Be Near Me (21 page)

Love me back, I whispered into the short glass.

I found out the next day that he was at Worcester. I heard he came from Liverpool—'how impossibly thrilling', said Edward—and eventually I found my way to one of those political meetings. I went to other meetings after that, and Conor was always there with his timidly devouring eyes. When I first walked up to him I stared at the badges on his jacket. 'You're one of them Balliol aesthetes,' he said.

His accent was intimidatingly friendly.

'Not exclusively,' I said. 'I like the Beatles.'

'Oh, them four.'

'Sorry,' I said. 'That's a bit pathetic.'

'You have nice skin,' he said.

'I'm sorry?'

'Good skin. Where you from?'

'Lancashire.'

'Thought as much,' he said. 'Lancashire or Yorkshire. I knew I could hear something in there.'

'I don't know what to say to you,' I said.

'Let's go for coffee and think of something,' he said. 'Don't you think Wilson is a war-loving hypocrite?'

We took a short trip to Florence that August and at the end of the summer he took me to see his parents in Liverpool. There wasn't much of them to see, though Conor brought me into their company as if they were a special room at the British Museum. We had two rounds of drinks in a large Victorian hotel next to a bingo hall in King Street. His father owned a clockmakers and was a keen gardener. He spent most of the time talking about rose bushes and his battles with the weather, while his wife, Conor's mother, made it clear that she ran her life (and everybody else's) according to principles rigorously upheld in Holy Catholic Ireland. Conor, by then, wasn't Catholic at all, but he went to Mass whenever his mother was around and said it was sensible to see her piety as an apt expression of all that her people had suffered at the hands of the English. I smiled when he told me that. 'Just play up the Scottish bit,' he said.

'Does she care that much?' I asked. I remember he struck a match off the sole of his shoe and lit a cigarette, whispering the smoke into the space between us.

'Just give the Voice what she needs,' he said. 'She doesn't need a great deal. She's not hard to manage.'

It was my friend Edward, when I told him about Conor's mother in advance of meeting her, who had christened her the Voice—short for the Voice of Doom—and even Conor took it up. In the hotel bar she proved that the name was not ill-suited. 'These Oxford ones,' she said, 'the best of them would sit down on the pavement and weep before they'd accept a day's work or a sign from God. Is that not right, Conor? And the best of it is, their gowns and their degrees and their mortar boards won't keep them safe during the nuclear war. Is that not right, Conor Docherty? Their eyes will melt away from their heads in the nuclear war—soon enough, mark my words—before they can so much as reach out to pick up their books. Where will your Willie Shakespeare be to lend you a hand then, Conor Docherty?'

For me, Conor was the better part of the 1960s. He expressed the times better than anyone I ever met. Looking back on those years now, people speak as if they were little more than a pantomime of alternative ideas, but Conor taught me how glorious it might be to live in colour for the first time. That night in Liverpool he spoke about the matter with a personal urgency. 'People forget what it was like in the 1950s,' he said, 'how grim Britain was. I used to worry that the world would never have a place for our way of thinking.'

'What way of thinking?' I asked.

'I don't know,' he said. 'Being who you want to be as opposed to who you were born to be.'

'Heaven forfend,' I said. I was never a 1960s person in the way that Conor was, partly, I suspect, because my father was dead and my mother was a 1960s person before her time.

'I thought I might never be allowed to say anything,' said Conor, 'or be anything that mattered to me. It was all cloth caps up here. Or petit bourgeois rubbish about refrigerators and savings. When I got to Oxford I thought somebody had turned the lights on.'

We were alone. I put my hand into the pocket of his coat.

'And it's political,' he said.

I could never share that feeling very precisely, but I had my share of the freedoms he spoke about, my share of the decade's hopes too. Conor looked up with his Bob Dylan eyes: 'These are our changes. Yours as much as anybody's.'

'Hell knows,' I said, walking down the pavement in a Liverpool of tin chapels and sleeping docks, the set of an old movie. 'I fear some of us are even more subjective than that.'

He smiled.

'Spoken like a true Marcellist,' he said.

