Fish of the Week

by Steve Braunias

  Wittgenstein, Forster, Woolf, Strachey—you go to the Orchard, see their photos, imagine all that genius in the shade of apple trees. No sign, though, of Katherine Mansfield. It seems the Grantchester Group came too early for the visitor from Thorndon; she arrived in London in 1908, and busied herself with a one-day marriage and an addiction to veronal. In his new book of essays and critical writing, novelist William Boyd dismisses ‘the slightness and ephemerality of her talent.’ A bit harsh, surely, although it fits Brooke like a silk glove.

  The man who made the Orchard famous wrote so much awful verse. From his poem on Grantchester: ‘Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand / Still guardians of that holy land?’ Yes, there are some elms. ‘Is dawn a secret shy and cold / Anadyomene, silver-gold?’ Oh gawd. On afternoons taking tea at the Orchard, you might instead consider the case of Leonard Woolf, with his ‘Jewish voice’, returning from a civil service posting in Ceylon, where his duties included giving the signal to the hangman to execute condemned prisoners. Virginia Woolf loved hearing about that. She boasted, ‘He has ruled India, hung black men.’

  Brooke’s poem simpers, ‘And is there honey still for tea?’ It can leave a sour taste.

  [October 22]

  English Punishment

  One of the great sights of English life is at the newsagent on mornings when every single newspaper, from The Times down to The Sun, displays the same story on the front page. All that potent, mesmerising, cheap ink, in a neatly folded row on the floor, a stack of shared hysteria convincing you in one large black flash that something terribly important has happened, something crucial and profound. Last week, it was the case of the Brazilian house maid who wore a silver ankle bracelet that jingled when she walked.

  Actually, Roselane Driza wore all sorts of accessories and outfits during her trial at the Old Bailey. There was the lacy black halter top under a zipped jacket, black trousers, and silver sandals that revealed her red painted nails. There were the gold sash and gold shoes and gold handbag. There was the turquoise dress with the jewel-studded high heels. Most days, she wore enormous dark glasses, and each day she blew a grand kiss to the photographers—she was auditioning as a celebrity, and she got the part, right up until her front-page appearance on the day she was found guilty of blackmail. Driza is banged up in Holloway Prison, awaiting sentence.

  It was so supremely lurid. It had sex, and it also had porn. It had cocaine, and it also had chilli. The great quote of the trial emerged from a text message sent by a distinguished judge to Driza: ‘You are real chilli hot stuff.’ The judge, identified during the trial only as Mr I, employed Driza as his cleaner. She worked for him when he was living with another judge, a woman who is still identified only as Miss J. After the couple broke up, Mr I began an affair with Driza. He was sixty. She was thirty-seven. ‘You’re a lovely shag,’ he texted her. And: ‘Delicious sex.’ Also: ‘I will teach you how to cook a curry.’

  Miss J was outraged when she found out about their affair. She had long harboured an intense dislike for Driza, once called her vile names—‘whore’, etc. One night she visited Mr I, pressed the doorbell, and kept her finger on the button until he plucked up the nerve to let her in. Driza was in the house and there were terrible scenes. Driza: ‘She said I was a dirty woman from head to toe, and I didn’t even wash my hair.’

  Around this time, Driza discovered two videos when she was cleaning the judge’s flat. One showed him having sex with a blonde woman; another showed him having sex with Miss J while she snorted a line of cocaine. ‘He was always inviting me to do porno movies with him,’ Driza said. She thieved the tapes, and told Mr I she would shop him to his boss, or to the press, unless he let her live in his house free of charge. She also demanded twenty thousand quid from Miss J.

  Sex, lies and videotape: the usual ingredients of scandal. But there was more to it than the lurid revelations. It was so impeccably English. It had the class system, and it also had the great themes of English character—weakness, secrecy, humiliation. The judge, a grave figure of authority ruling on serious matters, earning his hundred grand a year; the housemaid, an immigrant, scrubbing the toilet and dusting the shelves—oh look, some video tapes—for five quid an hour. The silly old fool—‘I was a complete and utter puppy,’ he told the court—hypnotised by sex with the help. His Honour reduced to a quivering wreck: on the night Miss J kept her finger on the doorbell, he tried to hide, was ‘pale and trembling, absolutely petrified’. M’lud caught with his pants down, robbed of his souvenirs of sex, tumbled, his reputation gone to the dogs.

