“Delightful young men such as yourselves are destined to be invited to all the most important formal occasions in university life,” the salesmen flattered transparently. Rupert rolled his eyes at Julian behind the man’s back and they left the shop together without making any further purchases. Rupert, an old Etonian, already owned a tailcoat from his school days and Julian could not have afforded to buy one even if he had wanted to, which he did not. But a friendship between the two men had been established there on Broad Street. Rupert was a generous-minded young man and enjoyed sharing his privileges with his clever new friend. Halfway through that first Michaelmas term he invited Julian to stay at Cuckmere for a weekend.
“My father is an MP and I know you and he would get on like the blazes, what with you being so obsessed with politics.”
Rupert had been right. Sir Philip Blunt had taken to Julian immediately, as had his wife, who was touched by the way Julian welcomed the maternal advice and encouragement that her own children rejected. Once a month, sometimes more, Julian had gone with Rupert to stay at the lovely grey flint house in Sussex. With his charming manners and eagerness to learn, as well as the respect and admiration he demonstrated for his friend’s parents, Julian had been unofficially adopted by the Blunt family and the household that served it. Julian sometimes felt he had landed in clover. Rupert’s parents fulfilled for him all that Voltaire’s “best of all possible worlds” promised.
However, there were aspects of his friendship with Rupert that made Julian uneasy. A life formulated on self-indulgence was surely a wasted life, Julian argued with Rupert and his Bullingdon Club contemporaries, who uniformly believed that life was too short to devote to anyone but oneself and one’s friends. The group of undergraduates who lived in Spartan digs in a house on Beaumont Street near the Randolph Hotel represented a tempting intellectual stratosphere frustratingly far from Julian’s reach. After poetry recitals and talks at the English Club, where Julian had shaken hands with members of this cerebrally rigorous crowd, he would return to the comfortable rooms he shared with Rupert feeling inadequate and angry, convinced he was squandering his Oxford years on inconsequences and misplaced values.
And then there were the girls. Julian’s girlfriend, Charlotte Bellowes, was two years younger than Julian, lived in London and was in the middle of her coming-out year. She had confessed to him that she wasn’t mad about books: “take them or leave them,” was her view. She and Julian had kissed of course, mainly at coming-out parties in deserted billiard rooms, in long galleries in which ancestral portraits hung beneath gilded ceilings or in the large darkened gardens of smart London houses that belonged to the parents of her fellow debutantes. Once they had found a derelict tennis court at the back of a huge Kensington mansion, and that night, after a great deal of pink champagne, Julian had been allowed to run his hand along the smooth stretch of thigh that emerged from the cuff of Charlotte’s silk cami-knickers. It had been like plunging into a pool of melted chocolate.
Everyone agreed that Charlotte—or Lottie, as her friends called her—was frightfully pretty. But there was something missing in the conversations Julian had with her. He had tried to discuss with her this ever-recurring feeling of guilt as they ate cucumber sandwiches in the Palm Court of the Ritz. But the subject invariably reverted to the next social engagement and to the people who might be invited to attend. To tell the truth, he was bored by her. Lottie didn’t even like going to the movies, pronouncing cinemas to be a hotbed of germs and smelling of vinegar and chips. Chips were Julian’s favourite food. One day he would find someone to love who also shared his passion for chips. And if she didn’t, he would somehow make her.
He longed to actually go to bed with Lottie but the prospect was out of the question. Apart from the moment on the tennis court referred to half jokingly by Lottie as “Lottie’s Lapse,” she had once allowed Julian to bury his face in her neck although he had not enjoyed the experience very much. The bitter smell of her skin surprised him by reminding him of his mother. Lottie had anyhow made it clear that she drew a line at the point where her pretty emerald necklace settled in the hollow of her collarbone and Julian did not object. Once after another cocktail too many Lottie had slumped against Julian on a pink velvet sofa in a Belgrave Square drawing room and admitted that her mother had told her that not only did “it” hurt quite a lot but that the whole sticky rigmarole was frankly overrated.
