“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?”
“I’d be surprised if Robert’s book was still available.”
“But that’s not the point, is it?” Cumbernald lights another Sobranie, and leans forward like a spiv with the cigarette cupped inside his hand, smoke jetting from his thin lips. “Remember Hobson…?” His voice trails down to a whisper at the hint of a discredited name. “And Brooking? Gone, of course. But you know. Move with the times, Brook. History changes…”
The tall glass-cased clock on the plinth behind us begins to whirrr and gasp, almost as if it can’t quite bring itself to pronounce that it is now ten o-clock on Thursday the 20th of June in the Year of Our Lord, 1940. The curtains have long been drawn. The porter’s men who serve us from antique silver trays wear swallow-tail coats that haven’t changed in centuries. Time stands still here; you could walk out into the cloisters and bump into Samuel Johnson, Edmund Halley, John Keats…
“Then there’s that whole unfortunate business of the Ford Lecture. The way I see it, Brook, it’s just silly to argue that King Louis’s decision to expel the Huguenots was—what was Robert’s phrase?—‘quasi-racism’. I’m sure that the only way to look at that whole incident now is to emphasise both the benefit it gave to France by encouraging the growth of the middle classes, and also the great good that the influx did to the Lowland countries and Greater Britain…”
Thus we continue through dizzying twists and turns as we re-write what we know of history, marked by the clock’s reluctant chimes. When my curriculum seems to be settled at last and some hitherto-unknown part of me is aching for another dose of the bitter fat pills that I’ve left up in my rooms and my throat is raw from a suppressed cough, Cumbernald leans over and lays a restraining well-manicured hand upon my shoulder as I attempt to get up.
“Oh, and there’s one other thing I’ve been planning, Brook. A little project of mine…” He steeples his hands and smiles. “It’s something in which I just had this feeling you’d be keen to assist me.”
“I’m sure I am,” I mutter, thinking how nice it would be to foul up one of Cumbernald’s stupid projects by dying in the middle of it. Last year he arranged for us dons to attend an excruciating series of talks by “ordinary people”.
“I don’t think there’s enough of a link been made, Brook, between science and history…”
I nod at that, mannequin that I am. I can’t even be bothered to tell him that he’s plainly got the wrong man. All I know about science is Archimedes’s bath, Pythagoras’s triangle, Newton’s apple.
“So I’m planning to widen the curriculum a bit in that direction. And cross-college, too. Well, I did try old Hazlitt here. You can imagine what he was like…”
“I’m sure.”
“So I’ve been on the, ah, blower to Frank Stanyard, and he’s recommended this young don of his. Name of Bracken. One or two things he’s doing are rounding off and apparently he’s absolutely chomping at the bit to get his teeth into something new and involving. Not an Oxford man, either. Did his degree at Warwick of all places—didn’t even know they had a university there.”
“It’s one of the newer ones.”
“Still, that’s the Midlands, isn’t it? Where you come from. Common territory. Thought it might help things along.”
“When do you want me to meet him?”
“Soon as poss if you don’t mind. You free tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Fine, fine. I’m told he works mornings in one of those ghastly new buildings along Parks.” Cumbernald smiles at me. “About ten o-clock, eh? I’m sure he’ll be expecting you.”
For the first time this summer, I leave my bedroom window open overnight as I wrestle with sleep. I hear the faint drippings and stirrings of the oak in the quad, the call of an owl. I hear the tick of a bicycle, whisperings and footsteps, a car’s engine, the clattering hooves of a cart. I hear a woman’s voice crying faintly and rhythmically in either pain or love, and the steam whistle of a night train. And beyond that, beyond my own breath and my heart’s agitated beating—beyond everything—there comes a dull, persistent roaring as of the churning of a vast engine, the breaking of a grey, unmeasurable sea.
