We Had It So Good (5 page)

Soon, all over Oxford, girls appeared in ripped skirts and shocking-pink petticoats, and cascades of hennaed hair fell across the pages of books in the Bodleian Library.

But beyond the involuntary turn of his head at a sight so bizarre, even in California, Stephen had paid no attention for he was not part of a crowd which asked who people were and where they had come from. He assumed that everyone, like him, came from nowhere and was a nobody. They were just two weird girls, part of the ongoing pageant of Oxford life, for you could find at Oxford men in cricket whites self-consciously carrying teddy bears, girls with monocles and cigarette holders, guys with Old Etonian accents wearing donkey jackets (a serge fabric with plastic patches on the shoulders, usually seen on hod carriers). Who cared?

The girls were part of that parade, and now they were next door, moving about behind the party walls, their voices inaudible. They rode bicycles and hauled the heavy machines in to their tiny hall. In the evenings, Stephen could hear the sound of bath taps and imagined them sliding, naked, into the tub; this picture sustained him for many nights alone on his mattress, though usually he thought about his last girlfriend but one, Polly. He remembered the time they drove down to the Mexican border and stared across it, to unknown lands. He had been that close to asking her to marry him but had come to his senses. It must have been her French perfume that had half-crazed him.

He was sitting in the garden under a tree smoking a joint. Next door the two girls were having a dolls' tea party with cups and saucers and finger sandwiches laid out on the weedy grass. He heard cries of raucous laughter and the lower murmurings of another voice and a tabby cat that mewed on the fence, an empire, he thought, of fleas and other sneeze-making contaminants. He was allergic to cat fur and pollen and spent as little time in the garden as he
could, especially during hay fever season, but the warmth of the day, the need to feel sun on his face after the endless English spring of low cloud and tepid temperatures—the relentless
averageness
of English life—compelled him outdoors.

A joint toward late afternoon relaxed him, and he had begun to take an intellectual interest in the hallucinogens, LSD and peyote, which you could still buy legally at a horticultural shop on the Banbury Road. Once he'd got to the bottom of them he would probably take a trip, but he liked to be sure, to know exactly what he was ingesting, the chemical properties, the toxicity.

The mild summer sun made him drowsy. Along the street someone was playing the Doors, and closer, the girls' voices rose and fell, bees moved with determination toward the lavender bush, and a worm made its way unheeded across the obstacle of his bare foot.

A head appeared above the fence. “Hey, man. Do you have a stash, can you bring it over?”

It wasn't a girl but a guy with blond curls, blond muttonchop whiskers, an Afghan waistcoat and, yet to be revealed, pink bell-bottoms and suede desert boots.

Stephen stood up unsteadily and walked to the fence.

“Hello, I'm Ivan. I'm just visiting the girls.”

He could see them in the garden with their cups and saucers, teapot, jug of milk, a tray. The two girls lounged around on the grass, the redhead in the long green velvet dress lay back with her head on the lap of the blonde.

“Stephen. Hi.”

“I'm Balliol. Grace and Andrea are St. Anne's.”

“Wadham. I'm a Rhodes Scholar.”

“Do you know Clinton of Univ?”

“Yes, we met on the ship coming over.”

“Excellent, so we might as well have been formally introduced. What have you got in your stash?”

“Just grass, I don't like hash, it's too strong for me. There are a lot of side effects they don't tell you about, especially if it's opiated.”

“Grass is more than acceptable. Can you climb over?”

“Sure.”

He put a leg over the rickety fence and tried to vault across to the other side. The redhead stood up. “I'll give you a hand,” she said. He didn't know if she was Grace or Andrea.

“No, I'm okay.” The fence swayed beneath him.

“It might come down altogether,” said the blonde.

“You're a bit betwixt and between,” Ivan said.

“In fact I'd say you were stuck,” said the blonde.

Stephen crashed down into a patch of nettles.

“Oh dear,” said the redhead. “I think vinegar is good for stings. I'll go and get some.”