If Julian had been older and married, the option of sleeping with another woman would never have arisen. Everyone did it. And even the older single man was able to pursue his options within the legions of bored, cooperative wives that glittered and littered the aristocratic drawing rooms of Britain. How had it come about that the older generation had it easy while Julian’s own younger frustrated age-group was compelled to wait?
Sometimes Julian wondered if he would ever acquire the expertise to become a good lover. The undergraduate women at Oxford, their never-quite-clean hair invariably pinned back to reveal proboscises developed for snouting out fact and never poetry, were universally unappealing. The idea of going to London and paying a tart for the experience did not attract him, although he did kick himself for not having answered the knock on his bedroom door at Cuckmere Park last weekend. Lady Bridgewater, the American wife of a senior member of the cabinet who at fifty-seven was still lovely in a faded sort of way, had squeezed his knee most enticingly under the table at dinner. But Rupert had succumbed to a similar squeeze only recently, and even though Rupert had assured him the experience was a bit of a letdown, Julian did not feel like comparing first-time notes, good or bad, with Rupert.
Reflecting on his misplaced behaviour with Evangeline during that awful evening at Bryanston Court, he was annoyed that he had half intentionally led her on. He could not think what had got into him. She was almost old enough to be his mother, although she seemed quite unbothered by the difference in their ages. Her gauche behaviour suggested she was quite innocent of any physical experience of love (or lust) although, God knows, by her age Evangeline must surely have had dozens of lovers. He kicked himself that on first sight of the overweight middle-aged woman in the unflattering and revealing dress he had tried to conceal his revulsion by making his usual mistake of going too far the other way and flirting with her. As soon as his fateful wink prompted that look of eager desperation Julian knew it would lead to trouble.
Rather to his relief, Lottie had been unable to come on the Easter expedition to the north of England. There was a stubbornness about her when she made up her mind. She had a dress fitting, she informed him, and two amusing-sounding tea parties already written into her engagement diary. And anyway, she had heard so often from Julian of his determination to see life in those northern towns and felt it might not be her cup of tea; she was bound to be a nuisance and get in the way. Far better that he borrowed May, the Blunts’ driver, who would not interrupt, knew her place and would let Julian concentrate on everything he wanted to find out about up in the North, whatever it was. As the suggestion that May should drive him there had actually come from Lottie, who saw no threat in a servant joining her sweetheart on such a trip, Julian felt quite guiltless when he agreed with Lottie that it was an inspired solution.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The trip up north had begun with a minor catastrophe for May. In her anxiety to make sure the car was properly packed, she had left her overnight case behind. Julian could not guess what was so wrong, as his intriguing young companion fell silent. An uneven flush, an unruly series of blotches, was spreading upwards from May’s collarbone. He had an awful feeling she was on the point of tears.
“Do you want to confess? Have you silently run over anything? Oh I am so sorry. Not funny. Sorry.”
May reddened even more.
“I have left my overnight bag behind.”
For a moment they were both silent.
And then Julian remembered he had two spare shirts. “You can have one of them. We will buy a toothbrush and some soap. And
after all, it is only for a few nights.”
What an idiot she was, she had told him. But she had accepted his old shirt and reported the next morning that she had slept better than she had for many days.
The three young people chose to have their breakfast in a nearby café rather than at the grubby linoleum kitchen table in the boarding house with its bottle of Worcester sauce, piles of ancient crumbs, and unidentifiable slops of liquid on its greasy oilcloth. Over a cup of tea and a thick slice of bread, Peter said he was intending to accompany his friend Eric to Spain before the year was out. Despite the short span of their acquaintance, Peter’s passion for the cause made his invitation to Julian to join them sound persuasive. The Communist Party could do with all the help it could get against the right-wingers, Peter told him eagerly. If Julian thought the mining industry was in trouble over here he should also take a firsthand look at the working conditions in Spain. A major conflict over there was not only inevitable but also imminent. Peter wanted to be there to record it and Julian assured him he would think seriously about his proposition.