5
CHRISTLOW SERVES ME A breakfast of scrambled eggs, black pudding, Oxford Dainties, fried bread, grilled tomato and bacon (“Looks like you need perking up, sir…”) which I scoff greedily from their lake of fat. Then I take a long soak in one of the white-tiled bathrooms at the end of the corridor. Finally, dressed, fortified with tablets, I walk along Broad in bright morning sunshine towards my meeting with this Bracken person.
The new science blocks along South Parks Road are still surrounded by the rutted clay of a building site. For once, I can only agree with Cumbernald. They are ugly; all squat towers, thick walls, defensive-looking windows, like fairy castles that have been sat on by a giant. I find Bracken by enquiring at the first major entrance I come to. Gawking at the sculpted knights and maidens as I wait for him to respond to a telephoned summons, I see that at last my time has come; the carved ribbons of inscription around the skylight roof—Dickens, Ruskin, Morris, John Arthur, lots of Shakespeare—are no longer in Latin.
Bracken arrives wearing a tattered jacket and a name badge. “They’ve got this thing about security here,” he mutters as he leads me along brightly-lit parquet-patterned corridors. With his broad body, straw-like hair, eyes that don’t really look at you, his faint smell of sulphur, he’s nothing like the dons I’m used to.
In his office, as we fence around the subject of what exactly we’re supposed to be doing together, I look for signs of his political loyalties. Not that anyone isn’t Modernist now, but still there are degrees. Little things that would have meant nothing a few years ago have acquired an almost magical significance. Too many volumes of Ruskin or Shakespeare in the bookcase (especially if they look new and little-read). The collected works of Sir Walter Scott (invariably pristine). Cups and medals, odd-looking diplomas, a breezy over-emphasis on outdoor pursuits, large group photographs of grinning adults. All signify the need for caution.
But the evidence here is harder to decipher. Bracken’s office is awash with heaped and be-ribboned exam sheets, piled textbooks with eye-stinging titles, unwashed crockery. And beneath that hair, Bracken is younger than he looks. He smells, I decide, simply of matches and grass; neutral out-of-doorsy smells. In another age, he’d have made a fine shepherd.
After we’ve acknowledged that we know little and care even less about each other’s subjects, we drink coffee in the deserted canteen, talking easily in that careless way that strangers sometimes have. As a fig-leaf to cover Cumbernald’s demands, we agree to say we’re working on something based on Pope Urban VIII’s dispute with Galileo. And I comment on how quiet it seems here: all these new buildings, all these rooms and floors, so few dons or students…
“Everything’s under-subscribed,” Bracken sighs. “If you get good School Highers in physics, you’d do a lot better going straight into the Army, or even the KSG. All that happens after you pass your degree here is that you’re conscripted. Then you’re stuck in the same secret institutions, and up against people who’ve been there all along.”
“That didn’t happen to you?”
“I served my two years. After that, I simply wanted out…” His voice trails off. “Anyway, as you’re here, I may as well show you some of what my work’s about.�
��
I’m treated to swirling displays of prettily coloured gases, the mad dancing of broken-looking pendulums, photographs of rain clouds, rolling trays of balls, as Bracken demonstrates a phenomenon called sensitive dependence on initial conditions. “You see…” he says, standing back as a tap splutters. “This is called turbulent behaviour. The actions of the individual water molecules are no longer predictable, no longer smooth and controlled. The slightest change—the slightest disturbance…” He tweaks a valve and the flow smoothes. “It becomes what we call laminar again. Turbulent, not turbulent—a vast difference, mathematically and physically. Yet all it takes is the minutest change.”
Bracken’s slow voice, his big hands, his deliberate manner, are impossibly soothing. I can’t help but warm to him, and his work on randomness and unpredictability seems like almost the opposite of science; something I can understand from my own study of the increasing wildness of history. Perhaps, the thought creeps in just as always it does when I meet someone male and less than repulsive, he, too, might be…? When he suggests that we go back to his house for lunch, I accept.
We take a green Oxford City bus from New Street to Marston—the older village rather than the newer suburb that’s going up nearby amid clouds of cement dust. Walking past St Nicholas’s church and quiet Cotswold stone, we reach Bracken’s pretty low-roofed cottage. The garden is filled with poppies, sweet peas, soaring red hot pokers and lupins.
