In this way, the college embarked upon a policy that gradually succeeded in replacing its traditional elite with a newer elite which, for all it was more lively and independent-minded, was less inducted into the rigours of communal collegiate living, less tutored to sing in the college choir, less equipped to play rugby, and certainly – in the case of its female intake – less capable of dragging its heavy, book-bound luggage up the onerous three flights of uneven old stone stairs.
It was an ebullient, girlish foursome, then, that boarded the Cambridge train from Liverpool Street on the morning of the college Open Day. The girls had not much notion that they were being cast as torch-bearers in the vanguard of the levellers. One of the four was Christina, the daughter of a New York publisher and a graduate in Oxford Greats. Another was Julia, daughter of a defected Czech violinist who had fallen on hard times. A third was Trinh, a fostered Vietnamese refugee from a family of medical research scientists long presumed dead. The only indigenous high-flyer among them; the only one humbly born; the only one not trailing residual assumptions of privilege and expectation, was Dulcie.
It ought not to have been surprising, then, that Dulcie was the first to retreat from certain implications of academe. Nor that her retreat took place that very same day. The girls were on their way from the railway station when it happened. They had chanced to pass a college lodge gate through which, unluckily, at that moment, six pre-pubertal choristers were emerging, dressed in top hats and pin-striped trousers. Dulcie immediately stopped in her tracks.
‘Fuckinell,’ she said. ‘Look at that! I don’t believe it. It’s fuckin child bridegrooms. Come on, then, Chris. We’re not fuckin staying around here!’
‘Yes we are,’ Christina said. ‘We haven’t even got to the college yet. Look, Dulce. They’re choirboys. Pipsqueaks in fancy dress. They’ve got nothing to do with us. Come on.’
But Dulcie, now filled with misgiving, had eyes for everything that threatened. She found menace in the number of signs that exhorted her, as she put it, to ‘Keep Off of the Grass’. She found menace in the prevalence of mullioned windows.
‘The whole sodding town looks like churches,’ she said. ‘Everything looks like Westminster Abbey.’
‘Don’t be so silly,’ Christina said. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you. All these buildings – they’re just old, that’s all. Old buildings look like that. Like my old school in the country. It sort of looked a bit churchy. Once you’ve got past all those gargoyles and things, well, they’ll be full of old sinks and gas leaks. Honest to God, they’ll be done up with those scratchy Dutch carpet tiles. You know. There’ll be Harpic behind all the toilets.’
But Dulcie was intransigent. ‘Well, I’ve never seen a fuckin school that looked like a church,’ she said. ‘My schools’ve always looked more like Cell Block H. Anyway, me mum reckons it’s time I got a job.’
‘Dulce,’ Christina said. ‘Please. Don’t. I need you. Have you any idea how much?’
‘Chris,’ Dulcie said firmly. ‘I’ll see you later at home.’
She returned at once to the railway station and set her sights elsewhere.
The remaining three made it through the Open Day and even through the weeks beyond it, but the drop-out rate was impressive. The Czech violinist returned suddenly to the newly declared Czech Republic and took her daughter with her. There they were received with roses and accolades and the return of the family home.
The Vietnamese orphan was fortuitously contacted by a missing cousin who had turned up at the University of Toronto and, within the month, she had flown over to join him in a transport of delight. Dulcie stayed to finish her A-Levels, but she had lost something of her zest. The Cambridge trip had bruised it. And she refused, thereafter, to engage her mind upon what the brochures around the Sixth Form room were calling ‘opportunities in tertiary education’.
‘So that leaves me,’ Christina reflected, morosely, from the isolation of her unfamiliar college room. ‘I am a survivor from three sets of four.’
Because first there had been her family – her parents and Pam and herself. Then – before Dulcie and Julia and Trinh who, along with her, had made up that apparently unstoppable quartet of bright, high-achieving girls – there had been that other foursome that had begun in the Renovated Railway Tea-room and had ended in a mess of ruined hopes. There had been Jago and Peter and Christina and Pam.
