'That one tribe is thought to be superior to another is once again, common enough. In this country for centuries we've used the class system to the same effect. What makes the situation in South Africa extraordinary from the point of view of jurisprudence, is the existence of actual legislation which decrees that a person of one colour is born superior to a person of another colour.
'This single element of the law is the linchpin which holds everything else together. While legislation of this kind exists, corruption of the spirit is inevitable. In the next three years together you and I will not discuss this problem in terms of black or white, but in terms of morality, integrity and how the law, used wisely, can indeed be the universally accepted instrument of truth and become accountable for justice in a civilised society.'
This was it, a true analysis of South Africa's plight. One that cut through the bombast and the dogma and the special circumstances. Peekay was overwhelmed with admiration. This was finally what he had come for, to learn to think clearly without sentiment.
'I wish I could have said that,' Peekay said softly. E.W. brushed away the compliment. 'And you have come to Oxford. Why?'
Peekay answered as simply as he could, 'To do what you suggest. I have come to learn how to make the law honest.' Looking directly at his young student, E.W. said, 'I'm not sure Oxford can give you what you want, Peekay. It is not the law which keeps a people safe, but the hearts and minds of some few good men and women who are its custodians. Conventional justice, when it is not in the hearts and minds of men, has only the power to corrupt. The letter of law may be upheld but its spirit is withheld. Isn't this what you are talking about?'
Peekay laughed. 'I'm not sure. You see South Africa doesn't have honest racial laws which can be corrupted by dishonest and venal men. We have no custodians to see that justice is done, because justice, in racial terms, is never done, almost by definition cannot be done! The good guys have no precedent, no fundamentally just law upon which to anchor their arguments.' Peekay frowned, looking for another way of putting his argument. 'Because racial injustice is perfectly legal, it is like shadow bOXing. When you throw a punch there is nothing to hit.'
'And making the law honest? Do you have a vision, a picture in your mind, of what this means?'
'Well, yes, it seems to me that justice should be easy to understand, a natural outcome. The prisoner, sitting alone in his cell, confronted with what he has done, should be able to admit his guilt to himself and accept the verdict because he understands he has broken his contract with a society whose laws he agreed to honour.' Peekay paused, searching for the right words. 'The law should be based on the concept of natural justice. Too often the black prisoner doesn't consider himself guilty, doesn't even understand why he is being sentenced. Too often the law itself is a denial of natural justice!'
E.W's eyebrows shot up. 'Good! That's good, we can use that.' When he smiled his teeth were slightly uneven and stained yellow from years of smoking a pipe. The young man seated opposite him was vulnerable and gauche, certainly an idealist, but his convictions were not entirely based on the dreary tenets of social injustice every nineteen-year-old undergraduate who pretended to think carried around like a big stick. Nor did he think he knew the answer to everything.
'Will you take me then, E. W?' Peekay asked, concerned.
'I thought I'd indicated that earlier, my boy?'
'Well, it's just that…well, I wanted to make sure we get it right from the beginning.'
'What on earth do you mean, Peekay?'
'Well, you see, we white South Africans tend to have an enormous chip on our shoulders, mostly because we feel guilty, are guilty. I simply cannot afford to waste my time at Oxford trying to justify my guilt. I'd like you to accept that I'm guilty, but that I intend to do something about it.'
'My dear fellow, that will hardly do. You may be guilty wherever else you desire, the exception being in this study. Discussion is the basis of the college system; two or more inquiring minds in a small room is what Oxford is all about. The personal tutorship you receive here is essentially why you would choose to come to Oxford. You are a boxer I believe? Here you will learn to attack and defend, the punch and counter-punch of discussion. You will win by using your intellect, it will be your only means of defeating an opponent. In this room there is no guilt. I simply won't have it!'
E.W. looked steadily at Peekay. 'We shall spend the remainder of your first term discussing natural justice.' He fumbled in the pockets of his tweed coat and produced a pipe from one pocket and a tobacco pouch and large box of Swan Vesta matches from the other. 'We may well spend the remainder of your time at Oxford discussing it. The rest of what you need to pass your examinations you can pick up in lectures and from the books I shall let you have.' He tapped the bowl of his pipe against the edge of the large copper ashtray, which gave off a loud ringing sound, and prepared to light it.
