The Summer Isles (8 page)

But Oxford. Oxford! All the years that I longed to see myself like this, on my way to the Bodleian—the very picture of academic greatness! It was something that occupied me even when my mother was still alive and I was working on a much earlier draft of my book. Although I’d never actually been to Oxford then, I knew it as some far-off Avalon, all myths, rumours and dreaming spires. I saw the quads and the beautiful buildings, the books, the whispering corridors of learning, the bat-like dons, the twin shining rivers. Graceful and free of care, I wandered in my imaginings with the chosen few as we talked and disported ourselves in the fragrant clouds of this academic heaven.

In those days, the real Oxford was almost entirely a male enclave. In my daydreams, it remained exclusively so. For I admit there was a twinge of the erotic to my yearnings. I suppose that in part it was the unmentionably controversial ghost of Oscar Wilde. I knew, by repute, of the trial concerning his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, although I couldn’t imagine that they had actually
done
anything together. Apart from the Ancient Greeks, who were almost mythical anyway, I couldn’t believe that any two men had ever really grappled with each other sexually. Still, by some odd personal antennae I picked up an aura about Oxford that was far from incorrect. Of course the great, gay, decadent days of the twenties and early thirties were still to come, with a generation of promising poets like Rowse, Waugh, Green, Auden, Sitwell, MacNeice and Betjeman whom I followed when I eventually subscribed to publications like
Outlook
waiting in the wings. Now—all lost, mad, emigrated, imprisoned, dead by so-called suicide—they are said to have been deviant to a man, and their names are excised from the University records.

Long before that, working each evening after school in the front parlour of our house as my mother nodded over her knitting in her chair behind me, I knew that I was still an impossibly long way from Oxford. But nourishing my one great work, I never even bothered to think of setting some more realistic target and perhaps submitting an essay on local history to the
Lichfield Mercury
or
Staffordshire Life.
It was all or nothing—and perhaps in my heart of hearts I was happy enough with nothing. I worked at that table by the window after teaching the rudiments of English and History to classrooms full of lads whom I passed in the street seemingly moments later and with a wife and a pram in tow. As easily as some faintly flavoured and not entirely disagreeable medicine, my whole life was already slipping by.

One evening, I remember, the work at the parlour table was going particularly well. A chapter on Metternich that I’d written twice before suddenly came into bright focus—although I really can’t imagine why I even wanted to write about him. The hours slid by. It was suddenly late evening. My eyes were tired and it was getting hard to read by the light of the tasselled electric lamp. There’s always a pleasure in stopping writing before you’ve quite finished, in knowing that you have something to come back to. So it was with satisfaction that I cracked my weary fingers and turned around to my mother to comment on the faint but foul smell that I had suddenly noticed. She sat unusually still in the dimness of the room behind me. Her head was lolling, her fingers were clenched around the knitting needles and the ball of wool had rolled from her lap in her final spasm.

Once inside the Bodleian’s musty maze, I set about the tricky business of obtaining some books that might tell me something concrete about recent Jewish history. First, I must reach the front of the queue at the Arts End. As I wait, my sense of pointlessness becomes stronger than ever. What am I doing here with so little time left to me—looking at
books
? Now, surely I should be able to shake off the habit.

The librarian behind the high desk has dark curly hair and a matching beard; he looks faintly nautical. After scanning my request form, he reaches into this jacket to swop his glasses and re-read it more closely.

“Just wait for a moment will you…” He spins off through an arched doorway inscribed
Medio Tutissimus Ibas
, whatever that means.

I gaze about at the wood-pillared walls, balconied with books, the ornate Tudor ceiling. All around me, the Bodleian buzzes like a busy railway station between trains. The general public are freely admitted now—although, of course, that no longer means tramps—and I, a don, must fill in form L4450-A(C) and wait my turn like anybody else. To anyone with any knowledge of Oxford history, a far greater sacrilege is the sign beside the bust of Wellington that points towards Lending. The Bodleian, as a copyright library, has kept its books strictly within its walls since it was founded in 1602. Not all that long ago, they were chained to the shelves. Even Cromwell was refused permission to lend a single volume to the Portuguese Ambassador.