And what had happened to them? Mostly she had tried not to think about them. It had helped that she had had to work so hard – and she had worked incredibly hard for all the time she had lived at Dulcie’s house. She had got callouses from digging people’s gardens for money over weekends. She had got tired feet doing an evening job with Dulcie in a Greek-Cypriot café that was not unlike the juggler’s greasy spoon. Bacon, sausage, egg, chips twice. She still didn’t like to eat meat. And what had become of him, she occasionally wondered – her juggler; her kindly, lofty, barefoot myth-man in his tall, pinnacle hat?
Yes, all the time that she had been with Dulcie, she had worked really hard – not only at the gardening and at the café, but also at the school books. Partly, she had perhaps done so because she no longer had Pam around to whom all responsibility for virtue and diligence could be delegated. Partly, she had done so because she had had to grow up fast and had discovered genuine interests. But partly, too, it was because the academic work had functioned as a block-out, since even the balm of Dulcie’s company and the force of Dulcie’s example had never been altogether enough to stop her getting sad. The tears she had wept in the supermarket on Seven Sisters Road had somehow managed to linger there, beyond the backs of her eyes.
She wondered, would Pam be stagnating, thanks to Mr Svengali? And Peter? She had some idea that Peter had gathered up his unhappiness and had gone somewhere abroad, but she had no idea where. And Jago? He was probably around – probably right there in Cambridge – given that, unlike Dulcie, he was one of those who had always imagined the ancient university to be, automatically, a part of his birthright. Yet she was absolutely confident, by then, that he would not be in touch with her. And it was certainly easier that way.
And yet, and yet . . . there had seemed to be such prospects for them; such a perfect and propitious symmetry. Two of them dark; two of them fair. Two short; two tall. Two of them ebullient and two of them grave. Like the stuff of Shakespeare Comedy. Like Twelfth Night; like All’s Well. Wine-red trunk-hose with wine-red farthingale. Green silk breeches with green jewelled overgown. Dramatis personae.
It equipped her, now, to think about the Comedies. How terrible they were, how raw, how wild, how red in tooth and claw. All that tempest and treachery. All that torture and prison. And how bravely the characters wisecracked as they waited to fall through the air.
Hugo Campbell Recumbent.
The Green Man by Water
‘Comedy,’ said Hugo Campbell. ‘Shakespeare Comedy. Go away and write me an essay about the Comedies.’ Hugo Campbell was one of her supervisors and this was the first time they had met.
‘But I’ve only just got here,’ Christina thought. ‘Is he turning me out already?’
It was clear to her, however, that poor Dr Campbell, invalid that he evidently was, had a need to conserve such energy as he possessed. She had entered his room, via an unlit flagstone corridor, to find him unambiguously horizontal, bathed in a watery green light from a trio of leaded windows that gave on to the river. He was reclining upon a moss-green sofa. He wore dark green corduroy trousers and a paler green lamb’s-wool pullover. The fine, taut skin of his handsome, bony face was freckled and pale to greenish. His hair, which was bronze and thinning at the temples, appeared to her, at that moment, to be overlaid with a patina of green light.
It had been a little embarrassing to discover that Hugo Campbell was Judith Levin’s husband – embarrassing and difficult to credit. They were like the Greeks and the Amazons in reverse. Horizontal and perpendicular.
Though Hugo’s desk was dominated by up-market
word-processing machinery, he appeared to have been processing his words in a wire-backed A4 notebook on his knee. The notebook was balanced on a large pastry-board and his mottled green fountain pen was poised, uncapped, in his hand. Under his head, in the hollow of his nape, he had a small, green kneeler cushion worked in needlepoint.
‘Excuse me,’ Christina said, before she took her leave, ‘but is that all?’
‘All?’ he said. ‘There are eleven of them, you know.’
‘Eleven?’ Christina said.
‘Comedies,’ he said.
‘Yes. I know that,’ Christina said. ‘But what I mean is – well – shall I go now? Is that the end of my supervision?’
