The Kennedy Moment

by Peter Adamson

  ‘No idea. I only called you.’

  ‘Very kind of you, Toby. You in touch with any of them?’

  ‘Saw the lovely Seema in New York last year. Very happily divorced. Doing well too, as far as I could see. Writing something called a book.’ The wince again. ‘And of course I see Michael from time to time. You?’

  ‘Haven’t seen any of them. Dreadful really. It’s being in such an out-of-the-way place, I suppose. Your mind tends to get cut off, too. Poor excuse, I know.’

  ‘Might be the boonies, but at least you’re doing something useful.’ The wince again.

  ‘Isn’t what you do useful?’

  ‘Christ, no! I think I can say with all due modesty that I haven’t done anything remotely useful in the last twenty years.’

  She gave him a patient look and turned her attention back to the streets. Cocooned in the car, she felt secure. But the thought of being alone out there filled her with something close to panic.

  Toby glanced at her again as they ran into traffic on Ealing Green. She was snuggled low down in the seat, chin lifted in a slight defiance that brought the young Hélène rushing back. She returned his glance. ‘That’s what the weekend’s supposed to be all about isn’t it – what we’ve all done with our lives? Do you imagine Stephen sees himself as judge and jury?’

  ‘Probably. Little creep. It’s bound to be absolutely excruciating. Especially for me.’

  ‘So why go?’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you, Hel,’ he said, accelerating into a gap in the second lane, ‘I’d go through a lot worse to spend the weekend with you. Only I was thinking, why don’t we forget Stephen and Oxford. Go to Paris? Or Rome? Or Reykjavik – Reykjavik’s nice at this time of year.’

  ‘You have no idea what Reykjavik’s like at this time of year. Did you ever think of going back to Australia?’

  Toby gave an exaggerated sigh as they reached the north end of the Green. ‘Persona non grata, my dear.’

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘Fraid so, sweetheart. Wouldn’t have a bar of me. Entirely my own fault of course. Did this little series of spots for a well-known brand of Aussie lager. Or at least it’s well known now. Sales through the roof. Alcoholism up fifteen per cent worldwide. Ditto domestic violence and cirrhosis of the liver. Scuds of awards. Fat bonus for TJ. Whole thing a staggering triumph from start to finish.’

  Hélène smiled as Toby forced his way out onto Castlebar Road. The Australian accent, she noticed, had all but gone.

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘One or two Aussies marginally underwhelmed. Felt I’d taken Homo Australopithecus a bit literally. Wrong image of the Australian male. And the female. Betrayed my own culture, apparently. Bloke in the Herald said I’d portrayed Oz to the world as a country where speech was an affectation. Kindly not to darken the Antipodean doorstep again. Seemed to think I was saying the only thing an Aussie female was good for was pulling a pint while some bloke looked down the front of her dress.’

  ‘And were you saying that?’

  ‘Absolutely. You’re sure you never saw that ad?’

  ‘It’ll all die down. Go back and do some pro bono work for the Sydney Opera House.’

  ‘Great idea, Hel.’ He raised both hands off the wheel for a moment, spreading his fingers. ‘I can see it now. Giant corks dangling all-round the edge of that roof. I could even write them a libretto – “Diggers and Divas: the Opera”.’ They were turning now into the driveway of a large house at the bottom of Eaton Rise. Hélène looked up at the ground-floor widows as the car came to a halt.

  ‘Will your wife be home?’

  ‘Wife? Home? My dear, what quaint notions you do bring into a man’s life.’

  That night, Toby Jenks lay in bed congratulating himself on being less inebriated than usual and thinking with full heart and moist eyes of the lean, sun-tanned and still-young woman he had installed, comfortably he hoped, in the third-floor guest suite directly above. It was so obvious. So obvious that he should have dedicated his efforts to winning her respect instead of getting her into his bed. Clear as daylight that she was the one he should have shared his life with, grown old with, possibly even grown up with. The one who could have kept him true to his talents, maybe even allowed him a fleeting glimpse of self-respect from time to time.

