Foreigners, Drunks and Babies

by Peter Robinson

  ‘How about “in the Heart of England,”’ you replied, with a smile.

  ‘Now where would that be?’ he wondered, without one. ‘I’ll put down Shropshire.’

  ‘But Bunbury is exploded,’ you didn’t, of course, say, picturing the gravestones in Isabella’s hometown cemetery, with their tiny photographic portraits of wife and husband lying beside, or on top of, one another. Yet in the quiet of his office, with a coffee cup raised to your lips, you were consenting with a nod to the Consul. You would stand by his fiction. Now that he’d written it down, ‘Shropshire’ was no longer a convenient invention to get out of a fix. He’d transformed it into a fact about your life.

  There were still further gaps to fill out on the form.

  ‘Where will your daughter be educated?’

  You alluded to the British public school system.

  ‘Where have you invested your money?’

  You mentioned some household names in the UK financial services industry …

  And so it went on to the end.

  Now, despite his occasional and momentary frowns, it seemed there was wind in our sails. You would complete the questions and, in due course, be entitled to apply in the usual fashion for a small maroon booklet that would let Clara into the Consul’s country (and hers) with not so much as a wave of the hand.

  But who was it said being born British meant – and still meant, despite all the blows to national pride – drawing a winning card in the lottery of life? And come to think of it, was anybody ever actually plucked from a mother’s womb British? How could all those tiny, bloody, bawling babies be allowed to pass freely without let or hindrance and be afforded such assistance and protection as may be necessary in the Name of Her Majesty the Queen?

  Fair enough, but you admit you were born and raised in England. If you so much as tried to pass yourself off as Scots, Welsh, or Irish, despite the family’s twilight ancestry, people from those countries would quickly and firmly put you in their idea of your place. Belonging was something that other people did. Still, whatever your passport, you were English right enough. It was there in your way with consonants and vowels: no escaping that, and little you could do about it either. What’s more, whoever said being born British was like winning the lottery of life had got something right at least. It was chance. A shining finger of fate would reach out of the sky and touch the daily existences of some average folk sitting around a TV screen – till each one dropped by lottery. Our number would come up … or we would draw a blank. The probability was just the same for any series of digits every time. No question of deserving it, and no justice in it either. Winning was quite as shameless as having lost.

  Yet still, we had won! At least the Consul was reaching the end of that pink official form. He had even allowed himself a certain smile.

  ‘But should your daughter marry a foreigner, your grandchildren will have no right to become citizens of the United Kingdom,’ he was explaining, visibly relaxing a little.

  The Consul’s eye caught you glancing over towards his family photographs up there on the bookshelf.

  ‘This is not the case, by the by,’ he went on, ‘for Civil Service employees stationed overseas. Their offspring, wherever they were born and whatever the nationality of the other parent, are granted the full citizenship of children born on British soil. After all, they were only born abroad because one or both of their parents was serving the Crown.’

  The Consul had risen and come round from behind his desk. You stood up to leave, and shook his hand. He reminded you to pick up the passport application form from the reception window before leaving. Finally, as an expression of his goodwill towards a fellow countryman, the Consul assured you, nodding towards your CV on his desk, that should you wish to return to Britain at any time, with your experience and qualifications, you would surely find suitable employment.

  ‘But, if you don’t mind me saying,’ he added, ‘I do think you’ve gone about this all the wrong way.’

  From the Stacks

  It will have been one of those melting days towards winter’s end. I don’t know why, but they’re days when I can’t seem to settle to anything. Perhaps it’s the sun’s angle at that time of year, casting long shadows over the still crisp ground, the leafless trees’ branches traced like vein-work and arteries over the paths that I’m drifting along. The school year coming to an end, suddenly the old campus is overcrowded with students heading for exam rooms. Yet despite being surrounded, I still have the feeling I’m just not there at all. No, I’ve never been able to work out if it’s because I’m an alien, or just the rigid hierarchy in which we’re all inescapably located. Faculty being on another plane, it’s out of the question for freshmen or sophomores to so much as acknowledge our existence, and if you even attempt to condescend to their level, they’re so flustered by the collapse of order that they don’t know what to say, and, to save face, will simply cut you dead.

  Naturally enough, after a while, you accept this last straw, and blank them too. Well, anyway, as I say, especially at that moment of the year, to minimize the chance of such non-encounters, I’ll go the other way along my corridor, out of the emergency exit and onto the iron fire-escape bolted to the end of the Arts Faculty block. Trying not to glance over the edge as I emerge and shiver in the chilly winter air, the eight-floor drop bringing on my vertigo, I’ll float down the stairs where, it has been rumoured, more than one desperate undergraduate has ended it all.

