NEXT MORNING—A FRIDAY, Midsummer’s Eve—I busy myself with a couple of the meetings I’m expected to attend by virtue of various obscure elections and nominations. Then, after a swift lunch of salmon and roast beef from the cold table in the West Room, I finally get around to sorting out the arrangements for my long-planned Scottish holiday. I queue first at the GWR Station for the tickets, then again at the City Post Office for all the stamps, clearances and cross-county passes that must go with them. The woman behind the counter eyes me through the spittle-frosted glass before she stamps my documents and slides them back to me. Perhaps she remembers my pestering her with queries about letters to my imagined aunt in Canada. I find myself wondering if she misses my acquaintance, and who emptied his desk upstairs in the Censor’s Office, who scratched his name off the tea club…
Outside, Oxford smells dizzily of the sour gas of its overstretched drains on this warm late afternoon, and is busier than ever with people up from London, people in from the suburbs, people down from the country. Everything about the city seems hectic and overstuffed today. The wares of the shops are tumbling out into the street, the pubs are bustling, pigeons are pecking at pools of sick, there’s a queue for pink-iced “Midsummer’s Eve Cakes” outside Boffins Bakery at Carfax, and everywhere there are too many cars.
I pause for a pint of Hall’s Gold Medal as I pass the Bear. The back bar, which used to resound to the click of dominoes and the splat of spittle on sawdust, has been carpeted and is filled with the shrieking of female voices. “We’re getting tiddled,” one of them explains. I sup my beer and knock back a couple of tablets, sitting close enough to the juke-box to listen to the songs I’ve put my penny in for over this jolly racket. April Showers. Mad About The Boy. Waiting For Nowhere… But today, their easy sentiment is lost on me. People meet, they fall in love, they marry, they have children: then their lives are wrenched apart because of some accident of birth or history. They disappear, and no one even seems to notice. Even I—I just sit here and drink my beer and nurse my pains and my self-pity when I should be standing on the table and yelling. What, I wonder, has happened to the world? Events used to go so predictably. Britain makes a treaty with Germany; France makes one with Spain. Portugal secures independence from Castile; Henry the Navigator pushes down to explore the coast of North Africa; envious Spain joins in; soon, the world is circumnavigated, America discovered. Cause and effect. But now, history consists of random twists and turns. A tiny earthquake in Bogota causes a gas leak in Ealing. The assassination of an Archduke in some obscure Balkan city brings about a World War.
The music ends and I stumble outside. The air feels stuffy this evening as my heart starts to pound and cold needles stab at my chest and hands. I shake out a third dose of tablets from my bakelite box and swallow them dry. When a 159 bus slows and stops beside me along New Road, I climb aboard it on impulse, drawn by its purposeful thrum, the stale scent of cigarette smoke and summer bodies, the fact that it will take me to somewhere that isn’t Oxford.
I share my journey down the Eynsham Road on this Midsummer’s Eve with two middle-aged chain-smoking Spanish tourists. They squeak and point at this and that from their seats on the top deck; fairy candles glowing from windows, sprigs of rowan over doors, the start of Midsummer bonfires in the parks, lamp-lit picnics, children sleeping out in tents in their front gardens. A Bus Inspector gets on at Botley and comes wandering along the aisles with a swaying sailor’s gate, asking to see passes and identity cards, enquiring about the purpose of our journeys: an old English custom that the Spaniards greet with excitement, although I’m sure it’s much the same for them at home under Franco. I tell him that I’m simply passing the time, and feel absurdly grateful when he nods and moves on.
By Adderly, the bus is empty and I head into evening across the village green through rolls of bonfire smoke. A promising-looking path of trodden grass runs across a field where the cattle stare at me in amazement, then come chuffing up with their long eager faces, their wet noses. I clamber over a barbed-wire topped gate where a wooden footpath sign points through a high expanse of thistles. Scratched, lost, tired, I finally reach a brick wall at the end of an alarmingly dark wood, pushing through ferns and foxgloves until I come to a door, once green, dotted with medieval-looking iron studs. When I give the iron handle a shove, the door creaks open.
Beyond, there is a wide lawn—more of a parkland, really—mottled with horse chestnuts that have had their undersides neatly nibbled flat by deer. A long redbrick house with many tall spiral chimneys glows orange in the sunset beside the long shadows of marquees, deckchairs, awnings. A scatter of croquet players look up from their game and give me a cheery wave.
I find a deckchair and sit down to catch my breath as white doves clatter over the topiary yews and gathering rows of Rovers, Jaguars, Bristols, and perky little MGs with their windscreens down, sweep in around the house’s moat of gravel, threading headlights into a golden mesh as men and women emerge fresh-minted in their evening clothes and the sky turns an ever-deeper blue. Lanterns are set out by the dark-suited servants and their flames flash in the windows and lick the twirl of limbs as sleeves are rolled up, ties discarded, music pulses and the people begin to dance. A knife of pain digs into my left shoulder. Nobody seems surprised to see me here. I take another tablet.
A girl with the kohled eyes of an Egyptian priestess twirls in front of me bearing a tray of half-risen cakes, on which the words EAT ME have been picked out in raisins. I grab one and take a bite, then another, wondering if I’m going to grow big or small as she skips off, giggling. The music wafting from loudspeakers in the trees is Glen Miller, Duke Ellington. Slick, sophisticated; decadent white-nigger American. A solo clarinet sounds over creamy pillows of trombone and sax, almost too beautiful for words. Me and cheap music.
Stumbling up from my deckchair, my mouth so dry and swollen now that I can barely swallow my next tablet, I grab a passing glass of fizzy English wine and tip it back. Hands brush against me, sequinned handbags flutter and cigarette holders jostle like lances as crimson lips smile in surprise and press close to mine. Here, we are all friends, acquaintances. I slump on a wall beside a lake where a rowing boat floats upturned amid the quivering stars. Time passes as water laps and the trees about me fizz and whisper, speckled with lanterns, stars, all the twinkling fey wonders of this Midsummer Eve.
Wondering about my prospects of getting back to Oxford, I try to focus on my watch. But there’s no one about as I ramble up to the side of the house where ivy looms dark in the moon’s shadow against the high walls and air heavy with the perfume of sea lavender carries the thump of distant music, the crash of broken glass, moans of passion, shrieks of laughter.
I walk across the soft lawns where a few crinkled white balloons float like weary ghosts of Midsummer’s past and a stone lion squats, its mouth smeared with either blood or lipstick. A fox darts between the long hedges, and he and I stare at each other for a moment before we go on about the strange business of our separate lives. The road beyond the house’s open gates is grey, a river of mist, and the sky, which never truly darkened, is brightening already as I walk between long lines of cob-web silvered elms which might lead back towards Oxford.
Soon, all the scents and sounds of morning start to rise, but still I have glance back to the deeper darkness that hangs somewhere along the glimmering road behind me. Once, I even stop and call out, sensing a figure, a shape. In fact, I almost urge it to come.