Back in his beloved second-hand Triumph Herald, Conor meshed his hands in his hair as he leaned over the steering wheel. It was dark in those streets and Liverpool's own popular songs seemed to animate the living air and render the old buildings closed and lonely. We didn't see it as a decade then but just as now, now, now. He turned round to face me in the passenger seat, laughing and biting his bottom lip, then he leaned over and kissed me. 'It was a masterstroke,' he said. 'Did you see the way the Voice's tone just changed when you mentioned the ancestors?'

'But they're real,' I said.

'I don't care if they're real. It was perfect. The Voice likes a martyr more than anything in the world.'

'I like a martyr myself,' I said.

'Must be a Balliol thing.'

A ferryboat sounded on the Mersey. 'This is good, Conor,' I said. 'A wonderful night.' We got lost driving in the city and at one point he pulled up in Scotland Road next to a shop that said Cookson's Diamonds. His eyes were so alive and only the audible burn of his cigarette hung between us as we discussed our plans in a pool of yellow light falling from the shop window.

'These dead recusants of yours can't be far away from here,' he said. 'Let's drive to Lanes and visit them.'

'No,' I said. 'Let's go south. I don't know how to find them.'

He turned the ignition and we moved at speed through
the grey roads of northern England, the car filling with pot smoke and sudden laughter, the towns blurring past in the dark.

'De Gaulle betrayed the workers,' he said.

That was what he did all the time, tried to improve my politics. I can picture the exact greyness of that journey, Conor's beautiful face, a downpour outside Birmingham, the oily rain on the windscreen, a tunnel of trees sucking us into Oxford and the sound of John Lennon's voice suspending all other voices as it emerged from the new car radio.

Men had a sense of danger about these things. You had to have: homosexuality was not yet legal for people our age. It is not often said, but the need for discretion suited some of us perfectly. It certainly suited Conor and me, the idea that privacy was not just a survival requirement but something quite central to what we had. I've seen men holding hands in the years since and wondered if something wasn't lost by what they gained. Maybe not. We found it easy to outwit the law because our own law called for caution.

I remember Hippisley-Cox stopping at the gate to the Fellows' Garden to tell me, under his breath and with his London face on, that I must dread the outcome of such a passion. 'Your admiration of that young political rogue has become exclusive,' he said.

'He's interesting.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' said Edward. 'You're interesting. Your curiosity about him is just another way for you to be curious about yourself. That's how love works.'

'That's hideous, Edward,' I said. 'And not at all the case.'

'You're becoming more like him,' he said.

'Is that an illness?'

'Not quite,' said Edward, 'but a form of suffering, yes. Just look after your pride, dear heart.'

'It seems so necessary,' I said. It took a lot for me to say that: I've never been good at saying what I wanted to say.

Edward looked at the base of the gate and pointed down. It was the Fellows' Garden tortoise, Hector, who had crawled out of the bushes covered in purple juice, having gorged, as usual, on the mulberries. We stared for a moment at the pawing reptile in its dark shell.

'Nothing about fondness is necessary,' said Edward.

'Is that from the Big Book?' I asked.

'No,' said Edward. 'It's just from me to you.'

I felt a flush in my cheeks and a rush of feeling. I wanted to tell Edward once and for all what it was like. I wanted to say to him: 'I am finally myself with this man and he is interesting and good and makes everything else seem cold.' But it didn't feel possible for me to say those things, and I realised that my undergraduate friends and I had never really wanted to know each other.

'He is a reality,' I said.

Edward took a breath and released it from his mouth both slowly and sadly, as if a tyre was being let down on purpose, along with his hopes for me and his hopes for himself. 'Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us,' he said. 'And that is from the book. Volume Two. Page 207. Good evening, Anderton.'

I saw less of the Marcellists after that. At Oxford I seemed constantly to be moving between realms of belief. I
had an authoritarian tutor who hated the authorities and loved the people in their ideal state. Nashe somehow continued, via anecdotes about Tunbridge Wells, to feed me wisdom in regard to the libertarian and fraternal instincts of the revolutionary French. But, when it came down to it, Nashe was no fan of the new student politics. He found those students to be false, spoiled, unfunny and lacking in proper social zeal. He favoured the Marcellists as examples of the good old-fashioned college sort.