“We can just let you have a few of these. We simply don’t keep Hansard for the years between 1918 and 1933…” The librarian is back. Wheezing behind him with a trolley is a red-faced messenger boy—who looks about eighty. “I’ve ticked them off on your list. These ones here…” He shoves a pile across the counter. “They’re only for use within the premises. This lot, you can take out. In fact,” he continues, helpful, most un-librarian like, “I’ve already franked them to save you having to trek over to Lending. If you’ll just let me have your identity card…”

Dodging the cross-fire of black looks from the long and restless queue behind me, I stagger to a vacant desk. Smoke-signals of dust rise in the evening sunlight falling from the widows as, one by one, I flick through books that even now M
UST
N
OT
B
E
R
EMOVED
F
ROM
T
HE
P
REMISES
. Mostly, they are official documents, census data, White Papers on Racial Minorities and Economic Development In The Scottish Highlands, Government leaflets with titles like
What To Do If You’re A Jew
(report straightaway to the Duty Sergeant at your local Police Station—“don’t worry, he’ll have dealt with your problem many times before”) and the more rarefied
The Question of Deviancy.
None of them tell me anything I don’t already know.

The few older pre-Modernist books I’ve requested that have actually come through the system lie at the bottom of the pile, and sit there oddly.
The Forged Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion. The Story of Jewish Bolshevism
—
A Warning To British Women.
Adcock’s
Britain In The Twenties.
When I try to open the first one up, I realise why. Two thirds of the book’s pages have been neatly excised with a knife. With the next, after the censor plainly grew tired of obliterating most of the print with long black stripes of his pen, it’s the entire second half. The Adcock, which looks thicker, in fact contains nothing but a wad of old card indexes. I glance around me, expecting some kind of reaction, but the other people are busy at their desks, or chatting. A couple of schoolchildren even appear to be playing tag around the periodical shelves.

I’m quite beyond work, and the closing bell will be going soon anyway. So, after checking that they’ve got something inside them, I grab the books I’m allowed to borrow and head for the main doors. Outside, in the bright warmth of this suddenly rainless evening, preparations for Midsummer’s Eve are starting on the shining kidney-stones of Radcliffe Square. A temporary bandstand, and bunting that has hardly had time to come down since Oak Apple Day, are going up again now that the rain has ceased. Next Monday, four days from now, there’ll be children in green frocks and sashes, roast bullock, mummers, gaudy morris dancers and a fair on Merton Fields with swing boats, beer tents and grinning curates joining the jigs now that the Archbishops have blessed these extra pagan celebrations.

The books I’ve brought with me are a bigger burden than I’d imagined, in part because I’m almost sure that they’ll be useless—otherwise, why was I allowed to see them? By the time I get back to college I’m so tired that I feel like the dying man I am. The quad smells rich and earthy. The sodden grass is lurid green. I stumble as I step up into the cloisters, nearly falling headlong.

I gaze at my scattered books, trying to summon the energy to bend to the worn slabs that commemorate the corpses of ancient fellows. By the time I’m ready to do so, Cumbernald, the college principal, has emerged from his office nearby.

“
The Jews Of Germany. The Community Of Lodz And Its Region. Baedeker’s Scottish Highlands and Islands, 1934. My Struggle
,” he says, scooping up my books with his long brown hands, frowning and inspecting the spines. “Hmmm, I’ve read that one—man’s totally mad. Good job old Kaiser Willy’s got him back in clink, eh? Bit far away from the Holy League, though, Brook.”

“Believe it or not, I need to keep my mind active,” I reply, tired and tetchy as he hands the books back to me.

Cumbernald smiles and raises his arms in mock surrender. The sun, reddening the few remaining clouds as it begins the long process of setting beyond the college tower, gleams on the bald dome of his head. He’s a tall man, is Cumbernald. He radiates smooth affluence and efficiency. Some part of me always yearns to thump him.

“Glad I caught you like this, Brook. Been going through next term’s curriculum and we need to talk. How about the Fellows’ Room—say, fifteen minutes, when you’ve caught your breath?”

