by William Boyd
“Look—there’s Hamid.”
At the foot of Queen Street was a small square with an obelisk. Clearly designed to be a modest public space in the Edwardian part of the city, now, with the modern redevelopment, it served only as a kind of forecourt or ramp to the maw of the Westgate centre. Now glue-sniffing punks gathered at the steps around the monument (to some forgotten soldier killed in a colonial skirmish) and it was a favourite spot for marches and demonstrations to begin or end. The punks liked it, buskers liked it, beggars liked it, Hare Krishna groups tinkled their cymbals and chanted in it, Salvation Army bands played carols in it at Christmas. I had to admit that, nondescript though it was, it was possibly the liveliest and most eclectic public space in Oxford.
Today there was a small demonstration of Iranians—students and exiles, I supposed—a group of thirty or so assembled under banners that read ‘Down with the Shah’, ‘Long Live the Iranian Revolution’. Two bearded men were trying to encourage passers-by to sign a petition and a girl in a headscarf was listing, in a shrill singsong voice, the Pahlavi family’s iniquities through a megaphone. I followed the direction of Jochen’s pointed finger and saw Hamid standing some way off behind a parked car, taking photographs of the demonstrators.
We wandered over to him.
“Hamid!” Jochen shouted and he turned, visibly surprised at first, then pleased to see who it was greeting him. He crouched in front of Jochen and offered him his hand to shake, which Jochen did with some vigour.
“Mr Jochen,” he said. “Salaam alaikum.”
“Alaikum salaam,” Jochen said: it was a routine he knew well.
He smiled at him, and then, rising, turned to me. “Ruth. How are you?”
“What are you doing?” I said, abruptly, suddenly suspicious.
“Taking photographs.” He held up the camera. “They are all friends of mine, there.”
“Oh. I would have thought they wouldn’t want their photos taken.”
“Why? It’s a peaceful demonstration against the Shah. His sister is coming here to Oxford to open a library they have paid for. Wait for that—there will be a big demonstration. You must come.”
“Can I come?” Jochen said.
“Of course.” Then Hamid turned, hearing his name shouted from the demo.
“I must go,” he said. “I’ll see you tonight, Ruth. Shall I bring a taxi?”
“No, no,” I said. “We can walk.”
He ran over to join the others and for a moment I felt guilty and a fool, suspecting him in that way. We went into the Westgate to look for pyjamas but I found myself still brooding on the matter, wondering why anti-Shah demonstrators would be happy to have their photographs taken.
I was standing over Jochen as he packed his toys into his bag, urging him to be more ruthless in his selection, when I heard Ludger come up the iron stairs and enter through the kitchen door.
“Ah, Ruth,” he said, seeing me in Jochen’s room. “I have a favour. Hey, Jochen, how are you, man?”
Jochen looked round. “I’m fine, thank you,” he said.
“I got a friend,” Ludger continued to me. “A girl from Germany. Not a girlfriend,” he added quickly. “She’s saying she wants to visit Oxford and I’m wondering if she could stay here—two, three days.”
“There’s no spare room.”
“She can sleep with me. I mean—in my room. Sleeping bag on the floor—no sweat.”
“I’ll have to ask Mr Scott,” I improvised. “There’s a clause in my lease, you see. I’m really not allowed to have more than one person to stay here.”
“What?” he was incredulous. “But it’s your home?”
“My rented home. I’ll just pop down and ask him.”
Mr Scott worked some Saturday mornings and I had seen his car was parked outside. I went down the stairs to the dentist’s rooms and found him sitting on the reception desk, swinging his legs, talking to Krissi, his New Zealand dental nurse.
“Hello, hello, hello!” Mr Scott boomed, seeing me arrive, his eyes huge behind the thick lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles. “How’s young Jochen?”
“Very well, thank you. I was just wondering, Mr Scott, would you object if I put some garden furniture out at the bottom of the garden? Table, chairs, an umbrella?”
“Why would I object?”
“I don’t know—it might spoil the view from your surgery, or something.”
“How could it spoil the view?”