'So, Anderton,' he said, 'I gather you are venturing towards the environs of Worcester College. A rather conservative place, but I hear one may find radicals among the twisted boughs over there. You must beware of ill humour.'

'Not to worry,' I said. 'We are seldom about the college.'

'Oh,' he said. 'And have we arrived already at "we"? I must refer you to the latter chapters of my imperfect book,
The Way of the People,
referring to the tyrannical though not uncolourful assumptions that may underlie the potency of this "we". And we are marching in aid of the workers now, I gather?'

'The Cowley men, yes,' I said, sheepishly. 'For better wages.'

'Ahh,' said Nashe. 'Better wages. That is a project almost certainly enhanced by the kindness of good men. Now, dear Anderton, mind how these new friends of yours will make mincemeat of your God. Those excessively in favour of the people are always unforgiving of the Man Upstairs. That is a principle of the modern age.'

'You seem to be rather well informed about my doings,' I said.

'Oh, heavens,' he said. 'You needn't vex on that point. You are one of those fine gentlemen like Maurice Bowra, a man much more dined against than dining.'

The Oxford of the First World War was a dead place to the likes of Conor. The past didn't interest him in that way. There used to be a sign at Oxford railway station that said: 'Welcome to Oxford, The Home of Pressed Steel.' My early friends and I used to find that hilariously funny, but Conor didn't. The Oxford of pressed steel was the only one he really cared about, and that great belt of manufacturers and printers to the east was his spiritual glade. Conor never allowed anyone to forget that the Cowley car plant was only three miles from the Sheldonian.

In my final year, 1968, Conor was everything, and his friends, the Bombastics, were all about us in their leafleting, polo-necked way. They knew all the student leaders at Berkeley, at Columbia, in Paris and in Germany. Whole evenings would be spent raising petitions for the people of Prague or the Deep South, and I can still see Conor smoking between sentences and creasing his forehead with concentration or shyness. And I can see him standing in his denim jacket among the wild tulips in Christ Church Meadow, listening to a clever young woman demanding a solution to Mexico's economic problems. Turning to see me at the edge of the trees, he would wink over and make me feel that love between men was part of the easy new world he wished to argue into being. It wasn't difficult, his smile seemed to say. It was our world to make right.

'Hello, old sausage.' It was Hippisley-Cox. He was standing with some of his new friends one night, outside the Eagle and Child in St Giles. I remember my scarf was wound halfway up my face against the cold. 'Off to a meeting are you, old sauce?' asked Edward.

'Just back.'

'Good, good,' he said. 'Fancy a glass of the old peculiar?'

'No thanks, Eddie. Have one for me.'

'We shall,' he said. 'We shall drink wine. Something made from grapes trampled by a thousand Sunderland peasants.' The young men around him laughed. Several were recent undergraduates.

'Excellent,' I said.

'True, isn't it?' said Edward. 'Please confirm the matter for my
confrères.
The Bombastics like nothing more than heading up north for a bit of unpaid graft in the company of some sooty-faced Britter. Was it not yourself and the Son of Voice who recently darkened the plains of Wales to help miners out with their allotments?'

'Not me,' I said. 'But I hear they are very nice. You can advise your
confrères
where to find their names in Debrett's.'

I looked up at the pub sign.

'The Bird and Babe,' I said. 'A rather elevated venue for you, Edward?'

He drank me in with his inebriated eyes.

'But of course,' he said, bowing from the waist. His head seemed so old at the time, though actually he was painfully young. 'We must each seek elevation in our own way.'

I came to feel those people had vitality but no values. They were just decadents; worse than that, the shadows of
decadents, actors really, living up to a half-formed picture of some mythical Oxford past. They used daring old novels for the better parts of their scripts and slivers of Wildean dogma to freshen their afternoons. In fact, I see now that I probably underestimated them, that they had more grasp of the world than they seemed to have at the time of my abandoning them. In the scramble for Conor and his world of commitment and change, I came to see Edward's world as a road not taken. Later on I would take it, but by then I was walking on my own. I said goodbye to Hippisley-Cox for the last time as if I were saying goodbye to some terrible possibility for myself. A few months later, he was arrested in London for soliciting in a public toilet.