Wrote For Luck

by D. J. Taylor

  ‘What’s behind this curtain?’ Mary wondered. She gestured in the direction of a kind of tarpaulin slung over one of the furthermost beams.

  ‘That?’ Hugo looked affronted again. ‘Some nonsense of Annabel’s. I don’t know. Actually, though, there’s a lot more space there than, I mean, perhaps we ought to…’

  ‘Daddy, it’s not nonsense.’ Julian saw that the red-haired girl had suddenly materialised beside them, at once hugely animated and bitterly upset.

  ‘Darling. Daddy is trying to show Mr and Mrs… Mr and Mrs… and really…’

  ‘Daddy, you mustn’t let them see.’ There was something quite desperate in the girl’s face, Julian saw: lost, worn-out, end-of-tether.

  ‘Hugo…’

  ‘No, darling, really don’t see why I can’t…’ Hugo was calling back over his shoulder as he foraged through the heaped-up boxes. What followed Julian remembered only as a tableau of noise and colour: Hugo’s beetroot face, dust motes hanging in the bright air, the surprisingly loud slither that the tarpaulin made as it hit the floor, the pink, glassy faces of the rows of dolls revealed behind it; the whole perfectly unsinister apart from Annabel’s banshee wail as she threw herself forward in their defence.

  Back in the car (‘Some bloody nonsense, no idea why she, carrying on like that, I mean…’ Hugo had confided on the journey downstairs) they drove through back lanes crowded out with loosestrife and cow parsley. ‘Well?’ Mary said expectantly. What did you think?’

  ‘Not terribly exciting,’ he said, keeping it non-committal despite his fury. ‘What about you?’ ‘Dream house. Just ravishing. Apparently he’s been made redundant, so they’re desperate to sell. And Mrs Warren says they’d let us have eight off for the state of the roof.’

  Julian thought about Hugo being made redundant, the pink face growing steadily pinker as sentence was pronounced. ‘Well, we’re not buying it.’ He was quite surprised at the sound of his voice, the memory of the small girl’s face suddenly streaking into tears. ‘Not if it was the last house in Norfolk.’

  There was silence for a moment. Signposts flicked by to Holkham and Wells-next-the-Sea. ‘You’re cranked up pretty high aren’t you? Mary wondered in faint bewilderment. It was an old, pet phrase they had, from years back, denoting sudden access of emotion, loss of temper.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Really, I am.’

  That night, while Mary slept in front of the rented TV, he wrote out the cheque to the letting agency. Later, in his dreams, the red-haired girl ran on blithely over endless tropical dunes while, far below on the beach, Hugo lay up to his shoulders in sand as the apes, capering with glee, threw ripe fruit at his head. There were ways of behaving, he thought, whole worlds that existed beyond the arc of red-faced barristers and their silent wives, sides that needed to be taken, even here amid the crawling ivy and the distant, shimmering lawns.

  —2002

  Wonderland

  Here in December the view beyond the lecture room had taken a turn for the worse. Like most scenery, it was less than reliable. Late afternoon made the overhang of trees by the lakeside ominous; the lake itself downright sinister. There were no students about. They were in junior common rooms, on buses heading townward, into their varied recreations, out of their heads. On the other hand the orange lights – luminous and Belisha Beacon-like – bobbing about in the darkness suggested that someone had taken a boat out into the lake’s northward reach. This was odd, as boating was forbidden, along with swimming and kayaking. Definitely odd, she thought, as she raised her head from the page of lecture notes – to be honest, a sheet of Basildon Bond writing paper with the words Eliot, tradition & individual talent and epiphany scribbled on it in failing pencil – and, gripping the sides of the lectern with a greater firmness than she had previously allowed herself, told the class that what Virginia Woolf had really brought to the English novel when it came down to it was a mythologisation of the processes of ordinary life.

