The Summer Isles (7 page)

One of John Arthur’s first acts when he finally became Prime Minister in 1932 was to push a bill through the then still-functioning Parliament authorising what was termed a new Domesday Book. This amounted to a detailed tallying not only of Britain’s land, but also of her people, their racial background, their wealth, their contribution to society. From this many things followed. The issuing of identity cards. The reform of the tax and welfare system. The clear identification of minorities.

The unemployed, ex-offenders, Indians and the Irish were required to report twice-weekly to the local Police Station. Jews were dispossessed of their homes and shuffled to holding camps at the edges of towns. I can well remember the
Homeland for British Jewry
newsreels: they were probably one of the defining moments of early Greater British history. There they were, the British Jews clear in black and white as the projector flickered through the spiralling cigarette smoke above the one-and-sixpennies. Whole eager families of them helped by smiling Tommies as they climbed from landing craft and hauled their suitcases up onto the shingle of remote Scottish islands that had been empty but for a few sheep since the Highland Clearances a century before. It was hard not to think how genuinely nice it would be to start afresh somewhere like that, to paint and make homely the grey blocks of those concrete houses, to learn the skills of shepherding, harvesting, fishing.

So many other things have happened in Greater Britain since then that it has been easy to forget about the Jews. I remember a short piece on Pathé that I watched before Disney’s
Snow White
in what must have been 1939 at the old Electra Cinema. By then they looked rustic and sunburned, their hands callused by cold winters of weaving and dry-stone walling, their eyes bright from the wind off the sea. Since then, nothing. A blank, an empty space that I find hard to fill even in my imagination.

Already, the same thing seems to be happening to my acquaintance. He’s so faint to me now that I can hardly remember his face. It’s as if he—his whole family—have been removed from history. For, despite all my snooping, it wasn’t as if I knew him well. Since our first chance encounter in the dank subterranean toilets beneath Park Street where the GWR and LNER stations meet, he has remained little more than a cock to me. It’s easier that way. Of course, I’ve scanned the newspapers, and winkled out what little town gossip there is that penetrates these college walls. I have hung around the back of Oxford’s Central Post Office, and have listened to the voices of the staff as they hurry home through the rain. I have pestered these same people at their counters with enquiries about what I can and cannot write to an imaginary aunt in Canada in the hope that I will draw down someone from the Censor’s Department upstairs; perhaps even Old Fatguts himself—although, I have to remind myself, he’s simply a creature of my own imaginings. I have caused consternation amongst the mothers waiting beneath their umbrellas outside the gate of his daughters’ school.
You don’t actually have a child at Saint Frank’s, do you mate? So bugger off
—
anyway, you’re too old. Who’d you think you are? Old git. You don’t belong here
…

They’re right, of course. I don’t belong. One morning as thunder crackles and water streams and the whole college seems to shift and creak like a ship straining at its moorings, tutorial-less now the exams are close, purposeless now that my book seems more dead than alive, and in a more than usual amount of pain, I’m still marooned in my rooms when Christlow arrives at eleven to do the cleaning.

Still clearly reluctant to get on with his duties even after I’ve assured him that I don’t mind in the least, Christlow pulls on his gloves and begins to dust the bookshelves. Pretending that I’m occupied at my desk, I steal glimpses of his bristled neck as he works. He’s no more ordinary than I am really; living in a pokier version of a room like this somewhere in the college depths. Alone, unmarried. At the end of the day, I realise, I have little to fear from Christlow. It’s the very obviousness of his allegiance to the Empire Alliance that makes him safe.

“You know the Jews, Christlow.”

“Jews sir? Yes sir. Although not personally.”

He pauses in his dusting. The situation already has a forced air.

“We seem to hear so little about them now.”

“That would probably be right, sir.”

“I was wondering—it’s part of my book, you see—what happened to the mixed families. Where a Jew married a gentile…”

“I’m sure they were treated sympathetically, sir. Although for the life of me I can’t imagine there was ever very many of them.”

“Of course,” I nod, and force my gaze back to my desk, the blank sheet of paper my elbows have been leaning on. Christlow returns to his work, his lips pursed in a silent whistle amid the rain-streaming shadows as he lifts from the mantelpiece, the photos of my mother, my father, the good-looking dark-haired young man.

