The Summer Isles (16 page)

A stray copy of the
Penrith Advertiser
has crept in amongst all the Nationals. The winner of the Regional Manhood Competition smiles out at me from the front page, his kilt falling in ample yet suggestive folds as he squats on caber-tossing thighs. The photo on the back page, beside a column giving advice to Young Mr. and Mrs. Modern on setting up home, is of a poorer quality, kindly taken by a J. H. Wigton. It shows an elderly woman hunched in the stocks on a village green. She has been put there, the caption jokily informs us, as
a show of local outrage.
Similar submissions are invited from other readers.

My train roars on through the night, reaching the Midlands at dawn. Pylons stride off towards the tower blocks of a new town, and an old man, as we slow outside Stoke on Trent, limps along the tracks with a wicker basket over his shoulder, stooping arthritically to collect fallen lumps of coal. He turns to look up at me through the carriage window. Our eyes meet without recognition.

Change at Rugby for Oxford. With half an hour to kill and rumour of my importance seeming to have petered out, I sit untended in the waiting room, which I must share with three members of the Young Empire Alliance. They’re little more than lads, really—younger brothers of caber-tossing Regional Manhood—and yet they affect maturity and ease as they smoke their Pall Malls and stretch out in long-trousered boy-scout uniforms. Is that the ring of a steel toecap I hear as one of them kicks absently at the bench on which I’m sitting? But they’re decent lads, even if every other word is fuck or a laughing animal growl and they give off the sweet-sour smell of whatever morning exertion they’ve been indulging in.

To be sociable as they puff away, I light one of my own Navy Cut Filtered. For once, the sweet acrid smoke dissolves into my lungs without reducing me to spastic coughing. The posters on the walls advertise the joys of visiting Great Yarmouth on the new Sandringham Class trains. Or T
RY
K
INGS
L
YNN
F
OR
A G
REAT
E
SCAPE
. There’s even T
HE
D
REAMING
S
PIRES
O
F
O
XFORD
. Another poster, looking much like the rest, advises A
LWAYS
R
EPORT
A
NYTHING
S
USPICIOUS
as a plump and cheery constable tips his helmet beneath a blue lamp.

There’s something about these YEA boys, the way they are kicking my seat, meeting each others’ eyes and talking in half-phrases, that makes me think they are not ignoring me at all. A woman in a floral hat appears at the waiting room window. I shoot her a despairing glance before she decides not to come in. Two of the youths begin to hum a tune under their breath, and alternately kick each side of my bench in rhythm.

Still, I sit there, staring at the posters on the walls, listening hard for the sound of my train.

“Party member?” one of them says suddenly. I stare at him for some seconds before I work out the meaning of his question.

I shrug.

“Thought not.” The spottiest of the youths smiles across to his colleagues. “But then I was wondering, because I saw the way that fucking porter was helping you with your fucking luggage when you got off that fucking train.”

“I have been ill.”

“That right? Look okay to me, you do.”

“Thank you. I’ve almost recovered.”

“Where do you live?”

“Oxford,” I say, raising a quivering finger in the direction of the poster on the wall.

“Not one of them fucking eggheads, are you?”

“Well, as a matter of fact…”

“Tell you what…” The best-looking of the three lads stands up. His face is tanned. His brown hair is cut so short that it would feel like velvet if you stroked it. He comes close to me and leans down. “The problem is…” A soft rain of his spittle touches my cheek. “I’m all out of matches. Can you light my fag for me?”

He keeps his eyes on mine as I fumble in my coat pocket and his friends watch on, grinning. His irises are an intense, cloudless blue. The scent and pressure of his body surrounds me. He squints slightly as the match flares, and he holds my hand to guide it towards the tip of his cigarette. The tobacco crackles softly as he draws in.

“Well, thanks…”

Moments later, my train chuffs in to its appointed platform and I leave the waiting room, cheerily wishing these lads a good journey. Then, a sweaty wreck, and still bearing an uncomfortable erection, I collapse into the carriage that the porter finds for me.

Oxfordshire comes. Then Oxford. I pay a taxi driver outside the station to take my suitcase to my rooms, then walk into town unassisted—just to prove to myself that I can still do it.

