Darke

by Rick Gekoski

  The traffic moved on, and the offending vehicle and its offensive occupant moved ahead of me, to be replaced by a sedate Jaguar with a gentleman in it. I took the cap off my thermos and poured a cup of lovingly made coffee. It tasted slightly off, though I always use a glass-lined flask. Never mind. Wait for the Valium to kick in, only not too strongly or I’d end up, shudder, in Beaconsfield, marooned in the fibrillating heartland of England.

  On the motorway at last, there was a curious sensation, as my speed reached 80 and the extraordinary engineering of a modern car – and of 10 milligrams of Valium – kicked in. There was virtually no sound from wind or road, and even more oddly, no sense of movement itself, as if I were stationary in the car and the road was unrolling itself under me, like those machines Lucy once played at seaside arcades.

  I was rather enjoying the sensation, instead of driving, I was just sitting in the comfort of my leather chair while the unfurling asphalt did all the work. Listening to the music, I had a desire to recline the seat and close my eyes.

  If he hadn’t honked furiously as I drifted into the fast lane, we would have collided. The driver shook his fist as he overtook me.

  Shaken, I pulled over to the left. There was a hard shoulder that I might have availed myself of, but suddenly the rush of passing vehicles frightened me, and I felt I would rather be in it than perched defencelessly at its side. I slowed to 45 miles an hour, in itself unsafe, in order to get some sense of the road in which I was in control, rather than it. It worked slowly. Cars honked as they passed. Elderly gentleman, hapless tootler.

  I turned off the music, which jangled my nerves. Nothing would have calmed them, for the Valium, oddly, made me feel both drowsy and anxious, adding to my problems rather than solving them.

  Eyes on the road, calm and steady, I reached the turning to Oxford and made my way along the endless approach road into the suburban wastes of Risinghurst, around the ring road until the Woodstock Road exit, then slowly towards the centre. The Old Parsonage Hotel – the best available in a city which should have good hotels but does not – was on my right. Whatever its deficiencies proved to be, it was within easy reach of both Merton and St Anne’s, neither of which I had visited for many years.

  I eased into the small car park, found the last available space, turned off the car, remembering to put it into ‘Park’, and slumped over the wheel. Time passed. I may have fallen asleep, because there was a sharp knock on my window, startling, and a young man peered in, concerned that some old duffer was using the only available parking place for his afternoon nap.

  I tried the window, but it would not work. Turned on the engine, pushed the button.

  ‘Can I help you in some way, sir?’ he asked in a manner studiedly neutral, but incipiently confrontational.

  ‘Yes. Of course. I wish to check in. Your desk will be expecting me. Darke, James Darke. Doctor.’

  ‘Welcome to the Old Parsonage, doctor. I’ll see to it that your bags are delivered to your room. The registration desk is on your left as you enter the hotel.’

  I’d booked a Junior Suite – a term that irritated me, only Americans call themselves Junior – for a week, and after the formalities of checking in, was escorted to it. On acquaintance, the emphasis was certainly on the ‘Junior’. But it was tucked away on the ground floor, with windows opening onto a small summerhouse in a courtyard garden. The sitting area was as small as the bathroom, but there was a small desk on the outer wall of the bedroom, adequate for my writing materials and computer. I’d even brought my mobile phone. I have a horror of making personal calls on a hotel phone, with some nosey receptionist listening in, while simultaneously charging you enough to buy a decent lunch.

  I had requested an extremely quiet room, and it was, at least at that time of day. It had a minimal ersatz country-house charm – not offensive – impersonal, but not alienating. Perhaps too much grey for my taste. But there was the desk and a hard chair, with internet access if I needed it. I wouldn’t. I plonked myself onto the sofa, feeling more alone than I had in my many months in the house. But it was good, at the same time, to emerge at the mercy of the world. And of my daughter. My dear Lucy.

  After a nap that failed to refresh, leaving me groggy and irritable, I ordered a pot of Assam with shortbread from room service. The waiter paused imperceptibly after leaving the tray, as if he expected a tip for accomplishing the Herculean task of bringing it to my room.