“So you’ll be alright, then, sir?” he asks, picking up his box of rags and polishes. “Fine if I leave you now?”

“Thank you, Christlow. As always,” I add, laying it on thick, “you’ve done a splendid job.”

He shoulders his way out of the door. When he’s gone and his footsteps have faded into the college’s loose stirrings, I slide in the bolt, then cross to the gloom of my bedroom and drag my mother’s old honeymoon suitcase from beneath the bed. Christlow’s complained about it being there once or twice—something about finding it hard to vacuum around. And I’m sure he’s fiddled with the padlock. Perhaps he’s even succeeded in getting inside, although the contents would surely disappoint him.

I always keep its key in my pocket. The case’s hinges creak as I open it, rusty from disuse, but nothing inside has changed. The tin toys. The tennis slacks. The exercise book with the name F
RANCIS
E
VELEIGH
inscribed into the cardboard cover in thick childish letters. A school badge. A Gillette safety razor—his first? An antique pistol wrapped inside a blue hand-knitted sweater. A decent-enough herringbone jacket. A single shoe. A steel hip flask. A soldier’s pass for 14–26 September 1916, cross-stamped N
O
L
ONGER
V
ALID
. Various socks and old-fashioned collarless shirts and itchy-looking undies. A copy of Morris’s
News From Nowhere.
And a Touring Map of the Scottish Highlands, folded so often that the sheets threaten to break apart as I touch them.

I grab a handful of his clothes and bury my face in them. Oxford damp. Oxford stone. Four Square Ready-Rubbed and Mansion House lavender floor polish. Little enough is left of Francis now. Still, that faint scent of his flesh like burnt lemon. A few dark strands of his hair…

What a joke I have become. My sole claim to fame is having dimly known a great man when he was still a child. And my sole claim to happiness lies almost as far back, a miracle that happened to me for a few days nearly thirty years ago. I suppose I’ve convinced myself since that homosexuals cannot really love—it’s easier that way. And yet at the same time, in all the years since, Francis had always been with me.

“It really doesn’t matter, Griff,” I hear him say as his fingers touch my neck. He smells not of lemons now, but of the rainy oak he’s been standing beneath as he watches my window from the quad. But he hasn’t aged. He hasn’t changed.

“No, it doesn’t matter at all,” he whispers as he turns me round to kiss me. “Not any of this. That’s the secret of everything.”

I smile to find him near me, and still shudder at the cool touch of his hands. In the moment before the thunder crackles closer over Oxford and I open my eyes, all pain is gone.

E
RNIE SVENDSEN, WITH HIS
suspiciously foreign name, his long nose, his thick glasses, seems an unlikely survivor of my kind. He puts it down to something that he has on Oxford’s Deputy Chief Constable, although I would have thought that would have made him a prime candidate for a hit-and-run car accident. More likely, he’s betrayed so many people that the powers-that-be find him useful. He’s known about me for years, too, has Ernie, although he has no direct evidence. I suppose I must be in a file somewhere, but in this as in many other ways, I lead a charmed life.

We meet at a park bench the next afternoon, during a break in the rain.

“Do you think they’ll let them stay together?” I ask as he tosses bread from a brown paper bag to the feathered carpet of ducks that have gathered around us. “Will they send him to the Isle of Man, the girls and the mother to the Western Isles?”

Giving me a pitying look, Ernie Svendsen (he swears his parents were Anglo Saxon) shakes his head. “It doesn’t work like that, my friend. Oh, they’ll get it out of him if that’s what they want. He’ll tell them anything—lies or the truth. That’s the problem they have to deal with. People always blab on so when you threaten them… I shouldn’t worry,” he adds, seeing the look on my face. “If something was going to happen to you, it would have happened already. Being who you are, I’m sure you’ll be safe.”

“I’m not who I am. I’m not anybody.”

“Then you’re doubly lucky.”

“I keep asking myself what the point is. I mean—why?”

The bushes around us look hunched and sodden. Which one, I wonder, would someone choose to hide in if they were watching us? Following people must be a messy business, shuffling about in the earth and the rain. Hanging at street corners, looking at the play of shadows on lighted windows. Studying us humans as if we were strange elusive birds.

“I think you’ve forgotten what it’s about, my friend,” he says.