Peekay's grandfather smoked a pipe and the elaborate ritual about to take place was familiar. Finally the small study was filled with blue, molasses-flavoured smoke. Peekay knew that this was temporary, that pipes go out as a matter of ritual soon after they're lit, when they're put down, allowed to cool slightly and then taken up again. The second smoking is the meaningful one.
He sat patiently and watched his tutor, reflecting on what he had learned. Now that he was actually here, Peekay understood that he would be judged by the quality of his mind. No more sporting hero, nice guy, natural leader, the stuff of which schoolboy legends are made; here only the intellect counted.
It would be like being back with Doc. When things got tough, Doc used to say, 'Listen always on the inside, Peekay. Inside of your head, in a quiet place, is sitting waiting the answer.' He was going to enjoy E. W. White's Oxford.
E.W. removed his pipe from his mouth and placed it in the copper ashtray. Then he took one last gulp of tea and, rising, said, 'I say, what do you think of this tea?'
Peekay was somewhat taken aback. He'd just undergone an afternoon which consisted almost entirely of verbal spankings and in almost the same breath E. W. White was asking him whether he approved of his thoroughly shitty tea.
He rose, preparing to go. 'Well, it was a bit strong.'
Peekay ventured.
'A chap named Goonesena whom I tutored in '47 sends it to me from Ceylon. It comes in a ten-pound plywood. box beautifully sealed in tin foil, regular as clockwork every two months.' E.W. looked up at Peekay despairingly. 'I'm rather forced, as you can see, to make it in very large quantities or I should never use it up. Alas, (he pronounced it 'A-la as') what you see is a Darjeeling man, condemned forever to drink Ceylon.' He seemed genuinely upset.
Peekay had never thought very much about tea. He generally took it with milk and two sugars about midbrown. The idea that tea should come in more than one flavour had never occurred to him.
'Ceylon is seeking independence from Great Britain. Why don't you do the same thing to them?' Peekay said, hoping he didn't sound too flippant.
E. W. White threw back his head and laughed loudly. 'I say! Well done, Peekay. Hoist with my own petard, what!' He found his pipe on the trolley and paused to re-light it. 'I think you and I are going to get along splendidly. Next week I shall require two thousand words. Please write clearly. I'd like your thoughts on the concept of natural justice and how it affects the law.'
'English law, sir?'
E.W. looked slightly taken aback. 'Why, all law, of course!
I am not aware that the English are any different from any other people when they are at the receiving end of things. Natural justice is the beginning of all true justice; we shall see where it leads. I think you might profitably spend a little time in the Bodleian consulting the work of John Fawcett, though, of course, I am more anxious to read your own thoughts on the subject.'
E.W., skilfully moving both of them towards the door, continued his instructions. 'So, please, dear
boy, not too many notations in your essay on the thoughts of men long dead. Profundity is seldom achieved by misquoting the opinions of those who cannot return to defend themselves. It is an unfortunate habit cultivated by the more modest minds at Oxford who can only impress their peers by building a bulwark of old ideas. It disguises, of course, the absence of any new ones of their own. By all means use the quotes of the dead to clear the known ground, then dare to walk the wildest unknown path. In this way we can look forward to some intellectual progress.'
At the door they shook hands formally. 'Goodbye, Peekay.' He rubbed his hands together, as though he had suddenly made up his mind about something. 'By Jove! Next time you come I shall serve you Darjeeling. I believe you have given me the courage to liberate myself!'
FIFTEEN
At the conclusion of her final year at Chelsea Arts School Harriet had applied for a grant to the National Arts Foundation, submitting two small maquettes of work she hoped to complete. The first was to be a three-quarter size study of two horses, while the other was a life-size sculpture of a boxer. Her application was successful and the grant enabled her to take a small cottage attached to an old stable with a lofted ceiling, which she hoped to convert into a studio.
