The Summer Isles (3 page)

“It seems,” he begins, “that a tumour has been growing in your lungs…”

T
HE NEXT WEEK PASSES
in an oddly euphoric daze. I feel, for a start, so much better now that I know what’s wrong with me. My body even seems to have stopped pestering me with unpleasant signals; it’s as if it understands it can leave me alone now the medical profession has taken over. After all the delays and worries, a real sense of purpose arrives with becoming a proper patient with a proper, diagnosed illness. Even the inexplicable absence of my acquaintance from our shed somehow seems part of this same coolly logical process.

Thrust upon the gleaming linoleum rivers of the new NHS, I am kept so busy that at first that there is little time left for worry about anything else. There are further X-rays at the Radcliffe, thin screens behind which I must robe and disrobe for the benefit of cold-fingered but sympathetic men who wear half moon glasses. Nurses provide me with over-sweet tea and McVitie’s Digestives from their ward tins. Porters lend me their newspapers and seek my opinion about Arsenal’s chances in the FA Cup. There’s comradeship, too, amongst the people with whom I must share these long waits in corridors and in campfire circles set around smoky ill-proportioned rooms. Gas fitters with piles from down the road at Abingdon and lobster-handed women from Jericho who still take in washing despite their dickey hearts—people I would normally have been at a loss to say anything to—become colleagues in this new world. My being from the University doesn’t bother them. Illness is timeless, classless. Here, at the gates of pain and uncertainty, there’s no town and gown.
That’s nice, so does that mean you’re a proper Professor? My son Nobby, now, he went on the trams
… Between tutorials and sleep and eating at Hall, my life is taken up in waits and bus journeys and having my throat and chest examined, my blood, my stools, my mucus and my urine collected in vials. Now that I am truly ill, my old fear of all things medical is easily conquered.

In fact, I feel almost heroic. After all, do not the ill have a special window of understanding on the world? And I am grateful for the impetus that my condition gives to a long-planned project of mine. A book, not of history, but
about
history. One which examines, much as a scientist might examine the growth of a culture, the way that events unfold, and attempts to grapple with the forces that drive them.
The Fingers Of History?
The way that inspiration sometimes arrives when you’re least looking for it, I may even have stumbled upon a title; serious and relevant to the subject, yet punning at the same time on my own small moment of popular fame at page eight, bottom middle column, of Saturday’s
Daily Sketch
between 1928 and 1932.

After years of doubt and uncertainty, of grappling with that sense of being an impostor which has pervaded most of my life, I suddenly find that I am making good progress in writing the pivotal chapter about Napoleon. Was he a maker of history, or was he its servant? Of course, he was both—and yet it is often the little incidents, when history is approached from this angle, which stand large. Questions such as, what would have happened if his parents Carlo and Letizia had never met?—which normal historians would discount as ridiculous—suddenly become a way of casting new light. Would history have changed, or would someone else have risen in his place; a similarly great thinker, soldier and organiser who would also have underestimated the strength of British naval power and the savagery of the Russian winter? But the whole idea of a Napoleon with a different name, a different accent—taller and without Josephine—it’s like Charles Lawton playing a role meant for David Niven…

From Marlborough to Louis XIV, from Charlemagne to Attila, history is full of these figures. Yet it seems to me that their influence becomes stronger as history develops. Alexander the Great remains more a creature of myth, and he came from a tradition of military might at a time when Macedonia would have had to face the hostility of neighbouring Thrace and Thessaly. The time was ripe for a strong, expansionist leader, and we must not forget that it was Alexander’s father who originally planned the invasion of the Persian Empire. Strange though it may seem, it is possible to argue—I think, convincingly—that if Alexander hadn’t existed, someone like him would have risen to take his place.

A similar pattern exits, I believe, throughout much of history. Columbus was just one of several mariners who were seeking the backing of the Court of Spain for a trip westward towards the Indies. Pizarro’s extraordinary victories against the Incas can be explained more easily in terms of military technology than his own egotistical Christian certainties. Henry VIII was not the first monarch to fall out with the Pope, but other forces engendered his decision to split from Rome with more far-reaching repercussions. Even Cromwell arose from a group of men like him in attitude, single-mindedness and intelligence. Until he became remarkable, no one had noticed him.

