Semi-Detached (30 page)

On the
wedding night of a Bejar nomad, the groom leaves the men’s tent in the middle
of the night, creeps across the desert and clambers under the tent flap to find
his betrothed. Then, in the women’s tent, surrounded by her mother, aunties and
sisters, he ravishes his bride. This was similar, though at least I knew where
to find her and didn’t have to stumble around in the dark and inquire where she
was. I obviously thought that siblings didn’t count. I would have done the same
for them. They had to pretend, for form’s sake, that they were asleep. If they
woke up and tried to eavesdrop, that was their look-out. But I wasn’t really
concerned about them. The extended courtship by letter and now an attempt to
take each stage as slowly and quietly as possible must have stoked up the
ardour. The condom smelt rubbery, but it was real sex, and Jill was a bona fide
visitor from the more straightforward Americas. I had joined the sixties sexual
revolution at last, and only two years late.

After
that we worked hard at it. I did a lot of babysitting. We would stand at the
door, see the parents off and get at it amongst the toy cars. Thank God for
dinner parties. I meet grown-up people today who could have choked to death in
their cots for all I knew. We loved the sex, but, alas, I gradually realized I
didn’t love Jill.

‘I
thought she was staying for good at one point, my mother told me. I should have
realized that no trip around Europe was really planned. Jill didn’t suddenly
reach for her backpack and wave a cheery farewell. I took her to see the Tower
of London, but the sites of major European cities weren’t the reason for her
visit. I was. I had made the poor girl cross the Atlantic, and as the summer
faded so did my passion. In September I would go to university anyway.

Jill
was far too grown up not to guess that there wasn’t any real future, even if I
was too immature to be able to broach it. I took her with me to Cambridge a few
weeks before I was due to go up. I hadn’t had the guts to talk to her, but by
now I was walking separately from her. I can feel the dipping, draining slide
of the stomach and the heat on the back of the neck. It’s called ‘shame’. I
simply grew cold towards her. We had talked a lot, now I didn’t talk at all. We
had walked hand in hand, now I took my hand away. We had been friends, now I
acted like a stranger. And she was thousands of miles from home.

She
finally got the message and flew off, and I was relieved. Everybody was sorry
that she was going except me. They were just more polite than me. They could
say sensible words and talk to her. I just let things drift and behaved
obtusely until she told me that she thought she had better go home. I hope her
parents hugged her. I hope she got married. I hope she’s happy.

I hope
she doesn’t read this.

14. The Whiff of Nepotism

In the autumn of 2003 I
went back to Cambridge. I was taking George, my son, there to start his
university career. I should have been many things at that moment. I should have
been proud and a little in awe of his youth and attainments and I should have
been happy for him. I should have been supportive and easy-going and helpful. I
should have been at the very least a little decent. But I suppose I have never
really been very good at being the things that I ought to be.’

The
year before, he had quietly come to me to ask me my advice about colleges. ‘My
advice?’ Once I had accommodated the mild shock, I had given my advice freely
enough. I was an expert, after all. It was one of my favourite subjects. ‘I can
only recommend two things.’ I was exploring a tone that I gradually recognized
as being magisterially paternal. ‘Go for a college by the river. You will be
spending time in university activities, not college ones …’ (how speedily
one becomes an utter arse under these trying and exceptional circumstances) ‘…
and the river colleges are much prettier. But, hey, it doesn’t really matter,
just whatever you do, don’t apply for my old college, Emmanuel. They hate any
whiff of nepotism. And anyway,’ I added, ‘it’s become some sort of academic
top-runner, apparently, first on some ladder list or other, and there’s no
point in making things difficult for yourself, is there?’

George
ignored my advice, applied to Emmanuel and got a place easily enough. The
director of studies was apparently utterly unaware that his father had been at
the college at all. And when the time came, I offered to deliver his bass amplifier.
It was the least I could do. Had my own father come with me at that point?
Probably not, but I wanted to be at least a little parasitic. We drove out
through east London, actually passing within sight of Epping on the way.