“I’m home!” he surprises me by calling out when he opens the front door on its latch. A feminine murmur of reply rises from the kitchen.
“This is my sister Ursula,” Bracken says to my slight and shameful relief as a young woman, dark haired and pony-tailed, smoothes her pinafore and smiles in greeting.
“I’m sure there’s enough mince in the oven,” Ursula says as she shakes my hand with her own, which is cool, firm, freckled. “I just wish Walter would tell me…”
Over plates of what would once have been called Irish stew, Bracken remains silent as his big, scientific hands dissect the somewhat gristly meat whilst his sister tells me about her opposition to the proposed new Oxford Bypass.
“They’re so lethargic here,” she says. “If nobody does anything, nothing will ever happen. The whole countryside’s being ruined…”
“You must be very determined,” I say, “to think that you can change things.”
“Oh, I’m sure I won’t. There’ll be the public enquiry, then they’ll start building it this autumn. The word is that they’ve already let the contract. But you have to make the effort,” she says gravely, fixing me with her steady brown eyes. “You have to do that, don’t you? I mean, that’s what I’m always telling Walter…”
Our lunch digested, Walter Bracken guides me through the bean poles and cabbages in the back garden to show me the long building that runs across the cottage’s rear. It’s vine-encrusted, made of rusted corrugated iron, is about the width of a car garage, but much longer.
Inside, as Bracken hefts open the padlock and clicks on the bare lights, I discover a long windowless space, caged off along one side. It smells more strongly of the scent I’ve already noticed on him. Salty, hayey; bitter and sharp. It’s hot in here. I brush the cobwebs off a stool to sit down as, after throwing switches that cause the place to buzz like a faintly aching tooth, Bracken opens a tall cream-enamelled cabinet at the far end that looks like a butcher’s fridge and does, in fact, contain several halves of pig carcass. He lifts one out and hooks it inside the cage. Painted blue to signify it’s been condemned by the Health Inspector, it gives off a sour, rubbery smell.
He then unlocks a big metal-banded chest containing a large armoury of pistols and rifles. I’m half expecting him to toss one out to me in the manner of Randolph Scott when the farmstead is surrounded—“You can handle a shooter, can’t you? Don’t matter now who’s Marshall”—but instead he places a large pistol into a vice within the cage pointing down at the blue pig.
Fiddling with screwdrivers as he loads the gun and sets the sights, Bracken recounts how the project he’s working on here was started by a don who nursed his son to a slow death after being wounded at the Somme. The experience made him decide to develop something called Humane Bullet—which is the projectile most certain to kill its target instantly. To me, it all sounds like another apocryphal Oxford story.
“The Government took it over in the twenties,” Bracken says. “They’ve been giving a grant ever since… Here,” he dangles me a grubby pair of ear mufflers, then steps back and pulls a wire.
Blam. The gun explodes, and the blue pig quivers through the smoke as various teletype machines begin to chatter to themselves like the crowd at Wimbledon after a rally. There’s small hole in the flesh beneath the ribs: the far side of this new orifice, as Bracken wanders down the cage and twists the carcass around to measure and inspect it, is a gouged-out mess of flesh, bone, gristle.
The Humane Bullet, he explains in this oddly intimate moment as the strangely appetising waft of half-cooked spoiled pork reaches me, is the meeting of a vast number of variables: there’s the size of the bullet itself, and the weapon from which it is to be fired, then the distance it will cross, the level of accuracy required, velocity, the alloy from which it is made, the type of jacket, aerodynamics, the chemistry of the charge, the clothing and body-mass of the target…The basic trick, though, is to make a hole in the tip of the bullet so that it spreads out on impact with flesh, transferring more of the energy. The Humane Bullet, put simply, is a sophisticated version of the dum-dum.