‘What’s the problem?’ he said. ‘I expect that you have read the plays, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve read the plays. I’ve even acted in some of them.’ A pageant flitted briefly across her mind of herself and Peter at thirteen. Identical twins, Viola and Sebastian. Jago as Count Orsino, drunk with love for somebody else. Alas. Ouch. Our frailty is the cause . . .
‘Good,’ Hugo said. ‘Then go away and write about them.’ He moved his head very slightly to indicate that she was dismissed. The movement caused the cushion to tumble from behind his head into a collection of crumpled paper that lay around the sofa. Christina, fearing that he might risk injury in trying to retrieve it, lunged for it with alacrity and gave it into his hands. She noticed, as she did so, that, at some time in the past, the fingers of one of the faithful had worked the letters ‘XP’ into its underside.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘ “Peace be with you”,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’ he said.
‘Your cushion,’ she said. ‘It’s Greek. Those are the first two letters of Christ’s name.’
Hugo Campbell glanced at the cushion as though he were looking straight through it. He turned it over once in his hands.
‘Never noticed,’ he said. ‘It was here when I came.’
‘Must have been filched from a church,’ Christina said, and she watched him stuff it back behind his head.
‘You will be aware,’ he said, ‘that the college acquired all its property by filching it from churches. We are cushioned, here, by the Acts of Dissolution.’
Christina gulped. ‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s no wonder that the whole sodding place looks like churches.’
Hugo Campbell looked at her for a moment with something half like interest. Then, with a sigh, he returned his gaze to the pastry-board.
‘Consider Shakespeare’s aunt,’ he said. He made a vague, dismissing gesture. ‘One of a thousand suppressed nuns. Only think how easily one might have found oneself with a nun for one’s mother.’
‘Yes,’ Christina said.
‘Consider,’ Hugo said, ‘The Comedy of Errors.’
‘Yes,’ Christina said. And then she took her leave.
Mixing Matching Dragging Fagging
After that, she made copious notes. She drafted the essay repeatedly. It got longer and longer as the subject got further away. Finally, she threw away the essay drafts along with all the notes. She walked the country path from Newnham Croft to Grantchester and asked herself why it was that she liked the Comedies so much, while the Tragedies failed to touch her. That was, except for Hamlet. Oh, Hamlet! How she longed to elbow that poor, pliable Ophelia out of his reading path and have the prince to herself. And why, incidentally, did all these four-star men so invariably fall for shrinking violets? What was the matter with them?
‘Testosterone,’ she said out loud. A cow stared at her as she passed, needling her with what she considered to be an excess of bovine placidity.
‘Well, don’t just stand there,’ she said. ‘There is supposed to be more to life than saggy boobs, you know. I mean, just because we’re both vegetarian –’ She stopped. ‘Concentrate,’ she said firmly. Comedy. Why was it so funny? Why was it so sad? All those brilliant people – had they survived the plague and the Protestants and the Catholics and the executioner’s axe, just so that now syphilis could get them? Rampage through their flesh? It put a new complexion on the idea of dying for love. Risk all. Dare all. Crack jokes in the prison cell. Make us laugh. Ejaculate. They had called it ‘dying’ to ejaculate. No wonder, then, that the Comedies were a better sort of Tragedy.
When she got back, she began all over again. She tried for a while a technique of talking aloud, imagining that Dulcie was there with her in the room. Then she wrote very fast, off the top of her head. First she gave her essay a title:
‘Shakespeare Comedy – a Better Sort of Tragedy’.
Then she underlined it. She omitted the next line and wrote, under the title a phrase remembered from Charles and Mary Lamb:
‘They laughed at the lady Olivia for the pleasant mistake she had made in falling in love with a woman.’
Then, omitting another line, she wrote:
‘And what about the second son of old Sir Rowland de Boys?’
Then she wrote her essay.
