by Adam Thorpe
Now I’ll let you in on a terrible fact, y’all out there. You still awake? How are the fireworks? Sizzled out in the sweet dark mother-fucker muscling softly past deaf to ma song? This fact is as follows: my great-uncle looks under the second linden where he sees his brother. His brother, OK, is also my grandfather, it’s not complicated, it’s logical and straightforward but the slightly older brother under the second linden tree is looking down at the ground. He’s avoiding things. He’s hanging his head in shame. He’s blushing so badly they’re giggling opposite because he can’t hide his ears, it’s not the 1870s or the 1970s – his ears stick out from a kind of Oswald Mosley prototype cut and he’s holding his boater by his thigh because of the wind, you’re allowed to do that if there’s a wind up the avenue. He’s feeling utterly beastly. He’s wishing his little bro had gone to another school. He’s being a selfish prick, is my grandfather, but you can’t really blame him. Siblings don’t always love each other and even if they love each other they don’t always keep it up through thick and thin, and right now it’s pretty thick, it’s the thickest it’ll ever get, and these two brothers didn’t particularly love each other, not particularly, but they didn’t hate each other either. There’s no hate, really, in what my grandfather’s feeling.
He’s called Giles. His younger brother standing in Sunday-black at the top of the steps is called William. You clutching yourself in the gusts up near the gates, I don’t know what your name is but you know William well, you’re a mate, a pal, a buddy, a chum; you’re implicated and you wish you were somewhere else, you wish this wasn’t happening, you wish your mother had loved you enough to hug you each night instead of what she did do, which was peck you on the forehead and pack you off over here for most of the year. Now she’s dead. You think she’s dead. They sent you this letter from Calcutta. If she’s not actually dead then she’s pretty much the same thing as dead and it’s sorrowfully regretted. Sometimes you see her at the top of the stairs to the Upper Dorms where you’re not allowed to go yet. Perhaps when you’re in the Lower Sixth and you’re allowed to go up there you’ll get to meet her at the top of the stairs and she’ll peck you on the forehead but it’ll be cold, it’ll be frost, it’ll be sorrowfully regretted and maybe she’ll tuck you up in bed before the gas farts and Bates comes to get you out of the dark. Perhaps. You imagine her cold bony hands tucking you up and you’d rather not. The thing at the top of the stairs in the early hours when you’ve slipped out for a pluve is probably not your mother, it’s probably the new boy who fell screaming dressed up as the earl’s wife or perhaps it’s the earl’s wife or perhaps it’s just the moonlight through the oval window doing something with the balusters and the cricket-bat stand. Perhaps. One day you’ll slip up there keeping to the edge of the stairs where it might not creak and test it by sweeping your hand. Only, if someone collars you on the Upper Dorm landing you’ll be properly for it. I mean, you can’t go telling Lightfoot or someone you were testing your mother. You just can’t. They’d dandle you like they did the new boy and the sheet might break, again.
My great-uncle at the top of the steps, called William, William Lionel Gainsborough Trevelyan – he’s not looking at my grandfather any more. He’s looking at the lip of the step in front of him. It’s worn, chipped, and in all the usual places. The chips and rounded worn bits, the bits where it shines like water going over rock smoothly, these are in all the usual places, the places he hates, the places which say that this step is the top step of the main entrance to Randle College for Gentlemen and it always shall be for ever and ever amen. And it always was. The earl never existed. If he did exist it was just for a flash before the school came along, bustling up the avenue with its purple gowns and its black gowns and its blue jackets and its screams and canes and slates and bladderdash balls and wagon-loads of iron beds and horsehair mattresses and puffing matrons and a great tureen of pig-slops, making the earl and his little golden-haired children and his white-faced wife flee for their lives across the marsh where they drowned and turned into mist. William knows this. He thought about it once on a butterfly expedition his first summer home at his summer home, at Hamilton Lodge, and he pictured it all and now he knows it was true, he knows it particularly when looking at the lip of the top step he must now go over into all those faces and the thought of going over makes his John Thomas widdle. He didn’t mean it to. It widdled and it’s still widdling, by itself. It’s warming his breeches. He’s pluving in front of the faces, in front of the school, in front of this big horrible assembly with Jefferies at the end of it who drives too fast and says obscene things under his breath and sometimes flicks your neck. It’s widdling on and on and on, as if he’s emptying himself completely of everything inside him but the odd thing is, and this is awfully frightfully odd – he ignores it, he