“The man from the knacker’s yard comes round Thursday evenings,” he adds as he works with a mop and bucket to clear up the scattered bits of meat. “Most of the carcass ends up as candles and glue…”
“Don’t you worry?” I ask.
Walter Bracken pauses, hands clasped on the top of his mop, head bowed, as if he hasn’t quite heard the question.
“I mean, about the use this will be put to.”
“If I wasn’t doing this,” he says, beginning to push the mop again, “it would be something else. There’s a project in Australia the War Office is pestering me to go to. Some part of the Western Desert that doesn’t even have a name. Very hush hush, and I’ve been using the Humane Bullet, I suppose, as a way of keeping them off my back. Unfortunately, though, the work out there is somewhat related to this…”
I gaze around the shed. “Australia seems a long way from here.”
“But it also has to do with the behaviour of materials under extreme compression,” he murmurs. “And turbulence, shock waves, even bullets, strangely enough…” Some time after that, the phrases lost in an internal train of thought and the clank and swish of his mop and bucket, Bracken’s voice dies. Then blam a while later as another dead pig bites the dust. He seems to have forgotten about me by then, and I’m feeling sleepy in the shed’s strange foggy warmth with the patter of sparrow’s feet on the roof interrupted now and then by the sour hammer of destruction.
When I finally drag my chin from my chest, I hear tinkling, and see that Bracken’s busy sweeping up the cartridge cases with a dustpan and broom. I’m forced out into the air as I begin to cough.
“I don’t know how many hours Walter spends down there,” Ursula says as we stand outside the kitchen window, gazing down the gravel path. “I’m surprised the neighbours don’t complain. But of course they’re used to it.” She folds her arms and gives a little shiver. “That’s why I came down here, really. To keep an eye on him.”
“Where do you live?”
“I suppose you can say here at the moment.” She shrugs. “Walter’s doing me the favour by letting me stay in this house. But since our father died, I’m not sure that I can fit in anywhere.”
“Oxford’s as good a place as any to not fit in,” I say. “At least, that’s what I’ve found.”
“Hmmm…” She nods, jutting her chin out nervously. “Anyway Geoffrey—can I call you Geoffrey?—Geoffrey, this work you and Walter are busy on—”
“—I’d hardly call it work—”
“—Whatever it is. I think he’s quite lonely down at the college. And here, with me. I’m not sure if I know how to say this, but will you keep an eye on him? Try to be—oh, I know this sounds silly—his friend?”
I meet her gaze. “I’ll do my best.”
She smiles up at me. “Anyway, I expect you’ll want to be getting back…”
So I say goodbye to them both, fiddling with the latch as we stand cramped in the little hall and Bracken runs his bitten fingernails around the edges of a letter that’s arrived, marked Recorded Delivery, with the afternoon’s post. The envelope’s brown, but plush. Crested. Perfectly typed. OHMS.
They watch me from the doorway, brother and sister, as I head off down the path. I give them a cheery wave. It’s a late afternoon in this suddenly perfect English summer, far too beautiful to waste standing waiting for a bus. As I set off down warm country lanes sleepy with birdsong and the drone of insects, and as the towers of Oxford drift closer over the haze of the parklands and the river, I’m sure I can still hear a gun firing repeatedly in the distance.
6
NEXT MORNING—A FRIDAY, Midsummer’s Eve—I busy myself with a couple of the meetings I’m expected to attend by virtue of various obscure elections and nominations. Then, after a swift lunch of salmon and roast beef from the cold table in the West Room, I finally get around to sorting out the arrangements for my long-planned Scottish holiday. I queue first at the GWR Station for the tickets, then again at the City Post Office for all the stamps, clearances and cross-county passes that must go with them. The woman behind the counter eyes me through the spittle-frosted glass before she stamps my documents and slides them back to me. Perhaps she remembers my pestering her with queries about letters to my imagined aunt in Canada. I find myself wondering if she misses my acquaintance, and who emptied his desk upstairs in the Censor’s Office, who scratched his name off the tea club…
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