The Summer Isles (22 page)

Ursula reaches past me to get to another tea chest, then leans back on the floor, covers her face and gives a long gasping sob.

Ursula hasn’t told me exactly what happened, and the local newspapers have been coy enough about it, too. But it’s common knowledge—another of those Oxford stories that, unless you’re actually involved in them, always seem too weirdly dreadful to be true. Did you hear about the chap who was working on some project to design a better bullet? Tied himself up at the place where he used to aim at pig carcasses and rigged his own firing squad. His sister was the one who eventually found him in the long shed where he did his work. Quite, quite, barking of course. It’s said that, from the look of him, you’d never have guessed…

“I wish I’d come over more,” I say to her—my ritual acknowledgement of guilt. “I truly liked him. But I’ve been unwell myself. Obsessed with my own… Ideas. I know that’s no good reason.”

“Honestly, that doesn’t matter.” Ursula pulls her handkerchief from the dust-greyed sleeve of her cardigan, wipes her nose, then sneezes again. “It’s really…”

“And this business about having to go to Australia. I know that that was bothering him.”

“It wasn’t,” she says in a voice that allows no argument. “What was bothering Walter was
Walter.
Australia would have been good for him if he’d wanted it to be. No, what Walter did was…”

“Unpredictable?”

“Inevitable.” She wrinkles her nose. “I can see that now. I can’t blame anyone.” Meaning herself. Meaning me. “Some things are inevitable, you know. Night follows day, doesn’t it? You get the programmes you’re expecting on the telly unless there’s been a delay at Lords. Walter was wrong, you see. Some things really are inevitable. Perhaps this was just his way of proving it to himself…”

She stands up then, her knees cracking. She goes to the window, narrow shoulders hunched up nearly to her ears as she looks out.

“He never got over the death of our father. Daddy brought us up really. Our mother died when she had me, so he had to do the job of both. Daddy was a good man. He began to suffer from premature dementia soon after Walter went up to Warwick. Died of it when he was only fifty five, although by the end I found myself wishing it had happened sooner…” Faintly, I can hear lads yelling to each other as they play football out on the green. The thump of boot against leather always sounds violent to me. I can’t help thinking of someone’s head. “…Of course, it was me who had to look after him. Walter just stopped coming home when Daddy ceased to recognise him. But it’s not
just
what you see, is it? If something happens, it happens anyway. It’s there, you can’t help it. It affects you whether you want it to or not.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realise how hard it must have been…”

“When we were young, Walter used to say how he’d like to build this big machine when he grew up and put every single fact about the universe into it. He remembered Mummy, you see. He said that if he had this machine he’d always know what was going to happen next. Sounds stupid, I know. He told me later that it wouldn’t work. I suppose he wanted control.”

“We can’t control our lives, though, can we?”

“No.” She looks hard at me. “We just have to live through what we are, don’t we, Brook? And history…”

The titles on the next box Ursula and I’ll have to go through are things like T
HE
A
LGEBRAIC
E
IGENVALUE
P
ROBLEM.
T
HE
P
ROPERTIES
A
ND
A
PPLICATIONS
O
F
D
IFFERENTIABILITY
. Funny, how we struggle to make sense out of something as brutal as an act of fatality on your own body. In a way, though, Bracken’s got his wish. He found out how to destroy the Humane Bullet. It’s tainted research. No one will touch it now.

“I’ll be leaving soon anyway,” Ursula says, turning back from the window. She grabs an old seed catalogue that lies by the fire and flips through its pages, staring down through it. “Oxford’s never meant anything to me. Do you know how many people turned up to the bypass protest committee meeting last night? Just one. And the college wants this cottage back. Once they’ve demolished that bloody shed…”

“Where are you going?”

“America,” she says, and sniffs, giving a long involuntary shiver. “I want to get out whilst I still can. I have a cousin in Philadelphia, and there’s a friend who’s looking to start afresh in Montana where there’s nothing but open sky and you can ride for days and the hills are so big they follow you in the distance. This tiny country’s rotten…”

I bid my final farewell to Ursula Bracken at Oxford Station just two weeks later. As I’d expected, the funeral was a sparse affair, and the case for the inquest was open and shut. No one else is here to see her off.