“What?”

“Being the way we are—bent, queer. The guilt. The stupid scenes. You remember those leaflets…” Ernie smiles to the elderly lady who picks her way along the puddled path with her fat black Labrador. “You know, the promises of help, that we could be cured. Don’t tell me you didn’t secretly get hold of one of those leaflets they used to have at the Post Office. Don’t tell me you didn’t read it and want to believe.” He sighs. “If we could just press some button—pull out something inside us—don’t you think we’d all do it? Wouldn’t you take that chance, my friend, if you were given it? Isn’t John Arthur right in that respect?”

But that would mean re-living my life—becoming something other than what I am. Losing Francis. So I shake my head. And I’ve heard the stories. The drugs. The electrodes. The dirty pictures. Swimming in pools of your own piss and vomit.
That
kind of treatment that was available in these isles even before Modernism made it compulsory. “It isn’t John Arthur,” I say. “It’s all of us. It’s Britain…”

Ernie chuckles. “I suppose you’ll be alone now, won’t you?”

“Alone?”

“Without companionship. Without a cock to suck.”

I glance across the bench, wondering if Ernie’s propositioning me. But his eyes behind his glasses are as far away as ever; fish in some distant sea. Sex for him, I suspect, has always been essentially a spectator sport. That’s why he fits in so well. That’s why he’s survived. He doesn’t want a real body against him. All he needs is the sharp hot memories of those he’s betrayed. Crucified flesh. Blood-curdled semen. The wind crackles, rippling the pools that have gathered on the lawns, rattling the trees and the bushes. Spray of droplets patter around us.

“I’m really not interested in sex any longer,” I say. “So I don’t need you to set me up with anyone, Ernie, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just—”

“—Haven’t we all heard
that
one before!”

“Look, I don’t really care if you believe me. I just thought you might have some information about what happens to… To the Jews—and to people like us. Surely somebody has to?”

Ernie drags back his widow’s peak. “All I know is what I read in the papers, my friend. And what I see in the newsreels.”

“But no one’s ever come back, have they? I mean—from the Isle of Man. That’s what the big secret is. It’s no secret at all, although God knows what happens to them…”

“You can believe what you want. It’s what we all do.”

“I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

“That’s alright.” Ernie smiles at me again. “Nothing’s ever wasted.” His gaze darts across the silvered lawns, then he lets his cold fingers slide across the wet bench to touch my own. My skin creeps. Now, I really do wish that there was some button I could press. A way to cut this thing out of my life forever. “I understand how it is, my friend. We’re only human, after all. It’s always sad when you lose someone…”

His fingers give mine a squeeze. Then he stands up and shakes the last of his breadcrumbs over the ducks. They quack excitedly. Jewel-like water droplets are scattered across their backs. I watch Ernie as he walks off, splashing a short cut across the lawns and then around the sodden nets of the empty tennis courts. A factory shift hooter goes off. In the distance, like the turning of one vast clock, the bells of Oxford begin to ping and click and chime.

I head back along the paths, as lost as ever. And I can’t help wondering if there will be a black official KSG Rover waiting for me somewhere soon. The uniformed man with his orders neatly typed on HMSO paper. The polite request and the arm hooked around my elbow and the people passing by too busy going about their lives to notice. The drive to a dark clearing in a wood, the cold barrel to the forehead…

As I make my way down Holywell to the Bodleian Library past the old city walls, the clouds in the west begin to thin. The wind picks and plays with rents of blue sky, dragging them out through the tangled grey like skeins of wool. The sun flickers. The streets and the rooftops gleam as if freshly varnished. The air suddenly feels warm. Steam begins to rise.

The Bodleian’s open until eight now in the summer. There are none of those funny and unpredictable half days—another advantage of living in Modernist Britain. The light brightens, the steam thickens. I dawdle along the narrow, unpredictable streets that wind around the backs of the colleges and give alternate glimpses of kitchen dustbins and Wren towers. I seem to be moving in a land of ghosts. A plump cat smiles at me before disappearing into the snapdragon and ivy along a wall. A woman with a face like the Queen of Hearts is shrieking from an open upstairs window over a brassy avalanche of pealing bells. For all that I can tell, she might be yelling,
No! No! Sentence first
—
verdict afterwards.