The Summer Isles (6 page)

My footsteps drag now. My lungs and my throat throb and ache. A few bedroom lights are showing in the houses, then puffing out. Already, it’s later than I imagined. The tellies have shrivelled to a white dot, the concert halls have emptied, and all the Jims and the Betties will soon be abed; merrily, guiltlessly, fornicating. Yet, twisted angel of death that I am, I feel a sense of watching from those curtained windows.

Number 4 Portia Avenue’s black-and-white gable looms into view: the privet and the long strip of drive that lead towards the side of the house where, in these days of ever-growing prosperity, a Ladybird car will probably soon replace the sturdy Raleigh that my acquaintance currently cycles to work on.
Old Fatguts can’t last long now, love, and then it’ll be me in that office. My name on the frosted glass
… The windows of his house, too, are darkened. But, unlike the others around it, they are also uncurtained. And, in this flowing summer darkness, there is something odd about the look of the panes, and even of the flowerbed that separates the house from Number 6 next door. A few weeks ago, I’m sure, it was filled with a military row of tulips. Now it seems messed, flattened.

My feet crunch on something sharper than gravel as I find myself walking up the path to my acquaintance’s front door, which I never imagined I would do outside my dreams. Many of the windows have been shattered, and a fat iron padlock has been fitted across the door’s splintered frame. There is a pervasive, summery smell of children’s urine.

I see, last of all, the sign that the Oxford Constabulary have pasted on the porch. T
AKE
N
OTICE
H
EREBY
… But this sky is incredibly dark and deep for summer, and even the streetlamps are out; I can’t read further than the Crown-embossed heading. I slump down the doorstep, scattering empty milk bottles, covering my face with my hands. At long last, it all seems to come to me. This. Death. The end of everything.

When I look up some time later, I realise that a figure is watching me from the quiet suburban night.

“I know,” it repeats. “This must be a shock to you.”

I nod, scuffing the heel of my hand as I struggle to my feet.

“Knew them well, did you?”

“N—not exactly.”

The figure, smaller than I am, clearly female, takes a step across the crazy paving. Housecoat and slippers. A steely glint of curlers. “Come on, then. I’ll get you some tea. We’re only next door…

“I’m Mrs. Stevens,” she tells me, wisely keeping her first name to herself as she potters about with the teapot and the kettle in the blinding brightness of her kitchen.

“My name’s Brook,” I say. I can’t see any point in lying.

“I check the doorstep each day for the post,” she says, twisting off the tap and giving her mottled fingers a shake. “Pass it on to our local bobby, although I’m sure he doesn’t know what to do with it either. You’d think they’d know better, wouldn’t you, than to keep sending
letters
? I mean, him virtually working in the Post Office and all. You’d like it sweet and strong, I expect?”

“Please.”

I watch Mrs. Stevens as she warms the pot, then ladles in the tea. The kitchen, now that I can make out more of it, is surprisingly big. Windows on two sides, one with a fan-extractor. A white enamel machine that I suppose must be a refrigerator hums gently to itself in a corner. A cuckoo clock ticks above the sink. The tiles and the work surfaces shine.

“When did it happen?”

“It would be…” Mrs. Stevens tilts her head and squints up at the ceiling. She must be close to seventy, but a part of her still seems girlish. “The Sunday before last. About six o-clock, I’d say it was. In fact, pretty much dead-on, as Les and me had just finished our salad.”

“They took them
all
away?”

“All of them. The pity of it really.” She stirs her own tea and passes me mine. Blue willow-pattern china. “Them young girls.”

“Nobody did anything to stop it?”

She gazes across at me, and licks a brown line of tea that’s gathered on her small grey moustache. “I’ll tell you what they were like, Mr. Brook. In every way, I’d have said, they were a decent couple. Only odd thing I remember now is they sometimes used to leave the light on without drawing the curtains so you could see right in… The lassies were nice, though. They fed our cat for us when we went up to Harrogate last year, although of course the poor thing’s got run over since. Probably that dreadful new road, trying to get back to his old hunting grounds. Silly puss…”

“You were saying.”

“There’s not much to say, really, is there? The way things have turned out. Shameful, though. Lets down the neighbourhood, especially what’s been done to the house since they left, mess and bricks through the window. But you know what the kids were like. Knew them well yourself, did you?”

“He was just an acquaintance. I hardly had any contact with the rest of the family.”

