Uncommon Enemy (5 page)

‘Do you?’ Charles had never thought of himself like that. ‘Do you seek power?’

‘Not yet. But if I do it changes everything. I become a different person. My life will be completely different. Who I marry, what I do, everything.’

‘Milk?’

‘No, thanks.’

Nigel talked about himself for an hour. At the end, when he stood to go, his eyes were duller and he looked tired. ‘Thanks for the coffee. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t marry Sarah,
if she wanted me, even if I did seek power. I’d still marry her.’ He spoke as if reassuring Charles. ‘I would. I wouldn’t abandon her.’

‘I don’t blame you.’

‘Thanks for the coffee.’

‘Good luck with the essay.’

‘I’ll drop it back when I’ve finished.’

He did, but afterwards, reading it aloud in his own tutorial, Charles discovered that Nigel had done the same and passed it off as his own, without telling him. His tutor all but accused him of
plagiarising. It was a minor dishonesty but indicative, he later concluded. He was going to tax Nigel with it, but by then so much else had happened that it seemed of no account.

In retrospect there were early signs of his and Sarah’s shipwreck, but at the time he was aware only of an unspoken tension, something unacknowledged, an edginess, a wariness, as if each
were expecting to resist some unreasonable demand from the other, though none was made. It was by then the term before Schools – their final examinations – and she worried more about
hers than he did about his. She was keen to do well and worked harder than he, but his attempts to reassure her counted for nothing, and her worry increased. He attributed the tension to this, but
later suspected it was also because their affair had, without their realising it – or perhaps without only him realising it – reached a point of decision. The harbinger of what was to
come was, as usual, something fairly trivial, a sudden lurch, a single, unseen, sickening sea-swell that came from nowhere and passed as suddenly, leaving them becalmed for a while.

Her birthday was approaching and he had booked dinner – not on the day but near enough – at the Restaurant Elizabeth, allegedly the best and certainly the most expensive in Oxford.
It would cost about a quarter of that term’s grant but he had money saved from his holiday job as a dustman and would make it up in the summer.

Sarah was still seeing Nigel, who had meanwhile won the JCR election and embarked upon what he called ‘the political trajectory’. This had led him towards the Oxford Union which
offered, he said, a bigger stage and the prospect of office. With a general election approaching, an Oxford Union debate featuring a Treasury minister and his opposition shadow attracted national
press attention. Nigel had invited Sarah to the debate, in which he was to speak. She told Charles she had accepted.

‘But that’s the night I’ve booked dinner at the Elizabeth.’

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘I said I was going to.’

‘But you didn’t say when.’

‘I’m sure I did.’ He wasn’t, but he thought he probably had. ‘Sorry if I didn’t.’ He knew he sounded insincere.

‘Can’t you change it?’

‘It’s difficult. They get very booked up. Probably not for ages.’ He wasn’t sure of that either, but he was irritated. What he had meant as a celebration to ease things
had already made them worse. They parted with the issue unresolved.

Back in his college, checking for mail in the porter’s lodge, Charles ran into Nigel doing the same. Had he not met him at that moment he might never have said anything, or might have said
it differently. But he was still irritated when he said: ‘Your debate date with Sarah. I’m afraid she can’t make it. We’re going to the Elizabeth. She didn’t realise
I’d booked it.’

Hostility showed briefly in Nigel’s eyes, like the flank of a fish turning beneath the surface. ‘Fine,’ he said.

Charles immediately felt guilty. ‘Sorry, but I didn’t realise she’d said she’d go to the debate.’

‘That’s fine, Charles, just fine.’ Nigel walked away.

Charles sent a note to Sarah saying that Nigel was fine about it. They had arranged to go for a walk after her tutorial the following afternoon. In the morning he looked fearfully for a
cancelling note but when he called on her that afternoon her door was locked. They met in the quad as he was leaving.

‘Dr Philpot overran,’ she said. ‘Then she brought out the sherry. She always does.’

‘You got my note about Nigel?’

‘Yes, I did.’ She turned towards her room. ‘You might have asked me before refusing on my behalf. I don’t like letting people down.’