pretends it’s not happening, he pretends that there’s nothing at all pouring silently out of his John Thomas and now anyway it’s stopped. He contracts OK his dick slightly and it starts again, but only for a second. He doesn’t even look down at his breeches. Streadnam’s saying things to him, right up close, hissing in the ear which is still sore and he doesn’t think he can go through with it, he doesn’t think he can be expelled like this with Madre at the other end, probably drunk, and maybe the servants, and maybe Father. He doesn’t know in what manner Father will receive the news. Father might laugh and clap his hands and say lousy bloody lot, anyway, just to spite Mother, whose cousin went to Randle and liked it and was an awful pile of Blues at Oxford. Perhaps Father will never speak to him again. Perhaps Mr Boulter hasn’t told Father and Mother everything. Perhaps by not telling them everything he’s made it sound worse. So William my great-uncle finds himself sliding down the side of a baluster the shape of Mr Boulter right on the edge of the steps, which are like a drop of rock to the sea – once upon a time I’d have had some stockshot of Cornish cliffs here with the sea swirling around at the bottom but I’m passed all that, I’ve accepted my limits, you’re just getting the steps with the gravel at the bottom and some upturned faces and now anyway Streadnam’s swearing and grabbing the Nancy bloody homey’s elbow and someone right up at the other end of the avenue cheers, which is horrible, and there are whistles and a sort of stirring and my great-uncle catches his coccyx on the sharpish base of the baluster and it hurts and a sigh comes out of him and his lower lip is off on its own, talking to itself, in and out and in and out, but there’s only a groan from way down in his tummy and he really thinks he’s going to be frightfully sick but most of him isn’t thinking it all, it’s drowning in a sludge of misery and fear and Streadnam’s breath and Streadnam’s grip on his elbow and a great sound echoes off the brick front of Cavendish House and it’s him, it’s his cry, it’s the cry that came out instead of a retch and it won’t stop.
I can’t stand it any more. I can’t stand being right there and doing nothing about it. And it’s only 1913. What’ll most people not be saying right now after the fireworks and the duckings in the fountain and the Auld Lang Syne crap? I couldn’t stand being right there and doing nothing about it. I couldn’t stand being right there amongst the Polish silver birches and doing nothing about it. I couldn’t stand being right there in the tidy boulevard with the nice old-fashioned cars and doing nothing about it. I couldn’t stand being right there in front of the TV news and doing nothing about it. That’s what most people won’t be saying, and the rest’ll be saying that was a good century, we tidied things up, but we didn’t go far enough. We didn’t get rid of the last gypsy and the last Jew. The last queer and the last Commie. The last revisionist and the last lousy film director who can’t make films any more but still does, somehow. The last Arab. The last person without a bank balance. The last everyone.
Hey, I’m sorry. My dad had a black shirt that wasn’t for funerals folded neatly in his bottom drawer and once socked a Mr Weinstein. Mr Oswald Mosley wrote him a letter of thanks. Mr Oswald Mosley had his heart on his sleeve and a nice grip. I’ve been having a dialogue with my daddy-o for
fifty-plus years. He meant well but he would have operated the oven doors and he was a lousy cook. He would have operated the oven doors perhaps. Maybe he wouldn’t have operated the oven doors but he would have done if Mr Mosley had asked him to nicely. Or not even nicely. My dad’s old man was jiggered by a loan shark and the loan shark was a greengage Jew. The loan shark was a rotten apple. Rotten apple’s make the healthy apples rotten, it’s well known, it’s not complicated, it’s a fact, son. All manky, son. If he could’ve cleared out the rotten apples he could’ve cleared out the slippery sweet mush of his origins. He’d have operated the oven doors on that – making apple stew, polishing society, strengthening the core, the pips, the nice big supermarket Granny Smiths you can see y’scowling mug in, the giant Houston reds you can play tenpins with and then crunch. Perfection. If Hitler had gotten in and still lost I’d have had a very embarrassing time with my dad. The Son of the Oven-Door Operator, at your local saloon bar now. Hey, he might have shopped me, not me him, if Adolf had hung around long enough. He might have done. Blood is thicker than water but I was a freak. I was a rotten apple. I was from my mother’s side. The sludge we never talked about over the Kellogg’s. My great-uncle’s blood flowed in my veins. I was a scug. He’d have shovelled me in, if asked nicely, my dad would’ve. Clang. The ultimate bloody sacrifice. Bloody fucking Abraham. Arse-hole. Oswald in the skies. Well, if I’d ever been old enough. If Hitler had gotten in for a bit and I’d grown up my true variant self. Why do I bother to go visit him? They should build an effigy of my dad and burn it. The Old Year. The Old Century. The Old Millennium.
