Be Near Me

by Andrew O'Hagan

  I woke in the chair when I heard a noise.

  Tish, tish, at the window.

  The town glowed yellow beyond the parted curtains. On the chapel roof the starlings were sleeping in their black corners, a soft web of Ayrshire rain shining the slates and covering the statue of Our Lady at the doors with a sheen of cold perspiration. Somewhere, I could hear pigeons cooing, and somewhere further, deeper than that, the sound of a police siren waking the mind and binding the night.

  Tish, tish.

  I heard anticipation in my own breathing as I stood half concealed, but there was no surprise: I knew it would be one or other of the young people. Through the dark I could see it was Lisa standing on the path with wet hair. She was underdressed, as usual, and overdressed at the same time, her arms folded against the chill and her eyes glistening with tears.

  'It's awright, Father,' she whispered. 'I don't want tae come in. Just open the windae and talk tae me.'

  Freshness came into the room, and I heard a sudden rush from the trees at the end of the lane, the breeze like an ambush of voices among the leaves. Beneath the open window, Lisa was looking up, saying, 'Father, Father.'

  'What's the matter?'

  'He stole ma phone. He's off his face, Father. I'm like: what did you do that for? And he's like: you don't have a clue what's goin' on. His da made him go to the police station and somethin's happening.'

  'Don't worry, Lisa,' I said.

  'You need to know,' she said. 'It's gonnae be bad news.'

  'Don't pay any attention,' I said. 'Go home and go to sleep. You'll get your phone back, I'm sure.'

  Her eyes were filled with fear and soap opera. The moment was both terrible for her and exhilarating, and I tried to say nothing.

  'But you need tae watch what you're doin', Father. You don't know what they're like. They want to get somebody and I'm not joking.'

  'Don't worry, Lisa. Go on home.'

  'I was always your friend,' she said.

  'I know. You're a nice girl. Go on home.'

  Walking across the room, I began then to remember what Cardinal Manning said of Cardinal Wiseman, writing of the latter's slow and ponderous death. 'It was like the hours of a still afternoon,' he wrote, 'when the work of the day begins to linger, and the silence of evening is near.' We were beyond that now. The evening had given way to the night's cold equation of sadness and desire, and I felt the comfort of knowing it as I stared into the fire and felt the heat on my face. On the rug at the side of the armchair I found a dead butterfly covered in dust.

  Red Cardinal, I said. But I saw my mistake: Red Admiral.

  I can still see those creatures fluttering in pairs over the Fellows' Garden at Balliol. I recall them too as caterpillars, black with orange stripes, those languid bugs feeding at night on violets. His name was Conor, the man whom I loved in those days, and my mind flooded with thoughts of him as I placed the dry butterfly in the fire and saw it consumed into nothingness, the energy going out from that tiny body now glowing white hot in a cradle of burning coals.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Balliol

  MEMORY IS A KIND of friendship, a friendship with the more necessary parts of oneself. How often do we reach for the past's genial knowledge to meet the unknowables of the present, asking once again that the anterior world might blossom into life and colour the current day? In this at least I cannot be alone. Oxford both made and unmade me, the temper of my affections as much as the idle drone of conscience, the loyalty to youth as much as the persistent hope of some better conversation with the dead.

  It was all Oxford. It was all the work of those grey, damp buildings between the Broad and the High, and it comes to me yet by daily instalments, some fresh footfall on the college gravel, some wafting smell of soup and furniture polish from the inner sanctum. Each of life's non-trivial events brings me again to those years. Every other day I am back in the grasp of that marvellous time, sitting in the evening by the lake at Worcester, listening to music, waving midges from around my head, watching people across the grass.

  'I was a modest, good-humoured boy,' said Max Beerbohm. 'It was Oxford that made me insufferable.' When I left Ampleforth and those serious, faithful, unfinished men, I now see that I must have been quite filled with the epic action of other people's belief. Plainsong had lodged itself, you might say, in my inner ear, and I suppose even then I knew the monks had begun something that couldn't be unbegun. I came up to Balliol for Michaelmas Term, 1965.

  A bottle of malt whisky supplied by my mother. A bag of novels and history texts bought at Blackwell's. A sack containing a chandelier courtesy of my mother's sister, Aunt Jean. And a pristine copy of Rubber Soul. These are the things I had in my Lancashire suitcase that first term, along with some old-fashioned clothes I soon replaced. I bought some drinking glasses and a raffia mat, arranged everything just so, put up the chandelier with the help of a borrowed stepladder and stood in the middle of the room feeling proud and independent as I stared at a window patterned with early ice. It was the coldest October on record.

