She lifted it open, filling the room with some faint other smell. What was it? Mud? Death? It was certainly unpleasant. “Well,” Mrs. Eveleigh gestured at the open box and I noticed that she was breathing rapidly, far closer than I was to tears. “You might as well have a look and see if there’s anything. After all, this is what Francis was when he died. A soldier…”
It proved to be half empty—as if someone had been through it and stolen the best bits already—although I supposed this was because these boxes came in a standard size and there sometimes wasn’t enough to fill them. There was that cheap edition of News From Nowhere, the pages splayed with damp, that Francis had been reading up in the Highlands and had probably, Francis being Francis, never got around to finishing. A pair of thick standard issue grey-green military socks, I suppose they must have been a spare; or thrown in to make the emptiness seem more substantial. They felt slickly damp when I touched them, but that was probably from the atmosphere in this house. More odd was the pistol. It seemed well-kept and in working order, although empty of bullets. Mrs. Eveleigh just gazed down at me as I sat on the bed and handled the thing. Clicking back the hammer. I wondered if, as a private, Francis would have been allowed to use it. Weren’t pistols for officers? So perhaps this was a memento of someone else, a friend or a lover who died in some earlier assault…
“Keep that too,” Mrs. Eveleigh said, something harsh in her voice. “I don’t want it.”
She was standing closer now. Like me, and in her own quiet way, I think she had passed into that grey hinterland that lies beyond an excess of drink. The time when everything seems normal again, and yet the world has become foul, and you are weary and filled with self-disgust.
I glanced around at the familiar wallpaper, the twee pictures, expecting her to turn and leave. But she just stood there in front of me, her hands knotting and unknotting across the long line of buttons that ran down her black dress.
“I only feel as though I’ve lost him now,” she said. “Before I knew we’d thrown away this War, it was always as if some part of him might still come back to me.”
I nodded, staring up at her, this twisted image of Francis as a middle-aged woman. Her eyes were lost in shadow; a shade deeper than black.
“And I wonder, even now, if he ever knew a woman.”
She took a step closer so that our knees touched. I was looking right up at her now, the rapid rise and fall of her breasts, the apertures of her nostrils, the lines of flesh under her chin. Beneath the sour dusty odour of her clothes, she even smelled a little like Francis: Francis if he’d been eating pickles, drinking sherry and gin.
“I never knew what he was like,” she said.
“He was…” I tensed my hands, feeling enclosed, threatened. But something snapped within me. All these evasions, the dishonesty. It finally broke. “I loved him, Mrs. Eveleigh. I just loved him…”
She took a step back and nodded severely. I had truly thought for a moment—had wanted, even—that she would kiss me: that we could somehow share our Francislessness together. But, instead, I covered my face in my hands and heard the sigh of her dress as she left the room, and the soft clunk of the door closing.
I crept out from the house early next morning, long before anyone was awake. I trudged through the darkness to the unlit station and sat waiting for the milk train.
The Eveleighs never wrote to me after that.
I never saw them again.
10
I TAKE THE LONG journey back to Oxford after my days of hospitalisation. Several demijohns of bloody jelly have been sucked out of my chest; the infection and the fever have passed entirely. Although I’m still dying, I feel almost well again.
One of the many advantages of leading a privileged life in Modernist Greater Britain is that I don’t have to trouble myself with fresh travel arrangements. By the turning of a well-oiled machine, new tickets are booked, new passes are issued, my abandoned Ladybird is returned to the Forge Garage at Ballachulish, my medical records are checked and updated. Even the odd discrepancy in my name between the various official records is easily absorbed. A comfortable ambulance takes me to the station, where a whole empty First Class compartment is pre-booked. The ticket collectors and the stewards have been appraised of my arrival: elderly gent; Oxford don; taken unwell on holiday; not exactly EA top brass or even a member, but connections with the Great Man. All I have to do is stretch my legs beneath my pre-warmed blanket and stare out of the train window.