  As soon as the sentence was out of her mouth she knew she had made a dreadful mistake, but there was no going back. The class stared at her: not with hostility, but blankly, like a double row of moon calves. They were all there, or nearly all of them. Girls mostly. (A couple of sarcastic boys sometimes sat at the sides asking questions calculated to fox her.) There was the frail, anorexic one who had once fainted from hunger during a lecture on Gertrude Stein. The fat-arsed one, whose mother or whose boyfriend or whose back-line buddy in the lacrosse team ought to have been told to tell her that skin-tight jeans above two-tone pixie boots were a thoroughly bad idea if you weighed one hundred and eighty pounds. The dull, sisterly pair who sat together in the very middle of the front row and had never, in the course of a dozen lectures and a real-live fire alarm, said a word either to each other or to anyone else. And then, squashed into the right flank of the back row, the planes of her face so flattened that she might have been pressed against a pane of glass – not a politically incorrect observation, Amy thought, for this was exactly how she looked – Mikado hair-do wilting a little in the heat, Miss Chen, Lily Chen, formerly of the University of Taipei or some such, who, of all the students who had ever waltzed into Amy’s class on mid-period modernism, was the one she most wished to throw out into the street on a charge of false pretences.

  The Belisha Beacon was still bobbing in the prow of the boat and there was a scrabbling noise as a boy with ridiculous dreadlocked hair put his head tentatively round the door-frame, saw that he had come to the wrong room and then unapologetically withdrew. Two miles away in his office Giles would be writing some press release, or emailing the chairman of the Kidderminster Conservative Association. A hundred and twenty miles away in the antiques shop in Camden Sam would be doing – well, what exactly would Sam be doing, except what he always did, which was – let us be realistic about these things – to break his parents’ heart?

  ‘I expect you can think of other modernist writers to whom this mythologising was an essential part of their engagement with form,’ she heard herself saying – brightly, but not so brightly as to introduce an element of pastiche. In fact, Amy had no such expectation, but these days you were supposed to involve them in what were sometimes rather grandly called the potentialities of discourse. Joyce. Eliot. Mansfield. The famous names rattled on, like stones in a tin can. As the lecture hall clock inched forward to five, her audience stirred perceptibly. The race had run its course. The fire had burned down. It was at this moment, at this part of the day, and at this stage in the term that Amy always wanted to throw her notes away and yell: Give up this world. It will do you no good. Return to the lands you came from. Live humbly and put not your trust in academe. But that way madness lay. Some of the overseas students were paying £13,000 for the privilege of hearing what she thought about the early poems of Sacheverell Sitwell. A colleague in the department of Creative Writing had once got into serious hot water for telling her students that the discipline they practised was so institutionalised as to effectively constitute a branch of the Civil Service.

  The bobbing, boat-borne lantern had disappeared now, possibly to the part of the lake that lay out of sight behind the porter’s lodge and the approach to the sports hall. One of the sarcastic boys was rolling a cigarette. Lard-arse was stuffing her roly-poly fingers into a pair of mittens. Lily Chen texted heroically on. Amy brought her hands smartly together, like a supplicating nun in a medieval frieze, concluded her address with the words ‘benchmark of modernism’s assimilation into the literary mainstream of the inter-war era’, waited politely to see if anyone wanted to talk to her – there were no takers – and then stalked out into the over-heated, brightly illuminated third floor corridor of Arts Block Three, home of English Literature, Romance Languages, Viking Studies and, somewhat incongruously, Experimental Psychology.

  There was relief here, but also uncertainty. The way home led along this third floor corridor of Arts Block Three, next to which the other two Arts Blocks now reared unignorably up, but it also led past a n
umber of departmental noticeboards, any one of which might harbour some unwelcome piece of news guaranteed to stall her progress. And, most calamitously of all, it also led her past the office of her immediate superior, Graham Jamieson, Professor Graham Jamieson M.A. (Oxon), PhD (Warks), ‘GBJ’ of the inter-departmental memo and known to the junior staff as ‘Sound of marching footsteps’ owing to his habit of appearing to be in continuous transit along the university’s myriad corridors, its concreted walkways, its greenly landscaped cross-campus tracks, at precisely the time you most wanted to avoid him. He was bearing down on her now, clearly making for his office, but equally clearly making for it at a pace that would enable him to be two yards short by the time she reached the door.