The cottage, which went by the unprepossessing name of Cow Cottage, lay about five miles out of Oxford in a setting beside a small brook and amongst tall old oak trees which now stood bare and bleak against the December landscape. The doorway to the cottage was partly overgrown by a climbing white rose Peekay identified as Francis Eileste, while the garden was overgrown with sweetbriar roses and camellia fighting for a space in the pale sun with the weeds and bramble. Harriet, trudging happily around it in a pair of wellington boots, claimed to discover all manner of lovely things cowering under the onslaught of weed, winter and neglect.
Harriet, like Peekay, had grown up in the country. She had spent her childhood in Norfolk and was familiar with gardens. 'I shall have a lovely cottage garden. It's all here waiting for spring and a little love,' she exclaimed happily. Hymie, on the other hand, was not reassured so easily.
He would pass through the three acres of rolling lawns, talking about watering devices for carefully planted beds like the ones in the Levy family garden in Pretoria. He looked at it all as dispassionately as he might a small public park. 'Sure,' he said, looking disapprovingly at the stone cottage buried in weed and neglect, 'I hope you don't expect any of this love you're talking about to come from me? God made my arm to drive a gold Parker 51. Why else would He have given me thirteen of them for my barmitzvah?'
Peekay, on the other hand, was delighted. He longed to get his hands onto a bit of dark, wet earth again and, like Harriet, he could sense that the two-hundred-year-old cottage garden, given a little encouragement, would stage a magnificent comeback in the spring. He also loved the cottage, with its ancient shingle roof, green with moss and lichen, and its Headington stone walls - none too straight, so that the front door leaned decidedly to the left, as did all the windows. He pointed to the south wall of the cottage. 'It looks as though the big bad wolf stood on that side of the house and huffed and puffed and damn nearly blew it down!'
'Christ! What a mess!' Hymie snorted. 'Who are we supposed to be? The three little pigs?'
The interior of the cottage consisted of one large room with a hearth forming the centre of the northern wall which was blackened by a century or two of smoke from the open fire. The early afternoon light strained through the dirty windows, making the interior almost dark. The room hadn't been used for several years and, though dusty, was surprisingly dry and very cold. The floor was of heavy slabs of blue slate, although it was hard to tell in the semi-dark; they could equally have been brown or grey. There was no electricity and no evidence of plumbing. Water was obviously carted in from the brook.
'Jesus! Talk about cosy!' Hymie said in disgust, flicking his cigarette lighter to examine the hearth. 'Shit, Harriet, there's no bloody stove!'
The toilet, a small wooden construction, stood at the bottom of the kitchen garden beside the stream. It too leaned, though from the weight of a very old clematis, its winter-bare vine hugging the entire edifice and pushing it to the right, as if in stubborn defiance of the direction the cottage had decided to take.
The stable, which was more like a barn, was actually larger than the cottage, and the hayloft had been removed, leaving a vaulted ceiling. 'When I can get two large windows set into either side of the roof it will make a perfect studio.'
Harriet explained. 'It's the only real expense actually, except for a coat of limewash inside the cottage and here and there a few tiny repairs. Otherwise the place is perfect, don't you think?'
Hymie lit a sobranie before answering. 'My grandmother on my mother's side, with only a large black frying pan on her back, fled from a shtetl in Russia where every house was a Taj Mahal compared to this dump!' He looked appealingly at Harriet. 'Do me a favour, come and live in Oxford? I tell you what. I'll buy you a bicycle so you can pedal out to this dump every day to work.'
'Oh, Hymie, can't you see how romantic it is?' Harriet exclaimed.
'Romantic? No stove! No plumbing! No bathroom! No bloody toilet! The only mod con you're going to enjoy around here is a hot and cold running nose!'
Harriet smiled. 'With a birch-log fire in the hearth, winter will soon pass and when spring comes you'll think it's a miracle, just you wait and see, Hymie Solomon Levy.'
'A miracle is right! A miracle if you're not dead in this cow of a cottage!'
