The Summer Isles (10 page)

When I finally drag my chin from my chest, I hear tinkling, and see that Bracken’s busy sweeping up the cartridge cases with a dustpan and broom. I’m forced out into the air as I begin to cough.

“I don’t know how many hours Walter spends down there,” Ursula says as we stand outside the kitchen window, gazing down the gravel path. “I’m surprised the neighbours don’t complain. But of course they’re used to it.” She folds her arms and gives a little shiver. “That’s why I came down here, really. To keep an eye on him.”

“Where do you live?”

“I suppose you can say here at the moment.” She shrugs. “Walter’s doing me the favour by letting me stay in this house. But since our father died, I’m not sure that I can fit in anywhere.”

“Oxford’s as good a place as any to not fit in,” I say. “At least, that’s what I’ve found.”

“Hmmm…” She nods, jutting her chin out nervously. “Anyway Geoffrey—can I call you Geoffrey?—Geoffrey, this work you and Walter are busy on—”

“—I’d hardly call it work—”

“—Whatever it is. I think he’s quite lonely down at the college. And here, with me. I’m not sure if I know how to say this, but will you keep an eye on him? Try to be—oh, I know this sounds silly—his friend?”

I meet her gaze. “I’ll do my best.”

She smiles up at me. “Anyway, I expect you’ll want to be getting back…”

So I say goodbye to them both, fiddling with the latch as we stand cramped in the little hall and Bracken runs his bitten fingernails around the edges of a letter that’s arrived, marked Recorded Delivery, with the afternoon’s post. The envelope’s brown, but plush. Crested. Perfectly typed. OHMS.

They watch me from the doorway, brother and sister, as I head off down the path. I give them a cheery wave. It’s a late afternoon in this suddenly perfect English summer, far too beautiful to waste standing waiting for a bus. As I set off down warm country lanes sleepy with birdsong and the drone of insects, and as the towers of Oxford drift closer over the haze of the parklands and the river, I’m sure I can still hear a gun firing repeatedly in the distance.

N
EXT MORNING—A FRIDAY
, Midsummer’s Eve—I busy myself with a couple of the meetings I’m expected to attend by virtue of various obscure elections and nominations. Then, after a swift lunch of salmon and roast beef from the cold table in the West Room, I finally get around to sorting out the arrangements for my long-planned Scottish holiday. I queue first at the GWR Station for the tickets, then again at the City Post Office for all the stamps, clearances and cross-county passes that must go with them. The woman behind the counter eyes me through the spittle-frosted glass before she stamps my documents and slides them back to me. Perhaps she remembers my pestering her with queries about letters to my imagined aunt in Canada. I find myself wondering if she misses my acquaintance, and who emptied his desk upstairs in the Censor’s Office, who scratched his name off the tea club…

Outside, Oxford smells dizzily of the sour gas of its overstretched drains on this warm late afternoon, and is busier than ever with people up from London, people in from the suburbs, people down from the country. Everything about the city seems hectic and overstuffed today. The wares of the shops are tumbling out into the street, the pubs are bustling, pigeons are pecking at pools of sick, there’s a queue for pink-iced “Midsummer’s Eve Cakes” outside Boffins Bakery at Carfax, and everywhere there are too many cars.

I pause for a pint of Hall’s Gold Medal as I pass the Bear. The back bar, which used to resound to the click of dominoes and the splat of spittle on sawdust, has been carpeted and is filled with the shrieking of female voices. “We’re getting tiddled,” one of them explains. I sup my beer and knock back a couple of tablets, sitting close enough to the juke-box to listen to the songs I’ve put my penny in for over this jolly racket.
April Showers. Mad About The Boy. Waiting For Nowhere
… But today, their easy sentiment is lost on me. People meet, they fall in love, they marry, they have children: then their lives are wrenched apart because of some accident of birth or history. They disappear, and no one even seems to notice. Even I—I just sit here and drink my beer and nurse my pains and my self-pity when I should be standing on the table and yelling. What, I wonder, has happened to the world? Events used to go so predictably. Britain makes a treaty with Germany; France makes one with Spain. Portugal secures independence from Castile; Henry the Navigator pushes down to explore the coast of North Africa; envious Spain joins in; soon, the world is circumnavigated, America discovered. Cause and effect. But now, history consists of random twists and turns. A tiny earthquake in Bogota causes a gas leak in Ealing. The assassination of an Archduke in some obscure Balkan city brings about a World War.