  He sighed and wondered whether she might be persuaded to come back with him after the reunion. She had been tired and they had decided to eat in: pasta and a jar of some ragu-type sauce was all he had been able to find, and a quite marvellous bottle of Barolo. They had talked of this and that, nothing too strenuous, and yet she had seemed to understand him more in a few short hours than his wife had in five years, or was it six? Her eyes, her look, had somehow seemed to say that she knew what was going on inside while he blustered on with his silly witticisms and world-weary cynicisms and God-knows-what other ‘isms’ that had become his conversational stock-in-trade over all the years of sucking up seven kinds of bullshit in Berkeley Square. There had even been moments of contented silence, and he had persuaded himself that he had felt happy for the first time in years as he sipped the Barolo and their eyes met. He thought of her now lying in the single bed not ten feet above his own, snuggled under a goose-down duvet, probably naked. Almost certainly naked. He closed his eyes. Maybe it was not too late. Maybe he could turn himself around. Make a start this weekend. Once or twice he almost drifted off to sleep thinking of the satisfactions of being with a woman such as this, waking up to her, breakfasting with her. Breakfast! Christ, all he had was half a three-day-old loaf and a jar of Vegemite.

  Friday, October 3rd, 1980

  To an outsider looking in on that afternoon in the autumn of 1980, Stephen Walsh’s lot in life might have seemed an enviable one: a fellowship at a prestigious Oxford college with no great weight of teaching responsibilities; comfortable, rent-free rooms with a scout who, if not exactly performing the duties of college servants of old, at least spared him life’s more tedious tasks; in the evenings, the excellent if rather rich food taken at High Table and followed, if he so wished, by the conviviality of the Senior Common Room and its well-stocked wine cellar. To our outsider, a commuter, say, shuttling between a 1970s housing development and an office in the city, all this might have seemed the very picture of settled privilege. But Stephen was not settled – not settled at all.

  He felt himself drawn again to the window seat and the view across the lawn to the rooms on the other side of the quad. Surely there could be no mistake. Three times this term, in the course of conversation at High Table, the Master had contrived to use the word ‘egregious’, each time catching Stephen’s eye. Given that the Regius Professor was by tradition addressed as ‘Regius’, it was the kind of Oxford in-joke that Stephen would normally have considered cringe-making. But surely there could have been no mistaking the Master’s intention?

  With half an hour to spare before heading down to the Turf Tavern, he set about tugging the motley collection of armchairs and the leather Chesterfield sofa into a rough circle ready for the morning. This done, he selected a couple of essays from a pile on the desk and dropped them into the chair nearest to the fireplace. Crossing to the principal bookcase, he checked that his own three books were at eye level, next to works by Paul Mus and Lucien Febvre. After a last look around, he returned to the narrow window seat. Weeks ago he had given up hope of being able to hold the reunion in his grand new rooms, but he had at least expected to be able to make the announcement of his appointment. As an afterthought, he retrieved four or five out-of-date invitation cards from the wastepaper basket and propped them on the mantelpiece next to a bottle of green ink.

  Just before 5pm on that Friday, Michael Lowell arrived at Oxford’s Gloucester Green coach station carrying the leather Gladstone bag that had once been his father’s and that he had for many years used as both briefcase and overnight tote. It was a fine evening and he had decided to walk the mile or so across town to the Cotswold Lodge Hotel. There he to
ok a shower, changed into sweater, jeans and a new pair of sneakers, and by 6.30pm was standing in his navy woollen overcoat outside Blackwell’s bookshop on The Broad. He looked at his watch. Half an hour to go. Half an hour in which to collect himself.

  To anyone who knew Michael Lowell in his professional capacity, the idea that he might need to collect himself would have seemed a little unlikely. In the jargon of the day, he was a man very much together, at ease in his own skin, respected by friends and colleagues alike for his managerial competence as well as for the professional achievements that had made him one of the world’s leading epidemiologists. The prospect of a meeting with any number of heads of state would not have raised his blood pressure a millimetre; but the thought of meeting Seema Mir had his heart pounding as he turned up Parks Road, deciding he had time to walk the three sides of the square that would eventually bring him to the Turf Tavern.