Finally leaving Scotland one train later and in an even plusher compartment, the smugness of being well cared-for and not quite ill finally breaks into a sense of loss. What, after all, have I discovered? Just a few rumours, a scrappy poster on an empty moor. Already, I can feel the obligations and disappointments of Oxford looming. Cumbernald and this science-and-history business with Bracken, moderating exams, the need to do something with my life before there’s nothing left of it. The concept of my book, The Fingers Of History (stupid name) seems inherently flawed, and quite beyond my abilities. Those who can’t make history write about it. I suppose that those who can’t write about it write nothing at all.
Scenery flashes by. I am brought coffee and newspapers, offered an ear attachment that you can plug into a socket and listen to the BBC Light Programme. Carlisle. Penrith. Manchester. I gaze listlessly at the newspapers. They are full of John Arthur’s closing speech at the London Olympics. Magnanimously, he congratulates the many foreigners who have won medals. The Russians, in particular, are singled out for praise. Their scientific training methods are acknowledged; their clean, almost Nordic looks are photographically portrayed in pull-out supplements showing THE LOSERS AND THE WINNERS. Reading all this, I get that faintly vertiginous sensation that is part of Modernist life. Can these be the same bloodthirsty Russians—Communists, although the word is scarcely mentioned now—that the Empire Alliance was supposed to be a bulwark against? Since last year’s pact with Stalin, everything has changed.
I flip back towards the SITS VAC, where a Decent Widow is looking for a Clean Anglo Saxon Couple to take care of her and her Nice Surrey House. In the Classified columns, various Modernist and EA self-education courses and camps are on offer, along with supposedly War Office-endorsed photographs of the Mons Archers, framed or unframed—or as a package with The Illuminated Quotes of John Arthur. And there are innumerable busts and photographs of the man. One advertiser, in a ploy that I suspect won’t be used twice, even dares to suggest that he drinks their Effervescent Tonic and Pick-Me-Up each morning. Still, I can see John Arthur smiling ruefully at that if he saw it. The price of what we still call a free press…
A stray copy of the Penrith Advertiser has crept in amongst all the Nationals. The winner of the Regional Manhood Competition smiles out at me from the front page, his kilt falling in ample yet suggestive folds as he squats on caber-tossing thighs. The photo on the back page, beside a column giving advice to Young Mr. and Mrs. Modern on setting up home, is of a poorer quality, kindly taken by a J. H. Wigton. It shows an elderly woman hunched in the stocks on a village green. She has been put there, the caption jokily informs us, as a show of local outrage. Similar submissions are invited from other readers.
My train roars on through the night, reaching the Midlands at dawn. Pylons stride off towards the tower blocks of a new town, and an old man, as we slow outside Stoke on Trent, limps along the tracks with a wicker basket over his shoulder, stooping arthritically to collect fallen lumps of coal. He turns to look up at me through the carriage window. Our eyes meet without recognition.
Change at Rugby for Oxford. With half an hour to kill and rumour of my importance seeming to have petered out, I sit untended in the waiting room, which I must share with three members of the Young Empire Alliance. They’re little more than lads, really—younger brothers of caber-tossing Regional Manhood—and yet they affect maturity and ease as they smoke their Pall Malls and stretch out in long-trousered boy-scout uniforms. Is that the ring of a steel toecap I h
ear as one of them kicks absently at the bench on which I’m sitting? But they’re decent lads, even if every other word is fuck or a laughing animal growl and they give off the sweet-sour smell of whatever morning exertion they’ve been indulging in.
To be sociable as they puff away, I light one of my own Navy Cut Filtered. For once, the sweet acrid smoke dissolves into my lungs without reducing me to spastic coughing. The posters on the walls advertise the joys of visiting Great Yarmouth on the new Sandringham Class trains. Or TRY KINGS LYNN FOR A GREAT ESCAPE. There’s even THE DREAMING SPIRES OF OXFORD. Another poster, looking much like the rest, advises ALWAYS REPORT ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS as a plump and cheery constable tips his helmet beneath a blue lamp.