The music ends and I stumble outside. The air feels stuffy this evening as my heart starts to pound and cold needles stab at my chest and hands. I shake out a third dose of tablets from my bakelite box and swallow them dry. When a 159 bus slows and stops beside me along New Road, I climb aboard it on impulse, drawn by its purposeful thrum, the stale scent of cigarette smoke and summer bodies, the fact that it will take me to somewhere that isn’t Oxford.

I share my journey down the Eynsham Road on this Midsummer’s Eve with two middle-aged chain-smoking Spanish tourists. They squeak and point at this and that from their seats on the top deck; fairy candles glowing from windows, sprigs of rowan over doors, the start of Midsummer bonfires in the parks, lamp-lit picnics, children sleeping out in tents in their front gardens. A Bus Inspector gets on at Botley and comes wandering along the aisles with a swaying sailor’s gate, asking to see passes and identity cards, enquiring about the purpose of our journeys: an old English custom that the Spaniards greet with excitement, although I’m sure it’s much the same for them at home under Franco. I tell him that I’m simply passing the time, and feel absurdly grateful when he nods and moves on.

By Adderly, the bus is empty and I head into evening across the village green through rolls of bonfire smoke. A promising-looking path of trodden grass runs across a field where the cattle stare at me in amazement, then come chuffing up with their long eager faces, their wet noses. I clamber over a barbed-wire topped gate where a wooden footpath sign points through a high expanse of thistles. Scratched, lost, tired, I finally reach a brick wall at the end of an alarmingly dark wood, pushing through ferns and foxgloves until I come to a door, once green, dotted with medieval-looking iron studs. When I give the iron handle a shove, the door creaks open.

Beyond, there is a wide lawn—more of a parkland, really—mottled with horse chestnuts that have had their undersides neatly nibbled flat by deer. A long redbrick house with many tall spiral chimneys glows orange in the sunset beside the long shadows of marquees, deckchairs, awnings. A scatter of croquet players look up from their game and give me a cheery wave.

I find a deckchair and sit down to catch my breath as white doves clatter over the topiary yews and gathering rows of Rovers, Jaguars, Bristols, and perky little MGs with their windscreens down, sweep in around the house’s moat of gravel, threading headlights into a golden mesh as men and women emerge fresh-minted in their evening clothes and the sky turns an ever-deeper blue. Lanterns are set out by the dark-suited servants and their flames flash in the windows and lick the twirl of limbs as sleeves are rolled up, ties discarded, music pulses and the people begin to dance. A knife of pain digs into my left shoulder. Nobody seems surprised to see me here. I take another tablet.

A girl with the kohled eyes of an Egyptian priestess twirls in front of me bearing a tray of half-risen cakes, on which the words E
AT
M
E
have been picked out in raisins. I grab one and take a bite, then another, wondering if I’m going to grow big or small as she skips off, giggling. The music wafting from loudspeakers in the trees is Glen Miller, Duke Ellington. Slick, sophisticated; decadent white-nigger American. A solo clarinet sounds over creamy pillows of trombone and sax, almost too beautiful for words. Me and cheap music.

Stumbling up from my deckchair, my mouth so dry and swollen now that I can barely swallow my next tablet, I grab a passing glass of fizzy English wine and tip it back. Hands brush against me, sequinned handbags flutter and cigarette holders jostle like lances as crimson lips smile in surprise and press close to mine. Here, we are all friends, acquaintances. I slump on a wall beside a lake where a rowing boat floats upturned amid the quivering stars. Time passes as water laps and the trees about me fizz and whisper, speckled with lanterns, stars, all the twinkling fey wonders of this Midsummer Eve.

Wondering about my prospects of getting back to Oxford, I try to focus on my watch. But there’s no one about as I ramble up to the side of the house where ivy looms dark in the moon’s shadow against the high walls and air heavy with the perfume of sea lavender carries the thump of distant music, the crash of broken glass, moans of passion, shrieks of laughter.