  ‘Hello Amy. I didn’t know you came in on Wednesdays.’

  ‘Well I do,’ Amy said, wanting to add You plan the bloody timetables, Graham, so perhaps you ought to, but in the end merely smiling in what she hoped was a respectful manner. She had never known how to deal with Jamieson. Junior lecturers tended to conceptualise the university on Harry Potter lines. Students were Muggles. The Vice-Chancellor’s office was the Ministry of Magic. Of Jamieson it had several times been said that he had gone over to the Death Eaters. He was also supposed to know the name of the Vice-Chancellor’s wife’s Siamese cat.

  ‘Teaching your modernism class, I expect.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Amy said, wanting to add: see what I mean about planning the bloody timetables? The overhead lighting gave the faces that passed beneath it a washed out quality, and made Jamieson’s look like a piece of cold boiled veal. He had short, stubby fingers, curiously whorled with dirt, as if he had spent the past few hours burrowing far underground.

  ‘Many there?’

  ‘Not too bad,’ Amy said, the vision of the veal still haunting her, as well as one or two other childhood phantasms she could have done without, and then, quite unable to resist the temptation: ‘Even Lily Chen turned up.’

  In the context of Amy’s relations with Jamieson, this was a step too far. On the other hand, the angle of his body – slumped half-way into his office, one hand pressed against the laminated notice that read Professor Graham Jamieson, English – suggested that he had already decided to shanghai her inside.

  ‘Actually I think that’s a tiny bit harsh,’ Jamieson proffered, in his neutral, head-of-department’s tone, which made a change from his matey, we’re-all-in-this-together tone, but was perhaps more sinister. They were standing in his office now, next to the photograph of him shaking hands with Stephen Fry and a bookshelf on which reposed no fewer than 17 hardback copies of his Hardy’s Poetics, of which the Times Literary Supplement had remarked that it was ‘in every sense jejune’. ‘I looked up Lily – Miss Chen’s – attendance record only the other week, and really it compares very well with some of the other students.’

  ‘Not, of course,’ Amy said, ‘that we’re allowed to mark them down if they don’t turn up.’

  ‘Do you know, Amy,’ Jamieson said, pretending, and failing, to be delighted by this remark, and at the same time making an arch out of his fingers, like a small child who has just produced a church and intends to go on and construct a steeple, ‘there are times when I don’t think you like your students very much.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Amy said, thinking that the smile on Stephen Fry’s face as he was being introduced to the proud author of Hardy’s Poetics could not possibly be genuine. The room, with its powerful scent of Jamieson’s personality – there was even a picture of Mrs Jamieson, Clementine she might have been called, in full hill-walking, up-and-down-daleing fig – had begun to oppress her. She wanted to be back in her own world, however devitalising, with its news of the Kidderminster Conservatives and whatever nonsense Sam had sent back from Camden Town. ‘It’s not that she turns up to one seminar in three, or spends the whole time texting when she is there. I dare say I would have done the same at her age, given the chance. It’s just that she can barely speak English and hasn’t read any of the books she’s supposed to be studying.’ And that somebody with full knowledge of her accomplishments let her in in the first place, she wanted to add.

  From outside in the darkness came the sound of an ambulance hurtling in the direction of the lake. The smile on Stephen Fry’s face was definitely a sneer, she decided. He had seen through Jamieson and despised him.

  ‘And then there’s her coursework,’ she concluded, thinking that Jamieson could not make her stay in his office beyond 5.15 p.m. on a Wednesday in December, that she had fulfilled all expectations that could be reasonably held of her, and that she was going to walk out of it whether he liked it or not.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Jamieson said, with what for him was considerable suavity. ‘I’d rather like to discuss that with you, seeing that we’ve had the second examiner’s report. Perhaps you could come and see me in the morning? I’d say now, but the M.A. people have invited a couple of sound poets to come and talk to them and I really ought to be there. Shall we say 10?’