Of course, the question of the role of the individual versus the economic, social and scientific developments of human history has always been in the balance. The core argument of my book will be that this balance has slowly shifted, and that, with the final tilt of the fulcrum taking place with Napoleon, then shifting still more with the likes of Bismarck, Lincoln, Mussolini, Lenin; and even—although I know I will need to be careful here—with John Arthur, the dominant individual is now the most important force shaping history.

Working on one or two outstanding points about the Egyptian Campaign after a satisfying morning tutorial with one of this year’s better undergrads, I feel that my life in Oxford is at last fitting into place. This, I imagine as my pen dances across the page, is how Gibbon must have felt. Sometimes, and not as is usually the case because I have simply run out of arguments and ideas, but rather because two or three of the things are clamouring for my attention, I even have to get up and pace the floor.

I watch myself then, finally the legitimate scholar striding about his creaky Oxford rooms. Yes, this truly is the place I once dreamed of when I knew that such a thing would be impossible. The tiled fireplace is set beneath a dimly-seen picture of a long-demolished country house in Warwickshire this college once owned. Two but-toned-leather armchairs face each other across a faded Persian rug; they are so scratched and smoothed by ages of scholarly bodies that they always seems to be in private debate. The roof beams are low. In places—for I am reasonably tall—I have to stoop to avoid them. A small iron hook juts from one, and there is a story that a student hanged himself from it after being informed that he would only ever be average at Logic. The student is unnamed—after all, suicide is just another part of the academic tradition here—but he must have been very determined, and quite short. His tale remains almost as famous as that of the don of another college who, when being told that one of his pupils had committed suicide, interrupted the bearer of the news by saying, “No, don’t tell me
who.
Let me guess…”

Along with this study-cum-parlour, my college rooms consist of the bedroom in which Christlow greets me each morning, once a separate chamber, its undulating floor linked by a relatively new Eighteenth Century doorway. There is also a small gas stove and sink that hide around a curtained corner, and an even smaller room containing the toilet which smells sweetly of ancient misdirected piss. In these rooms, none of the furniture is mine, and most of the books on the sagging shelves were here when I first arrived; left as worthless by the previous incumbent although I—superstitious, respectful, lazy—have never been able to dispose of them.

If I wanted to, I could wear nothing but college gowns. Probably, if I asked Christlow, he could supply me with college underwear. My food is also provided; breakfast is brought up on a tray, lunch and collation are a sumptuous cold table in the West Room, dinner is served at eight amid the Victorian tapestries of the Hall. Tea and biscuits may be called for at all reasonable times by pulling a lever on the wall beside the fireplace. Decent sherry and port from my college’s vintage cellars, likewise. Champagne, even—and free for the two weeks before Lent following some ancient bequest. My shelves are dusted, my bed is made and changed, my clothes are whisked away to be washed, starched and ironed. Were it not for the distraction of the students (whom the more academic dons avoid) it would be possible for me to spend my entire time working, thinking, writing, talking—contributing to the steam of the great intellectual engine house that Oxford is supposed to be, and perhaps once truly was.

From outside, drifting through the open mullioned window, raising the corners of my freshly-written sheaves of paper, the warm air brings the chant and the tread of Christlow and his fellow EA members as they parade on the ancient grass of our college quad. The sound has become so familiar to me now that it is as soothing as the clock chimes, dove coos, the sigh of trees, hesitant piano scales, dim voices and the clatter of footsteps which fill the essential silence which underlies this great dreaming city. Settling down again at my chair, I gaze out at them, then glance briefly down at my watch, nursing the knowledge that I only have half an hour of the morning left before I must get up and keep yet another medical appointment. Recently, it is this need for urgency that has often produced my best, most precise work.