‘This
is actually what I’d like to do,’ I said by way of conversation half-way up the
M11.

‘What?’

‘Oh, I
don’t know Spend a few years studying architecture at undergraduate level.’
University was wasted on young people. ‘They only want to shag each other and
explore the shops. Ha ha. We should go to university at sixty. Then we’d be
fascinated by the lectures. God, I’d attend all the lectures these days.’

My wife
Jo shifted in her seat and laughed gently. ‘Are you trying to compete with him?’

I
laughed myself, loudly. I was trying to make conversation with an
eighteen-year-old, wasn’t I? OK. I was dumping my neuroses on him as I did so,
but then he was old enough to understand that, wasn’t he? By the way. had he
actually read any of the set books on that list they sent him? Had he?

By the
time we arrived, I had the grace to feel moderately ashamed of myself, and he
was a nervous wreck.

‘Oh,
for God’s sake, it’s always
you!’

But it
was
me. This was the unacknowledged elephant sitting in the back seat of the
family Zafira.

We
arrived at the back of the college, my college. They had built a cream-painted
wall where there had once been internal windows looking down into the Junior
Common Room, but otherwise the building was utterly unchanged. To an
undergraduate returning from the 1940s, Cambridge in the 1970s would have been
a different planet, but as we heaved the trunk through the same heavy sprung
door up the same spiral staircase and stood in the same corridor I felt I had
entered some sort of cruel time warp. George wasn’t actually in my room. He was
in Andrew’s, next door.

This
was the real reason they discourage nepotism. The experience is too traumatic
for the older relative. George’s room had the same bed, pushed back under a
sloping double cupboard, with the same adjustable shelving above. There was the
same desk with the same wide, shaded anglepoise light. The same plate-glass
window ran along the width of the north side looking out on to the same roof
garden, where the same shrubs now seemed surreally overgrown, reinforcing the
impression that it was a looking-glass dream, because when I say ‘the same’ I
don’t mean it in a comparative sense, I mean it in its absolute sense. Why hadn’t
they, at the least, changed the colour scheme or replaced the lino?

When I
was at Emmanuel, according to ‘the alternative guide’ for college
undergraduates, I flooded the North Court passages after an accident with a
washing machine. (Heh, heh.) But this was completely untrue. Surely I had felt
nothing for my college? Emmanuel had merely become ‘a place to sleep, hadn’t
it? I sneeringly rejected the beery Junior Common Room and its habitués,
dressed like a Marks and Spencer knitwear catalogue. I pompously spurned
everything that reminded me of school (the sports teams, the head of the river,
the rowing bumpery-frumpery, the college societies, and the Master’s wife,
with her well-thumbed copy of
Who’s Who
resting on her nest of tables).
My college scarf had lain for years at the bottom of the architect-designed
chest of drawers, wrapping up some china. So why was it affecting me so oddly
now?

‘We
should go.’ My wife was standing by the door, having said her goodbye to
George.

‘Yes.
Do you want to meet later? Anything you need? Hadn’t we better get you a
kettle?’ I was grasping at utensils. ‘Shall we meet you for tea?’

‘Perhaps.’

We went
out via Front Court and I started to slow my steps. There were the same posters
for what looked like the same productions of
The Bald Prima Donna.
I
furtively glanced at the stairs up to the pigeon-holes. I had to fight a residual
urge to go up and look — as if there might still be something in mine. No, no.
This was ridiculous, but what my wife could not understand, and what I could
not admit, was that I had never finished whatever it was that had started here.
I was standing in the cloisters looking across the square of grass at the
yellow stone hall and trying to leap across thirty years, but the leap that I
was trying to make was forward, to accept the present. Thirty years? My father
once told me that he had never felt a day older since he had been at university.

‘What
on earth is the matter with you?’