As they left the stifling heat of the brightly lit café, thanking Peter and wishing him well with his research and the writing of his paper, they adjusted their eyes to the darkness outside. Both were in a jaunty mood as, turning the corner, they were confronted with what looked like a giant orange gobstopper balanced on a tall black pole. Julian recognised the Belisha beacon at once. The transport minister, Mr. Hore-Belisha, was a parliamentary friend of Sir Philip’s and had stayed at Cuckmere the preceding summer just after the first beacon had gone up. He had joked to Julian that pedestrians had at last won their independence from the tyranny of cars.
“You are witnessing an historic landmark of the future,” Julian assured May in an exaggeratedly dramatic voice.
But May was looking bored.
“I thought you would be interested, what with you being a car buff,” he said in a tone of mock-hurt.
“Interested in lamps on sticks? You must be mad. Anyway, I’ve seen them before. They’re all over the place. You notice things like that when you drive a car, you know.”
She spoke in such a robust way that Julian burst out laughing at his pomposity. And then May laughed too. Together they walked through the streets, their carefree mood evaporating as they became conscious of the curiosity they invited in passers-by with their clean, neat clothes and their healthy, well-fed cheeks. At first the greyness and despair that Julian had anticipated seemed to be everywhere. Row upon row of identical buildings, built back to back, stretched out in front of them. Washing lines hung in the backyards, on which newly washed clothes were flapping, already grubby from air that tasted bitter with coal dust. Gutters were full of discarded crusts and tea leaves. Miniature cemeteries crowded out the flowerbeds that must once have brought some brightness to the front gardens.
May heard Julian’s indrawn breath. A man was hunched against a wall for support, coughing the life out of his guts, gasping and heaving between each spasm. A sailor was crossing the road, carrying a parrot on his arm, the blue and green plumage of the ragged bird muffled as if it had been dipped in muddy water. A small boy flinched in the doorway of a shop, as a woman raised her fist, lowering it as soon as she noticed she was being watched, her anger temporarily thwarted from making contact with its target. Bunched up at the street corners, and standing outside the high iron-grilled factory gates, groups of men smoked, huddled together in twos and threes, their caps dragged well down over their eyes, their jacket collars pulled up firmly to their necks, the top button done up. Every moment or two one of them would suck in his cheeks, before landing a globule of foamy spit on the pavement.
“These men and two and a quarter million more cannot find work,” Julian said more to himself than May, shaking his head.
But May was not listening. She was looking at a man whose face was so ingrained with coal that it seemed that no amount of washing could ever remove the stains. May smiled at him, her gesture returned with an expression that lit up the young man’s face, his smile revealing white teeth that dazzled in contrast to his sooty lips.
“For a moment that boy reminded me of my brother,” she said, smiling once again at the thought, as she and Julian walked on. “Same sort of age, I think.”
And as they both looked more closely they began to see that among the scenes of hopelessness there was an intense vitality to these streets. Groups of shoeless children were playing near the steps of the houses, jumping, hula-hooping and chasing one another around the cold hard pavements with as much abandon as the children May had watched playing on the powdery sand of her island home. Women stood in animated conversation, sharing grudges and gossip, their arms tightly folded over their dingy aprons. Some knelt, their backs rounded over a pail of sudsy water, or squatted with a brush, demonstrating their pride in producing the most gleaming of thresholds. A couple of women were turning a skipping rope, their chatter uninterrupted by the children who hopped over the whirling arc between them. Two little girls were absorbed by something in the sky directly above them and, following their gaze, May and Julian made out a vapour trail emerging from the tail of a high-flying aeroplane, as it formed the word “OXO” in blurry white letters.