The Tragedies [she wrote] are Tragedies and the Comedies are Tragedies. The Comedies are a better sort of tragedy because they make us laugh and because the characters stay alive. Survival is admirable. It is more difficult than death, since it takes more energy and guile. The Comedies send us home feeling happy, because we believe that we have witnessed happy endings. What we have really witnessed are sexy endings; visionary endings; endings frozen in a moment of precarious, brilliant symmetry, like a rain of fireworks in a prison yard. The Comedies climax on a moment of upbeat that is balanced between all time and no time. Their reality is forever and never. In between the tortures and the banishment, the leg irons and the threats of execution, the Comedies operate like Comp-U-Date, hell-bent on making matches. Everyone is paired off two-by-two like animals going into the Ark. Every Jack must have his Jill. ‘An illfavoured thing, sir, but mine own.’ And ‘you and you are sure together as winter to foul weather.’ Symmetry is all. And if you’ve got to the end of Act V and still there are threads untied – a woman as yet un-husbanded; a dukedom in the wrong hands – don’t worry about it, because Shakespeare will always intervene and resolve it. He will reach into the pool of unemployed actors hanging about in the wings and he will shove one of them on to the stage, already colour-coordinated in two-tone slashed trunk-hose.
‘I am the second son of old Sir Rowland,’ says Mister Mystery Man, breaking through the undergrowth into the clearing. And, ‘Oh yeah?’ you think – you the audience – ‘Oh yeah? And where have you been hiding yourself, Mr Second Son, for the preceding four and a half acts of this play, that none of the other characters has made any reference to your existence?’ But he has been on hold for the duration of his whole life, precisely so that he can appear like this, brazenly, in the eleventh hour and taunt you with your own humdrum incredulity.
So the Comedies end juggling; holding a balance in the air which dares us to disbelief. The characters are like a troupe of Chinese acrobats balanced on a pyramid of chairs. The act would fail to uplift us if it ceased to be precarious. It would not excite our optimism if the chairs were all nailed to the floor.
The Comedies are a better sort of Tragedy [she continued], with the glaring exception of Hamlet. This is because while the Tragedies are concerned with Establishment people, straight people, married people, people bothered about ambition, status, power and reputation, the Comedies are about the you-and-me people; the young people, single people, street people, people with free spirits to celebrate and wild oats to sow. Of course we know that the Wild Oats people will eventually turn into the Establishment people but in the Comedies we are living for the brilliance of the moment. If Shakespeare had given us the sequels, we would see at once that all those brilliant, bantering Beatrices, having become the wives to all those brilliant, bantering Benedicks, will be whining in back bedrooms that they are neglected, while their husbands chase the maids.
She sighed. She omitted the next line.
She wrote, on the following line, one word:
Testosterone.
Then she wrote on:
The Comedies take on as their subject what people seem to care about most. That is the business of getting it together with a member of the opposite sex. In this they are just as abrasive and cruel as life. The sexes are matched in a constant state of war. The war is represented by the words. The quick-fire banter between men and women is a mating dance and a metaphor for the act between the sheets, in all its violence and joy.
At this point she narrowly stopped herself putting on the page what she had on the tip of her tongue:
Dear Dr Campbell,
I know precious little about the act between the sheets, though this has not been for want of trying. It is a fallacy that men go after women like Beatrice. They don’t find talkie women sexy. That is to say, while gabbling is acceptable, wit is beyond the pale.
Yours sincerely,
Christina.
What she did write went on as follows.
In the conflict of gender, the women win the war of words, but the men will win the battle. The women win on points, but the men are the people who have the points. They have the last weapon against the last word. They have kisses and penetration.
‘Peace! I will stop your mouth.’
‘Women are made to bear, and so are you.’
The tragedy of the Comedies is that while sex draws men and women together, gender draws them apart. This is the terrible contradiction. Contradiction makes friction. Friction makes heat. Heat makes energy. Energy makes electricity. The Comedies are electric and it is not by accident, then, that their sparks fly against some X-rated scenarios:
Comedy A – has a faithful manservant manacled in a dark dungeon while the cast gets on with the business of rampaging through the wine cellar.
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