The Radiant Way
Page 20
Brian and Stephen had first met when they were both eighteen, more than twenty years ago, while doing their National Service. The lads had taken the piss out of Stephen, in those first weeks of basic training, for his cultured voice, for the impediment in that cultured voice. Brian had taken Stephen’s part. There was something affable, easy, determined about Brian that compelled respect: he was also six foot two inches tall, and well-built with it. The lads had laid off when Brian was around. A born mediator. Blessed are the p-p-peace-makers, Stephen had stammered at him one night over a pint, the wooden table between them aswill with beer, the air thick from the smoke of countless cigarettes, the beer mats sodden. They had talked of many things, over the class barrier. Stephen’s father was a country doctor and Stephen had attended, unhappily, a minor public school. Brought up in the heart of rural England, in the West Country, in the heart of the Tory shires. A sensitive, delicate child, a fourth son of a third son, he suffered from hay fever, did not like riding, was afraid of bullocks, was devoted to his Jack Russell, and greatly enjoyed cricket though he did not play. A country child, an outsider, a solitary.
Brian’s father had worked all his life at Pitts and Harley, hammering circular saws. His father’s father had been a furnaceman, and his father before him. Brian had been brought up in the heart of urban England, in industrial Yorkshire. He had attended the local school, where he neither shone nor offended. When he was little, he wanted to be a policeman. A town child, an insider, one of the boys. Or so it had seemed to Stephen, during those first weeks.
But things had turned out to be not quite what they seemed. Stephen, although delicate, was stoically unappalled by the rigours of Army life, which could not rival, he declared, the incomparable physical and mental misery of boarding school. He perversely praised the food, about which it was customary to complain: bangers and tinned tomatoes were a treat, corned beef fritters a delicacy, after the stinking fish pie of Moxley Hall, he said. He praised the bedding – at least we’ve got enough blankets, I couldn’t sleep for the cold all winter at school, he would say. He admired the uniform, which he claimed to find much more becoming than the damn-fool blazers and boaters which had attracted such unwelcome attention from the local Teddy boys. The arbitrary nature of the discipline and the incomprehensibility of the rules made him feel quite at home, he maintained. Ideologically, he was committed to preferring the Army to Moxley Hall: he had already decided not to apply for a commission, so he had to like it. He had spent his last year at school reading about the Spanish Civil War, and nourishing dreams of comradely communion. He had read Auden, Spender, T. E. Lawrence. His head was full of notions. And Brian embodied those notions well enough: some of the other lads were a bit of a trial (in particular that puerile little Geordie whose idea of fun was to plant beer mugs laced with washing-up liquid and worse substances on unsuspecting drunks) but Brian offered hope.
Brian, conversely, found the Army something of a shock. His family were solid, respectable, law-abiding folk, non-conformist, mildly prudish, domestic: the black farce, foul language, hard drinking, skiving, practical jokes and occasional malicious stupidity of his fellow-conscripts offended him, and unlike Stephen he did not regard them as a challenge to his manhood: he was, more simply, offended. He had never slept away from home before, had never slept on a bed without sheets, was not accustomed to the lack of privacy, the incessant obscenity: he was dismayed by the nastier habits of his comrades, by their physical proximity, their smells and farts and belches.
Brian had already served an apprenticeship at Pitts and Harley, was assured of a job at the end of his two years. Stephen had a place at Oxford, where he was to read History. (It had not occurred to Stephen not to accept this place. It had not occurred to Brian not to return to Pitts and Harley.)
Brian, at twelve, at thirteen, had also known what it was to be tormented. For a time, he had been short and fat. Bunter Bowen, they had called him. But then he had grown taller and was teased no longer.
It was some time before Stephen discovered what he took to be a clue to Brian’s protective nature, to his odd gentleness. It emerged that Brian had a sister. Well, he had two sisters, one of them a lively creature three years younger than himself, Barbara, who was subsequently to emigrate to Australia. The other, Kathie, was two years older than Brian, and from the age of sixteen had suffered from multiple sclerosis, which confined her to a wheelchair. Brian had looked after her. He would bear her in his arms from room to room of their semi-detached on the Coalbright Estate, would arrange her gently on the couch in front of the fire, would take her up and down the stairs to bed, would fetch and carry for her, would wheel her round the neighbourhood. Slowly Kathie faded, as Brian attended. Her eyes dimmed and Brian would read Woman’s Own to her, would find her items in the Northam Star, would tune in the radio for her, would read to her from Mills & Boon novels. She was particularly fond of doctor and nurse romances. He peeled her oranges and cut up her toast. Now that he was away for two years, how would she manage? How would his mother manage? Although Kathie was as light as a bird, his mother was too small to lift her easily. Should he have applied for exemption from his National Service on compassionate grounds? Would it have been granted? Brian fretted over this, but did not, at this stage, speak of the matter to Stephen. It was revealed, retrospectively, years later, when Stephen visited the Bowens: revealed as Brian tucked a plaid rug round his sister’s thin knees, and squeezed her thin white hand. There was more intimacy, more tenderness in those gestures than Stephen had been offered in the whole of his boyhood: or so it seemed to Stephen.
