The Undertow (32 page)

“Which school did you go to?” the boy asks.

Will looks back round at him. His school smelt of boys and boiled
meat. The corridors were a greasy shade of yellow. The classrooms swam with dust and when you passed the staff-room door it reeked of tobacco and coffee and soup. Why would anyone want to know about his school?

“Glastonbury Road,” Will says. “I was in the grammar stream.”

The Indian boy’s eyes are really beautiful. Big and brown and glossy as conkers, and the whites as clear as milk. He blinks, and then nods, and then turns away, looking back up the pitch towards the game. Will’s eyes follow his. The scrabble and surge of play.

“And you?” Will asks, to be polite.

“Eton.”

“Right,” Will says. Then, after a while, “Wish they’d let us have a go with the flippin’ ball.”

The moments tick by, and he glances round at the Indian boy, whose name he didn’t even think to ask, who is watching the play, and Will feels stupid, and that he has somehow already failed.

When he lies full length his feet don’t touch the end of the bath, because it has been built for the giants.

The sky is dark through the high window. From somewhere far off he can hear a girl’s laugh, and music. He strains to catch it, but it’s a distant ghost. He gets a trickle here and there of piano, and it’s Mozart. And the girl will be someone over from St. Hilda’s, or down from Somerville. The graze hurts, but he’s not soft enough to let a graze put him off, not even the ancillary discomfort—the red burn in his hip from getting jolted. The yell and the break for it and Michael steaming down the pitch towards him, followed by an undisciplined brawl, sashes flapping, faces taut, thundering to catch him. Michael coming at him, and Will gathering himself up into a dodging obstructive run. Michael’s eyes wet and hard. Will nipping in to scoop the ball off him and away—to show off the skills that made him captain of Glastonbury Road Seniors soccer team.

His right foot made contact with the ball, he’s pretty sure of that. He thinks he felt it. Before he felt himself land on his backside on the hard ground. He got to his feet. His hip hurt. His shin bled through the mud. Standing, he tried his weight on his bad leg, and the whole leg sang out in dismay. Michael came over, and put a hand to his back, and said something, and Will shook his head, no, okay, okay, I’m okay, old
injury, and Michael said something more. Will shook his head again, and straightened up, and dragged in a big breath, and let it go. On the way back through Fellows’ Garden, he watched the birds rise in the sky. It hurt too much to feel embarrassed at the time. He feels embarrassed now.

He feels slight. Not just in size. He had been captain, but here he won’t even make the team. He is just
tiny
.

Even the steam can’t take the chill off the bathroom. The vast claw-footed bath sucks the heat from the water. He shifts himself up, wincing against the pain, and reaches over the edge for his trousers. He dabs his fingers on the cloth to dry them, then lifts his cigarettes out of his pocket. He lies back in the tepid water, looking at his toes—the wiry structure of tendon and bone—and lights up. He turns his Ronson lighter round in his hands, looks at his initials scored into it:
WAH
. Like a baby’s cry. It was a gift from the boys he’d taught, that year after A-levels, when Mr. Tate was coaching him for the Oxford exams. It had been something, to teach at his old school, to even sit the Oxford entrance papers; his mum had gone all tight-lipped with pride.

There is a fire in his sitting room. There is Sweet’s
Anglo-Saxon Reader
to get to grips with. He is not in the mood to be sociable, let alone face up to the football squad toasting the newcomers in the JCR. But he had promised Ollie, and Ollie had promised there would be girls. Literary Society girls, as if that itself is some kind of inducement. As if that makes them all liberated Lawrentian females. Ursulas and Gudruns and Lady Chatterleys, all brightly coloured stockings and heavy limbs and easy morals, keen on cocks and swoony sex in the outdoors. They will just be girls. Girls from Somerville and St. Hilda’s. The red-brick, buttoned-up colleges out on the edge of things.

Top of the Pops
is on tonight. Janet will be sitting on the pouffe, chin in hands, elbows on knees, staring at the screen, shushing everyone who dares walk in. Dad will be out in the garage, tinkering. Mum will be confined to the kitchen by Janet, who can’t stand her comments on pop music. Anne Graves will be holed up there with Mum, taking a breather from Mrs. Graves who’s something of a trial now Mr. Graves has died. She calls it a breather but they’ll smoke so many fags that the ashtray fills and overflows and looks like something out of Pompeii.