“That’s great, then. Thanks very much.”
Mr Scott, as a young army dentist, had sailed into Singapore Harbour in February 1942. Four days after he arrived the British forces surrendered and he spent the next three and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese. After that experience, he had told me—in all candour, without bitterness—he had made the decision that nothing in life was ever going to bother him again.
Ludger was waiting at the top of the stairs. “Well?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Mr Scott says no. Only one guest allowed.”
Ludger looked at me sceptically. I held his gaze.
“Oh, yeah?” he said.
“Yeah. In fact you’re lucky he’s let you stay for so long,” I lied, quite enjoying the process. “My lease is at stake here, you know.”
“What kind of shit country is this?” he asked, rhetorically. “Where a landlord can tell you who can stay in your home.”
“If you don’t like it you can always bugger off,” I said, cheerfully. “Come on, Jochen, let’s go to granny’s.”
My mother and I sat on the rear terrace of the cottage, looking out over the blond meadow at the dark green mass of Witch Wood, drinking home-made lemonade and keeping an eye on Jochen, who was galloping around the garden with a butterfly net, failing to catch butterflies.
“You were right,” I said, “it turns out Romer is a lord. And a rich man, as far as I can tell.” Two visits to the Bodleian Library had furnished me with a little more information than the few facts provided by Bobbie York. I watched my mother’s face intently as I documented Romer’s life, reading from the notes I had made. He was born 7 March 1899. Son of Gerald Arthur Romer (deceased 1918). An elder brother, Sholto, had been killed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Romer had been educated at a minor public school called Framingham Hall, where his father had taught classics. During the First World War he had become a captain in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, and had won the Military Cross in 1918. Back to Oxford, post-war, to St John’s College, where he obtained a first-class degree in history in 1923. Then there were two years at the Sorbonne, 1924-5. Then he joined the Foreign Office from 1926-35. I paused. “Then it all goes blank, except that he was awarded the Croix de Guerre—the Belgian Croix de Guerre in 1945.”
“Good old Belgium,” she said, flatly.
I told her that the publishing enterprise had begun in 1946—concentrating on learned journals, initially, with material from mainly German sources. The German university presses being moribund, barely under way or severely handicapped, German academics and scientists found Romer’s journals very welcoming. On the back of this success, he moved increasingly into reference books, drily academic in character, expensive, and sold largely to academic libraries around the world. Romer’s business—Romer, Radclyffe Ltd—soon had an impressive though specialised market presence, one that led to the firm’s buyout in 1963 by a Dutch publishing group, netting Romer a personal fortune of some £3 million. I mentioned the marriage in 1949 to one Miriam Hilton (who died in 1972) and the two children—a son and a daughter—and she didn’t flinch. There was a house in London—‘in Knightsbridge’ was all I could discover, and a villa near Antibes. The Romer, Radclyffe imprint continued after its take-over (Romer sat on the board of the Dutch conglomerate) and he became a consultant to and director of various companies in the publishing and newspaper industries. He had been made a life-peer by Churchill’s government in 1953, “for services to the publishing industry”.
Here my mother chuckle
d sardonically: “For services to the espionage industry, you mean. They always wait a bit.”
“That’s all I can dig up,” I said. “There’s not much at all. He calls himself Lord Mansfield now. That’s why it took some tracking down.”
“His middle name is Mansfield,” my mother said. “Lucas Mansfield Romer—I’d forgotten that. Any photographs? I bet you there aren’t.”
But I had found a fairly recent one in Tatler, of Romer standing beside his son, Sebastian, at his twenty-first birthday party. As if aware of the photographer, Romer had managed to cover his mouth and chin with one hand. It could have been anyone: a lean face, a dinner-jacket and bow tie, a head now quite significantly bald. I had had a photocopy made and I handed it over to my mother.
She looked at it expressionlessly.
“I suppose I might just have recognised him. My, he’s lost his hair.”
“Oh yes. And apparently there’s a portrait of him by David Bomberg in the National Portrait Gallery.”
“What date?”
