Semi-Detached (37 page)

‘We
were.’

‘I got
some very good reviews.’

‘What
are you talking about, Geoffrey? The whole show was slated. Michael Billington’s
notice started “If this dismal little revue …”

I had
read all the critics on the top of a bus coming into the West End. Outside the
theatre I stood watching a man from an advertising agency balancing on a
stepladder. He was desperately trying to find some words of good cheer to stick
up on his hoardings. Literally scratching his head, he saw me and scowled. ‘I
don’t know what you’ve got to laugh about,’ he said.

It was
a strange way of spending a summer. We dug in for four weeks and were filmed by
the BBC. After a few days, Michael White came to see us and took away the
meagre subsistence we were paid, in order to save on overall costs. (‘Well, you’re
students, so it won’t matter to you.’)

I
stayed in London at Charlotte’s home and took to exploring the life of her
parents, who lived amongst piebald cats and potted plants in a cluttered flat
in West Hampstead. They were exemplary student accessories. Anne, Charlotte’s
mother, related to the Thackerays, was kind and judicious, and one of the
founders of Britain’s social services. Kellow had written a whole book I had
heard of called
The Victorian Underworld
and had been a Communist in the
thirties, when such things had been the height of fashion. Now he was working
on a history of sporting life, a project sadly never to be finished, but he
would throw up his hooked nose with a fruity chuckle and disconcert visitors to
his green-baize— covered dinner table by assuming that their knowledge of
eighteenth-century London, or nineteenth-century boxing or Byzantine bishops
was as detailed as his own. When he asked, ‘Oh what was the name of that fat
chap in Tom and Jerry?’ he meant the nineteenth-century popular novel not the
cartoon. I learnt to mumble distractedly, as if the name had just eluded me
too, until Kellow grew impatient and pressed on. I would leave this little
capsule of literary bohemia to sing the ‘Fork Lift Truck Driving Song’ at the
Comedy Theatre. ‘He’s the best forking forker in the whole forking world.’

Geoffrey
remained resolutely sober until the final night at the Edinburgh Festival. It
was like bookends. The extravagances of 1973 had bankrupted Cambridge drama at
the Festival so Footlights went alone, sharing a hall with Oxford. We put on
extra shows and took the money for ourselves, and, despite London’s critical
outrage, it was a well-honed popular show by then. We did three performances on
the final night, with a midnight matinee and then an extra, extra-late,
performance at one-thirty in the morning.

As the
festival finished, it was almost time to go back to Cambridge. And I had been
given an extra year to finish the race to my degree. ‘Two more years before
exams! Wow.’ Now I could really enjoy myself.

We
blundered on into our next year, feeling light and feeling free. Or some of us
did. Simon came from a conventional enough middle-class background. His father
was a pathologist. Simon specialized in gruesome comic monologues about
syphilis and disfiguring ailments, but just like everybody else he took part in
any play that was available. When Simon’s results came through his father
ascended from a trap to drag him back down to hell. He failed the first exams
of his two-year Part Two in Law There was to be no more play-acting. He had to
leave and take his bar exams separately (He is a successful barrister today)

We were
in Southampton footling about in
Paradise Mislaid
when the phone call
came, as if from another world. Never mind his public, Simon had to go back to
Cambridge to face his tutor and then, worse, his dad.

At the
time, we discussed it in hushed awe. This was like the past coming back to
haunt us. We had managed to artificially mature beyond our real
responsibilities. We had used the last two years to mark out our own territory.
We weren’t doing this for our parents any more, were we? Or were we?

Simon’s
father was a powerful presence. I met him ten years later during the height of
Not
The Nine O’Clock News.
He quizzed me about whether I was earning a living,
nodded a little curtly when I told him I was, and then leaned in closer. ‘How’s
your father taking it?’ he asked sympathetically.

I like
to think that I never went home, but I probably skulked back to Epping in
September. Around this time my father had started to venture across the Channel
in his boat and he needed help. I had certainly gone with him on his first
trip, sitting callowly to one side as he fretted about his navigation and
became convinced that we had drifted a hundred miles north in the space of an
hour because he spotted an oil rig. (It was being towed down the Channel.)