‘I thought you’d decided not to go.’

‘You assumed it, you mean.’

The walk was short, because she was cold, but it eased things. She told him she would rather have dinner with him than go to a debate with Nigel, though she didn’t want him in her room
that night, pleading tiredness and work. After dining in her college he walked back to his own in a penetrating wind and a few erratic, unseasonal snowflakes.

It snowed much more on the day of the debate, provoking national wonderment. Charles rose early, partly because of the unaccustomed brightness and partly to enjoy the pristine quads and
backstreets before boots and tyres turned them to slush. At breakfast in hall someone said the debate had been cancelled; more snow was forecast and both main speakers had seized upon the excuse to
pull out. Later, when he ran into Nigel, residual guilt made him want to be generous.

‘Sorry to hear about the debate. You must have put a lot of work into it.’

‘You could say that.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Don’t know. JCR. Have an early night.’

‘Come to the Elizabeth with Sarah and me.’

Nigel, who had wealthy parents and a reputation for expensive living, looked at him. ‘You can’t mean that.’

‘I do, I mean it.’ Charles knew he didn’t as he was saying it. It was stupid, a gesture was all he had intended, but he felt obliged to go on. ‘No, come with us.
We’d both like it.’

Nigel hesitated. ‘Okay, if you’re sure. What time?’

Sarah was sitting at her desk brushing her hair, a mirror propped before her, when Charles broke the news. He sat on her bed with his back against the wall, much as he would later in his cell,
watching her face in the mirror. When he said it she was holding her hair with one hand and brushing it with the other. She stopped in mid-stroke and their eyes met in the mirror. Her expression
betrayed a brief struggle for self-control, swiftly achieved, then settled resolution. She resumed brushing.

‘Oh, right, it’ll be nice to see Nigel. At least he won’t feel rejected now.’

‘Sorry, it was clumsy of me. It was an impulse, I didn’t mean him to accept it. I’ve been clumsy throughout all this. Sorry.’

‘No need to apologise.’

‘There is. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be.’

Soon he was apologising for apologising and by the time they reached the Elizabeth they were not speaking. Nigel was there already and they fell upon him with relief at not having to confront
each other. The meal was presumably good – Nigel said it was – and certainly expensive. Charles paid. Afterwards he remembered nothing of what he’d eaten, but knew she’d had
only a first course and toyed with a trifle. Nigel was at his most entertaining, blooming under their dual attention and failing to notice that neither addressed a word to the other.

It was snowing again when they left. Charles drove slowly through the quiet, whitened streets, dropping the still loquacious Nigel at their college before continuing north to Sarah’s. They
said nothing. The squeaking windscreen wipers appeared to brush the same flakes away at each sweep. He drew up at the back of her college, by the usual nocturnal entrance for forbidden male
visitors. Snow covered the parked cars and hung heavily on the tree branches; the street lamps showed it already obliterating his tyre tracks.

‘Rotten evening,’ he said. ‘Except for Nigel. He enjoyed himself. All my fault. Sorry.’ He switched off the engine.

She got out and shut the door without looking back, picking her way through the snow to the black wooden door in the college wall. At least she hadn’t told him not to follow. He watched as
she carefully brushed the snow off the latch with her rolled umbrella before touching it with her suede gloves. She left the door half open behind her.

He followed. When he reached the door he saw she had paused on the garden path leading to her hall and was doing something in the snow with the tip of her umbrella. Still not looking back, she
moved on without waiting for him. When he reached the spot he saw that she had written ‘I love you’ in the snow. It was that night, he believed ever after, that she became pregnant.

N
ow, waiting in his cell for her, he tried to remember how many years had passed before he ceased to think daily about it all. Ten at least, years
in which he confided in no-one and pored over every detail until it was as familiar to him as his face in the shaving mirror. Yet he knew all the time there was nothing new to be thought.

He was excited by the prospect of seeing her again, though not because he anticipated any resurrection of the past. It was an unquantifiable prospect; he could not anticipate what he would feel,
still less she. It was not, after all, as if there had been nothing since Oxford to complicate things between them.