  After my trials on the outward journey – like Stanley, having conquered the dark spaces – I was hardly up to a further expedition into the street. Best to settle in for a while. I’d brought some minimal reading sustenance, in the form of the New Yorker, The Economist, The Spectator, even a copy of the LRB, with its dread typeface. Po-face, I should call it. I considered throwing it out immediately, but sometimes there’s something instructive in it.

  Magazines stink of death, whatever temporary moment they celebrate soon past, unremembered. They are lightweight, disposable, generally ill printed and badly designed. Inadequate containers, even, for an order of fish and chips.

  I hadn’t brought any books, there was something physically repellent about them just then, not sure why. The dust, the mouldering paper, the smell of dissolution . . . The death of the book? I could no longer read one without a struggle. I kept falling asleep, drifting into unrelated reverie, uncompelled by the arbitrary fantasy that the author had put before me, some fiction that was supposed to make me excited but didn’t – like trying to penetrate a long-abandoned lover, grown old, baggy and strange, desirable as a stewed cabbage.

  Anyway reading would have distracted me. I needed to keep writing. To tell some final bits of a story partially mine, partially that of others, essential in that fruitless way that all intensely felt human projects are. The proximity to our old Oxford addresses, the colleges, the flat in Park Town, would be a spur to memory, and the painful warmth of nostalgia.

  In the morning I took a walk to clear my head and to revisit some old haunts. Old. Haunts. Rather than walk to Merton – though I could feel a magnetic pull towards my old college – I walked north towards St Anne’s, making my way past the porter while his back was turned, and entering the grounds for the first time in almost fifty years. Though Suzy had invited me to accompany her to the occasional Gaudy – she liked keeping up with the girls, now women – I couldn’t imagine why I should. I didn’t go to them at Merton – I loathed the very thought of it, the creepy recidivism – so why go to hers to meet the aged incarnations of youngsters whom I’d never met?

  Suzy’s former room was on the left, up staircase B, overlooking the quadrangle. Sometime after we met she had invited me for tea – a hopeful sign, I thought – and when she showed me in, she immediately apologised for the clothes strewn about, stained coffee cups on the top of her desk, saucers of smelly cigarette butts with lipstick rings – the louche fusty air of the garret. I suspected that she cultivated the look, and the manner, but I was wrong. It was as natural to her as the wave in her dirty blonde hair, or the odd tuck of her chin.

  She noticed me looking about. I couldn’t help it, my face is made for judging and is incapable – volition has nothing to do with it – of dissembling. My stray thoughts deploy themselves across my features, be they disapproval or doubt, lust or disgust. My nose twitches, my eyes fix, my jaw clenches. I must have sniffed or recoiled, however inadvertently. She had already described me as ‘fastidious’ during our first sustained conversation after a seminar on Chaucer. I was rather hurt by the accuracy of this. As I looked around her room, she shrugged with a touch of bravado: ‘You’ll have to forgive me, I’m a bit of a slut.’

  Such provocation, this charming archaism! What an opportunity! I had an immediate impulse to act. I looked around the room for a duster, perhaps even a Hoover. In twenty minutes I could have made a serious difference here: I loved cleaning and straightening. Even my scout wasn’t good enough at it – the rooms looked worse after he’d finished with them, and he was forbidden f
rom doing anything other than cleaning the windows, which he did adequately. On being so instructed he looked at me intently, searching his vocabulary for the absent term anal.

  ‘Bit particular, sir?’

  ‘I am. It’ll save you trouble.’

  ‘It’s no trouble, sir. It’s my job.’

  Wash up Suzy’s filthy cups, empty those reeking saucers, fold the clothes and put the others on hangers into the wardrobe, dust, straighten, make up the bed. She must have had a scout more sluttish, even, than she. Or did St Anne’s not rise to scouts?

  She saw me looking at the rumpled sheets and wayward counterpane of her bed, and mistook my intentions as much as I had mistaken hers. But I wouldn’t have entered it in such a state. Or her. Start as you mean to go on.