There’s something about these YEA boys, the way they are kicking my seat, meeting each others’ eyes and talking in half-phrases, that makes me think they are not ignoring me at all. A woman in a floral hat appears at the waiting room window. I shoot her a despairing glance before she decides not to come in. Two of the youths begin to hum a tune under their breath, and alternately kick each side of my bench in rhythm.
Still, I sit there, staring at the posters on the walls, listening hard for the sound of my train.
“Party member?” one of them says suddenly. I stare at him for some seconds before I work out the meaning of his question.
I shrug.
“Thought not.” The spottiest of the youths smiles across to his colleagues. “But then I was wondering, because I saw the way that fucking porter was helping you with your fucking luggage when you got off that fucking train.”
“I have been ill.”
“That right? Look okay to me, you do.”
“Thank you. I’ve almost recovered.”
“Where do you live?”
“Oxford,” I say, raising a quivering finger in the direction of the poster on the wall.
“Not one of them fucking eggheads, are you?”
“Well, as a matter of fact…”
“Tell you what…” The best-looking of the three lads stands up. His face is tanned. His brown hair is cut so short that it would feel like velvet if you stroked it. He comes close to me and leans down. “The problem is…” A soft rain of his spittle touches my cheek. “I’m all out of matches. Can you light my fag for me?”
He keeps his eyes on mine as I fumble in my coat pocket and his friends watch on, grinning. His irises are an intense, cloudless blue. The scent and pressure of his body surrounds me. He squints slightly as the match flares, and he holds my hand to guide it towards the tip of his cigarette. The tobacco crackles softly as he draws in.
“Well, thanks…”
Moments later, my train chuffs in to its appointed platform and I leave the waiting room, cheerily wishing these lads a good journey. Then, a sweaty wreck, and still bearing an uncomfortable erection, I collapse into the carriage that the porter finds for me.
Oxfordshire comes. Then Oxford. I pay a taxi driver outside the station to take my suitcase to my rooms, then walk into town unassisted—just to prove to myself that I can still do it.
Along Park End and George Street, the city is warm, summer-quiet and at peace with itself now it has lost the unwanted distraction of students, and smells sweetly of dusty bookshops, old stone, dog shit, grass clippings. The display in the main window of Blackwells is for a book by some bishop entitled Christian Thoughts On The Future Of A Greater Britain, and a string of Pickfords’ lorries are parked outside the Bodleian. Whistling men are carrying large tea chests filled with books up the ramps. Wearily turning the corner with all but the last few yards of my long journey behind me, I’m struck by the thought that Oxford really has changed. Egged on by her fitter, younger relatives who care nothing for the things she once stood for, she dresses now like a senile old dowager in unsuitably modern clothes. Powdered and stumbling, a parody of all she once was, she falls into the heedless arms of the future.
I turn past the grinning college gargoyles who supposedly represent of some of the early dons. There is, I see, a long black Bristol parked beside the NO PARKING sign in front of my college gates. A uniformed KSG chauffeur is leaning against its side, smoking and looking bored whilst Christlow chatters to him.
“Someone for you, sir…” Christlow says, nearly falling over the tea-tray he’s put down on the pavement. “Right at the moment. Up in your rooms.”
“Thank you, Christlow. It’s nice to be back.”
“I, ah, saw your case up there personally from the taxi, sir. Sorry to hear you were a bit ill. Do hope you had a good holiday…”
I walk on as his voice rings down the passage. I cross the quad, head along the cloisters, climb the old oak stairs and stride down the sun-threaded corridor to my rooms with all the briskness of a younger, fitter man; eager to get whatever this new thing is over with as quickly as possible. Someone from the KSG wants to see me. It’s no big deal—happens to people all the time; some of them must even live to tell about it. Anyway, what have I got to lose?