  On the day of the verdict, the suppression order on Mr I’s name was lifted. You expected it to be someone called something like Chivers, or Glasscock, or Staines, but his name was Mohammed Ilyas Khan. He was born in Kenya, came to England in 1965; his parents arranged his Muslim marriage to a woman from Pakistan. His photo appeared on all the front pages, an Asian man with a big head and a big beard.

  It was a jolt in the English narrative—or was it? Chivers, Glasscock, Staines: that would have been a stock character, someone from an old-fashioned morality tale. Khan updated it, modernised it, made it even more impeccably English—the England of diaspora, of the immigrant experience. The new England, with its new national dish: ‘I will teach you how to cook a curry.’

  As for Driza, she was new England too, the new English slapper, a brash trout with her jingling ankle bracelets. Her work visa from Brazil had long expired; she was an illegal overstayer, and the rich irony is that both Khan and Miss J were asylum and immigration judges. Driza had got married to an Albanian thug, currently serving a twenty-year sentence for murder. During the trial, she held up her press cuttings in nearby pubs, and boasted about selling her story after the jury found her innocent.

  But then the guilty verdict came in and Driza was taken away. Jail for her, shame for Khan, and a morality tale for the daily newspapers with their mesmerising ink, spelling out English punishment.

  [October 29]

  English Telephones

  The last thing you ever want to hear is the phone ringing at three or four in the morning. What’s happened? What’s wrong? Panic roars like a tiger through the jungle of your blood, bears lunge, elephants stampede, there is fire and noise and agony. It’s even worse when the phone rings at three or four in the morning when you’re living, temporarily, in Cambridge, England, at an impossible distance of ten thousand miles from your home in New Zealand, too far away to attend the tragedy that’s about to erupt in your ear.

  This was on a Wednesday night in October, my third week stationed in Cambridge, among the bicycles and the narrow brick lanes. Cambridge looks exactly how you imagine it, except better. The slow river, the flat marshland fens. Above all, the vast colleges, those rich and powerful fiefdoms, with their antique fountains and their magnificent wooden doors. Only an English footballer could miss those doors; they’re as wide as barn doors.

  It’s so old. In fact, it’s olde. There are olde jokes—an apple tree planted beneath the Trinity College window where Isaac Newton began his study of mathematics in 1661. (Apples. Gravity. Boom-boom.) There is so much good history to learn. I didn’t know until last week that William the Conqueror was actually known as William the Bastard. You can’t have a drink without seeing something profound. I was drowning in pints of Old Speckled Hen at The Eagle when I saw, carved into the wall, a pithy and amusing remark made by DNA pioneer James Watson when he lunched there on February 23, 1953, and his colleague Francis Crick casually informed the barmaid they had just that morning discovered the secret of life. Perhaps she gave them a discount on their haddock.

  New Zealand, of course, gets a mention. Ernest Rutherford did things with ions and uranium at the Cavendish Laboratory, and the Museum of Zoology holds specimens of the extinct huia. But other than a few things like that, Cambridge really has nothing to do with New Zealand, and neither does England. England is the antipodes, a country turned on its head. Three or four in the morning means three or four in the aft
ernoon in New Zealand, means broad daylight when anything can happen, accidents and emergencies ripping the day apart, and about to tear down the phone line in my warm little cave in Cambridge with news from home.

  You almost never see news from home in the newspapers; definitely the biggest New Zealand coverage here was a two-page story in The Independent concerning the gay rumours about Helen Clark’s husband Peter Davis, as first reported in an apparently very reputable Sunday paper. There was also a New Zealand reference in an obituary in The Daily Telegraph. Someone with a double-barrelled surname whom I’d never heard of had died, leaving a brother I’d never heard of in Wellington. An obituary, the extinct huia—New Zealand is dead air in Cambridge.