“Nineteen thirty-six.”
“Now that would be worth seeing,” she said. “You might get some idea of what he was like when I met him.” She flicked the photocopy with a nail. “Not this old chap.”
“Why do you want to find him, Sal? After all these years?” I asked as innocuously as I could manage.
“I just feel the time has come.”
I left it at that as Jochen wandered over with a grasshopper in his net.
“Well done,” I said. “At least it’s an insect.”
“Actually, I think grasshoppers are more interesting than butterflies,” he said.
“Run and catch another one,” my mother said. “Then we’ll have supper.”
“My God, look at the time,” I said. “I’ve got a date.” I told her about Hamid and his invitation but she wasn’t listening. I could see she was in Romer-land.
“Do you think you could find out where his house is in London?”
“Romer’s?…Well, I suppose I could try. Shouldn’t be impossible. But what then?”
“Then I want you to arrange to meet him.”
I put my hand on her arm. “Sal, are you sure this is wise?”
“Not so much wise as absolutely vital. Crucial.”
“How am I meant to arrange to meet him? Why would Lord Mansfield of Hampton Cleeve want to meet me?”
She leant over and gave me a kiss on the forehead.
“You’re a very intelligent young woman—you’ll think of something.”
“And what am I meant to do at this meeting?”
“I’ll tell you exactly what to do when the time comes.” She turned to the garden again. “Jochen! Mummy’s leaving. Come and say goodbye.”
I made a bit of an effort for Hamid, though my heart wasn’t really in it. I rather relished these rare evenings alone but I washed my hair and put on some dark grey eyeshadow. I was going to wear my platform boots but didn’t want to tower over him so I settled for some clogs, jeans and an embroidered cheesecloth smock. My burn-dressing was less conspicuous now—under the cheesecloth of the smock it formed a neat lump the size of a small sandwich. While I waited for him I set a kitchen chair outside on the landing at the top of the stairs and drank a beer. The light was soft and hazy and dozens of swifts jinked and dived above the treetops, the air filled with their squeakings like a kind of semi-audible, shrill static. Thinking about my mother, as I sipped my beer, I concluded that the only good outcome of this Romer-search was that it seemed to have cut down on the paranoia and the invalid play-acting—there was no more talk of her bad back, the wheelchair stood unused in the hall—but then I realised I had forgotten to ask her about the shotgun.
Hamid arrived, wearing a dark suit and a tie. He said I looked ‘very nice’ though I could tell he was a little disappointed at the informality of my outfit. We walked down the Woodstock Road in the golden, hazy evening light. The lawns of the big brick houses were parched and ochreous and the leaves on the trees—usually so vividly, so densely green—looked dusty and tired.
“Aren’t you hot?” I asked Hamid. “You can take your jacket off.”
“No, I’m fine. Maybe the restaurant has air-conditioning?”
“I doubt it—this is England, remember.”
As it turned out, I was right, but in compensation numerous roof fans whirred above our heads. I had never been in Browns before but I liked its long dark bar and its big mirrors, the palms and greenery everywhere. Globe lights on the walls shone like small albescent moons. Some kind of jazzy rock music was playing.
Hamid didn’t drink but he insisted on my having an aperitif—vodka and tonic, thanks—and then he ordered a bottle of red wine.
“I can’t drink all that,” I said. “I’ll fall over.”
“I will catch you,” he said, with awkward suggestive gallantry. Then he acknowledged his awkwardness with a shy confessional smile.
“You can always leave some.”
“I’ll take it home with me,” I said, wanting to end this conversation about my drinking. “Waste not, want not.”
We ate our food, chatting about Oxford English Plus, Hamid telling me about his other tutors, how another thirty oil engineers from Dusendorf were arriving, and that he thought Hugues and Bérangère were having an affair.
“How do you know?” I asked—I’d seen no sign of any increased intimacy.
“He’s telling me everything, Hugues.”
“Oh, well…I hope they’re very happy.”