The door is slightly ajar, but my name, reassuringly, is still on it, and when I go inside my suitcase sits placidly in the middle of the floor like an old dog that can’t quite be bothered to raise itself and greet me. I don’t know what I expected, but the KSG man is standing by the window that overlooks the quad, and he has that still-but-startled air of someone who’s nearly been caught doing something—perhaps flicking through the many piles of manuscript that I had left heaped on my desk.
“Mr. Brook—it is right to call you Mr., is it? This funny little fat man who kept buzzing around me and trying to get me to eat biscuits told me you weren’t quite a professor…”
“That’s right. I’ve just come back…” I gesture around at my room as if in explanation. “From a curtailed holiday.”
“I heard you were taken ill. I’m sorry.”
He takes a step away from the window. I admire the various glints and shadows of his crisply-pressed dark blue uniform, the smell of good cigarettes and hair oil as he offers me his hand.
“My name’s Tony Anderson. I’m a Captain in the Knights of Saint George—what everyone calls the KSG—and I’m currently seconded to the Cabinet Office.” He reaches inside his jacket. The hairs of my neck prickle. “I have a card here somewhere…”
“No. That’s alright.”
“I won’t take up much of your time, Mr. Brook. In fact, I’d have picked you up from the station myself but the lines got crossed somewhere. And there’s the traffic from London…” He pulls a face. His skin is pale. His shiny black hair is pressed down slightly at the sides—which comes, I suppose, from wearing his peaked officer’s cap. His chin is square and dimpled. He permits himself the luxury of slightly longer-than-regulation sideburns. “Still, it’ll all be much better when they build the motorway.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m just the delivery boy.” He walks over to one of my button leather armchairs and clicks open an official briefcase. He produces a long envelope. “This is for you…”
He holds it out whilst I stare at it.
“A ridiculous expense, I know, Mr. Brook. Sending me up here—and in a car with a chauffeur when it would have been just as simple by train. Goodness knows what the press would make of this sort of wastage if they heard about it. But then again, if they knew who the letter was actually from…”
Finally, I take the envelope from him. G. Brooke. I feel a different kind of premonition.
“Who’s it from?”
“I won’t spoil it by telling you. But I do just need you to sign this.” He offers me a clipboard from his briefcase with what looks like an ordinary correspondence chit. Document CWR 776/234/DSA—1. I use the creamy Parker Flight pen he offers to sign it. “There was some confusion,” he adds, his breath faintly citrus as he stands close to me and inspects my scrawl, a ribbon line of medals across his chest, “about the e at the end of your name.”
“Don’t worry. It comes and goes.”
“I’ll be off then—you kn
ow how it is. Things to do. Thank you for your time…”
Stiffly, he turns and leaves the room, pulling the door fully shut behind him. It’s something I’ve noticed with my ex-demob students—the difficulty military people have in not marching.
I stare at the envelope as his footsteps fade, wondering if I should play a game with myself for a while and let it rest… But already my hands are tearing at the embossed crest, the wax seal, dragging out the one small sheet of paper that lies inside.
Beneath a lion and unicorn crest, it reads:
WHITEHALL
FROM THE OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER
8 August, 1940
G B —
I know it’s been a long time, but I honestly haven’t forgotten.
You may have heard that there’s going to be a “National Celebration” in London before and around 21st October, Trafalgar Day. It probably still seems a long way off, but these things take a lot of planning. I’d really like to see you there. I promise it’ll be nothing “formal”.
I really do hope you can make it. My staff will send you the details.
All the very best as ever,
J A.
11
THIS LONG AUGUST, ALL of Britain seems to drift, held aloft on wafts of dandelion and vanilla, the dazzling boom of bandstand brass. Each morning, the Express, the New Cross and the Mail vie for punning headlines and pictures of Modernist maidens in fountains, ice cream-smeared babies, fainting guardsmen. Everything, I had stupidly imagined, would be settled on my return from Scotland. Some great truth would be revealed. My book—somehow—would be written. I would die. But, with or without me, life seems intent on going on.
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