Along Park End and George Street, the city is warm, summer-quiet and at peace with itself now it has lost the unwanted distraction of students, and smells sweetly of dusty bookshops, old stone, dog shit, grass clippings. The display in the main window of Blackwells is for a book by some bishop entitled
Christian Thoughts On The Future Of A Greater Britain,
and a string of Pickfords’ lorries are parked outside the Bodleian. Whistling men are carrying large tea chests filled with books up the ramps. Wearily turning the corner with all but the last few yards of my long journey behind me, I’m struck by the thought that Oxford really
has
changed. Egged on by her fitter, younger relatives who care nothing for the things she once stood for, she dresses now like a senile old dowager in unsuitably modern clothes. Powdered and stumbling, a parody of all she once was, she falls into the heedless arms of the future.

I turn past the grinning college gargoyles who supposedly represent of some of the early dons. There is, I see, a long black Bristol parked beside the N
O
P
ARKING
sign in front of my college gates. A uniformed KSG chauffeur is leaning against its side, smoking and looking bored whilst Christlow chatters to him.

“Someone for you, sir…” Christlow says, nearly falling over the tea-tray he’s put down on the pavement. “Right at the moment. Up in your rooms.”

“Thank you, Christlow. It’s nice to be back.”

“I, ah, saw your case up there personally from the taxi, sir. Sorry to hear you were a bit ill. Do hope you had a good holiday…”

I walk on as his voice rings down the passage. I cross the quad, head along the cloisters, climb the old oak stairs and stride down the sun-threaded corridor to my rooms with all the briskness of a younger, fitter man; eager to get whatever this new thing is over with as quickly as possible. Someone from the KSG wants to see me. It’s no big deal—happens to people all the time; some of them must even live to tell about it. Anyway, what have I got to lose?

The door is slightly ajar, but my name, reassuringly, is still on it, and when I go inside my suitcase sits placidly in the middle of the floor like an old dog that can’t quite be bothered to raise itself and greet me. I don’t know what I expected, but the KSG man is standing by the window that overlooks the quad, and he has that still-but-startled air of someone who’s nearly been caught doing something—perhaps flicking through the many piles of manuscript that I had left heaped on my desk.

“Mr. Brook—it
is
right to call you Mr., is it? This funny little fat man who kept buzzing around me and trying to get me to eat biscuits told me you weren’t quite a professor…”

“That’s right. I’ve just come back…” I gesture around at my room as if in explanation. “From a curtailed holiday.”

“I heard you were taken ill. I’m sorry.”

He takes a step away from the window. I admire the various glints and shadows of his crisply-pressed dark blue uniform, the smell of good cigarettes and hair oil as he offers me his hand.

“My name’s Tony Anderson. I’m a Captain in the Knights of Saint George—what everyone calls the KSG—and I’m currently seconded to the Cabinet Office.” He reaches inside his jacket. The hairs of my neck prickle. “I have a card here somewhere…”

“No. That’s alright.”

“I won’t take up much of your time, Mr. Brook. In fact, I’d have picked you up from the station myself but the lines got crossed somewhere. And there’s the traffic from London…” He pulls a face. His skin is pale. His shiny black hair is pressed down slightly at the sides—which comes, I suppose, from wearing his peaked officer’s cap. His chin is square and dimpled. He permits himself the luxury of slightly longer-than-regulation sideburns. “Still, it’ll all be much better when they build the motorway.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m just the delivery boy.” He walks over to one of my button leather armchairs and clicks open an official briefcase. He produces a long envelope. “This is for you…”

He holds it out whilst I stare at it.

“A ridiculous expense, I know, Mr. Brook. Sending me up here—and in a car with a chauffeur when it would have been just as simple by train. Goodness knows what the press would make of this sort of wastage if they heard about it. But then again, if they knew who the letter was actually
from
…”

Finally, I take the envelope from him.
G. Brooke.
I feel a different kind of premonition.

“Who’s it from?”

“I won’t spoil it by telling you. But I
do
just need you to sign this.” He offers me a clipboard from his briefcase with what looks like an ordinary correspondence chit. Document CWR 776/234/DSA—1. I use the creamy Parker Flight pen he offers to sign it. “There was some confusion,” he adds, his breath faintly citrus as he stands close to me and inspects my scrawl, a ribbon line of medals across his chest, “about the
e
at the end of your name.”

