought it through.

It had never crossed my mind that I’d spend three hours talking to the wives of people I’d never met. It was like being stuck in a stalled Tube train, trying to make common cause with the strangers in the next seat, but without the
Evening Standard
for respite.

Coffee arrived at one o’clock. By then, I was no longer capable of thought. All that once I’d known, I had forgotten.

At one-thirty, I stumbled upstairs. I must have drunk at least a bottle of Stellings’s Meursault and a bottle and a half of La Dominique (I noticed he was still keen on the ‘poor man’s Pétrus’, or whatever he’d christened it). I was well into a second packet of B&H.

A couple of men were standing in front of the fireplace.

‘Ah, hello, er . . .’

‘Mike,’ I said.

‘Mike. Of course. We were just talking about this new school that’s started in Cambridge Gardens. Do you know it?’

I felt a curious rage begin to swell in me . . . But I was tired and drunk and the blue pill swirled the last of its gentle magic through my veins as I sucked in deep on good Virginia tobacco.

‘You bet,’ I said. ‘I gather it’s fantastic.’

Back home that night, I restored some sense of sanity with a diary session. I lay in bed in the darkness and selected a special date, one of my favourites: the first ever.

T
HURSDAY
25 M
AY
, 1972

I’ve decided to keep a diary. My name is Jennifer Arkland and I’m 19 years old. I’m a first-year history student and I’ve just done my preliminary exams, or ‘prelims’. They don’t give you grades, but they tell you your marks and I did better than I expected.

I’ve never kept a diary before, so I feel a bit odd writing this. Should I introduce myself? Why?! I’m not going to show it to anyone. And to herself, Jennifer surely needs no introduction.

If not to show it, then why write it? Do I have a ‘deep subconscious’ desire to be read – to reveal and be shamed? Doubt it.

I’m writing it for two reasons – or two that I’m aware of. One, so I can read it in old age, or middle age. Always regret so few photos of us as children. You think: what’s the point, today like any other day, nothing special, not worth recording. But it is, it was. Why? Because
it’s all there is
.

Don’t mean that to sound morbid, like typical first-year: ‘birth, copulation and death, that’s all there is when you come down to it . . .’ No. Key word is ‘all’. And that ‘all’ is plenty.

What I mean is that I don’t have teleological view (great new word from Dr Abraham seminar on Puritans. They v definitely
did
have tel. view). I believe that the living and the breathing and the being with people you are fond of and the friendly exchange with them of ideas and stories and encouragement and love is the totality of what we are and of what we can do. Don’t believe those exps can be forced into meaningful ‘shape’ or ‘journey’, as per tel. view.

Do
believe that the richness available in those exchanges is definitely enough.

Enough for what? you may ask, Hypothetical Reader. Without tel. view there is no framework, no criteria by which the experience of being alive can be deemed ‘sufficient’ or ‘insufficient’. So: illogical question, dear HR!

I suppose I just mean ‘enough to make me happy, curious and full of excitement’. That’s the way I feel. Agnostic but happy. (I sound like a puppy. Do believe am a
fraction
deeper than that . . .)

How so? Well, maybe the love generated between people who behave well and kindly adds somehow to the available pool of existing good feeling in the world, and lives on after them. (Now sound like drippy hippy, but actually it’s true and easy to prove.) Without good example such as preserved in literature, there would be nothing to live up to, no sense of transcendence or of our lives beyond the Hobbesian. So these feelings do endure and I believe they also survive through memory, orally and in families as much as in written word. So while living may have no
meaning
in any teleological sense, it does have practical
purpose
in the way that how we live can improve the experience of others alive and yet to be born; and thus, a bit more contentiously (because harder to define scale on which it’s measured), it also has
value
. This seems so obvious to me as to be almost axiomatic.

But brings me to second reason for starting diary. First is for future reading pleasure, period quaintness, as described above. Second is because I feel so happy. Haven’t always been this happy and know I won’t always be so in future; so wanted to pickle and preserve, not just for historical interest but as possible future store to draw on in leaner years. Contentment as chutney or sauerkraut.

Why so happy? What so great, Jen? Live in rather horrid modern room in college. Small metal-framed window overlooks back delivery yard with bicycle rack, kitchens and rubbish bins. Bed-cum-sofa, window seat, desk, chair. Pantry and bath down landing. Bathroom always occupied. Not nearly as nice as my room at home.

Friends . . . Yes, but no one as close as family or Susan and Becky from school. Molly down corridor v nice and think Anne cd become friend. Emma M? That Indian-looking girl – Malini, is it? Bit scary. So not exhilaration of fab friendships making me so happy.

Work is interesting, but, despite what Mum and Dad think, have never really been a swot. True, did well at school, but not hard, not v brainy school so not much competition – yet good teachers. In final term three of them teaching three of us univ candidates. What staff/pupil ratio!