As it happened, fate conspired to consolidate the tentative friendship of Brian Bowen and Stephen Cox. At the end of their basic training, as each awaited his first posting, a hitch appeared in their processing. Brian, who had been expecting to move on with the rest to some unknown destination – Egypt, Aldershot, Cyprus, Caterham – was told that he had scored mysteriously well on his IQ test and was to hang around waiting for important decisions from above. Did they think he was guilty of cheating, or of treason, or both, he wondered. Stephen was told he had a suspected shadow on the lung. The rest of the intake disappeared from Staffordshire overnight, never to be seen again. Brian and Stephen were left in limbo, waiting for something to happen. For a full fortnight they killed time together. Alone in their barracks, which were due for repainting or demolition (no one knew which) they lingered. The other bunks were empty. New conscripts arrived, nervous, naïve, pale faced, but they were allotted to another building, where they moved, beyond a wire mesh fence, like unknown soldiers from another world, undergoing at a remove the strange rituals that Brian and Stephen knew so well. Brian and Stephen had the old space all to themselves. A physical leper and an intellectual leper: misfits: nobody knew what to do with them. A shadow on the brain, a shadow on the lung. They enjoyed their isolation. They hoped to prolong it by marching purposefully, unquestioned, through the gates, then sliding off unobtrusively into the countryside, where they lay in the deep grass and tall cow parsley, beneath the dark red of a hawthorn, talking, smoking. A white warm milky light lay over the Midlands. They wondered if the summer might not last forever. A pastoral eternity.
Stephen confided to Brian that he wanted to be a writer. He lay on his back and stared at the blue sky. He felt exalted. Stephen spoke of the Spanish Civil War and George Orwell. He even persuaded Brian to make his way through some of Homage to Catalonia. The sun warmed them as they lay. They worried that they were becoming improbably brown, that their idleness would betray itself through suntan, that they would be put on a charge. But nobody noticed them. A romantic time, an idyllic time, a time of intense physical well-being. Soldiers in the grass. Diffidently, they pledged their friendship.
(Alix, listening to stories of this period, a period which, despite its intermittent evocation, she could in no way visualize to herself, would speculate about sex, of course: then she would wonder if Brian ever speculated thus about herself, Liz and Esther?)
Stephen also proved unsuitable material for his intended destiny as Education Sergeant, despite his impressive paper qualifications. His stammer was too pronounced, he could not speak in public at all, he was unfitted to convey even the most elementary information. He was made librarian, then told he ought to enrol for the language course in Bodmin to learn Russian. Stephen resisted, on principle, but his resistance was eventually worn down, and off he went, a detected intellectual, to join a group of aspiring students and new graduates, middle class like himself, ex-public school, ex-grammar school. He had tried to avoid this classification, and had failed. (He was often to comment, in later life, on the oddity of a system which was so paranoid that it banned Karl Marx and Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World from the Sutton Champfleur library, which obliged Stephen to bind his George Orwell in brown paper, and then sent him off to learn, of all things, Russian.) Stephen in Bodmin held all the more strongly to his friendship with Brian, to whom he wrote long, oblique, tortuous, sentimental letters. These letters did not offend Brian, who replied, though more tersely.
By the time Brian left the Army, he too planned to be a writer, encouraged by Stephen, by the mad Cohen-Brill, by the distinguished economist, and by an impassioned reading of Jude the Obscure. Stephen disliked Hardy, thought him melodramatic, crude, excessive, and wrote quite a strong letter to Brian about Hardy’s shortcomings. Brian replied boldly. At this point, Brian knew that he was thinking for himself. Brian fell in love with English Literature, which he now teaches, and teaches much better than Stephen could ever have done.
But both, eventually, became writers, according to plan. Brian resisted Cohen-Brill’s suggestion that he should join the Regular Army, a suggestion repeated over various pints and eventually over a slap-up dinner at the Dorchester Arms: we need men like you, Cohen-Brill said with the utmost sincerity, his empurpled, intelligent, manic face glaring over the roast lamb and mint sauce. Brian, filled with sorrow and admiration for this lonely man to whom he owed so much, declined as gracefully as he knew how, and went home to Northam and his sister Kathie and his job at Pitts and Harley. But he continued to attend evening classes and University extension classes, eventually enrolled for a full-time course, and in 1965 acquired a degree in English Literature. In the same year, Kathie died. Brian left Northam and got a teaching job on Tyneside. He published a novel about factory life in the North East, another about a footballer who contracted polio. They met with a muted but respectful reception, and were sometimes quoted as examples of the regional working-class novel, along with the better-known works of Sillitoe, Storey, Braine and Barstow. He was himself far from satisfied with them, for his critical faculties had by this time estranged themselves from his creative impulses, but he did not worry about this much. In 1968 (just before the Open University received its charter) Brian moved south, where he met and married Alix. He has now more or less abandoned the hope of writing the great chronicle of working-class life that haunts his imagination. He knows he cannot do it. But it haunts him, it will not let him go. He loves it. It does not sour him, this familiar failure. He is, broadly, he would say, a happy man. And an excellent teacher. He and Alix are happy. By and large. They have resolved themselves. It seems.