I’ve gotten all worked up, look. All sweaty, all manky.
Sorry, Greg. I know you’re quite fond of him. That’s ’cos he’s old and blameless. The toothless have no bite. Corker of a character, what? Gave sinew to your workin’-class origins, pride of place among all those public schoolers and posh compers palming themselves off as one of ve peep-hole, the wankers. They jeered at y’dad though, didn’t they, them art school/film school/poly-put-the-kettle-on poseurs? You only had to say my name and they’d say who? Then you’d explain.
Then they’d look me up in the Biographica Cinematica and decide I was OK, I was perfect for tossing casually over the canteen table with a knowing snort, just to impress the others who hadn’t a clue, but who knowingly snorted anyway because it was that sort of crew, swinging me and Ken Russell round by the ankles while they slobbered over Jarman or some other fake.
Hey, is this diverting? Am I talking to anyone out there? Can you believe I’m this wound up thinking about my great-uncle who—
Later, later.
Long before I was squeaked aht me mam’s mangle, anyway.
Meanwhile: I’m going for a long shot up at the gates. I’m the other side of the gates. I’m peeping through the wrought iron but first I’m focused on the iron. It’s got rust spots. There’s a spiral and I’m right up close, so close I can break a blister of black paint on the tip of the flange but I won’t because Jefferies is right next to me and anyway I’m a phantom. I’m the unseen guest, the unborn blob, the guy who popped out screaming in something not yet thought of on this fine smoky chilly morning back now: an air raid. Air raids hadn’t been thought of. If I were to turn round and say to Jefferies the coachman, hey, schmuck, I was born in an air raid, he’d blow smoke in my face and think I was talking dirty. Yehes, so were I, he’d say. And I bin tryin’ to get back in ever since. Heh heh heh.
Heh. Yeah, Jefferies is filthy-minded. He was a steam-plate operator in the GWR works at Swindon until he got some of his hand in the way. He usually holds the reins between his right claw, when he bothers. I’m not saying plenty of people don’t get their hands in the way of things in 1913, because they do, it’s a time full of tackles and weights and chains and grinding tools, of stamps and presses and punches, of an absence of safety helmets and asbestos gloves and shop-floor regulations beyond not spitting ’cos spit dries out and sends off plumes of tubercle germs and not swearing ’cos swearing upsets the ladies and God. I’m sounding like John Fowles in that book I nearly got the film rights to. I’m sounding like Graham Swift in that book I never even tried to get the film rights to because I was already out of decline and into fall by then. Who cares? I can sound like who I like, I’m fifty-three. I’m looking through the gate. I’m changing the focus so the black blister blurs and fades – hey, iron is that insubstantial? – and the avenue turns from a golden fuzz to an avenue with dead leaves and boots on the edge and a big house at the end with steps on which, take my word for it because they’re pretty small, two figures descend and a third doesn’t.
The boots are boys. They lean in and watch, their hands flutter, their boaters are held, they turn towards me but mostly they don’t. The weird pair of boots are yours, because you’re in the wrong togs. I won’t embarrass you further. But you’re leaning in, you’re watching, it’s getting interesting, you didn’t do anything –you’re thinking about the arithmetic class and Mr Holloway-Purse more than you’re thinking about your chum, Trevelyan. He’s a chum but you call him Trevelyan. Actually, you call him Trevels. Bates calls him Margery, for some reason. Cowdrey and most of the boys in the Sixth call him The Purulent Pleb, which is rather tricky to say smoothly but they do, they’ve practised, they practise it in chorus after lights out to the tune of ‘The Eton Boating Song’, it’s a frightful wheeze, it’s bloody. You think this is because Trevelyan’s pop is Business rather than Law or Church or Court or Land. They’ve got a name for you, too.
You know who’s coming down the steps? It’s my great-uncle and Mr Philips.