He poured some more wine into my glass. Something about the way he did this and the set of his mouth and jaw forewarned me of some serious conversation coming up. I felt a faint lowering of my spirits: life was complicated enough—I didn’t want Hamid complicating it further. I drank half the glass of wine in preparation for the cross-examination and felt the alcohol kick in almost immediately. I was drinking too much—but who could blame me?
“Ruth, may I ask you some questions?”
“Of course.”
“I want to ask you about Jochen’s father.”
“Oh, God, right. Fire away.”
“Were you ever married to him?”
“No. He was already married with three children when I met him.”
“So: how come you had this child with this man?”
I drank more wine. The waitress cleared our plates away.
“You really want to know?”
“Yes. I feel I don’t understand this. Don’t understand this in your life. And yet I know you, Ruth.”
“No you don’t.”
“Well, I have seen you almost every day for three months. I feel you are a friend.”
“True. OK.”
“So: how did this happen?”
I decided to tell him, or to tell him as much as he needed to know. Perhaps the act of relating such a history would help me also, set it in some kind of a context of my life; maybe make it not less significant (because it had produced Jochen, after all) but provide its significance with some perspective and thereby transform it into a normal slice of autobiography and not some gaping, bleeding, psychological wound. I lit a cigarette and took another long sip of wine. Hamid, I saw, had leant forward on the table, his arms folded, his brown eyes fixed on mine. I am a good listener, his pose was telling me—no distractions, full focus.
“It all began in 1970,” I said. “I had just graduated, I had a first-class degree in French and German from Oxford University—my life lay ahead of me, full of bright promise, all sorts of interesting potential options and avenues to explore, etcetera, etcetera…And then my father dropped down dead in the garden from a heart attack.”
“I’m sorry,” Hamid said.
“Not as sorry as I was,” I said, and I could feel my throat thicken with remembered emotion. “I loved my dad—more than my mother, I think. Don’t forget I was an only child…So I was twenty-one years old and I went a little crazy. In fact, I think I might have had some kind of a nervous breakdown—who
knows? But I wasn’t helped at this difficult time by my mother who, a week after the funeral—almost as if she’d been given orders by someone—put the family home on the market (a lovely old house, just outside Banbury), sold it within a month and, with the money she made, bought a cottage in the remotest village she could find in Oxfordshire.”
“Maybe for her it made sense,” Hamid ventured.
“Maybe for her it did. It didn’t to me. Suddenly, I didn’t have a home. The cottage was hers, her place. There was a guest room that I could use if I ever wanted to stay. But the message was plain: our family life was over—your father is dead—you’re a graduated student, twenty-one years old, we will go our separate ways. And so I decided to go to Germany. I decided to write a thesis on the German revolution after the First World War. ‘Revolution in Germany’ it was called—it is called—‘1918—1923’.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know—I told you, I think I was a bit mad. And, anyway, revolution was in the air. I felt like revolutionising my life. This was something suggested to me and I grabbed it with both hands. I wanted to get away—from Banbury, from Oxford, from my mother, from memories of my father. So I went to university in Hamburg to write a thesis.”
“Hamburg.” Hamid repeated the name of the city as if logging it in his memory bank. “And this is where you met Jochen’s father.”
“Yes. Jochen’s father was my professor at Hamburg. A history professor. Professor Karl-Heinz Kleist. He was supervising my thesis—amongst other things like presenting arts programmes on TV, organising demonstrations, publishing radical pamphlets, writing articles for Die Zeit on the German Crisis…” I paused. “He was a man of many facets. A very busy man.”
I put out cigarette number one and lit cigarette number two.
“You’ve got to understand,” I continued, “it was in a very strange state, Germany, in 1970—it’s still in a strange state in 1976. Some sort of upheaval was happening in society—some sort of defining process. For example, when I went to meet Karl-Heinz for the first time—in the university building where he had his office—there was a huge hand-painted sign across the façade—put up by the students—saying: Institut für Soziale Angelegenheiten —‘The Institute for Social Conscience’…Not ‘The History Faculty’, or whatever. For these students in 1970, history was about studying their social conscience—”