Engleby (50 page)

‘Are there many Thai families in Rookley nowadays?’ I asked Tony, and he explained, suppressing a smile, that it was just a pub fad.

We passed the back gate into Chatfield and walked on up the high street. We went past the tobacconist’s whose supplier’s van I used to rob and came to where I thought the record shop had been, where I had spent my saved or stolen money.

‘Was there a record shop here?’ I asked Tony.

‘Yes. It’s still here,’ he said. ‘Just a bit further on.’

And so it was. It still sold records, too, a few anyway, though mostly CDs, videos and computer games.

We went inside and I sniffed a bit, to reorientate myself after all these years. I turned by instinct to the side wall where the deep wooden bins had been, where I spent so many hours flipping through the sleeves, stopping now and then to pull one out and flick it over.
A Song for Me
by Family with Roger Chapman on vocals and John ‘Poli’ Palmer on vibes;
Split
by the Groundhogs;
Stonedhenge
by Ten Years After;
Songs for a Tailor
by Jack Bruce.

Time was pressing very hard on me. Things before my eyes were there and not there. I asked to leave.

We went to the top of the street and into a café, where they bought tea and cake. It was clear to me that Tony and John wanted to prolong their outing as long as possible. They chatted and smoked and drank tea in a natural, friendly way.

Eventually, I couldn’t stand it any more and I said, ‘Do you mind if we go back?’

Last night I lay in my room at the top of one of the old Victorian buildings. These days I have a good, long view down the hill and over the village to the school and the woods beyond. I can almost see the playing fields from which Baynes was returning late that afternoon.

In between, in the foreground as I look down, is the tall perimeter wall of Longdale with grey brick and rolled barbed wire.

And as I lie here in the dusk, I suppose that I am evidently (and I have chosen that word carefully, for its denotation, connotations and all the ripples in between) bonkers.

I have a world in my mind, in the inexhaustible repertoire of my memory. I can recall at will, note-perfect, from the reams I have stored there.

As the electrical self-deceit of human consciousness ebbs and fires at random through my brain, there are long hours when I don’t know if I’m alive or not.

Sometimes I see myself as one of those magi of the guitar – Rory Gallagher, D. Gilmour, Jeff Beck or Jan Akkerman. I stand in the spotlight and take a solo.

I build the choruses and sequences in any order I choose.

I improvise; I make the familiar seem new; I reinvent, recast and bring to life.

So where’s it coming from, this feeling, this funny low euphoria? A little bit from the town, I think. I do love the dirty brick of the miniature terraces and the mist from the river and the cold mornings, even now in May. And then the sudden huge vista of a great courtyard of King’s or Trin or Queens’, when everything that’s been pinched, and puritanical and cold and grudging and sixpence-in-the-gas-meter is suddenly swept away by the power and scale of those buildings, with their towers and crenellations and squandered empty spaces, built by men who knew that they’d calculated the mechanical laws of time and distance and there was therefore no need whatever to build small.

It’s teatime on Friday in November. The road is lit by the lamps of bicycles; cars pass at their peril, slowly, because the pedalling girls, some frizzy and stout, some slight and eager, the girls with their lights front and rear, are the queens of the highway.

Back from games, the girls are flushed; their faces are red from the Ural wind. Red Russian wind from communist mountains, from the giant Soviet factories. Jennifer is running down the corridor, lively with the sense of her good fortune. They’re having tea now in Anne’s room, which has a gas ring. Molly comes in with cake she bought in town: a sponge cake with cherries. They sit on chairs and floors and beds. There isn’t much room, but there’s music on Anne’s cheap record player: a balladeer, a minstrel, shock-haired with a guitar – afternoon songs for girls in jeans with coloured silk scarves knotted or held with silver woggles from Morocco.

There’s a tortoiseshell cat who lives opposite and he’s half adopted us. I pull back the curtain and see him on the roof, stretching in the thin early sun. I love the jumble of small slate roofs on the brick terraced cottages. I lie watching for a few minutes while an ‘inane disc jockey’ (Dad) babbles on the radio. Then I put on socks, slippers, sweater and coat and go down to the kitchen, and, while the kettle’s on, open the back door to the cat and call him in. He tumbles off the roof of the shed and comes shyly to the step where (if lucky) he gets a saucer of milk and a stroke.

Jennifer sat back against the wooden settle in a slightly defensive posture; she wore a floral print skirt. I could see her bare legs. She had a sharp patella that gave a fetching inverted-triangle shape to the knee. She was smoking a cigarette and trying not to laugh, but her eyes looked concerned and vulnerable as Robin’s low voice went urgently on.

She is alive, God damn it, she is alive. She looks so poised, with that womanly concern beginning to override the girlish humour. I will always remember that balanced woman/girl expression in her face. She was twenty-one.

They left. She was so absorbed by what Robin was saying that she forgot to say goodbye either to me or to her friend Malini who was at the other end of the room. She went through the door, hoisting her brown leather shoulder bag up, the hem of the skirt fluttering for a second as she tripped down the step onto the cobbles.