12 o-clock comes amid a stagger of bells, faint and loud; and with it only one extra sentence done—and that crossed-out. I’d intended to skim back towards the present from Nelson in Aboukir Bay, hinting at many links to come. But the sound of Christlow barking out instructions like a Butlin’s bingo caller, and the ragged movements that he elicits from an odd assortment of students, a few younger dons (who, of course, insist that they’re humouring him), college office workers and manual labourers, is too distracting, too here and now.

I weigh down my papers with a sea-smoothed stone, crack my fingers, and stand up. From marks on the cobweb walls of public toilets, the empty dust of old potting sheds, lost gasps of stifled satisfactions, to here… My few personal possessions seem out of place now as I look around at them. My hanging tweed jacket. My mother’s old honeymoon suitcase with its hasp forever padlocked that peeks from beneath the bed next door. Her photograph and that of my father, thin and stiffly posed, in a tiny silver frame above the fireplace. Another photograph, smaller still, of a handsome young man, dark-haired against a lifeless white background, whom some people, flatteringly, assume to be me. A few shameful Eric Amblers on the bookshelves amid the cloth and leather-bound weight of Tort’s monumental
France and England in the Middle Ages
and Stubb’s massive
Constitutional History.
A new Baird
Dreamland De Luxe
radiogram (my one obvious luxury) squats in a low alcove, its fat marquetry face leering like a Martian. Within its sliding doors, I keep my prized collection of records.
Love Is The Sweetest Thing. Forty-Second Street. Blue Moon. Whispering Grass. A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square
… I once attempted to argue the merits of modern popular music with Bedford-Moles, Regius Professor of Divinity at a neighbouring college. Nowadays, I simply hide them behind Furtwangler’s Beethoven.

Christlow’s exercises have finished without my noticing. But for the click of shears in the walled herb garden, the midday air hangs still over the quad as I cross it. Once out in the street, I check once again the address on my appointment card. Not the Radcliffe this time—and further down Abingdon Road than I’d imagined. Too late for a bus, and I’ll have to hurry if I’m going to walk.

12:45, P. Wiseman. Across the bridge, gull-like human cries and the reek of chlorine wash over me from the Open Air Baths. On the right, past Vicarage Road, I reach Saint Eustace Row, which is a lime-fronted edifice of old redbrick and rusted guttering that must be to do with one of the colleges. Here, I’ve floated up into some higher echelon where all the threads of medicine meet. Eventually, if you’re ill enough, you get to see the same specialists and going NHS or private no longer matters; the only difference is whether you get to chat afterwards over lunch at the club. Just the white plainness of this card, the fact that unlike some common GP, ward surgeon or anaesthetist, P. Wiseman doesn’t even call himself a doctor—let alone list his qualifications—tells me that.

I’m shown straight down a surprisingly modern corridor and up a staircase where numerous dead stags have stuck their heads through the walls. A M
IND
Y
OUR
H
EAD
sign leads to some older part of the building past a rusted coat of roundhead armour that looks as though it’s been left there by its forgetful owner. Then a large door into an even larger room. I’ve become used to these twists and turns in Oxford: the rabbit-hole that leads to the ballroom, the hovel that backs onto the palace. I cross the rucked carpet and sit down on a big but uncomfortable wing chair to squint expectantly as P. Wiseman lights a cigarette from his gold case and the sunlight from the tall casement windows pours down around him.

“I’m glad you could make it,” he says, spectacles glinting as the ormolu clock pings one. “I’ve been following the progress of your tests, and I think it’s about time that you and I had a little chat.” Pause for a smile. “About things.”

“It’s been,” I shrug, sweaty and breathless, “a bit of a shock to me.”

“Bit of a shock?” He nods thoughtfully. “Yes, yes. And you’re what? Sixty Five?”

“Sixty. My birthday’s next month.”

“Mmmm.” He glances down at his tear-off page-a-day calendar S
UPPLIED
B
Y
B
RIGHTON
P
HARMACEUTICALS
as if he doubts me. T
HURSDAY 13
J
UNE 1940
. The letters seem to glow in the sun, so brightly rainbowed at their edges that I wonder if this isn’t some other new symptom I’ll have to try to explain. There’s a day’s motto, too—
Fata Obstant
—which means nothing to me, not knowing Latin.