She shows me the travel authorisations she’s obtained as we stand waiting on the platform for the slightly delayed Liverpool train, and I dutifully admire them. It’s become a British habit. People have started to collect and swap the older ones—there’s even a society for it. Ursula’s are temporary, and she’s only permitted to take enough money to the States for a two month holiday. If she doesn’t come back then, whatever else she owns or has in her bank account will be frozen. Eventually after publication of the appropriate notices in the London Gazette, all her assets will be repossessed by the Government.

“Is there anything I can do?” I ask vaguely.

She shakes her head. “I think they probably know, don’t you? People like me are scuttling off the ship like rats. I’m not brainy like Walter. I haven’t got any qualifications. They probably think good riddance.” She smiles. The Tannoy chimes the names of Midlands towns. “Immigration into the United States isn’t easy, either. For all I know, they may send me back.”

“I’m sure they’ll be happy to have you.”

“Ha—all hundred million of them! Anyway, I’ve brought everything I can. You needn’t worry about me, Geoffrey. I can look after myself.”

“I can’t think of anyone who’d do it better.”

Embarrassed by all this silly intimacy, we shift our gaze and look around at the heaped mailsacks, and at the other people who are waiting. A boy is being comforted by his mother beside of one of those useless vending machines you always get at stations. Now
there’s
something even John Arthur hasn’t managed to put right.

I glance back at Ursula at the same moment that she looks at me. Part of me wishes the train would hurry up now and put an end to this unnaturally protracted process. The other wants to tell her about Francis, about John Arthur. About everything.

“Before he died,” she says before I can begin, “Walter mentioned to me that you were seriously ill.”

“Yes…”

“I’m sorry.” She reaches out and squeezes my claw-like hand with her own. Which is young, alive. “I hope things get better.”

I nod, suddenly near to tears. At that moment, saving us both, the sound of the arriving train breaks along the platform. A soldier and his girlfriend kiss extravagantly. A lady in a salad bowl hat asks us if this really
is
the train to Liverpool.

I help Ursula off the platform with the lighter of her two suitcases, sliding it along the corridor until she finds a compartment. We touch hands, and then I step back onto the platform.

The stationmaster’s whistle blows. The train hoots back excitedly. Ursula leans out as the carriage begins to slide beneath the platform bridges.
Ham and eggs, ham and eggs.
We gaze at each other, unsmiling now, separated by steam and distance.

I turn away when the train has gone from sight. It’s still early. The news hoardings on the Botley Road bookstall promise a special Trafalgar Celebration pull-out in today’s
Mirror,
but they’ve already been beaten to this by Monday’s
Cross
and Tuesday’s
Express.

It’s called the Trafalgar Celebration, despite the fact it’ll be going on for days and the Battle of Trafalgar happened exactly 135 years ago—not a particularly significant anniversary. It’s as if all the other festivals and celebrations that have taken place in Greater Britain still haven’t satisfied our hunger. The Olympics, after all, were international, try as we might to make them British. Even the huge Exhibition of 1938 was about the Empire, and in
Glasgow
of all places. No, what Britain craves is something inward-looking, a festival where we don’t have to put up with the rest of the world, even if the rest of the world would come if it were invited.

It is, at the end of the day, purely a celebration of the fiftieth birthday of John Arthur. The
Mirror
, though, is as coy about this as every other newspaper. It’s as if, as long we keep our voices down, the man himself won’t see it coming. He’s busy, after all. He’d never want a fuss made. He’ll wake up on the day (very early, as is his habit) from his plain bed in his plain bedroom of his famously small self-contained flat on the third floor at 10 Downing Street. He’ll stretch and turn on the light. Just this once, he’ll find the whole nation has got up before him. We’ll be grinning in party hats. Bearing jellies, egg sandwiches, little sausages speared with sticks…

My hands shake as I hold the newspaper. All of the pains that the long summer almost burned away seem to be coming back again. By now, everything has a sense of inevitability. Walter Bracken—
poor
Walter, as I stupidly thought of him without even realising—has seen to that. I owe it to him, and to Ursula. I owe it to my acquaintance. I even owe it to Francis, although I can’t quite explain why. There’s no turning back.