  As a young man I didn't believe anything was true unless I'd read about it first. I was addicted to guidebooks and miniature histories, always seeking to augment the work of my eyes and ears, wanting history and precedence to upbraid my inexperience and temper every intuition. None of my initial contemporaries knew anything about Balliol except that it had Trinity over the wall and was brainier than some, but I thought I knew everything worth knowing, including the names and great deeds of its former Masters: John Wyclif, whose religious teachings gave rise to the Lollards, and Benjamin Jowett, who wanted to 'inoculate England with Balliol'. I must have liked the notion of being among the ghosts of great men, for I'd lapped up their stories before I knew my tutors or had settled properly in my rooms. I read Hopkins and Swinburne and Arnold before I came up, and they turned me into someone, I suppose; at least, they got me ready—not Swinburne, he hated the place—for what I imagined would be a beautiful escape into 'mystic eloquence'.

  The spirit of Oxford, at least among the people I took up with in those lazy, leather-jacketed days before change became the only anthem, was slightly in thrall to the dead boys of the Great War. It was those benighted undergraduates—wraiths, every one, and clichés, passing through the quadrangles with their gowns and golden hair—who fed one's notion of what it meant to be a son of Oxford and a servant of the world. Their absence came to mind with the toll of the bells; for me, and such as me, an image of courage and folly and blighted hope hovered somewhere above the spires and cupolas, though I can't be sure they survived the 1960s in the form we knew them.

  Great snowfalls filled November. My early days were spent next to an electric heater, rubbing a spyhole on the frosted pane of my window and looking down into the Garden Quad from Staircase XI to see the trees shagged with snow. From the bed, it looked as if exotic birds had brushed the windows with their great feathers, and I lay back and thought of Ampleforth. Occasionally I ventured out to a lecture. But the window soon cleared and voices began to enlarge themselves at Balliol; winter changed to spring and I never went home, finding my feet in the library and in persevering visits to the Dominican church and study house of Blackfriars. Later, when wisteria had grown unchecked over the buildings on my side of the college, I took a room for the summer in a guesthouse in Jericho run by a spying matriarch with varicose veins. She had me down for a misfit. 'I don't mind the occasional cigarette,' she said. 'I'm a brandy woman, myself. If you meet some friends you can ask them into the sitting room for a glass in front of the fire, if you like. Long as they take off their shoes. I hate loud talkers and manky shoes on the carpet.'

  Friends emerged over the following year. I was reading History and got in with a wonderful host of wine-bibbing undergraduates, some from Balliol but others from Christ Church and a Welsh guy from Jesus—or, as they would have said, Beggars, the House and Jeggers—who were reading French or English and were delinquent in the old style while professing to be very hi
gh-minded. Edward Hippisley-Cox was an ugly former Etonian with a valiant attitude towards the smoking of cigars. He was a good painter too: he did a portrait of me sitting in my college rooms, which I took from place to place in the years that followed and which finished up in the rectory at Dalgarnock. He was very funny, Edward, inordinately fond of names and literary trivia. When I first met him, he was especially keen on names for people's wives and mothers. He liked it, for example, that Rimbaud called his mother 'Shadowmouth', and liked it no less that Zola called Cezanne's mistress 'La Boule'.

  Curtis Wenderoth was the son of a New York dentist. He later became a leading light in psychiatry at Harvard and wrote a number of camp plays and musicals. There were half a dozen more in the group, but Edward and Curtis led the procession. This involved some rather staged champagne parties in their rooms, hours of backgammon, interminable lunches at the Gridiron Club, afternoon pranks that usually relied on an attempt by Curtis and his acolytes to intoxicate the deer in Magdalen Grove, or else evenings spent sitting on deckchairs under the mulberry tree next to the Fellows' Garden at Balliol, some of us lolling on the grass and competing to see who could remember the most stuff from Proust.

  'The sun's fading,' Edward said. 'In this light you look very American, old sausage. I believe you are making a great effort to be handsomely American. Is that so?'

  'Reason not the effort,' said Curtis.

  'You look rather angelic.'

  'I've been in the Park Avenue sun.'