  Through the higgledy-piggledy chaos of students’ bicycles I’ll slide my way past them and on through the long shadows of branches towards the refectory and faculty-only restaurant. Often, unable to settle to anything useful, I would get up from my desk far too early for lunch and, as a last resort, take myself off to the library and hover about the shelves in its capacious basement. There’s practically no chance of meeting anyone down there. Only members of the academic staff have the privilege to look at the books, and hardly anyone, it seems, takes advantage of it. There’s a central stairway down to the lower floors and vast, cavernous rooms branching off to left and right. To the right are the post-1972 acquisitions, to the left the older holdings. The newer volumes have fixed, open shelves; but the dustier tomes are kept in what I can only describe as concertina stacks. Entering their room, you’re confronted with a vast box-like structure, a facing wall of pale green metal shelves – but closed together, without the space between them even to browse. On each shelf there’s a button in front of you that lights up when you push it, and, open-sesame-fashion, the two shelves part sufficiently to allow you to walk between them and hunt for your item. It’s the only place where I’ve ever come across such an arrangement and, given my never having encountered a soul down there, I was obliged to discover how the system worked by trial and error. It was the way I fathomed out that it’s impossible to open a second stack, which will automatically close the first, until you have turned the first light off by pressing the button again. Of course, it had crossed my mind to wonder what would happen if the system were tampered with and the stacks closed when I was in there thumbing through some long-forgotten treatise. It would be a fate like one of those in Edgar Allan Poe – a fine, century-old edition of whose Tales of Mystery and Imagination you’ll find on the third shelf down in the first American literature stack, but mistakenly catalogued under E.

  As I say, it was one of those warm days near winter’s end, the sun casting long stark shadows from the still bare cherry trees across the campus, when I swiped my library card a couple of times, struck yet again by its black-and-white photo of a bearded perpetual student out of Russian fiction, and headed underground to make some notes.

  The acquisition policy of the university is a curious one. Professors are entitled to order any books they feel they require for their research or personal interest. These volumes are registered and then returned to the purchasers to keep in their offices until retirement, at which point the entire collection of a lifetime’s curiosity and study is deposited
in the stacks. As a result, you can find the most eccentric publications. And, I freely admit it, I feel at home down there. One of my pastimes is imagining new systems for cataloguing acquisitions. There’s the seven-handshake system, the strange bedfellows system, the occult influence system … but I digress.

  Yes, one of those warm days near winter’s end, when you feel you’re about to be born, or reborn at least – that was the day when, as fate would determine, I picked out the Death’s Jest Book volume of Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s Works (I mean the two-volume 1928 edition dedicated to the memory of Edmund Gosse). Naturally enough I admired the binding, work of a quality long since vanished from the earth, and, blowing the dust from the top, gingerly opened its thick pages, not wanting to cause any damage to them if – as is so often the case down there – they haven’t even been cut. Someone had certainly read the whole of this volume before, though, for there was no need to perform that curiously tantalizing chore. Just as I was reaching the section that most interested me in this neglected poet’s works, my eye alighted on a faded blue envelope lying upon the matt lino floor at the foot of the stack.

  It must have fallen out of the book, I thought, stooping down to pick it up. That letter certainly hadn’t been there when I ambled down between the still-moving shelves. The envelope was addressed to the visiting professor of English by title but not name, and it had been rather hurriedly torn open. Inside was a letter closely written, but on one side only, of five pale blue sheets. The top one bore the single-line address, ‘as from Land’s End’, and it was dated in the month of the Wall Street Crash.

  ‘Dear Charley,’ it began, ‘your letter came a week ago and I’m afraid it left me feeling even worse about our prospects than ever …’ I know it’s not right to look at letters that aren’t meant for your eyes only, but I just couldn’t help myself, and read the missive through twice, from the ‘Dear Charley’ to the ‘Your own Marian’. It was an extremely personal letter – one detailing the difficulties of their life together. She had travelled alone, it appeared, halfway round the world to be with him here, going by ship through the Suez Canal, then across the Indian Ocean, and the China Sea … finally to land at the port of Nagasaki. Marian had then found herself in this strange country, unable to speak the language, to shop or do anything but cook and wait for this Charles whatever-his-name-was to come back from his office. There was a long paragraph in which she enumerated her sorrows, her loneliness and solitude, the difficulty making friends, especially among the town’s miniscule expatriate community of American missionaries and educationalists. It went on to apologize for her embarrassing tearfulness in public, her feeling that she had let herself down – and him too, with her painful regret and sense of failure. It was hard enough to read it through, even though her words were not addressed to me. I couldn’t help wondering how this Charles had received it, and how it had come to be left in the pages of Death’s Jest Book. Marian’s letter made it clear that their winter together in the foreign professor’s traditional-style house, perched on a mountain not far from the ruins of its ancient castle, had been a terribly cold one. Surviving it, Marian had finally come to the conclusion that the only way to save herself from a nervous breakdown, and to mend her marriage, was to spend some time back home on the family’s West Penwith estate. She had added in a postscript that she was so sorry her ship had left Yokohama on Saint Valentine’s Day – which was such a bad omen, but so it had been.

  This peering into other peoples’ sorry love lives, and not just as if you weren’t there, had practically made me blush down between the concertina stacks, and my first thought – unrealistic as could be – was that the letter must be returned to its sender or, better, recipient. But how would I ever do that? It was dated 1929, an age ago now, and the best I could even hope would be to return it to the copyright holders of the recipient’s literary estate, assuming, that is, that this Charles had such an archive somewhere.