  You sometimes overhear it said on the street, and the words sound like a whisper, a low scratching in the bushes. ‘New Zealand’—it sounds like a rumour. You’re never really sure you did hear it; it seems so unlikely, totally out of the blue, or rather out of the grey autumn day this month. Those narrow brick lanes, that slow river, the fens and the Old Speckled Hens—New Zealand doesn’t belong here. England is foreign. The natives speak good English and drive on the left, but they eat things with incredible names like haddock, they tear their flesh when the national football team tries and fails to beat Macedonia, they go bird-watching in their thousands. They mention New Zealand like it’s half a world away. It is half a world away, but when your phone rings at three or four in the morning, you know New Zealand is about to enter the room, sobbing.

  Worse, it was my cellphone. How many people know that number? This was going to be hell. But it was only an old friend with a penchant for asking random questions. I stood there in the English dark, in a room turned on its English head, and heard him say: ‘Do you have a phone number for Alan Duff?’

  I doubt I’ve ever thought of novelist Alan Duff with anything remotely close to pleasure or joy, but relief swept through my blood, silenced the tiger, healed the agony, at the mention of his name. Sorry, I said, but I didn’t have a phone number for Alan Duff. I mentioned that I was in England. ‘Oh God,’ he said. But he wasn’t to know. And no harm done.

  Quite the opposite. I got up briefly, and stood at the front door to smoke a cigarette, looking at the stiff-necked English hedges in the glow of street lights, and thought of the one I love, probably at that moment slaving away in her office, but safe as houses, as our house in New Zealand awaiting the happiness about to enter our spare room. All was well with the world half a world away.

  [November 5]

  A Visit to Manchester

  England has soaked up the longest summer since records began, sunshine and warmth spilling all over autumn—already, spring flowers are in bloom. Here in Cambridge, anxious shopkeepers have slashed the price of scarves, the river is as soft as caramel, students yawn and read Martin Amis on lawns, and just the other day I saw two big tits splashing in a bird bath. Long, languid days full of light, weekends included, when the Salvatore & Son ice-cream van rolls past my door at four in the drowsy afternoon.

  Lovely. But there are times when Cambridge can seem rather too … pleasant, a kind of staged university town with its ancient orange stone colleges and its flat, empty fens where nothing moves except pheasants and red-legged partridges. Feeling an urge to escape this gilded cage, I studied what kind of midweek entertainments were on offer outside of Cambridge. The best available tickets were to see Manchester United v. FC Copen hagen at Old Trafford, or a trip to London to appreciate Harold Pinter sit in a wheelchair with a tartan rug over his knees and perform a one-man Samuel Beckett play on a dark stage. What to do? The next train to Manchester was due to leave in ten minutes, but I got to the station with time to spare.

  Nice day for it. The sun was high and the sky was wide. There was the famous cathedral in Ely, and there was the next station, called Waterbeach, but there wasn’t any water and there wasn’t any beach, just tidy rows of apple trees. The train went through the middle of England, through gorgeous green English fields, past black English pigs, stopping at a station called March, where an English dwarf hopped on. Cambridge shire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, South Yorkshire, shires for Africa—the loveliness did not go on and on.

  Attractions included a large bleak field with steaming mounds of horse manure set out in tidy rows. Further on, one of England’s most arresting birds, the wagtail, was trying to eke out a living on a slag heap. I read the papers. ‘A depressed doctor killed herself at her desk by injecting herself with a muscle relaxant, an inquest heard … A killer called a taxi to pick up his victim after he left the body behind a tree, a court heard … The woman whose ex-husband tried to kill her by shoving a latex glove down her throat today lifts the lid on her mad life of torture and lesbian sex with the sadomasochist she had to call The Master.’ The train stopped at industrial Sheffield, a city that looked like it had been killed after a violent scuffle.

  The exact second the train pulled into Manchester’s Piccadilly station, it started to rain. What a dark, cramped, grim, damp city. ‘Every day is like Sunday,’ sang Manchester’s greatest poet, Morrissey. ‘Every day is silent and grey.’ This may or may not have anything to do with why Manchester was chosen as the venue for a New Zealand Expo, due in town the following week. Employers from sixty companies were arriving to lure qualified Britons to live and work in New Zealand. Land of milk and wages! Only four million people! It never rains!

  Well, we’ve been pulling that stunt on Britain since forever. That great rogue Edward Wakefield got the first colonials to pack up their English lives and emigrate to New Zealand by promising them a South Seas paradise, but he never told them about Petone, and made himself scarce when the Tory sailed into Wellington harbour.