  Edward sniggered into a paper cup. 'Who had a horror of sunsets?' he said.

  'Mme de Cambremer,' said Curtis instantly.

  'And why?' said Edward, biting the cup.

  'She found them so operatic,' said Curtis, with a flash of his good Yankee teeth.

  'Damn your eyes,' said Edward. 'You're wickedly good.' I was lying on the grass beside them, taking in the sky and the sound of some minor bell when the thought struck.

  'He's more generous than good,' I said. 'Aren't you, Curtis? This wine is ridiculous. Sweeter than chocolate mice. How much of your daddy's tooth money went on this?'

  'Who cares?' he said.

  'Reason not the care,' I said. 'Eddie, how much do you reckon for the goodly bottle of weggers?'

  'An insurmountable number of cruel-faced dollars,' said Edward. 'And I raise my glass to it, every cent. I raise my cup to Curtis Sr's heavenly skill with the back molars.'

  'Generosity's my middle name,' said Curtis, drinking back the last of his cup and lightly burping.

  'Now!' I said. 'Of whom, in the big book, is it conjectured that he understood that generosity is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named them?'

  'Swann, naturally,' said Curtis. 'And it's not just named them but "named and classified them".'

  'Bugger!' I said.

  'Not comprehensively,' Edward said.

  'Altruism that is without egoism is sterile,' Curtis said.

  'Curtis, you are amazing,' I said. 'Even thinking about self-esteem adds to your self-esteem.'

  'You sound like the Brasenose radicals,' he said. 'Of course, radicals do the same thing. They grow fat on caring about other people's thinness. But they don't call it self-esteem. They call it selflessness.'

  'Bravo!' said Edward.

  'I'm afraid we are the best endowed of men,' said Curtis. 'And the radicals would say that of themselves, and indeed, the men the radicals pity would say it too of their men. "The optics of our social perspective makes every grade of society seem the best to him who occupies it." Eddie: which volume? There's a good Beaumes de Venise in it and I want page numbers.'

  'Volume Four,' said Edward. 'I can't say which page. Early.'

  'How early?' said Curtis.

  'Within the first hundred paggers.'

  'Just,' said Curtis. 'But I choose to accept your half-knowledge and the pleading expression on your English kisser.'

  'You have a wonderfully bad character,' I said to Curtis.

  He didn't deny it. He opened another bottle under the secrecy of his carefully torn winter coat. 'You remember Mme Verdurin's party, where she confesses to not feeling bad about her friend's illness?'

  'Yes,' I said. 'Mme Verdurin kept dwelling on her want of grief, not without a certain proud satisfaction.'

  'Ten points,' said Edward. 'Yes, she thought it was stylish not to care.'

  'Not caring added to her self-esteem,' said Curtis.

  'Precisely,' said Edward. He leaned up on his elbow. 'Anderton. For extra points. And a decent swig of Wenderoth's bottle. What did she smell of at her party—Mme Verdurin?'

  A cloud moved gently overhead. 'Easy,' I said. 'She smelled of the far-from-pleasant odour of rhino-gomenol.'

  'Blessings!' shouted Edward.

  'Because she gets colds after she weeps,' I added. 'And a student rubs her lip with the stuff before the music begins.'

  'Not quite,' said Curtis, topping up the mug that stood on the grass next to my arm. 'Not her lip, Davvers. He "greases her nose" with the rhino-gomenol.'

  'I dispute it,' I said.

  'Don't be boring.'

  'No, I'm disputing it. The stuff is on her lip.'

  'Son of a gun,' Curtis said, before sloping off to his rooms to consult his well-worn Scott Moncrieff.

  'He's right, my dear,' said Edward, after he'd gone.

  'I know,' I said. 'But he didn't take the bottle.'

  That is how it was with us: fifty years out of date. People at Oxford during my time didn't pride themselves on being original. Being wisely unoriginal was more in the style of the time. It felt so new for people to pick and choose the possibilities for themselves, and where they didn't choose to join their personal hungers to a movement—though many did, giving the 1960s its famous reputation—they became like Edward Hippisley-Cox, a very self-conscious, lurid amalgam of borrowings from the beautiful past. 'One is an A to B sort of person, darling,' said Edward. 'From Aubrey Beardsley to Anthony Blanche.'

  'Oh, heavens,' I said. 'Proust is one thing, but Brideshead?'