  The leaves were falling as he crossed over towards Rhodes House, seat of the Trust that had first brought him to Oxford all those years ago. He slowed his pace, drawing comfort from the solid edifices of science – the Departments of Organic and Inorganic Chemistry, the Radcliffe Science Library, the Schools of Forestry and Zoology – that lined the north side of road. And directly ahead now, through the gathering gloom, the red-brick façade of the School of Pathology, unchanged by all the years. He crossed to the iron gates, looking up at the lights that still burned in the windows of laboratories where Florey and Chain had ushered in the age of antibiotics, where Dreyer had done all the early work on immunology, where Gowans had shown that it was the lymphocyte gene that governed immunological reaction. He took his hands from his coat pockets in what was perhaps an unconscious gesture of respect. Who might be up there this evening? What discoveries were enticing and eluding them as they carried out the tests and checks that could lead to a dead end – or to a Nobel Prize? Two decades ago, all he had wanted was to be part of it all. But the years since had proved his father right a hundred times: breakthroughs in the laboratory were the easier challenge.

  He checked his watch and turned down Mansfield Road, directing his thoughts into less well-charted waters. Would he even recognize this stranger of twenty years who had passed her forty-first birthday last week? She might still be slim, or carrying thirty pounds more; the hair still jet and lustrous, or on the brittle road to silver. Her face still angular and elegant, or full and soft? You might not even know her. But I would know. I would know by the way she walked, by the poise of her, by the something about her that was to be valued above all the ordinary business of the world. I would know her by heart.

  ‘Michael?’

  He turned to his left and saw the slight figure on the other side of the road, half obscured by the shadow of a plane tree. Without looking, he stepped from the kerb to cross towards her and was almost hit by a cyclist who swerved at the last moment and sped off towards Longwall, disappearing into the evening with a mild expletive.

  ‘Hello, Michael.’

  ‘Hello, Seema.’

  An awkward kiss on each cheek, holding on to each other’s hands as she leaned away, looking up into his face under the light of a college window.

  ‘You look well, Michael.’

  ‘So do you.’

  The same subtle, self-possessed smile. The same languid way of speaking. The same inexplicable attraction that had marked him so deeply all those years ago. He looked at her uplifted face, aware of nothing but the astonishing reality of being once more with Seema Mir in the cool of an Oxford night.

  She let go of his hands and tilted her head to one side. ‘It’s very, very good to see you again, Dr Lowell.’

  ‘It’s very good to see you, too,’ he said, in his best WHO meeting voice. She laughed and took his arm, marching him up Holywell and turning him into the cobbled passageway of Bath Place that leads directly to the Turf Tavern.

  In the Middle Ages, the Turf Tavern had been an illegal gambling den. In more recent years, it had become well known to television audiences the world over as the favourite watering hole of the fictional Oxford detective Chief Inspector Morse. It was also within its ancient walls that a future President of the United States famously did not inhale, and that a future Prime Minister of Australia drank himself into the Guinness Book of Records by downing a yard of ale in less than twelve seconds.

  Despite these convivial traditions, the Turf proved a less-than-ideal meeting place for the five friends who assembled there on the evening of Friday, October 3rd, 1980. Smoke and noise crowded under the low seventeenth-century ceilings and the beer-spilling crush around the two small serving hatches gave the lie to the idea of the British as a nation of orderly queuers. But it was here – to confused shouts of ‘Haven’t changed a bit’, ‘So good to see you’, ‘Can’t believe it’s twenty years’, ‘Never thought we’d lose touch’ – that Seema Mir, Michael Lowell, Stephen Walsh, Hélène Hevré and Toby Jenks began the weekend that would change their lives.

  Over dinner, the noise restricted the conversation to brief, bad-telephone-line exchanges about travel plans or other Oxford pubs they had known and loved. Only afterwards, when the little group carried coffee and drinks out into the garden to brave the cool of the autumn evening, did the reunion really begin.

