Roger telephoned me from Heathrow Airport the day he came back from Kenya, and appeared at my mother’s door two hours later. I saw him from the landing window before he rang the bell, and made my way sedately downstairs, containing a surge of youthful joy. And there he was, fulfilling my every tremulous expectation, tossing dark schoolboy hair from his eyes, smiling dimples from bronzed cheeks, travelling light in every sense, being suspended above geographical and social involvement.
‘Your doorbell is in the key of D Major,’ he said. My mother’s doorbell was one which played a snatch of the Big Ben chime. Welcoming, but nonetheless pregnant with suitably petit bourgeois implication, it was called ‘The Harmonious Chime’.
‘It’s not my doorbell,’ I said defensively, ‘it’s my mother’s.’ We began as we went on. Roger representing, with his arrogant febrile grace, what seemed to me an awesome accumulation of high breeding. Me, breast-beating and struggling to improve myself. King Cophetua and the Beggarmaid. But I noticed only that Roger’s light blue eyes showed themselves to quite startling effect in his delicate brown face. He had in his left hand two duty-free Johnny Walker whisky carrier bags bulging with freckled mangoes, and all for me. He had argued zealously with customs officials to get them through and had succeeded, because conviction can move mountains and Roger had conviction in no small measure. I believe that Roger would have put his hand in the fire rather than bow to false gods, at that time.
Roger ate my mother’s chocolate cake with a schoolboy appetite which charmed her and told us that he had spent the three days before his flight lying on a beach in Mombasa. He pulled photographs out of an overnight bag, stuck with East African Airways luggage-labels, of Arab dhows and market stalls. He had a photograph of a rickety little Asian hotel with a tin roof and a veranda. The hotel was signposted ‘Bond Street Hotel, Piccadilly’, and bore an enamelled hoarding advising one to drink Coca-Cola ice-cold. They depicted another world which he had slowly come to enjoy. When he had finished at Oxford, he said, he would go back to East Africa and teach. It embarrasses me to confess with what innocent suburban promptitude I began to build into my scheme of things the unlikely prospect of becoming a schoolmaster’s wife on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. I would peg up sun-bleached terry napkins on a line which fluttered among burgeoning hibiscus bushes, while Roger stretched long legs and paused in his perusal of exercise books, covered in brown wrapping-paper, to contemplate, contentedly, his satisfactory domestic situation.
‘My family thinks I’m arriving tomorrow,’ Roger said. ‘I’ll spend tonight in Golders Green with my grandmother.’ The announcement opened up for us the delightful prospect of being on the loose in the metropolis for one whole day.
‘Is she expecting you?’ my mother said. Roger shook his head.
‘I’ll telephone her a bit later,’ he said.
‘But your parents,’ my mother said incredulously. ‘Won’t they be at the airport tomorrow to meet you?’ That was what one did. One met people at airports. Particularly one’s kith and kin.
‘My parents?’ Roger said. ‘No fear.’ Roger’s parents would more likely have expected him to earn the train fare home, or to leg it with the help of the Ordnance Survey map and a little ‘O’ Level Geography. For my mother this rather confirmed that the Goldmans, who had in the first place been irresponsible enough to have had six children, were now as neglectful of them as was to be expected. She sighed, displaying the merest hint of vicarious pique.
We walked, later, on Primrose Hill, Roger and I, and pressed our faces and limbs inexpertly together in the privacy of the wooded verges.
‘I love you,’ Roger said. ‘I missed you. I thought about you all the time.’
‘Me too,’ I said.
‘You’re so lovely,’ Roger said. I remember that as he said this I was too much aware that I had on my cheekbone a small rash of pubescent spots, partially obscured with medicated cake makeup, and that I was humbled before his perfect brown skin.
‘I can do you the Coventry Carol on the descant recorder,’ I said. ‘The two flats and the one sharp.’ Roger smiled and kissed me rather clumsily on the mouth, causing my earring to fall off into the grass.
At the top of the hill Roger initiated a game which we played with sunlight. We stared into the sun, then covered our eyes with our fingers and described the patterns on the retina. Endlessly repeating cones and vibrant amoebae in tones of red and green. Then he talked about Oxford. Roger loved Oxford. It was the place where he had spent his childhood holidays, away from his quarrelling parents. His grandfather who, inconceivably, persisted in refusing to harbour Jane, had always been perfectly willing to harbour Jane’s children, provided his wife made the arrangements for their visits. Roger’s perception of this person to whom Jane referred as ‘the old Gothic Horror’ was of somebody who played three-legged races with one in the Fellows’ garden and allowed one to try out his pipes. Oxford was a place of magical cobbled lanes which led to the sweet-shop. It was a place where tea came with strawberries before the peal of bells for Evensong, where Grandmother, in a Pringle sweater and thick stockings, took one to watch punters from the bridge over the High Street, and where one went through doors into secret gardens with high stone walls. He never came to see it as a place afflicted with too much trad and old stones. He was not, as I was, embarrassed by the idea of privilege. He described to me with an almost holy joy the journey he would make from the railway station, past the litter and grot beside the slime-green canal, past the jail and on into St Ebbes towards the ample splendour of Christ Church.
‘You can come and see me all the time,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you the bridge where Jont and I had spitting competitions.’ In the contemplation of Oxford’s sweet privilege we confronted our awakening selves. Roger slung his leg rather daringly over mine as we reclined on the grass.
‘Think of a fate worse than death,’ he said. It made us both laugh briefly, excitedly, the melodramatic phrase and the reality behind it. Roger had used it with a sure intuition to cover, thereby, the awkwardness of our inexperience.
I had visited Oxford for the first time that summer and only briefly. I had driven with Jane to deposit Rosie with the grandparents for a week. They had moved by this time from their college house among the cobbled lanes to a comfortable Edwardian structure northwards of the town centre, set in a garden full of plum trees. Through the garden gate one could see, in the back garden, a sundial held up by two stone putti agreeably covered in lichen. On the way Jane had told me that her father kept a collection of antique Japanese swords in his study.
‘A very nasty collection of old knives for killing people,’ she said. With a sudden crazy panic I had watched Rosie walk towards the door of a house full of knives.