  'Don't be difficult,' he said. 'One discovers oneself to be nostalgic for nothing so much as nostalgia.'

  In my day, groups at Oxford never gave themselves names but were given them by other people, often their opponents. One of the student radicals called us the Marcellists, owing to our irritating addiction to Proust's big book, and, exactly one day later, Edward arrived in the Junior Common Room to announce that the radicals and associated worshippers of Mao and haters of Lyndon Johnson were to be known forthwith as the Bombastics. To me it was an amusing Swiftian extravaganza, the Marcellists and the Bombastics. 'More like West Side Story,' said Curtis. 'They've taken over the goddamn Union with their gruesome red book. Best place for them. They simply adore the Vietcong. Quelle horreur.'

  As befitted his Eton background, Edward liked to drink only in the dingiest, most hangdog of Oxford bars. He liked places stained yellow with nicotine and full of darkened brass, as if to conform to some Baudelairean stereotype. That's why he favoured the Grapes, just off the Cornmarket. 'Hark,' he said one afternoon when a workman stopped at the bar. 'It's the People. Godders in heaven. Ask him if he's one of zem undergradders sponsored till the end of time by the National Union of Mineworkers.'

  'Stop it, Eddie,' I said.

  'Comely, comely, Anders, my delicious,' he said—that's how he spoke all the time, even to his mother—'we've got to get the laughers going before the old death cracks in. Mightens we scoff a glass of the old Pope's Chartreuse before you shove off to your boring concertina?'

  One of Edward's great attractions lay in his mysterious, rather mature acquaintanceship with London. He was forever going up on the train with a fiver in his pocket. He came back speaking of Muriel's and dirty bars in Soho, and speaking about them, too, in the half-cocked Polari he must have picked up in those places. It was the sort of queer world I'd never considered. But Eddie kept us all informed, sneaking back to Oxford on Monday afternoons li
ke a drowned ferret, his lips rather blue and his eyes empty of wonder.

  'Your portraits are good, Eddie,' I said. 'You should do more of them. Make a bit of money. Get some of those London bods to have a look at them. You've got a touch.'

  'Oh, darling,' he said. 'You're rotten sweet to say that, but it isn't true. I'll be painting my face from here to eternity, but that's about it.'

  The Bombastics were up in the corner of the Grapes one night. Edward was swathed in fifteen miles of scarf, smoking Sweet Aftons one after the other like he was taking some vile medicine. He gazed semi-lovingly at the People as the smoke and the scarf unfurled. The Bombastics always had papers spread out among the beer jugs. They leaned over them, their faces burning with some great intensity or other. Some of that crowd later became known among the Enragés of 1968, but then, before Paris, before Berkeley, before Prague, they just ran action groups and committees and won their debates with enormous ease. It was obvious even to the terminally pretentious that these ruddy youths had the times on their side.

  'Capture the horror,' said Edward. 'Over in the black corner there, the Ban the Bombastics.'

  'Yes,' I said. 'Jolly serious.'

  'Dreaming the good dream, my dear,' said Edward. 'Flying stolen helicopters for the Vietcong. Handing over the keys of the kingdom to dem dat's as black as the Ace. Oh, stoppers. Sinking a few punts in a tough stand against the Toggers.'

  'The whatters?'

  'The Torpids Boat Race, my dear,' said Edward. 'You really must keep up, Anderton. Life is rotten slow.'

  Oxford invented gunpowder, bottled ale, the Church of England and gilded youth. It also invented the MG car. But its greatest addition to the glory of nations, in my view, was Geoffrey Nashe, my favourite tutor at Balliol and the greatest Frenchman England ever produced.

  Nashe kept a set of oak-panelled rooms filled with first editions and daft French postcards. Outside of religion (which he laughed at, thinking it 'all poppycock and painted idols'), he was to become my captain in all issues relating to the mind and how to capitalise on a little devoted reading. When I first came to him, he had just published his monumental work on the strategies and manners of the mob during the French Revolution. It made him famous, the first sign of which was a sharp increase in the amount of sherry he doled out during our weekly tutorials. He was small in stature, about sixty-two I'd have said, with silver hair that seemed slick and moulded like a helmet over his head. Everything about Nashe was the opposite of hostile: he wore round tortoise-shell glasses, a succession of green cardigans, he liked booze and was forever shaking his watch at his ear, waiting for time to move on and jokes to improve.