  When the last chair had been scraped over the flagstones and the last coat tugged close, a silence had fallen. On the medieval wall, a caged light bulb illuminated only a vivid green moss. Otherwise darkness hemmed them in. On the table itself, a single candle glowed faintly on cold faces. Stephen was the first to break the spell, looking over the top of his half-moon glasses and enunciating the single word ‘Well?’

  ‘This was a great idea, Stephen,’ said Hélène, touching his arm. Stephen pulled his mouth down at the edges, implying that this was, of course, like all such assertions, open to challenge. He eventually nodded his head in acknowledgement of the murmured thanks of the others. ‘Pity Tom couldn’t make it.’

  Seema hugged herself against the evening chill. ‘Do you realize he’s the only one of us with family commitments?’

  ‘Not quite.’ Hélène glanced towards Toby who had leaned away from the table and was lighting a cigar.

  ‘Purely financial, my dear. All pain and no gain.’

  A little way from the candlelight, Michael sat upright in his overcoat, wondering if it would be ridiculous to stand and place it around Seema’s shoulders. Of course she was older. And there was more caution, more sadness even, in the wide eyes. And perhaps less lustre in the hair, now cut short in a modern style to reveal the shape of her neck. Much more startling was what had not changed: the same dreamy, almost ethereal presence; the same readiness to be amused lingering permanently at the edges of her eyes and mouth; the same untouchable serenity. Since their first meeting under the street lights of Holywell she had avoided meeting his eyes, but glanced at him now as she tapped the table. ‘So what is programme?’ The words were spoken in a light, mock Pakistani-English accent, wagging her head slightly from side to side. The others laughed and looked towards Stephen.

  ‘Oh, take it as it comes, I should think. Meet in my rooms tomorrow, say about ten of the clock? And then I thought perhaps each of us could say something appropriately self-revelatory about what we’ve all been doing with ourselves these past two decades? More the inner journey than the outer, I thought?’

  Toby widened his eyes and buried his nose in a balloon of brandy.

  3 | Life and times

  Stephen sat astride the bench, the letter open on the long refectory table, the discarded envelope embossed with the three crowns of the University coat of arms. Dominus illuminatio mea.

  The last of the students had left for their ten o’clocks and he was alone in the Great Hall. Portraits of alumni looked down on him from panelled walls: the great and the good; the gartered and ermined, the begowned and bewigged, the mitred and medalled. All different and all the same. E pluribus unum. A single portrait of four hundred years of a self-satisfied establishment.<
br />
  He took a sip of coffee that had long ago gone cold. The tone of the Estates Bursar’s letter had been perfectly polite.

  ‘As I am sure you are aware … rooms in college at a premium … normal limit five years … College’s firm commitment to accommodating increasing proportion of female tutors.’

  But the bottom line was – he was out. As of the end of Hilary Term. Instead of moving into the grand suite of the Regius Professor, he would be renting accommodation somewhere off the Banbury Road, preparing his own meals, making his own bed, even doing his own laundry. But even dwelling on these details was only a way of pushing away a greater truth: his academic career had come off the rails.

  He looked at his watch. Standing to go, he slipped the letter into its envelope and folded it inside the University Gazette. When they had last all been together, being a Marxist historian as well as one of Oxford’s youngest dons had been about as chic as academic life could get. But the tide had steadily turned, leaving him stranded on a shore that he had expected to be a beachhead. At the top of the Hall stairs he paused for a moment to survey the quad. The truth of the matter was, Karl Marx had let him down. On the other side of the lawn, his fellow tutor in history was swanning towards the library with two female undergraduates in tow. Surely it was not to be Robin Liddell (emphasis on the second syllable, please)? He had been one of those who had turned with the tide, renounced the faith, indulged himself in a grand intellectual mea culpa to the delight of the right-wing press. They had not spoken for months, ever since Stephen’s review for The Guardian had labelled Liddell’s television series on the Levellers ‘the embourgoisement of history’.