  Good luck to the Britons who believe the Expo sales pitch, light their umbrellas on a pyre and head our way. But I liked Manchester. Yes, it was cramped, grim, etc, and probably a fertile breeding ground for yobs who get served by police with something called an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. The thought of raising a kid there froze my New Zealand blood. It was a city walled in with red brick, it looked like hard work, it carried the stain of the dark Satanic mills from the nineteenth century. You probably wouldn’t go there for a romantic weekend.

  It was the real England, a proper city. It was lively, exciting, on its toes, sharp, knowing. I bowled into a number of cheerful pubs. Everyone was friendly. ‘Awright, darling? Where you from, then?’ They were clever and funny, they were what is known as avin a larf, they were drunk. I stayed the night in an attic. The trams were cheap and easy. You could walk around the city, no trouble.

  Manchester United won 3–0. Good game—I had a feeling I would enjoy the performance of star striker Wayne Rooney, 21, more than the performance of Harold Pinter, 76. Men came on at half-time with brooms and swept the grass. There were 73,020 people at Old Trafford; outside, on Sir Matt Busby Way, I bought fried cod from Lou Macari’s fish and chip shop, as constables sat on horseback and Danish fans called out to each other, ‘Lars!’

  I was there on a Tuesday and Wednesday, and both felt like Sunday, silent and grey—but with a quality and a brilliance I’ve never detected in Cambridge, and British migrants will never find in their new, distant land of milk and wages.

  [November 19]

  English Christmas

  Red holly, red robins, the blood of the goose—England is painting the towns red right now, with twenty-three shopping days ’til Christmas, ’til the day of the crackers and the fizz and the hot necessary pudding. It’s already so cold, the light grabbing its hat and shuffling out the door at just after four in the afternoon, and it’s already so festive. Here in Cambridge, the lights are strung up all around the market square, the illuminated stars and angels suddenly lifting this cramped university town out of its usual medieval gloom. Strange to think of Cambridge in Christmas, stuffing its face with goose, enjoying itself. I won’t be here. I’m leaving, south.

  Strange to arrive home to New Zealand and think of Cambridge under
frost. Just recently, in the gardens of my college, I found a relic left by the former landlord, Antarctic explorer Sir Vivien Fuchs. Bunny, as Fuchs was known, was a keen topiarist. He took his clippers to an enormous bush and created an emperor penguin. It’s still there, this enormous green bird, and so is the cute touch Bunny clipped out at its feet: an enormous green egg.

  Strange to think of dusk falling over the river with its sighing bridges, over the red-legged partridges red-legging it across the fens, over the flat fields full of black scatterings of rooks and jackdaws and carrion crows. Strange to think back to meals at Formal Hall, when someone banged a gong, someone spoke in Latin, and then servants brought out a plate of delicious red-legged partridge.

  Strange to think of the friends I made here, in the house we shared in Barton Close, as they freeze to near-death in the unfamiliar English air. Good luck to Jaquelina, a lovely journalist from Argentina, who every day said, ‘How are you! Fine! I think so, of course!’ Good luck to Ital, a tall, louche historian from Ghana. I liked him at once. He called me Charlie—apparently it’s Ghanaian for friend. He was entertaining with his old proverbs, his taste for reggae and Tupac, his likely stories—there was the one about a shaman who attended a scientific conference at Accra, threw palm seeds on the ground, added a bucket of water, prayed, then stood aside as a palm tree soared into the air.

  Good luck to Massimo, a thin and ponytailed professor of mass media from Sardinia, who went out chasing Cambridge girls with Ital, sang while he whipped up ingenious pasta dishes night after night, and flew home now and then to work in the bar his family had owned on the island for over 300 years. I liked him at once, too, and was happy to help when he asked me to go over his research project, but my attempts were futile. He wrote in Italian, then had it translated into English by using Google. Typical passage: ‘Post-modernity can really be believed in its existence, therefore as it could not be worthy of sideboard. And the de-fragmentation of and the before glorious. It submerges to us completely, but the solidity of that modernity it is a pillar to which still leaning itself. The individual survives in a society that is earth of nobody.’