  Some weeks later, when we were semi-officially a couple, she asked to visit my rooms. The prospect was alarming: if she was a bit of a slut, I was a lot of a fusspot. I made sure, painful as it was, to de-Jamesify my premises as far as I was able. I allowed two unsharpened pencils in my pen and pencil holder, kept my typewriter slightly offline on my desk, allowed a few novels to drift out of alphabetical order, neglected to plump up my pillows and cushions, let the Persian carpet drift off-centre. When the time came, her hand went to her face, as if to adjust a mask to keep her germs from entering the atmosphere. I wanted to shout: ‘But look, it’s messy!’

  God knows what she saw in me. People must have wondered, though I was reckoned, at the time, to look something like Peter O’Toole, which was presumably intended as a compliment, but was inaccurate. I was taller than he, and slimmer, and my eye lacked any semblance of a come-hither twinkle. I was like one of the grave-diggers in Hamlet, only funnier and better dressed. Anyway, I detested actors and the theatre, taking Miss Austen’s view of them: all that feigning and dissembling overheats the imagination and the blood. Give me a great poem any time.

  We’d go for a coffee after tutorials – not a modern make-it-while-you-wait-for-a-long-time concoction assembled by a so-called barista – but for some builder’s coffee at George’s in the Covered Market. She was interested in me, though I was too naive to recognise a sexual motive, which would have frightened me. In her asexual presence I was natural, opinionated and argumentative. She liked that, she was a competitor through and through. ‘Sporty’ we called it then. I’d met the type, of course, at school, and never bonded with any of them.

  I reluctantly allowed her to initiate me, sometimes going to the Parks to watch the University play cricket. I rather liked that. I would make up a luncheon hamper, Suzy would bring a bottle of wine and thermos of coffee, and I could sit in a deckchair and read The Times. Now and again a weak case of the claps would issue from the assembled watchers – never more than about sixty of us – and I would belatedly join in and say ‘Well played!’ in what I thought of as a hearty tone.

  ‘Oh, do shut up, James. What are you applauding for anyway? You were reading.’

  ‘I am joining in the spirit of the game. Jolly good stuff!’

  She glared at me. The next term she conceived a plan – by way of punishment for my cricketing inattention – to go up to the Manor Ground in Headington to watch Oxford United. Instead of a hamper – ‘totally wrong, love!’ – we arrived a few minutes early and queued to buy meat patties in baps with stewed onions and red sauce, and bought a beer inside the ground.

  I munched and quaffed stoically, settled into my uncomfortable seat, observing only that I would prefer a deckchair.

  ‘You’re lucky to be sitting at all! I would prefer standing myself, but you’re such a wimp!’

  ‘I rather object to that. We’re called sybarites. And you won’t find many of us here.’ United employed two brothers, one in the middle of the field, called The Tank, who later became a manager and smoked cigars, though palpably a Woodbines man. The other, smaller and redheaded, was called George, and could – even to my eye – play a bit, unlike most of his fellows. They were a hapless lot, but unobjectionable. Those days, players went to the ground on public transport, drank at the local with the locals, made a living wage. Kept their working-class roots. You couldn’t have picked them out in the street, and most of them would have been embarrassed if you had.

  Now, top-division teenagers make more money in a week than a University Vice Chancellor does in a year, drive fleets of supercars, fuck whoever and whenever, wherever and however. Spoiled brats, deracinated, unattached to any community other than their own. Their game a hateful, ubiquitous spectacle. I gather it is now largely peopled by itinerant EU mercenaries, and by Africans, whom they sweep off their native veldt, hang up in a tree to mature for a year or two, and then unleash upon their slower and less gifted white contemporaries. Within a few years they are making more in a week than ten thousand of their poor compatriots make in a year. I’ll bet none of those starving millions catch any trickle-down.

  In the new spirit of enforced sportiness, during summer term I would occasionally meet Suzy at the college tennis courts – she played number one for St Anne’s, and was hoping for an invitation to join the University squad. She would have preferred a blue to a First, though eventually, to her disappointment, she got the latter and not the former.

  ‘That bitch Hilda,’ she said, ‘I can beat her three out of four times, but she’s fucking the Secretary and I haven’t got a chance, unless I go down on that frightful dyke, like the rest of them. No way!’