Peekay was secretly glad. Harriet had asked him to pose for the boxer sculpture and he liked the idea of coming out into the country to do so. He'd known Harriet for fourteen months and had been careful to keep the relationship strictly kosher, always making sure that the three of them were together. She belonged to Hymie; but in his mind at night in bed, she belonged to him. At first he'd tried to dismiss her from his thoughts, telling himself how futile it was to allow his imagination to own her. But it didn't work. The famous Peekay mind control collapsed in a whimpering heap at the thought of Harriet in bed with him.
Peekay was not even sure, given the opportunity, that he'd have the courage anyway. His experience of women was one fantastic night with Carmen. He was hopelessly short of experience in the preliminaries. He'd been totally indulged by Carmen but in the process had received very little useful information in the preliminary kissing and feelup department. His mind was filled with schoolboy stuff, breasts which pumped up like rocks when you felt them and nipples that stood up so you could practically roll one around in your mouth like a large plump raisin. But the practicalities of, for instance, unhooking a brassiere, were beyond him. However hard he tried to imagine it, he knew he couldn't do it.
The trouble was that Harriet was so nice. Peekay felt guilty about making love to her in his imagination. She wasn't just a stunning-looking girl you wanted to do it to. She was someone you wanted to like anyway. She was intelligent, independent and fun. She could be formidable in argument and she would kiss them both spontaneously, hug and touch and be loving, as though it was a perfectly natural thing to do. Which it was, of course; but which it also wasn't, of course.
After over a year together Peekay wasn't so sure Harriet was Hymie's girl. Harriet seemed to treat him no differently to the way she treated Peekay, ami Hymie didn't seem to mind this in the least. They were seldom together alone and Hymie made no deliberate attempts to make this happen. If Hymie was sleeping with Harriet, they were going to great pains to conceal it from him.
The trouble was that he and Hymie never talked about it. It was the only thing they hadn't shared. This was mainly Peekay's fault. Because he felt the way he did about Harriet he was afraid Hymie would find out if they talked about her. Peekay wasn't sure he could hide his true feelings from his friend. So he'd gone along with the platonic bit, the two brothers and a sister thing they'd developed between them. It was infinitely better than having
no Harriet in his life and Hymie seemed more than happy, even gratified by the arrangement.
Sex was the weakest link in the relationship between the two friends. Hymie had always seemed rather ambivalent about the subject. At school, when puberty had struck like lightning to keep their right hands cupped and guilty and where loud-mouthed fantasy had kept them all from going mad, Hymie had always remained cool. The contagious delirium caused by the overheating of the group's collective sexual imagination seemed to pass him by. It wasn't as though he drew apart, he simply didn't contribute. This was unusual for Hymie. In most other things his opinion played a leading role. Peekay had once bounced his fist against someone's head for suggesting Hymie was a queer. But he had to admit that when the boys woke in the morning and carried their towels to the showers draped over their rigid tent poles, Hymie always sauntered in, slack as a wind sock on a still morning, his towel slung casually over his shoulder.
If Hymie didn't take much of a physical role in the restoration of Cow Cottage, as usual he made things happen. He sent Bobby and Eddy, Peekay's two former sparring partners from the Morris Works, scrounging around builders' yards until they'd found two huge Gothic arched windows. The two boxers arrived at Cow Cottage in a Morris van 'borrowed' from the works on a Saturday morning and before mid afternoon, when the light was beginning to fade, they'd shaped two large holes in the stable roof and edged them in plywood covered with copper sheeting. The following day they'd hoisted the windows up onto the roof and fixed them neatly into place. Hymie had paid for the windows; they were Harriet's Christmas present from him. But when he'd gone to pay the lads they wouldn't hear of it.
Both boxers had become friends, particularly of Peekay. They'd become infinitely better boxers after working out with the young South African who was generous with his knowledge and was often in their corner on a Saturday night calling the tactics. They'd also met Harriet on several occasions and it was clear they approved of her thoroughly, urging Peekay in a good natured way to wrest her away from Hymie, whom they referred to as, 'the Management'. Bobby would shake his head. 'She's a fighter's lass, lad. 'Taint no good wastin' a good sort like 'er on the Management!'
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