I walk across the soft lawns where a few crinkled white balloons float like weary ghosts of Midsummer’s past and a stone lion squats, its mouth smeared with either blood or lipstick. A fox darts between the long hedges, and he and I stare at each other for a moment before we go on about the strange business of our separate lives. The road beyond the house’s open gates is grey, a river of mist, and the sky, which never truly darkened, is brightening already as I walk between long lines of cob-web silvered elms which might lead back towards Oxford.

Soon, all the scents and sounds of morning start to rise, but still I have glance back to the deeper darkness that hangs somewhere along the glimmering road behind me. Once, I even stop and call out, sensing a figure, a shape. In fact, I almost urge it to come.

L
OADED WITH SHOPPERS, BICYCLES
, dogs, and hung-over students going down, the early-evening local train calls at every imaginable halt between Oxford and Rugby. There are stations beside canal bridges. Stations in farmyards. Stations piled with milk churns and mail bags in the middle of pretty nowhere. And posters, posters. Posters of the seaside and posters of the country. Posters of towns. T
HE
L
AKE
D
ISTRICT
F
OR
R
EST
A
ND
Q
UIET
I
MAGININGS.
T
AKE
T
HE
S
UNDAY
S
PECIAL
A
ND
V
ISIT
L
AMBOURN
D
OWNS
, where a smiling family are picnicking on a swathe of green as coloured kites dance against a cloudless sky.

Then finally Rugby, where I change platforms and sit on the edge of a handcart until, gun-blue, its streamlined snout oozing steam and the sense of far-away before flashing endless carriages, the
Sir Galahad
overnight Euston-to-Glasgow pulls in. A porter helps me struggle with my old suitcase as the Tannoy barks incomprehensibly. I find my reserved seat—First Class;
G Brooke
in copper-plate. This, I tell myself as I settle back and the whole station starts to slide by, must be a good omen. To have back, with all these other memories, my original name.

It’s still early. We are still far south. The less seasoned travellers in this carriage cross and uncross their legs, press fingers to their mouths, pick at the white lace that covers their armrests. I recognise two probable civil servants, a likely academic, the doddery Lord of some Scottish estate, a honeymoon couple—and another couple who pay such little attention to each other that their journey has to be sweetly illicit. At the carriage’s far corner, in an arbour so bedecked with roses that there was hardly a need to mark it Reserved, sit four senior officers of the KSG, the Knights Of Saint George. They steeple their well-manicured hands and talk in low voices. The fact of their power is so strong that it is hard to take in the specific details of their appearance, that one is red-haired and young, that another is bald and sports a moustache. They all somehow just look sleek, plump—seals basking on a sunny shore, washed by the warm waves of the future.

They order first for dinner whilst tablecloths are laid in the dining car next door, and I notice as we clatter over points how the other passengers strain to hear what they have selected from the menu so that they can choose the same themselves. We flash through Bedworth, Nuneaton towards the whole grey mess of eastern Birmingham and then on into the cattle-gazing anonymity of the Midlands countryside.

After sherry, we move cars and sit down to face cutlery that lies clean as a surgeon’s implements. I flap out my napkin—the roaring embroidered GWR loin now holds a Modernist cross in its paws—and I smile at the man opposite me. We have nothing left to say once we have commented on the lovely weather. This, after all, is still Britain. In many ways, little has changed since Francis Eveleigh and I went to Scotland nearly thirty years ago.

I dip my spoon into the gently slopping asparagus soup and break open a bread roll. I smoke a cigarette between courses. We pause at Crewe. The pork is excellent, the roast potatoes are crisp little envelopes of warmth. Even my sense of taste seems to have come back to me. No ash, no dead leaves, and the strawberries for pudding taste exactly like strawberries, the clotted Devon cream is just like clotted Devon cream. Feeling faintly sick, faintly elated, I finish my coffee and Glenlivet as Manchester becomes Bolton and then Preston without any obvious change. I smile to my companion and sway past the tables. Letting down the strap and leaning out of a window between carriages, I can see the train stretching far ahead of me along the bends. The towns become grimmer for a while as the hills grow wilder, before suddenly transforming into pale stone and whitewash where packhorse bridges straddle silver streams in the prickling fairy dust of evening. The waiter taps my shoulder, asking if I would like another Glenlivet. He has it ready on the tray he’s holding, along with iced water in a GWR jug, individually-wrapped GWR chocolate, a GWR matchbox, a choice of GWR cigarettes.