  Perhaps it was only because my name also happens to be Charles – people call me Charlie – but the natural researcher in me was fired by these tantalizing details from the life of one of my predecessors in this out of the way job as a teacher of literature to the youth of Northern Japan. You see, this particular university had a tradition going back to just after the Great War of inviting published poets to work as its foreign professors, so, more than likely, this Charles had been a poet too – and if I could find out what his surname was, I might be able to discover whether he and his Marian had managed to save their marriage, whether he did have literary executors, or an archive anywhere, and then return this sad document to its rightful place, its rightful library, as it were.

  As I say, I’ve never got used to the invisible feeling that goes with this position, and being among fellow aliens, as I sometimes inevitably am, doesn’t, I’m afraid, tend to help much either. In a hotel lobby as the drinks take hold, they’ll be laughing fit to burst, tears falling from their faces, laughing till it seemed they would come to pieces, splitting their sides, as if undone. Of course, they’ll have their resident comedian. He’ll be running through his repertoire of different gags and voices, evoking the past in a turn of lip or phrase. Yet it must be admitted he’ll do no more than provide them with excuses. The things he says are funny, but no more than the truth.

  ‘Sorry about the state I’m in,’ he might interject, shaking the glass in his fist as if suffering from DTs, then using one of the hand-towels to wipe up the few stray spills slopped onto the table.

  ‘What state is that?’ his straight man would ask.

  ‘Japan.’

  ‘Enough in itself to drive you to drink!’ another will say, gripping the tiny glass with two hands and desperately sucking another drop from his Kirin original lager, as if his life depended on it. And that would be enough to tip them all over the edge once more.

  Perhaps I should explain. It will have been the sense of relief, hidden at last, as they might be, behind a row of dwarf palm trees. An assortment of old hands and new arrivals, thrown together by circumstance, they’ll have seemed an odd crowd there in the not too antiseptic beige of that hotel lobby bar. Seven of them in all, they might be sitting on sofas in two rows of three with their comedian in residence, plus me, on a chair drawn up to one side.

  The senior figure, the comedian’s mentor it seemed, would be playing the central role. He might be on a lecture tour of the country, and being on tour can be reason enough, as some of them clearly understood, to be collapsing in helpless laughter. The professor’s performance will have passed off without a hitch. After the applause and questions, he’ll have been approached as he stepped from the podium, and asked to sign a couple of books surprisingly pushed towards him – including one written by somebody else, who happened to have the same name.

  ‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over,’ he’ll have quoted, approaching his support team in the foyer of the conference where the publishers lay out their wares. There was the need to care and not to care. There was, as some knew only too well, the need for a near complete self-effacement in living here … producing, as it did, an overwhelming sense of release when the effaced person was granted the chance to indulge this disappeared self among relatively like-minded others. Yet it seemed I could never make that work for me, could barely get a word in edgeways.

  ‘It makes you feel two-faced,’ the honoured guest would say.

  ‘But why be two-faced when you can be many-faceted,’ their resident comedian might quip.

  ‘Touché,’ the other would reply.

  ‘The trouble is,’ as the comic might explain, ‘we’re all forced to be two-faced here. It comes with the territory. Take, for example, this whole series of cases I’m painfully compelled to tell you every last detail of … where you’re every time not only stabbed in the back, but must die the death of a thousand cuts.’

  ‘And which simply obliges us to take an egoistic approach,’ another would put in, ‘because in fact we have no real purchase on any
other reality.’

  ‘Then they go and accuse you of being ungrateful,’ as a third might say.

  ‘Not untrue anywhere,’ the lecture tourist could murmur.

  Now the comedian, as it turns out, is telling his jokes from the challenged self-esteem of the professional artist whose livelihood depends on breaking down the resistance of even the most frozen of audiences – which, in this case, means the young woman sitting beside him, who appears (quite falsely) to be just such a difficult customer. It had, nevertheless, grown clear enough to this new presence, the only woman among their number, that here was a shower of those whinging Poms. Being new to the country, as she was, made her the implicit target for some of their advice-like talk. But such old-hands’ tales are likely to pass the newcomers by, because perspectives and expectations are too far apart and, anyway, people must be allowed to make their own mistakes – education being an admirable thing, as Oscar Wilde says, though it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

  Speaking of which, that’s when I found myself trying to get a word in between their laughter, trying to tell them about this sad letter, the one fallen from that copy of Death’s Jest Book, as you know, in the concertina stacks of our library. No, they were having none of it. Again it was like I couldn’t make myself felt, as if someone had turned off my amplification. That melancholy missive was, in any case, way off topic for this band of aliens laughing fit to burst. Nothing could prevent them chattering on, interrupting each other with more and more of their nonsense, till, on the margins of that marginal group, I couldn’t tell whether they were crying with laughter, or laughing through their tears.

  But back on campus, a few days later, it struck me that even if no one else was interested I would have to, for my own peace of mind, try and track this Charles whoever-he-was down. After all, it could turn out to be a regular Big Clock-style investigation. With nothing else in the world to do, as it happened, I couldn’t help thinking that now was as good a time to start as any. There were bound to be archives on the history of the place, the yearbooks of defunct literary societies and such like … and plenty of it here among the dusty scrolls and tomes.