Julian closed his eyes as shame began to creep over him. What had he been expecting to gain by this cursory visit north? On the way up he had tried to defend the research-based purpose of the visit to May. His own words returned to him now and he regretted them. Over breakfast May had told Peter about some of the families who lived in her cousins’ neighbourhood in East London. The children, many of whom had so little, played together and laughed together as if the riches of the world were theirs. Women who spent back-bending hours of the day cleaning and cooking and doing their best to manage, viewed life with a cheerfulness that was instinctive, infectious. And men, even though unemployment meant they struggled to maintain their natural place in the hierarchy of society by providing for their families, were rarely beaten entirely. May’s ability to look beneath the superficial was unmistakable. Her insight startled him.
That evening the mayor had moved on and two single rooms had become available in the hotel. Julian suggested they go out to a film and a plate of fish and chips afterwards. As Popeye, the spinach-eating sailor, appeared on the cinema screen accompanied by his hoop-eyebrowed girlfriend, May was unable to suppress a shout.
“That’s it! It’s her! Different body but same face!”
“Who?” hissed Julian, taken aback by the little outburst.
“Tell you later,” she promised.
But later Julian had forgotten to ask her why she had laughed so much at the sight of Olive Oyl, although he did notice that May pushed the chips to one side of her plate, leaving them uneaten. By an unspoken agreement they did not dwell on the sights and experiences of the day they had just spent together. Both sensed a need to leave the subject alone for a while. Instead, May wanted to know about Julian’s life in Oxford. She had glimpsed that beautiful city once from the window of a coach, she told him, and longed to visit it again properly. Julian told her how his father had taught at the university, how instead of sending him to sleep Matthew Arnold’s dreaming spires had woken his mind and how long hours in the Bodleian library raced by as he read everything he could lay his hands on. Locke and Berkeley and other writers May had never heard of seemed to be speaking directly to him, he said, although he couldn’t get on with Kant. And for that matter he was having a hard time getting on with his flatmate.
“Rupert is a member of a club called the Bullingdon,” he told May. “God alone knows what they all get up to except drink and eat and demolish as much precious property as possible. About ten years ago club members smashed up nearly five hundred windows in Peckwater Quad at Christ Church. They are a bunch of vacuous, spoiled, snobbish, stupid idiots,” he said, suddenly furious. “And what’s more, their current hero is Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader, one of the most wrong-headed men in Britain. God knows where it is
all going to lead.”
“Why on earth do you share a flat with Rupert?” May wanted to know.
“I sort of fell into it,” Julian admitted. “The truth is I am annoyed with myself for not having ended the arrangement. Too late now, though. But that’s my trouble. I say I will do things and I mean it when I say it, but then the motivation slips away. But I do rate his parents. Especially her. Poor Joan. She worries so much about Rupert. She deplores all that right-wing talk.”
Julian changed the subject.
“Tell me about you,” he said to May. “What sort of place did you grow up in? What do the West Indies look like? I know nothing about that part of the world.”
May needed no more prompting. She began to tell Julian of the monkeys who hung from their stringy arms in the trees around the plantation, waiting for the right moment to sneak a banana from the lunch table. She spoke of the rustling sound made by the wind that whispered its way up and down the green swaying sugarcane. She told of the brilliance of the new growth of the cane, the colour of crushed peas, and described the way she would peel the waxy skin from the stalks and suck out the sweet sticky juice. She spoke of the markets held in village squares, where the country people would come, balancing baskets on their heads packed high and tight with shiny avocadoes, olive- and coral-coloured mangoes, lemons still attached to their leafy branches, shiny green peppers and crescent-moon-shaped chillies. And without mentioning her mother, or the accident, May told him about the island’s deserted beaches, which lay below cliffs lined with scrawny hawthorn trees, bent almost double by years of storms that had tried to dislodge them from their precarious footholds. Finally, when she began to describe the sea itself, in all its mesmeric, ceaseless, churning, dangerous, deep blue beauty she fell silent, floored by the power of her memories.
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