I
definitely joined the boat on some canal in Belgium for a week at the end of my
second year, when my father’s prickly self-justification and anxiety at
unfamiliar foreign lock etiquette, his fear for his topsides, his daughter’s
embarrassments and his son’s headstrong independence all shaken up inside a
twenty-nine—foot cask kept threatening to detonate into a blistering family row
On the day I arrived, I met my sister storming along a jetty, off home, with my
father chasing her down the dock apologizing. I don’t suppose I made it any
easier, berating him for his dithering as he vacillated about squeezing his
precious cargo into a slab-sided lock shared with four two-hundred-ton
motorized Rhine barges.

‘But
who will go with him if you don’t?’ pleaded my mother. Who indeed? Len and
Derek had their own boats and had stayed the other side of the Channel. Twelve
months later I managed another trip, but only by taking my Footlights friend
from Middlesbrough, Chris Keightley, as a fender. Chris was a scientist. He was
uncomplicated and interested in things like diesel engines. He could talk with
my father, or at least talk at my father, who couldn’t sail a boat, worry about
future hazards and make anything approximating to conversation all at the same
time.

For my
part, his northern frankness was what I admired — no trimming there, but I wasn’t
sure how to respond one evening when we went strolling along Ostend promenade.
We had bought ourselves a paper cup of ‘warme wullocke’ — whelks boiled with
onions and cabbage. We chewed a whelk for half a mile, but the mollusc remained
obstinately intact and increasingly flavourless. It was either swallow the
whelk or spit it out. As I discreetly gobbed it into the gutter and noticed six
or seven other well-chewed whelks discarded in exactly the same place, Chris
suddenly turned to me and said thoughtfully, ‘I tell you what. I don’t half
fancy your mum.

17. The Burdens of Office

‘Um … I know we have a
supervision planned for tomorrow, but I haven’t actually managed to get the
entire work done … would it be at all possible to postpone it a bit …’

There
was a pause at the other end while the supervisor riffled through his diary. ‘I’m
afraid I would be unable to accommodate you until next week …’

‘Oh
dear. What a pity Perhaps we could make it then? Put the phone down, breathe
steadily, walk out into the sunlight and into the nearest pub.

Supervisors
got used to my phone calls — so did I. It took guts the first time. Can I ring?
What will he think? Shall I pretend I am ill? But like most self-deceptions,
with practice they became surprisingly routine: ‘I’m not going to be able to
make the supervision this week, bye!’

I had
been given a year ‘to catch up’ for what was a fairly simple Part Two in English.
It took monumental extracurricular commitment to comprehensively waste it. I
directed a lavish pantomime version of
Babes in the Wood,
starring Clive
Anderson as Buttons. I chaired committees, shaved my head to take part in the
Marlowe, sang comedy songs at smokers and wrote a convoluted play called simply
Dracula
on the expectation that the name itself would shift tickets at
eleven o’clock in the evening. (It did and the preposterous, wordy nonsense
went on to sell out at the Edinburgh Festival too:

‘A mild
thrill at midnight’ — the
Scotsman.)
John Lloyd directed the best of the
Footlights revues,
Paradise Mislaid,
and I rushed about a huge set
designed by Tanya McCallum.

‘You
had that big place in your second year, out towards the Newmarket Road,’
Charlotte reminded me. While I was astonished by my amateur theatrical career,
she had quite a good grasp on the accommodation.

‘By the
Zebra pub. Yes, I remember.’

‘But
you swapped it in your second term.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes.’

I had
forgotten. I remembered the ugly modern accommodation block. I remembered the
large, separate bathroom with the huge bath. I remembered that after Charlie
and Charles, my non-acting college friends, had helped me drink an entire
bottle of Southern Comfort I had brought back from America, we foolishly
decided to smoke the souvenir comedy cigar that came with, it. The cigar was
ten inches long. It was real tobacco, but green, the Southern Comfort was
sweet, and the three of us filled the bath with vomit. We were so drunk it
seemed like a bizarre medical experiment.