What he really wants is to find a telly, and settle down in front of it and watch
Top of the Pops
, even though he doesn’t know who’ll be on. Wilson Pickett, Dusty Springfield, maybe; “Some of Your Lovin,” The Yardbirds. He misses Janet, who doesn’t sulk at him: they’d watch it
together, know when it was okay to speak in a way his mum can never quite work out. But he hasn’t seen a telly since he got here. There probably isn’t one in the whole of Oxford.

And he did say to Ollie. And Ollie shares these rooms. It wouldn’t do to annoy him. Fag tucked between his lips, he presses his hands down on the cold enamel edges of the bath, and lifts himself cautiously out.

They are playing jazz.

He bloody hates jazz.

Ollie is barking into someone’s ear, almost directly above Will’s head. The room is noisy and hot and smells of damp wool and cigarettes. Will has a bottle of Watney’s ale in his hand. His suit is sharp. He likes this suit. Nice narrow tie. Ollie wears a cream cable-knit jumper, cords; doesn’t seem to think anything of it. Will glances round, trying to spot girls, but he can’t see any. He tries to pick up on the conversation, to grab a thread he can drag himself in on, but it is all about people that he doesn’t know but with whom Ollie and Geoff both seem to be easily familiar: Geoff’s cousin who’s standing for the Union presidency, and someone else who’s thinking about one of the minor posts coming up, worth standing for, because you can build on that, build on that profile. People get to know who you are, you see, and that’s the name of the game, isn’t it? Getting known. Geoff swigs his beer.

“So how do you know each other?” Will tries.

“Young Geoff here,” Ollie says, “was house captain year before me.”

Will nods. He doesn’t know what this literally means, but it has a clear associative sense to it: they know each other because they all know each other because they just do. They’ve got the shared code, the friends of friends, a web of association.

He doesn’t know the code. He doesn’t know his way around. He doesn’t know anybody. And it seems like he can’t even work out how to get to know anybody here.

The music swings up overhead, then dips into a fiddly scrambling fall like a sparrow shot with an air rifle. Then a drum solo. Bloody
drum
solo. Jesus.

“Sounds like a drum kit falling off a cliff.”

Ollie barks a laugh. Geoff looks at him. Smiles thinly. Then turns back to Ollie. “So, I was thinking, treasurer this year—”

And Ollie clicks back in, nods along.

Will looks around the room. It is packed tight with cords and slacks,
with saggy knitwear, floppy hair, duffel coats. And the footie team over in the corner all laugh at something Michael says.

He swallows a mouthful of beer over the lump in his throat.

It’s better than shunting a broom and unblocking toilets and fixing leaky gutters at the infants’ school, he tells himself. This is Oxford, and that’s worth something. It’s like cauliflower, he decides. He doesn’t have to like it; he just has to get it down him. Find a way of making it tolerable.

Sport is out, clearly. Social life: not so far. Study. He can study. He can always study. He is good at studying. He has a capacity for nine-hour reading stints, for essays that fly across the page. Mr. Tate used to rest his hand on Will’s shoulder when he gave the essays back. Will tips his bottle to his lips. His chest feels hollow and grey. Finish this, then back to his set, back to the unfamiliar Anglo-Saxon script, attempt translating those first sentences.

He sets his bottle down on the bar.

Anglo-Saxon, then.

The music stops. There’s a click and swoop as the needle is lifted, and there is a sudden space in which voices crisscross like wires overhead, supported by nothing. Some drop away, others bray louder as if in protest at the silence. He cranes his neck to look over towards the record player. He can’t see what’s going on: too many people.

Then the record player starts up again. The soft fumpfh of the needle set into place. He loves this moment. The moment before the thing happens, when there’s a possibility of something great. Even if it’s only going to be deadened in an instant by more loopy bloody jazz. The soft hssk, hssk, hssk as the needle traverses the smooth tuneless rim of the disk. Then his heart is lifted by the great raw yelp of Lennon’s voice.
Help
.

“Scuse me.”

He steps round, past Ollie. Elbows his way through the crowd. Above him, the music powers out like a train, uninterruptible, into the stone vaults of the JCR.

The crowd thins a little, further from the bar. The coffee table, the record player. A girl slipping the previous record back into its sleeve.

A girl with amazing legs. Her hair catches auburn under the nasty electric light.