“Don’t worry. It comes and goes.”

“I’ll be off then—you know how it is. Things to do. Thank you for your time…”

Stiffly, he turns and leaves the room, pulling the door fully shut behind him. It’s something I’ve noticed with my ex-demob students—the difficulty military people have in
not
marching.

I stare at the envelope as his footsteps fade, wondering if I should play a game with myself for a while and let it rest… But already my hands are tearing at the embossed crest, the wax seal, dragging out the one small sheet of paper that lies inside.

Beneath a lion and unicorn crest, it reads:

WHITEHALL

FROM THE OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER

8 August, 1940

G B —

I know it’s been a
long
time, but I honestly haven’t forgotten.

You may have heard that there’s going to be a “National Celebration” in London before and around 21st October, Trafalgar Day. It probably still seems a long way off, but these things take a lot of planning. I’d really like to see you there. I promise it’ll be nothing “formal”.

I really do hope you can make it. My staff will send you the details.

All the very best as ever,

J A.

T
HIS LONG AUGUST, ALL
of Britain seems to drift, held aloft on wafts of dandelion and vanilla, the dazzling boom of bandstand brass. Each morning, the Express, the New Cross and the Mail vie for punning headlines and pictures of Modernist maidens in fountains, ice cream-smeared babies, fainting guardsmen. Everything, I had stupidly imagined, would be settled on my return from Scotland. Some great truth would be revealed. My book—somehow—would be written. I would die. But, with or without me, life seems intent on going on.

I keep my windows open day and night to admit what cool air there is into my rooms, and with it comes the scent of wisteria and hot stone, of the parched earth of our quad that has revealed the faint outline of some long-forgotten Saxon building in these near-drought days. I dream of killing Napoleon. I am surrounded by pointless history. After my illness in Scotland, I find that I am weaker. With the generosity that doctors reserve for the dying, I have been prescribed even bigger bottles of pain-killers, anti-inflammatories and some new wonder of Modernist science called penicillin. I am sure that they are all adding to the fevered warmth of this great Summer Isle. Now, I am able to accept the dizzying surges, the strange buzzings and twangings, the luminous dreams, the odd blurrings and shiftings of reality.

By any normal standards, my life’s work is already done. For most of the time, it didn’t seem like
work
at all—or even much of a life, for that matter. I walk on. I say my few lines. I walk off again. I am about to get started, then I finish. Most alarming of all is that I feel no more disappointment about myself than I would for a student who, whilst not inherently lazy, never quite achieves the things he might. In the great schemes of things, it scarcely matters.

Freed from the ties of being conventionally ill—a luxury that only the truly healthy can afford—I find that I remain remarkably active. I have asked Christlow, for example, to serve my breakfast a full hour earlier at quarter to seven. Then, by half past eight or nine at the latest I can manage to be fully dressed, my lungs coughed-out, my tablets taken, my limbs unstiffened, my eyes fully focused, my heartbeat and my breathing made almost regular. Thus aroused, I have taken a surprising number of trips out this August.

I have wandered, with the walking stick I now affect, the seafront at Brighton, and I have breathed the air fresh with sunlight and the cries of gulls that for me will always bring images of sandy limbs, salt-powdered fingers, the whispers of sun-dried lips; a giddy sense of erotic regret. I have taken the train back to my home town of Lichfield, and have walked along those strangely shrunken streets that are sweetly sticky with the smell of hot tarmac. I have looked over the low front wall of my mother’s house sold six years before, and I have noted the new pebbledash, the new window frames, the concrete path set with coloured glass. Hindleys’ Cake Shop where she worked is still there with what look like the same cakes displayed in the window, although there’s now a self-service tea shop at the back. The butcher’s shop above which Francis used to live has become a gent’s outfitters, and the window of the room where he used to sleep now bears the words F
ORMAL
D
RESS
H
IRE
. The Scales is no longer a tanners’ pub—there aren’t any tanners left, these chemical days. On the lunchtime that I go into it, it’s filled with lads and lassies from all the nearby solicitors, accountants, banks, building societies, investment advisors, insurance brokers and estate agents. The women wear suits much like the men. They drink the same drinks, laugh at the same jokes.