Later I
swapped rooms with Charlie. Charlie moved out into my rooms in the Newmarket
Road, and I got Charlie’s suite, back in the centre of town, in exchange. I
think it had something to do with access to supplies of Scotch eggs.

It was
a pretty little set of rooms, at the top of a staircase in North Court, with an
‘oak’ (which could be sported), a minute kitchen and separate bedroom and
sitting room, and (particularly lovely this) a gas fire with glowing asbestos
bars, in front of which I could fall asleep whenever I picked up a book. I kept
the rooms for my third year too. They should have eased the stresses of finals,
except that I didn’t have any finals. Mine were postponed a year. Still, there
were plenty of other distractions.

I had
arrived at the university looking like the bass guitarist in the Sweet. I left
dressed as a science master in a costume drama. The seventies presented
bewildering options for the impecunious popinjay In the early part of the
decade, I thought I looked pretty dashing in a pair of navy-surplus canvas
button-front trousers. I had a baby-blue tank top and a round-collared muslin
shirt too. Perhaps I should have been wary about wearing the lot together, but
I was nothing if not sartorially willing.

I was
just an amateur, of course. There was no money for any of it. There was bound
to be an element of improvisation. Perhaps everyone would have started wearing
duck canvas bell-bottoms eventually There was barely time to find out. It would
have been simpler to stick to moss-coloured jummies from Marks and Spencer.

Then
Bryan Ferry went and looked excessively cool in his white tuxedo on the front
of
These Foolish Things.
It was time to dump the glittery-coloured
things and take to Casablanca. Charles Lambert and I went to see Louis Malle’s
Lacombe
Lucien
and decided that members of the French Resistance had exquisite
taste in tailoring even when being tortured.
The Sting
was a. bit
tight-arsed, but the French riposte — a film starring Belmondo and Delon called
Borsalino
— unequivocally demonstrated to us that people just simply didn’t
know ‘how to dress properly at all any more’.
Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Baker,
Casablanca.
Look at those beautiful suits. If you wanted proper bags, there
they were.

I’m not
sure that Charles, who was rather more scholarly than I was, did more than pass
comment. He was all mouth and no change of trousers. I was less inhibited. On a
quick tour of Cambridge’s charity shops I turned up dozens of elegant if
slightly smelly outfits. ‘Demob suits’, my mother might have called them, but
it seemed more probable that they were hand-tailored, slightly conservative,
professorial degree-ceremony wear. King Street was lined with old-fashioned
tailors — yellow gel in the windows to protect their old-fashioned stock — but
they were not quite old-fashioned enough for us. Generally, the jackets looked
mimsy, mid-sixties and dull, but thirty years before, the Emeritus Professor
of Greek had splashed out on a dark navy wool barathea suit from the same
source, and it was lovely.

My
uncle in Cardiff proved an unexpected ally in all this. Ieaun must have seen in
me some slight respite from the trend to dowdiness in the rest of the family He
recognized the faltering gene of dandyism. He could see that at least one
nephew was going to try to pass himself off as a piss-elegant fraud. Things
started arriving, jolly nice things too. He gave me a ‘cast—off’ watch. Well,
he called it cast-off, and I believed him. I realize now that he was excusing
his gift, the unexpectedness of it, playing down the generosity Insensitive as
usual, I took it at face value and failed to spot the nuances.

I still
have it. It is a Movado gold fob, biscuit-slim, on a white gold and platinum
chain, for wearing in your breast pocket — exquisite. It was attached through
the button hole, but only useful, of course, if you happen to have a breast
pocket and a proper ‘cut’ button hole to hang it in. There were six jet and
platinum studs too. And you could only wear those if your dinner shirt was
starch fronted and pompous enough to need studs. Not with a tie-dye t-shirt.
The signet ring had once been the property of the first Lord Mayor of Cardiff.
It was made of gold mined in the Welsh hills and bore the great boyo’s seal. He
had been related to my uncle’s wife, Aunty Joan, so it cannot have been without
sentimental value, but the circumstances of his giving these things to me have
gone, except that he subtly informed of their ‘prettiness, what?’