She turns to hand the jazz LP to her friend, who’s cross, and trying to pretend she’s not. The girl with the nice legs is trying to be friendly,
You’ll like it, Claudia
, but the other girl won’t listen, turns to rifle
through her box of records to slot the rejected one back into place. She shakes her backcombed head dismissively, it doesn’t matter, of course Madeline should play her record if she wants to, it’s no trouble to her, but is she sure that pop music—the way she pronounces
pop
is so careful, strange, like she’s puzzled to find a marble dropping from her lips—is appropriate to the time and place, well, that is fine. The girl with the nice legs folds up her lips, turns away, and catches Will’s eye. She folds her lips in tighter, strangling a smile. But her eyes sparkle. Will’s stomach dips. Christ. She is amazing. Holy Christ.

The confidence of it. The sheer bloody confidence of it. Will hadn’t even realised Ollie was there until a large hand clapped onto his shoulder. Conversation was dropped into so smoothly: the girls like pop music? Ollie has a cousin in the record business. Scandal of the family. Uncle had wanted him to go into banking. Cousin has met—has had nights out with—the boys at the Ad Lib club, the Bag O’ Nails. He means The Beatles, of course. And then he twists the conversation sideways, before any detail can be gone into, and they’re hearing about a place out at Boar’s Hill that Ollie would just love to show them. Will has got a car. And they are out of the warmth and smoke of the college bar, and in the chill of Will’s little old Singer Gazelle (six months’ wages), Ollie weighing down the back left-hand suspension, next to the slim girl in green. Madeline.

“Thought Singer just made sewing machines,” says Claudia, buttoned up to her chin in a yellow coat.

“They do,” says Ollie, and lets out a great guffaw.

Madeline, in the back, says nothing. They pull out of the town. The car hums along the pale road between the fields. Will’s hands are cold on the steering wheel, but his cheeks burn.

“Take a right,” Ollie says. “Keep on this road.”

Moonlight. Faint trails of fog here and there, but mostly it’s clear stubble fields, dark and bristly; skimming hedges; a tree slowly traversing the corner of Will’s sight. Claudia wriggly on the other side. Picking off lint, settling skirt and hair and hands into place. And Madeline in the back, curled into a corner by Ollie’s bulk, and him talking away to her and laughing. Will notices the quiet from her. Asks, over his shoulder, whether she’s comfortable.

“Yes,” she says faintly, and then, “thank you.”

And he warms with the words. He likes her.

• • •

The road is direct—up ahead there’s a sudden steepness and then woodland.

“Boar’s Hill,” Ollie pronounces, as if he’s produced it from a hat.

They climb into the woods, the little engine struggling. With every gear change, Will’s uneasy that his knuckles will brush against the mustard wool of Claudia’s flank.

“What now?” Will asks.

“I’ll tell you when,” Ollie says.

“If you could just give me some indication—”

“I’ll know it when we get there. It’s been a while.”

Will bites back a sigh. The tunnel of trees whisks along through the headlights. Claudia’s gone still. The headlights skim a gateway.

“Ah …” says Ollie from the back.

“Was that it?” Will glances up at Ollie’s blank face in the rear-view mirror. Ollie’s eyes skip along the road. His mouth hangs open.

“Ah—no. There!”

And Will turns his eyes back to the road, just in time to spot the gateway, and a house sign. He slams on the brakes, crunches down a gear. Spins into the drive with a rattle of gravel.

“But this is someone’s house …” Will says.

In the mirror, Ollie nods him onward.

“But won’t they …?”

In the mirror he catches the side of Madeline’s face, a curve of pale cheek, the drift of her hair. The car bounces on along the chalk track, white in the moonlight.

“S’all right. My aunt’s place,” Ollie says. “Used to come here when I was a nipper.” Ollie glances at Madeline to include her in his pleasure. “Lovely grounds here. Acres. Won’t disturb the old dear.”

There’s a bend, and Will’s caught off guard, his attention on the mirror. He brakes, jerks the car round. Eyes on the road from now on. Eyes on the road.

They have reached the far side of the hill. To the left, there are woods: tall, slender trunks grey in the moonlight, deep shadow in between. To the right, the countryside opens wide in a sweep of grey-blue fields. Here and there stand broad, spreading trees. Far off, there is a speckling of lights. A village or a town; Will doesn’t know. He doesn’t know where he is, where anything is.