  They said 10. The ambulance siren was still wailing, but the noise of the engine had stopped. Here in his sanctum, surrounded by his paraphernalia – the back numbers of the Journal of Coleridge Studies and the collected works of John Cowper Powys – Jamieson’s face looked less palely ascetic. Perhaps he had some kind of a romantic life. You could never tell. She strode off towards the end of the corridor, down two flights of stairs, out through the breeze-blocked foyer and into the dimly lit stairwell where, eight hours previously, she had chained up her bicycle. It was still in one piece, except that someone had plastered a flyer advertising an LGBT conference slantways across the seat. In the semi-darkness the air was raw and smoky, blown in across the wide East Anglian plain. Eastward, beyond the sports park and the crazed outlines of the dental school, pallid lights winked from the council estates. There would be trouble about Lily Chen’s paper on T.S. Eliot’s classicism, trouble about the paltry forty-nine marks that Amy, after much soul-searching and not a little annoyance, had ended up awarding it; trouble, and then, once she had taken aboard whatever Jamieson had to say about it tomorrow morning, more trouble. Usually the bicycle was her solace, the quinquereme in which she sailed quasi-majestically down the hill and then up the short sliproad that brought her home, but there was no pleasure in it now, not when all she wanted was news of her menfolk, Giles and Sam, the first of whom had, some years ago, mysteriously lost what was supposed to be the safest Conservative seat in the whole of the West Midlands, and the second of whom had said goodbye – there was no way of getting round this, no possible means of glozing over what had happened – to his reason.

  Back at the house there were lights on in hall and kitchen, and a hedgehog lying dead – no doubt symbolically – in the drive. Inside the front door the dog, a debased and rickety dachshund, was toying with some potato peelings it had rooted out of the supposedly unbreachable compost bin and Giles was standing by the telephone, receiver in hand, attending to what sounded like a recorded message playing back. An arctic chill swept out of the drawing room, and she went to adjust the thermostat, noting as she did so that several other early Christmas cards had appeared on the pile on the sideboard and that one of them was from the Prime Minister and his wife.

  ‘The people at Kidderminster called half an hour ago,’ Giles said, coming into the kitchen where she stood eating a banana, with the card – rather a dull one with a picture of Downing Street in the snow still clutched between her fingers. ‘Didn’t even make the shortlist.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ she said, the best wishes from David and Samantha searing into the flesh of her palm. ‘Who did they go for?’

  ‘Anstruther. The Badger. Wimbledon-Smith. The one whose name I can never remember with the prosthetic leg.’ A travelling caravan of aspiring Tory MPs toured the safe seats, always leaving one of their number behind on the morning they broke camp. But Giles’s place at the caravanserai grew ever more precarious. He was fifty three now, a decade and a half older than the Badger a
nd Wimbledon-Smith.

  ‘I shall really have to start thinking seriously about giving this up,’ Giles said haplessly. She liked him much more now that he was no longer in parliament, and there were fewer crackpot phone-callers. ‘There’s a message from Sam on the machine.’

  The doorways of the house – sitting room, dining room, kitchen, downstairs loo – gaped at her. ‘What sort of message?

  ‘Listen for yourself.’

  She put the Christmas card back on the pile and, milk-white face with its high, grey-brown halo of hair looming towards her in the hall mirror, switched on the answerphone. Sam never called anyone’s mobile. As his rigmaroles went, it was far from unprecedented; comforting even, in that it went no further than distances previously covered. The snow-bound tundra might be gleaming out there beyond the circle of firelight, but the wolves had been kept at bay. While she listened she thought of the moment – irrevocably fixed in her mind – when she had decided that Sam was different from other children, and that a substantial part of her life would be given over to exploring that difference and sanding down its edges. It had happened when he was about three years old and she had come upon him sitting on a sofa, cat gathered up in his arms – that he had liked the cat had always been a point in his favour – watching some children’s programme or other, and appreciated – on what evidence she could not quite say – that the look on his face was more than simple intentness, or fixity or vision, that, like some of the outwardly innocuous remarks let fall by Professor Jamieson in his office, it meant trouble. And now there he was, sixteen years later, working in an antiques shop in Camden and living, or not living – nobody was sure about this – with the woman who owned it and leaving bewildering and ironical and sometimes transparently furious messages on the answerphone.