  One afternoon I arrived to find her in the midst of a strenuous session with – to my surprise – not one of the lissom college girls, but a blocky, ginger-haired, red-faced lad, hardly taller than she was, who gave the ball a ferocious wallop. When he announced the score, it was obvious – from his accent – who he must be. He’d been pestering her for a knock-up, and she’d finally capitulated, though she hadn’t told me. Or perhaps they’d been knocking away all term? She’d been airily dismissive of him – ‘a real Lancashire hotpot, that one’ – and had apparently decided to teach him a lesson. Or, two lessons.

  The first was on the court, where it was clear, even to my untutored eye, that though her suitor could smash a first serve and bash a forehand, the rest of his game was rudimentary. His backhand faltered, he moved about the court like a bear, his game had neither variety nor delicacy. She ran him around, hit drop shots, acute angles, under- and over-spin, conducting the rallies with contemptuous grace. After one supreme example, in which she’d drawn him to the net with a drop shot, flicked a lob over his head which he manfully retrieved, only to be drawn in and passed, he sat on the baseline gasping for breath. She hardly gave him a look, or time to recover, before taking her place to serve.

  She moved with wonderful ease, and if I closed my eyes, I could hear no more than the swishing of her skirt – can one really hear a skirt swish? – as she glided about the court, with satisfying thwacks every now and again. This was in that prelapsarian age before a certain Miss Seles began to emit a hideous grunt whenever she hit a shot. Everyone was so appalled that no one thought it seemly to ask her to desist, as if she had begun farting and couldn’t stop. She not only looked like a piglet, she sounded like one.

  I was delighted when I read that she had been attacked, taking it as an appropriate protest against her acoustic crimes: designed to shut her up, and all those who followed her example, like smacking the fat lady if she sings out of tune. I assumed that the insertion of a modest kitchen knife into her back, as she sat at the side of the court, was intended to be threatening but not life-threatening, an aide-memoire: Shut up or you will be even sorrier!

  But it turned out – how often one is disappointed by one’s fellow man – that her attacker was merely a stalker, without an aesthetic or critical bone in his body. What a shame. I am opposed to gratuitous stabbing. You never know what it will lead to. Poor Miss Seles recovered slowly, which was good, and eventually returned to the courts, which was not. Generations of grunters and screamers followed, most of them Eastern European piglets swilling and squealing at the money tr
ough, and the tennis authorities were too intimidated and witless to ban them. I have hardly watched a match since that time, nor do I care who wins the now degraded Wimbledon, where silence is demanded only of the spectators.

  In her own elegant way, Suzy was knifing her opponent, humiliating him, making him cringe with frustration as he ran about manfully and fruitlessly. She wanted both to wind him, and to wind him up. She mimicked his accent when she announced the score. She had an aversion to Northerners that amounted to a phobia, though she was ignorant about geography – the North started in Birmingham and ended in Scotland – and could not distinguish Yorkshire from Lancashire, she adamantly maintained that the whole area – and its people – stank of the mill and the pit: grimy, ugly, blackened by toil.

  ‘After all,’ she’d say, with mock reasonableness, ‘look at what they name their towns! Bury, Blackpool, Burnley, Grimsby, Hull (though they spell it wrong). That’s probably how they say it: “What the hull, luv.” Blackburn, for fuck’s sake! And that awful place where they play cricket and chant at those lovely West Indians, and wave bananas. Tell me who the monkeys are, really! Thank God they change their accents quick enough once they come down south, else they’d be laughed back home again.’ (Hearing this, I decided to suppress any reference to my own Northern antecedents, shallow though those roots were.)

  The English are masters at making foreigners – and better yet their fellow countrymen – feel insecure. The French? Pah, you can flick their arrogance off like a bogey, and be untouched by it. It’s merely gestural, nothing to do with you. But a nicely educated English public school product can make you feel undermined, and ashamed. Suzy could do it effortlessly, but often chose to try. She treated her Lancashire suitor with an amused contempt that, had he not been a stolid Northerner, would have shrivelled his ego and made him slink home. Even so, as she kept announcing the score in her cod-Lancashire accent – ‘Aye, that’d be forty love, luv!’ – he became increasingly uncomfortable, even though her accent was risible. All she did was add a lot of ‘ayes’ and ‘lads’ and ‘luvs’ and overlay a generic, ill-observed ‘Northern’ inflection.