“No,” the blonde said, “my mother always says dock leaves, dock leaves grow near nettles, they're nature's remedy.” She handed him a large coarse green leaf. “Rub that on your hands.”

Stephen thought about the patent paper he had read on ibuprofen. It was supposed to knock pain on the head like a mallet, he couldn't wait to try it.

“You probably won't be able to skin up with those fingers,” Ivan said. “Should I do it.”

“Good idea.” He handed him the bag of grass from his jeans pocket. “What are your names again?” he asked the girls.

“I am Grace,” said the blonde.

“And I am Andrea,” said the redhead.

“I'm surprised you didn't know that already,” said Ivan. “The girls are famous.”

“Famous for what?”

“We are the zeitgeist,” Grace replied haughtily.

“The what?”

“The spirit of the age,” Andrea said, and smiled slowly, revealing very crooked un-American teeth. She was the easier of the two to
deal with. More relaxed. The other girl was so tightly strung she twanged and snapped.

A shaft of sunlight passed across Grace's face. Blue eyes blazed coldly. No one in Stephen's family was blue-eyed. His own were the color of stirred mud. She was so beautiful he felt wiped out by it, her beauty wasn't human. And she had the most stupendous breasts he had ever seen. He blinked several times to indelibly imprint them on his pupils. He wanted them packed away somewhere in his mind, for later. The other girl had large breasts too, but this one was the raving beauty.

“What business do you have being American?” she asked.

He looked at Andrea, hoping she would help him out, but she was silent, her green eyes taking him in, the bee-stung lips slightly parted over the bad teeth, and an expression he and many others had misunderstood as spiritual.

“To state the obvious, I was born there.”

“Yes, on stolen land.” Grace poured herself another cup of tea and picked up a finger of cucumber sandwich. “Yum. Just the right amount of salt. Are you hungry? There's plenty.”

“Stolen from who?”

“The red Indians.”

“Honey, we don't call them red Indians. That's just in Hollywood.”

“It doesn't matter what they're called, you're squatting on their land. That's a fact. You really should have a sandwich, they're excellent, and there's a cake of some description in the kitchen, we'll get it in a minute. Andrea, what kind of cake do we have?”

“I think it's ginger.”

“Shop-bought, today, I'm afraid. Andrea makes a very good cake but no time this morning, we overslept. We like a nice piece of cake, don't we?”

“Well, you do, Grace, I can take it or leave it. I'm fat enough already.”

“That's her, selfless. Makes a cake she won't even eat. I'm not selfless. Obviously.”

“I like baking, I like things you do with your hands, though not dressmaking, that's Grace's talent, not mine. She makes all our clothes. But Grace, you should eat
more
cake. You're so thin.”

“Never mind cakes and dresses. He still hasn't owned up to being what he is, a squatter on stolen land.”

“Oh, do stop it, Grace,” said Ivan. “She's only teasing. Have you read much Merleau-Ponty and his work on perception, Stephen?”

“No, I never heard of him.”

“What do they teach you in American universities, how to make money and then how to make more money?”

“Don't goad, Grace. It's ill-mannered.”

“What exactly have you got against America? Apart from the war, anything else?”

“I hate it.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“Of course not. Why would I do that?”

“To ground your opinion in objective reality.”

“Sorry, we don't do empiricism at Oxford.”

He had fallen in with Humanities people and he found them just as he had suspected, full of bullshit. It was all about the war, he supposed, which he didn't support, no one he knew did, apart from his parents, of course, who were right behind it, particularly his mother, but the war was not America. America, he thought, was his father stepping off a ramshackle ship onto the dry land of Ellis Island, a boy alone, and now with a son at Oxford University.

“My old man came to America from Europe. Everyone he left behind was murdered. My mom is from Cuba. I look around Oxford and I don't see too many black or brown faces, apart from the overseas students from India and Africa.”

But instead of surrendering, Grace carried on enumerating America's crimes.

Man, he thought, she could wear a person down. Dope did not appear to mellow her. Yes, that was true about Oxford, she said, and why the whole place needed blowing up along with every other political institution of English life. She had run through the town trying to save guys from the flames.