“Like I say, they seemed decent as you or I. Made no fuss when my Les was putting up the summer house at the back and got building sand all over their roses. Laughed it off. I remember him saying, Mrs. Stevens, it just doesn’t matter. Put my Les’s back out, though, it did. He’s upstairs now. Asleep, most probably. Separate rooms, we are, since he had that trouble.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Stevens. But when they came to the house, was it the KSG or did—”

“—and you’d never have known, would you, to look at her?”

“Her? You mean…?”

“Ah…” Mrs. Stevens slaps her hand flat down on the table and leans forward, her brown eyes gleaming, almost childlike in her excitement. “So you still don’t know the truth of it? Well, that’s understandable, I suppose, cos, just like they say, you really never can tell. I mean, even you—I’ll be honest, Mr. Brook—it crossed my mind till I got a good look at you out of the dark. You can’t be too careful, can you?”

“No. I suppose not. I’m sorry, Mrs. Stevens, but I’m still confused.”

“Her real name, it seems, was something Polish before she married. All
xs
and
ys
and
zs.
Her parents came over here after the War, changed it to something proper.” She hurrumphs. “Hood, I think it was—but even that doesn’t quite right, does it?”

“I suppose they were thinking of Robin.”

“Robin?”

“Don’t mind me, Mrs. Stevens.”

“Not that I’ve got anything against the Serbs in their own country.”

“You mean Poles?”

“Yes. And a few of them over here—it’s understandable that they
want
to come, isn’t it—just as long as they don’t make themselves a burden, earn a decent living, talk like we do and don’t bother our children and keep themselves to themselves and make a proper effort to fit in.”

“So what was the problem?”

“She was a Jew, wasn’t she. All these years they’ve been living next door and acting all normal and hiding it from us. I mean, it’s the
deceit
I really can’t stand. And
he
must have known. Must have been in it with that job of his, and helped her fake the papers when they married. Her with coming round through that door in a sunhat sometimes to give me a few extra cuttings for the rockery Les was working on.” Mrs. Stevens raises her shoulders and shudders theatrically. “To think of it. It’s the
dishonesty.
And her nothing but a dirty little Jew.”

The cuckoo clock whirrs and pings. A wooden bird with glass eyes sticks out its head and stares down at us for a moment as it toots breathlessly. Eleven o-clock already.

It’s far later than I’d expected.

C
LOUDS SWEEP IN ACROSS
Oxford, thick and grey as wet cement. Rain brims over the low surrounding hills and washes away the hope of what had promised to be another spectacular summer. Cars hiss by on gleaming streets. Pedestrians dodge cascades from sluicing gargoyles. Queues of galoshes, wet coats and sodden umbrellas fill the doorways beneath college arches with a sick, rubbery smell.

Ascot is a wash-out; horses and high-heeled women sink deep in the paddock, hats are ruined and Best Boy, the King’s own horse and hottest favourite in years, pulls up lame in front of the Royal Box in a sea-spray of mud; a story that fills the front pages of next morning’s damp-at-the-edges newspapers. In the whitewashed yard of Oxford’s town prison on the hissing grey dawn, two men are hanged for their part in an attempted mail robbery. But few turn up to watch, and it barely makes page five of that evening’s
Oxford Mail.

In Honduras, the British prefix lost to revolution in 1919 is restored when General Avetin succeeds in a bloody coup and asks to re-join the Empire. A car bomb in the Trans-Jordan kills fifteen German League of Nations soldiers. Plebiscites in the Gold Coast and Rhodesia confirm their population’s acceptance of newly-restored British Governors. In India, as ever, there are uprisings and massacres.

Gone With The Wind,
a film that most people want see despite the fact that it comes from decadent America and Bette Davis pinched the Scarlett O’Hara role from our own Vivien Leigh, is given the Modernist stamp of approval when it is premiered in the West End in the sprucely uniformed presence of Jim Toller, Major-General of the Knights of Saint George, the ubiquitous KSG, and Commander-in-Chief of the British Armed Forces. John Arthur, typically, is quoted to have said that he too would liked to have attended, but happened to be too busy.