I open my mouth to say something about being tired, pressure of work, the fact that I probably won’t be much use to him anyway in the next academic year on account of my dying. It comes out as a simple, pliant yes.

Having fortified myself with two fat bitter tablets and tumbled down book-lined shafts and through rooms and along corridors that grow big, then small, I’m sitting with Cumbernald in the big wing-back chairs of the Fellows’ Room half an hour later. The soot-stained Cotswold fireplace between us is filled with a display of orange-red roses so bright that they seem to give off a warmth.

Cumbernald offers me a Balkan Sobranie from a burr-walnut box decorated with our college arms.
Tarum Per Cornua Prehende.

“Can’t help noticing that you’ve been looking a touch under the weather, Brook.” He lights up, then twirls the stem of his port glass. “Nothing serious, I hope?”

I gaze back at him as I light my own cigarette with its gold tip, its pink paper, its mouldy scent of bazaars, puffing the smoke into my cheeks and blowing it back out, my face reddening as I struggle not to cough. Although I’m eating more than I did before, food has become tasteless. And such is the gap between my belly and my trousers that I’ve started wearing braces, unfashionable though they are. My ribs are sharp, like coathanger wire. My long face looks narrow and hollow.

“I’ve been slightly ill. You know how it is—summer cold. Bit of a dickey tummy.”

Cumbernald blinks slowly and nods. Oxford’s a big city these days—so thank God and John Arthur for the anonymity of the NHS where you can be decently ill without people finding out about you.

“Personally,” he says, “I’ve always thought this place was unhealthy. Too low, too many rivers. Just think what it’s been like this week—you should see the college cellars! Totally flooded. Everything gets trapped by the hills, and now there’s all this extra traffic. Foul, terrible air…”

“Actually, I quite like it.”

“You haven’t been at Varsity as long as I have. And you look like someone who needs a break. Me, I’m off to Tuscany straight after Mods. I time-share a villa near Sienna with a professor from the new National Fascist College at Ravenna. Fascinating man—you should hear him on the Battle Of Aegospotami. Knows Mussolini personally.”

“I was thinking of going up to the Scottish Highlands,” I say, feeling a brief pang at the thought of warm scented pines, the blaze of sunlit marble; all the people and places I’ll never get to know. “It’s been many years since I was there. I’d like to see how it’s changed.”

“Fresh air! Scotland! Well that sounds… Splendid. Let’s just hope it doesn’t rain. Meanwhile, Brook, what I’ll do is to bypass you…” Cumbernald makes an aeroplane movement with his hand to demonstrate, “in the initial assessment and marking processes when we get the papers in. Later on in the summer, perhaps you could moderate?”

“That would be fine,” I reply, thinking back towards the eye-fizzing task of last year’s marking; and wondering what gaffe I made.

We nod at each other in an excess of agreement. I take a sip of the splendid port and grind out my largely unsmoked Sobranie, depositing a grey worm of ash on the carpet.

“About Michaelmas Term,” Cumbernald continues, shifting on his lean buttocks and re-crossing his legs to reveal a surprisingly brown length of shin. “I was thinking of giving you the Enlightened Despots again. Mind?”

“As you know, it’s my speciality.”

From there, we move our way through other bits of responsibility. How to keep Badman from rattling on about Thermopylae. Whose turn it is to do the weary trudge through the early middle ages. Names of students are exchanged, although I’m not sure if there’s a moment when we both recognise the same person. Like most inferior academics, Cumbernald had pushed his way into administration. Yet he has risen ridiculously far, ridiculously fast. I can’t believe the Oxford of old would have put up with someone so obviously second rate. He welcomes, for a start, people like me. They bolster his own inadequacy.

“Bit of a problem with Roberts, you know,” he says after peeking around the wing of his chair to scan the scattered occupants of the others, who are mostly ancient, draped in the shadows like mouldering coats, to make sure that no one can overhear us. “Evidently he wrote a book back in the twenties about the economics of the Roman Empire. Argued that the colonies were a drain on Rome, rather than supporting it. Big factor in the downfall—you know the kind of thing. Then he keeps going off into the same rubbish about Britain. Even crops up in his students’ essays—although of course we can’t expect the dear things to know any better unless we teach them, can we?”