I cut down Pembroke Street and Silver Street and over the river and I think of all the people who’ve gone before me – the men in the Cavendish Labs and the Nobel prize-winners and Milton and Darwin and Wordsworth, of course, but mostly of the generations of young men and women who weren’t famous but were so relieved to be here at last and meet people like themselves, and didn’t mind the freezing cold and no money for the meter and the greasy college breakfast. I think of the men in their tweed jackets with the elbow patches and the bluestockinged women in their clunky shoes and I feel glad for them still. Feel v lucky and
not that cold
. Goodnight, Dad. Thank you for everything. Sleep well back in Lym. x

As Hannah came into the sodium light of the street lamp, I recognised the navy blue coat, a replica of Jen’s own that had presumably vanished with her. She also wore a grey sweater, the polo neck that wasn’t quite, blue flared jeans and boots.

She walked down the grey pavement, going away from us; her step was light and confident, and you felt all that Jenniferish excitement about being alive and it
was
her in all but fact: it was her again, you could smell her hair, her skin, and sense how much she was looking forward to the bump of the lit gas fire and the ski socks, as she quickened slightly in the cold, thinking of the cat tumbling from the roof in the morning and the day ahead.

She walked, this girl, with that slow stride suppressing gaiety, her love of living, the slight sway of her narrow hips as she moved onwards, away from us, turned right at the end of the street and vanished in the Fenland mist.

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.

We knew nothing of drugs. I wondered how many of the bright-eyed boys – their parents’ treasures, the comets of their hope – were now in Fulbourn and Park Prewett, fat and trembling on the side effects of chlorpromazine: an entire life, fifty indistinguishable years, in the airless urine wards of mental institutions because one fine May morning in the high spirits and skinny health of their twentieth year they’d taken a pill they didn’t understand, for fun.

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 twenty 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.

She walked, this girl, with that slow stride suppressing gaiety, her love of living, the slight sway of her narrow hips as she moved onwards, away from us, turned right at the end of the street and vanished in the Fenland mist . . .

There are some things in the past that may have happened and some that may not have happened. But the reality of their happening or not happening
then
has no weight
now
.

Until we can navigate in time, I’m not sure we can prove that what happened is real.

Yes, up here in the spotlight, I can do anything. Anything at all. Listen.

16 F
EBRUARY
, 1974

Last night went to party at Pete and Vicky’s in Malcolm Street. Typical student bash, though in unusually nice house. Charlie from Emma there, a bit freaked out.

Danced a lot to good selection of records, mostly Tamla, and drank perhaps rather too freely of Pete’s Algerian red. Irish Mike turned up with two bottles, also v welcome.

Had intense conversation with Philippa from Newnham about historical perspectives and whether historiography
necessarily
political, naive to pretend otherwise etc. Slight sense that she trying to get things clear in her own mind before finals, esp re Foucault (And I’d always thought F was a physicist – rotation of earth etc . . .)

Also v amusing talk with Charlie about why men look so good in mascara! He amused that I find this annoying. ‘But, Jen, since women have abandoned make-up, why shouldn’t we use it? Someone has to.’ Did not let on that I was actually wearing pan-stick (nasty small spot on side of chin; ‘Harold’ due shortly) as well as artfully applied eyeshadow . . .

V good fun, though. Smoked some of Vicky’s Afghan black and felt pretty good though somewhat heavy in the feet and rather indiscriminately affectionate. Thought better to leave while still on top (if I was) and went out into b. freezing night, dreading long walk home sans bike. Bloody hell.

Then on Jesus Lane got lift from Mike. What piece of luck. Up Vic Rd, round one-way system and down to our house.

Felt I had to ask him in as it was still not very late and least I could do was offer him tea. Lit gas fire in sitting room and put on
Bryter Later
by Nick Drake.

Sat on floor by fire and let amazing melancholy music flood room. Mike visibly moved and rather poured out his heart to me about his home and family and so on.

I got more dope from my room and made some more tea. Nick was at Hannah’s, Molly had gone to her parents’ and no sign of Anne.

On doubtless very ill-advised whim, put my arm round Mike in sisterly way and he rested head on my bosom. Music played. All very innocent. Eventually wanted to go to bed. He said he now incapable of driving because stoned, and could he stay. I felt so full of warmth and dope that said all right, but no funny business and he swore not.

Kept on knickers and ski socks as well as old-lady nightie so hardly much of a lure, I imagine. Lent him tee shirt and after kiss on cheek, turned away for night. Duvet cover and sheet clean that morning. Fell asleep at once.

Somehow in course of night found ‘things’ happening. He v sweet and pleading. V cold outside. What could I do? Relented in magnanimous hippie way. Silly girl, but surely no harm done.

Woke up appalled. No hangover, but just appalled. Went down and made tea, brought it back to room. Mike asleep and snoring slightly with half-smile on his face. I felt an utter fool but couldn’t help laughing a little bit. Pulled back curtains. Pissing with rain. Couldn’t face bikeless trek to Sidgwick. Then remembered: Saturday anyway.