Mr Philips and Mr Holloway-Purse have a relational problem. First, Mr Holloway-Purse makes a point of spelling Mr Philips’ name with two ls. There is a lot of opportunity to do this, because Mr Holloway-Purse is always writing notes to Mr Philips about infractions mainly and leaving them in his pigeon-hole. Mr Philips is a housemaster, his house is the smaller junior house, the tiny one tucked away behind the kitchens in what used to be the earl’s mistress’s cottage. OK. Ahem. Take a dive into your highball. Relax. The infractions are to do with not doing the right thing at the right time, or doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Walking on Pod’s grass is only permitted if you are not in Lower School with the exception of Sunday till midday. No one knows who made this rule, but it was in the founding fathers’ rules, and Mr Holloway-Purse knows the founding fathers’ rules by heart. Long before Mr Holloway-Purse came along Sunday until midday had become all weekend. Mr Holloway-Purse rapped on the Master’s door one day. The Master had never once looked at the founding fathers’ rules. He’d absorbed them like a loofah. There was nothing written down that said Lower School boys could walk all over the Pod’s lawn all weekend, although Mr Boulter pretended to try to find it in his drawers, trying not to roll the rum bottles, because it had been like that ever since he had arrived with his downy little beard thirty years ago. Mr Philips had been seen in the company of two new boys walking across the Pod’s lawn at one thirty-five on Sunday afternoon. Mr Boulter agreed with Mr Holloway-Purse that this was not what a tight ship was all about, that the Great Randle Rebellion of 1832 grew from just such small beginnings, that the greatest army in the world was not born from slipshod drill and murky buttons, that Mr Holloway-Purse, while having the highest respect for Mr Boulter’s Arnoldian reputation, could not expect the Master to have his nose in every nook. Christ, I’m sounding like Dickens. What I’m trying to get over to you all is the hidden import of this action of Philips, this succouring of the boy who was lately in his little Junior House where Mr Philips was kindly but firm. Honeydew Philips, he’s called – I’ll come onto that, I’ll come on to that.
Still Three: go see it. Honeydew Philips, posh portrait of, circa 1910. Note the wing collar, the bow-tie, the lounge suit, the waistcoat, the little snowy range of the handkerchief in the top pocket, the silk topper in his lap. Neat, huh? But irrelevant. It’ll make you think he’s not around any more, he’s a fossil, he’s a fl
y in amber, he’s dodo dead and gone because he’d rather die than have to wear jeans. He’ll have one of those ridiculous voices that clip and drawl with built-in scratches and static effects. He’s a millennium old, he’s pre it all except history, he’s stiff and respectable, he’s the drawer that sticks, he’s the one the other side of the fog. He’s too real for TV, too echt for Merchant-Ivory, he wouldn’t know how to move, he’d move funny, he’d move jerky, we’d have to look away and hide our snorts as he flickered and jerked and tried to talk.
But even the eyes are funny. People in those days had funny eyes. Everyone except Mr Holloway-Purse had eyes that you don’t find these days, even on centenarians. Everyone’s eyes changed, on a certain day, and no one noticed.
Go look at his eyes. Fix yourself a snort of mother’s ruin, on ice. Go look at his eyes and then go look in the mirror.
SORRY ABOUT THE shoving, that was a complicated manœuvre with so many of you out there and lubricated in all the wrong places, especially with that jerk in the dress shaving. Anyway, see what I mean? His eyeballs are kind of rubbed up, like they’ve been spat on and polished. Those are pearls that were his eyes, as Gielgud might have put it if only. Maybe they cried more. Maybe for them the storms always cleared. There was a lustre to the grey light, the sun was out, their eyes were awash with rain but it was going to be a fine day. I’ve stared into those eyes and tried to find in them my great-uncle’s face twinned and smiling gratefully up – tried to find the kindness and civility that went. I mean, that went generally from the world. I can’t. I can only find the kindness and civility that didn’t go. That’s still around the place. It’s like the amount of carbon I think it is in the atmosphere. It doesn’t change. Surely it doesn’t change. The cornea doesn’t change, bar accident or disease. The cornea doesn’t change like skin, like the rest of the body, it sticks it out right through until whatever. Bet you didn’t know that, fur-eyes. Did you see it in the mirror? The kindness and civility? No? Say, what a shame. It must have got lost somewhere. Mr Holloway-Purse has been up to his old tricks. He’s stolen your marbles. He’s playing dead-man’s tap with your pearls.