For now, it was less the personal significance of events than their sequence that he had to get right. Yet where the facts were feelings, personal significance could not be ignored, however
distant. Never blessed with the equivocal gift of prophecy, he had been sure that night in her college that she was – or would be – pregnant. It had dropped upon him like a great weight
as he lay beside her in the narrow bed, propped on his elbow, gazing on her dreaming face.

‘When is your period?’ he asked, waking her.

She blinked. ‘About a fortnight.’

He had been certain from that moment but she refused to accept it for almost another two months. Normally practical and pragmatic, a woman who faced and said things as they were, she would not
even discuss it, reacting with dismissive irritation when he tried. She was focussed on Schools, she said, the eight exam papers she was revising for, and had no time to worry about anything else.
Whereas he thought about nothing but, and worried not at all about his own exams. Meanwhile, stupidly – amazingly now – they had simply carried on, while there grew between them the
unspoken assumption that she would do nothing and that they would not marry.

But he had asked her, he remembered, almost saying so aloud to himself now as if in self-justification. It was one day when the exams had started, as they walked back across the parks to her
college. They had both had papers morning and afternoon, and she felt – wrongly, it turned out – that she had done badly. She would never be a lawyer now, she said, because a poor
degree in law never got anyone into any decent firm. She would have to do something else; she had no idea what, she had made a mess of everything. He tried to reassure her, but she did not
respond.

‘Not to mention—’ she said eventually, and didn’t.

They walked in silence, he a pace or two behind. The university was playing cricket against a minor county. He tried to remember which, as he stared now at the cell wall. It used to come
unbidden to his mind as one of those insistent, unwanted, irrelevant details, but now it was gone. God alone knew what else might have gone with it. He remembered the batsman hitting a four, then
the slow ripple of applause, while asking himself whether he really meant what he was about to say.

The way it came out wasn’t much of a proposal, he acknowledged to her years later, yet he felt he had never given himself more to anyone than when he said, ‘Whatever happens, I would
marry you anyway.’ She walked on without answering.

When he caught up with her he saw tears in her eyes. He wished he hadn’t said it. It was a self-centred irrelevance that solved nothing. She would still be pregnant, her future was still a
mess. That was what mattered to her, he thought. The batsman was out next ball, caught in the slips.

As the baby grew inside her, they grew apart. He felt he was caught in the undertow of a great tide while she, increasingly self-absorbed, seemed content to float with it, except when his
attempts to discuss it irritated her. At the end of their final term she returned to her family in Northumberland, not yet visibly pregnant and determined that the baby should be adopted. Neither
he nor she had told anyone.

‘He’d have a better life if he was adopted,’ she had said one night, over a miserable Chinese meal. She seemed to take it for granted that it would be a boy.

Charles was secretly, and guiltily, relieved. ‘If that’s what you really want?’

‘It’s better he has a proper home with a couple who want him, don’t you think?’

‘I suppose it would be.’

She toyed with her rice, not looking at him. ‘I mean, we don’t, do we?’

‘I guess not.’ It felt wrong to say it, despite its truth.

She glanced at him, then looked down again and placed her chopsticks neatly on their rest, side by side. ‘Can we go?’

They spent some time together in the summer, intense, uneasy days of compromised passion that were to prove their last. When they were apart they wrote several times a week
and, decades later, he still had all her letters in his flat. They would now make unproductive reading for the search team, he thought. Telephoning in those days meant having the right coins and
finding call-boxes; he couldn’t use his parents’ phone without being overheard. There had been few calls and fewer visits, either way. These were difficult from the first and became
more so. ‘I want to see you, but when I see you I want to hurt you,’ she wrote after one, with an honesty that made her growing hostility easier to take than the polite indifference
that followed it.

Another prisoner began banging on his cell door and shouting – presumably the disruptive young man – as Charles tried to recall how he had known that she was seeing more of Nigel,
who would drive down from his parents’ home in Edinburgh. She must have told him by letter because he remembered her writing that Nigel was being ‘very sweet’. Judging by her next
letter, Charles must have replied intemperately – if again prophetically – since she crossly accused him of being ‘silly’.