“What guys? You burn
people
here?”

“I mean Guy Fawkes. We burn him in effigy on Bonfire Night because he tried to blow up Parliament.”

“When was this?” Stephen did not pay much attention to the local news but he was certain he would have heard if someone had tried to take out the government.

“It was 1605,” said Andrea, helpfully.

“For crying out loud, you still remember
that
? That was before the fucking
Mayflower
.”

“Of course we should remember him. We should name a national holiday after him, our greatest revolutionary.”

“Oh, do shut up, Grace, you do go on sometimes. Leave him alone.”

Ivan put his hand to her lips and closed them. He has some nerve, Stephen thought. But she did nothing.

The afternoon wore on, Andrea went into the kitchen and brought out the cake, which they ate very quickly because they were suddenly ravenous, apart from Grace, who cut a wafer-thin slice. They talked and then fell silent. Stephen understood almost nothing of the conversation. Andrea spoke of R. D. Laing and his theories of madness and sanity. Grace and Ivan studied politics, philosophy and economics, Andrea read politics, philosophy and psychology. They knew things he didn't and the things he knew they did not have the training to understand.

English afternoons drew to a close with a slight smattering of rain, he observed, as if the day had exhausted itself before it was even over. In California the light held up for as long as it was able then shut down, fast, at the horizon.

Church bells, of which Oxford had many, chimed seven.

“Let's go and have something to eat,” Ivan said.

They got into his van. “Where are we going?” asked Grace.

“There's a good pub in Wiltshire I've always wanted to try. And we could go and take a look at the white horse at Uffington afterward.”

They drove west along what seemed to Stephen like narrow green alleys. Darkening flowers nodded in the hedgerows. The Downs rose up on either side of them like a bosom.

They stopped at a village and ordered food from a menu chalked up on a blackboard at the bar. Stephen had no idea what to have, there were no steaks or hamburgers or macaroni and cheese.

“Maybe you should order for me,” said Stephen to Ivan.

When his food came, it was some kind of pie. Stephen dug in his fork and pulled out a piece of what seemed to be the breast of a very small chicken. Tiny breastbones lay half concealed by gravy.

“What is this?”

“It's pigeon pie.”

“Pigeons? Those birds?”

“Yes.”

“Don't they live on the streets?”

“Not these, they nest in the woods.”

They started talking about revolution. Grace was of the party that wanted to blow everything up and start all over again, while Ivan favored an alternative society, which would coexist with capitalism, and replace it when capitalism had collapsed of its own internal contradictions. Andrea said that capitalism was more than an economic system, it was a means of manipulating desire.

“Do you know about Wilhelm Reich and the orgone box?” said Ivan.

“No idea.”

“There is a primordial cosmic energy in the universe called orgone, which comes about through having an orgasm.”

“No, there isn't,” Stephen said.

“Let me finish. You have people go inside this box and screw, and they produce this orgone with their orgasm. Then people who are mentally or even physically ill go into the box and the energy from the orgasm cures them. Now, orgone is blue and you can see it, because it's the color of the sky, and it's also responsible for gravity. Red corpuscles, plant chlorophyll, gonadal cells, protozoa, and cancer cells are all charged with orgone.”

“Where's the data?”

“I don't know, I'm just telling you the theory. If we all fuck enough, we'll release enormous amounts of orgone, and capitalism will disappear of its own accord, because capitalism is simply a manifestation of sexual repression.”

Stephen looked at Ivan. You have to be smart to get into Balliol, he thought, that's a top school. “You're just kidding around, aren't you? Did you make this guy up?”

“Of course I didn't.”

Ivan had mustard in his muttonchop whiskers. Grace leaned over to him, stuck out her tongue and licked it away.

What is going down here, Stephen thought, where am I and who are these people? Outside the leaded windows of the pub, night had fallen. He was miles from Oxford and his solitary mattress and John Baines and the Dyson Perrins lab. The sky was full of intermittent stars and a large moon.