Gripping the polished handle of my walking stick, I cross the road, clumsily avoiding a bus. The air has a cooler feel to it this morning. There’s still even a hint, where the longest shadows fall, of dew on the pavements. The limes are dripping. Sycamore seeds are spinning. The swallows will soon be gone. The soft autumn sun bathes the towers and rooftops and domes with golden light. As I pause to look back after crossing the canal, a dark figure scuttles from sight behind a steeply-loaded coal wagon. This time, I fancy that I glimpse his face: but it’s only Christlow. And the all bells of Oxford ringing, filling my head, my eyes, my heart. History beckons.

My moment has come.

T
HE NARRATOR IN WILLIAM
Morris’s
News From Nowhere
awakes in London to find that summer has at last arrived. The air smells sweeter as he wanders the streets, half in a daze. The Thames runs cleaner, and the buildings along its banks have been transformed into glorious works of art. The people wear bright costumes, and smile at each other as they go about their everyday tasks. There is no poverty. Everywhere, there are pretty houses set amid fields: the rigid barrier between town and country has dissolved. Children camp in the Kensington Woods. The Houses of Parliament have been turned into a vegetable market.

A full century and a half before Morris predicted, as I gaze down from an airship droning high above the stately parks and teeming streets and the sun-flecked river, his dream of Nowhere has come true. Even the old landmarks look remade in this vision of London. Truly, I think as I sip my chattering glass of iced gin, this city has never looked lovelier. The Adelphi Theatre. Cleopatra’s Needle. The sightseeing boats that thread their wakes across the Thames. The trams like insects as they move over Blackfriars with their shining beetle backs, their raised antenna…

The aspidistra beside me nods in agreement and we tilt back over London towards the westering sun, but the other passengers aboard
The Queen of Air and Darkness
are subdued as the gondola sways. Most are sitting as far away as possible from the airship’s windows. The beautiful second wife of a Modernist Zulu chief is covering her eyes, and the Chief Executive of Northumberland County Council is the colour of Christine and Barbara Cumbernald on the drive back from Penrhos Park. The Rolls Royce engines change tone as we tilt on some stray zephyr over Vauxhall. The wires tense and sing. For the Director of the Tate Gallery, as she moans and buries her face into a sick bag, it is already too late.

The engines rise to a piercing roar as the
Queen
sinks down through the skies and across the flashing lakes and lidos of Hyde Park, and pram-pushing mothers shade their eyes to look up. Eventually, after much tilting and squealing of airbags, the airship is safely moored to a huge gantry, and we are escorted along a wobbling tunnel to the lift that bears us to the ground. There, a bus sponsored by Cozy Stoves and Oxo awaits to take us along Park Lane, Resolution Hill and the Mall. This autumn day still feels balmily warm, trapped with city heat as I climb, my limbs easy from the gin and the tablets, to the bus’s open top.

We are slowed by the traffic of trams, taxis, Bristols, Ladybirds. The London pavements, too, bustle with businessmen, sightseers, shoppers. The air smells of diesel, cigarettes, frying onions. The lenses of a Pathé News camera follow us from the corner of Oxford Street and Portland Place. It would be rude not to smile and wave. Who knows, a darker thought nudges me, this image of the killer’s face may be the one that makes it into history. From further down the bus, I can hear Father Phelan effing and blinding. A comic-turn Irish priest of the kind you get in Ealing B-film comedies—the only kind of Irishman, in fact, that you’re likely to see on mainland Britain—Father Phelan supposedly coached John Arthur in boxing after the War, although that’s the one thing he won’t talk about. Our bus turns into the wide new architecture of Charing Cross Road. Then Trafalgar Square. A pigeon on each shoulder, Nelson stands huffily on his pedestal. Vast, sheer, the Victory Spire at the end of Park Lane looks like some Jules Verne rocket, or a new secret weapon. Compared with all of this, and even cleaned of all the grime and bird mess, the great government offices along Whitehall are solid and sombre. Their Victorian arches seem to frown; reluctant participants in this Summer Isles dream. Yet they, too, radiate power. From beneath them, it is said, tunnels, offices and air raid shelters fan out across this whole city.