Stephen’s progress was more erratic. After Oxford, he went to live in Paris, to his father’s disappointment, where he earned a meagre living teaching English and writing subtitles for a film company, while trying to write his novel. He had an affair with a married woman. He finished his novel but nobody would publish it. He wrote another. Nobody would publish this one either. He watched the radical surge of the 1960s, then came home: he settled in London, in a bedsit above a dry-cleaner’s in Stoke Newington, where he nearly died of toxic fumes. He wrote a thriller and published it under a pseudonym. (He told nobody of this but Brian.) In 1969 he published his first serious work, a deeply eccentric novel of (it was immediately pronounced) distinction and originality, set, analogically, in Paris at the time of the Commune. It was much noticed and won a prize, and Stephen became sought after, both in England and in America. He was invited to give lectures, to take up residences, to grace universities with his presence. He published other novels, equally eccentric, equally successful. He was able to move away from the dry-cleaning. His father and brothers were proud of him, but his mother wished he would settle down. Now that he is in his mid-forties, this seems less than likely. But he does not seem unhappy. Neither happy, nor unhappy.
For Stephen, persistence has paid off. He has managed to justify, to afford, to occupy his oblique position, his anomalous role. It is more than, at various points, he had hoped for. Now he sits at table with his friends Alix and Brian Bowen, and their friend Liz Headleand, rolling himself a thin cigarette with thin fingers, over the remains of an apple crumble, his head tilted quizzically to one side as he listens to Liz’s account of her apprehensions about her autumn trip to Japan. They are still talking about travel and mobility. The eighties will be the global decade, everyone says, says Alix, but if this is so, why don’t Brian and I ever go anywhere? I spend all my time driving from Wandsworth to Wanley, or sitting on the bus between Wandsworth and Whitehall. That’s mobile, but it’s not global, is it? Whereas you, Stephen, you flit about like a bat.
One doesn’t learn much, from the kind of visits I make, says Stephen mildly.
Then why go? asks Liz.
I suppose because one learns more than nothing, says Stephen. Just a little more than nothing.
They talk, inevitably, of Jane Austen and the Country Village. Of knowledge through width, or depth. Of south Londoners who never cross the river. Of Cobbett’s own restlessness, and of his descriptions of a couple who had never moved beyond a five-mile radius from their cottage. Brian leaps up, tries to find the quotation in his copy of Rural Rides, fails. They speak of Kissinger and Lord Carrington, of global diplomacy. Stephen tells them a story about his old tutor, Sir William Hestercombe at Oxford, a historian whose hobby is collecting honorary degrees. He’ll go anywhere, says Stephen, incredible stamina, and he must be getting on for eighty. America, Canada, Australia, Israel, New Zealand, Ceylon, he thinks nothing of it. He’s got a whole heap of honorary degrees lying in a corner in his study, like cricket bats or hockey sticks, ready for some mysterious game of carpet French cricket. Red tubes, blue tubes, green tubes, those mock-leather things with gilt lettering on. Maybe they’re real leather? He only accepts those that come in nice round tubes, he says, and with a free air fare. I noticed in The Times
the other day that he’d just got back with another one from Argentina. Have you ever seen his entry in Who’s Who? It’s getting beyond a joke.
‘I see from your new entry in Who’s Who that you’ve listed sitting in Russell Square as your hobby,’ said Brian. ‘What prompted that?’
Stephen smiles, gently, and explains. Alix watches him. He has a delicate mouth, with a thin, fine, curved upper lip. Alix thinks of Charles Headleand and his big teeth and hard jaw. She looks across at Brian, whose face is so familiar to her now that it merely seems to be humanity itself, the archetypal human face, the natural face. Brian’s hair is thick, grey and curly. Stephen’s is white, soft, and straight. Suddenly she remembers her first husband Sebastian, for a moment. Sebastian lives, for a moment. Had he lived, would his golden hair have faded, receded? She ceases to listen to the conversation. Her son Nicholas’s hair is receding. The knowledge of this fills her with distress. He is so beautiful, so young, how can he be submitted, already, to the processes of age? For herself she cares not at all, she laughs to see her face wrinkle, she prides herself on being without vanity, but for Nicholas she grieves, grieves more than she could say. Or is it for herself that she is grieving?
She shakes herself, returns to the conversation. It has changed tack completely, but completely, and Liz, who had been growing somnolent, is suddenly sitting forward with an expression of intense animation, as Stephen declares, ‘Yes, anything beginning with a B or a P, those were always my worst consonants. But never in French. Or in Russian. Or when singing.’
‘Fascinating,’ says Liz, ‘fascinating. Has anyone ever offered any explanation for it?’
‘For what? For the selectivity?’
‘For the selectivity or for the origins.’