Despite P. Wiseman’s apparent pronouncement of my death sentence, there are still many tests and indignities for me at the Radcliffe. I am congratulated on my resilience and given the kind of drugs that I suspect could trace their origins back to the Chinese opium dens. Pain, when it does come, fills up my bleak sense of absence, and I can feel, if I press my skin lightly, a walnut-sized lump just to the left of my ribs. Why is it always walnuts, I wonder? Where are the plums, cherries, conkers, cobblestones, quail’s eggs of human pathology…?

Back at college, as the University presses along Walton Street begin to churn out acres of examination papers and Trinity Term slips past the half-way mark, many of the students begin to look ill-kempt and pale, their hair lank; their voices, as they attempt to make themselves heard in seminars over the chatter of rain through antique lead gutters, sound lost. It’s the bright ones I feel sorriest for; middle-class lads and lassies who’ve pushed hard to get here through late nights of eye-stinging revision, grants and bursaries, enduring the bemusement of their family and friends. Like me, although probably with better reason, they thought that a different Oxford lay at the end of the dream.

It doesn’t pay, after all, to be
too
clever nowadays. Merely bright will do just fine. After all, the students at Oxford have to put up with teachers like me, whom they should properly have left behind them when they went to a decent grammar school. A couple of days ago, for example, staring out during a tutorial at the quad’s dripping oak at the hunched figure that sometimes seems to be standing beneath it, I lost the thread with one of my best students as we discussed his essay on the reforms of Peter the Great. He gazed back at me in polite amazement as I talked, but said nothing. I only realised after he had gone that my thoughts had got tangled in the pages of my book, and that I had been going on about not Peter the Great, but Alexander.

But BC or AD—Ancient Greece or Imperial Russia—what use anyway is the solemn study of history? Give me instead a few juicy stories of Empress Catherine or the complex morning ritual that was the Emptying of the Chamber Pots at Versailles. I’ve always had this gossipy view of my subject—more Charles Lawton and
The Private Lives of Henry VIII
than anything to do with the reality of the past, when life was surely no grander or funnier then than it is now, and probably made just as little sense. All the rest is a pretence of knowing the unknowable, or downright lies.

Oxford, meanwhile, as the rain continues and salty tidemarks rise in her stones, endures. She functions, as some wag must surely have remarked, in much the same way as a swan drifting amid the stranded benches of the flooded Isis. All poise and grace above the surface. Much mad paddling beneath.

Living here at the time that I do, when for every undergraduate student there are two who are taking some lesser qualification or simply here for a weekend course; at a time when, whilst my college and a few others struggle to maintain the tutorial system, there is no essential difference between our degrees and ones obtained, say, at Carlisle Institute Of Further Education, I still find it hard to be certain if anything has really changed. Did not Lord Eldon pass his Finals simply by giving the name in Hebrew for The Place Of The Skull, and that of the Founder of University College? Did not Gibbon describe his time at Oxford as the most idle and unprofitable of his life? Instead of the Lords and Baronets who used to cram the place, it’s true there are now many sons and indeed daughters of KSG Majors, Town Council Chairmen, Empire Alliance District Organisers and various other Modernist sycophants and high ups. But that in itself can hardly be described as making Oxford different—more a question of the old girl responding as she has always done to the ever-shifting times.

The editor of the
Daily Sketch
was probably right when he told me over a compensatory lunch at the Savoy that the time was no longer suitable for a weekly column filled with old-fashioned facts, and that the John Arthur connection was well and truly played out. And I despair as I work on my book of ever making any sense of history. It seems, to quote Gibbon again, little more than a register of cruelties, follies and misfortunes. For example, in the Year of Our Lord 1099, the First Crusade under Geoffrey of Bouillon captured Jerusalem from the infidels, then set about slaughtering the entire population. And in 1919, in Poland, Jews were gathered up by Nationalist gangs, stripped and flogged, then made to dig their own graves…

In Britain, the Jews have always been small in number, and, although there were savage pogroms in York, London, Norwich, Stamford and Lynn in the late 12th century, we’ve generally been tolerant. Before the rise of Modernism, my acquaintance and his family probably had little more to fear from exposure than a silence in the greengrocers as they entered and the occasional human turd stuffed through their letter box. After all, Jewishness isn’t like homosexuality, madness, criminality, communism, militant Irishness: they can’t exactly
help
being born with their grabby disgusting ways, can they? Rather like the gypsies, you see, we didn’t mind them
living
, but not here, not with us… In this as in so many other areas, all Modernism did was take what people said to each other over the garden fence and turn it into Government policy.