‘Nothing.’
My son had usurped my life. He had thirty years on me, stretching ahead of him.
This was where my own life had suddenly become what it had never been before: exciting.
It had remained exciting, but never as much fun. I was fiendishly envious of my
own flesh and blood. ‘We can get a kettle in Robert Sayle, if it’s still there,’
I said.

In
1972, my mother was impressed by my place at Cambridge. My father, apparently,
had been bright enough and qualified for Oxford, but the War intervened, or his
father died (the exact circumstances varied), and he had had to stay at home
and become a doctor in Cardiff. Mummy had to admit that she wasn’t quite sure
what it was all ultimately ‘for’. She hoped, I think, that I would eventually
become as successful as David Frost, the Cambridge graduate who most seemed to
epitomize varsity success amongst the middle classes in the late sixties.

At
school, only the senior chaplain, ‘Sexy’ Gardiner, ever stopped the roar of the
qualification machinery for long enough to allow the Oxbridge factory to
examine itself. ‘Why are you all going to university?’ he asked, in the middle
of a general studies lesson. We stared sullenly back at him. Eventually Horth
stuck up a hand. ‘Because you told us to,’ he said.

There
was no ‘beyond’ Oxbridge. It was the edge of the flat world. This was the era
of
The Graduate,
with that party scene when the man comes up to Dustin
Hoffman and says, ‘I have one word to say to you — “plastics”.

Nobody
even said ‘plastics’ to us. Nobody said ‘law’, or ‘civil service’ or ‘City of
London’ either. Nobody said anything beyond ‘get a degree.’

At
Cambridge I was to bump into a few seemingly deluded would-be rulers of the
country wearing waistcoats who liked to bray loudly and publicly at either
basset hounds or rowers or the Union. (They ended up editing major newspapers
and running political parties and were not deluded at all.) But they were not
us. We had no sense of destiny, only mild shame. How could we do anything other
than blush and groan slightly when our mothers introduced us to some pompous
friend with the dreadful words ‘He’s going up to Cambridge next year’? We
learned to mutter to our contemporaries, ‘I’m at college.’

We
were, after all, products of the
Melody Maker
and
NME,
of earnest
endeavours to persuade teachers that the lyrics of Procul Harem were the equal
of Shelley, that the bass rhythms of Deep Purple were as musically complex as
Scarlatti, and that Bob Dylan was as clever as Auden (and decidedly more
important because he was populist, egalitarian and youthful). A whole
generation had been corralled and seduced by the marketing ambitions of a
self-important youth culture. Nick Hornby was somewhere over the park in Jesus,
preparing for an early career writing for music magazines.

‘My
father tells me you were at Emmanuel,’ a different famous novelist I
interviewed for
Bookworm
once said.

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Seventy—two.’

‘Oh.’
He looked bemused. ‘Same year as me. What did you read?’

‘English.’

‘Gosh,
same subject.’

I was
in a different set. ‘Funny we never met.’

‘Yes,
well, I spent most of my time at Cambridge lying in my room smoking dope,’ he
said.

In
Brideshead,
they drink themselves insensible in panelled halls. In
The Adventures of
Verdant
Greene, Verdant spends most of his waking hours chatting up shop
girls. Betjeman never did any work. Byron ran up debts furnishing his rooms.
Peter Cook spent most of his time in London, writing revues for Kenneth
Williams. But they were all self-consciously, unashamedly, at
Cambridge
or Oxford. Not us. We were the egalitarian generation. The ‘Oxbridge seventies
lot’ rather scrupulously avoided any national presence until Stephen, Emma and
Hugh came along and were clever in public again. For years, the most outwardly
famous product of Cambridge of my era was ‘the Cambridge Rapist’.

There
is an undistinguished triangle of open space, just off the river, at the corner
of Grantchester Road. In 1972, my mother drove me off the main A11 and through
the suburbs to start my own first term and it was this bit, ringed with low
Victorian villas, rows of almshouses and the tall trees of the meadows by the
river (not collegiate Cambridge at all) that spuriously hit me with the promise
of cloistered academia.