“WALTER NEVER CLEARED THINGS out,” Ursula Bracken says as we crouch on the rag rug in the parlour and sort through Walter’s old books and magazines and telephone directories, all of which simply need to be thrown away. “The shed’s done of course. Some men from the War Office came yesterday in a big van. They seemed surprised at how much there was in there. But you know what they’re like up in London. They probably thought the work he was doing was theoretical…”
“Did they find his papers?”
“I really don’t know. I don’t think they knew themselves. They just took everything. I suppose…” She turns away from the dust to sneeze. “After what’s happened, they’ll dismiss whatever he’s done as some mad obsession, although you and I both know that Walter wasn’t like that. Did you see what happened to that big Oxford Dictionary, by the way? He always put it…”
Ursula reaches past me to get to another tea chest, then leans back on the floor, covers her face and gives a long gasping sob.
Ursula hasn’t told me exactly what happened, and the local newspapers have been coy enough about it, too. But it’s common knowledge—another of those Oxford stories that, unless you’re actually involved in them, always seem too weirdly dreadful to be true. Did you hear about the chap who was working on some project to design a better bullet? Tied himself up at the place where he used to aim at pig carcasses and rigged his own firing squad. His sister was the one who eventually found him in the long shed where he did his work. Quite, quite, barking of course. It’s said that, from the look of him, you’d never have guessed…
“I wish I’d come over more,” I say to her—my ritual acknowledgement of guilt. “I truly liked him. But I’ve been unwell myself. Obsessed with my own… Ideas. I know that’s no good reason.”
“Honestly, that doesn’t matter.” Ursula pulls her handkerchief from the dust-greyed sleeve of her cardigan, wipes her nose, then sneezes again. “It’s really…”
“And this business about having to go to Australia. I know that that was bothering him.”
“It wasn’t,” she says in a voice that allows no argument. “What was bothering Walter was Walter. Australia would have been good for him if he’d wanted it to be. No, what Walter did was…”
“Unpredictable?”
“Inevitable.” She wrinkles her nose. “I can see that now. I can’t blame anyone.” Meaning herself. Meaning me. “Some things are inevitable, you know. Night follows day, doesn’t it? You get the programmes you’re expecting on the telly unless there’s been a delay at Lords. Walter was wrong, you see. Some things really are inevitable. Perhaps this was just his way of proving it to himself…”
She stands up then, her knees cracking. She goes to the window, narrow shoulders hunched up nearly to her ears as she looks out.
“He never got over the death of our father. Daddy brought us up really. Our mother died when she had me, so he had to do the job of both. Daddy was a good man. He began to suffer from premature dementia soon after Walter went up to Warwick. Died of it when he was only fifty five, although by the end I found myself wishing it had happened sooner…” Faintly, I can hear lads yelling to each other as they play football out on the green. The thump of boot against leather always sounds violent to me. I can’t help thinking of someone’s head. “…Of course, it was me who had to look after him. Walter just stopped coming home when Daddy ceased to recognise him. But it’s not just what you see, is it? If something happens, it happens anyway. It’s there, you can’t help it. It affects you whether you want it to or not.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realise how hard it must have been…”
“When we were young, Walter used to say how he’d like to build this big machine when he grew up and put every single fact about the universe into it. He remembered Mummy, you see. He said that if he had this machine he’d always know what was going to happen next. Sounds stupid, I know. He told me later that it wouldn’t work. I suppose he wanted control.”
“We can’t control our lives, though, can we?”
“No.” She looks hard at me. “We just have to live through what we are, don’t we, Brook? And history…”
The titles on the next box Ursula and I’ll have to go through are things like THE ALGEBRAIC EIGENVALUE PROBLEM. THE PROPERTIES AND APPLICATIONS OF DIFFERENTIABILITY. Funny, how we struggle to make sense out of something as brutal as an act of fatality on your own body. In a way, though, Bracken’s got his wish. He found out how to destroy the Humane Bullet. It’s tainted research. No one will touch it now.
“I’ll be leaving soon anyway,” Ursula says, turning back from the window. She grabs an old seed catalogue that lies by the fire and flips through its pages, staring down through it. “Oxford’s never meant anything to me. Do you know how many people turned up to the bypass protest committee meeting last night? Just one. And the college wants this cottage back. Once they’ve demolished that bloody shed…”
“Where are you going?”
“America,” she says, and sniffs, giving a long involuntary shiver. “I want to get out whilst I still can. I have a cousin in Philadelphia, and there’s a friend who’s looking to start afresh in Montana where there’s nothing but open sky and you can ride for days and the hills are so big they follow you in the distance. This tiny country’s rotten…”
I bid my final farewell to Ursula Bracken at Oxford Station just two weeks later. As I’d expected, the funeral was a sparse affair, and the case for the inquest was open and shut. No one else is here to see her off.
She shows me the travel authorisations she’s obtained as we stand waiting on the platform for the slightly delayed Liverpool train, and I dutifully admire them. It’s become a British habit. People have started to collect and swap the older ones—there’s even a society for it. Ursula’s are temporary, and she’s only permitted to take enough money to the States for a two month holiday. If she doesn’t come back then, whatever else she owns or has in her bank account will be frozen. Eventually after publication of the appropriate notices in the London Gazette, all her assets will be repossessed by the Government.
“Is there anything I can do?” I ask vaguely.
She shakes her head. “I think they probably know, don’t you? People like me are scuttling off the ship like rats. I’m not brainy like Walter. I haven’t got any qualifications. They probably think good riddance.” She smiles. The Tannoy chimes the names of Midlands towns. “Immigration into the United States isn’t easy, either. For all I know, they may send me back.”
“I’m sure they’ll be happy to have you.”
“Ha—all hundred million of them! Anyway, I’ve brought everything I can. You needn’t worry about me, Geoffrey. I can look after myself.”
“I can’t think of anyone who’d do it better.”
Embarrassed by all this silly intimacy, we shift our gaze and look around at the heaped mailsacks, and at the other people who are waiting. A boy is being comforted by his mother beside of one of those useless vending machines you always get at stations. Now there’s something even John Arthur hasn’t managed to put right.
I glance back at Ursula at the same moment that she looks at me. Part of me wishes the train would hurry up now and put an end to this unnaturally protracted process. The other wants to tell her about Francis, about John Arthur. About everything.
“Before he died,” she says before I can begin, “Walter mentioned to me that you were seriously ill.”
“Yes…”
“I’m sorry.” She reaches out and squeezes my claw-like hand with her own. Which is young, alive. “I hope things get better.”
I nod, suddenly near to tears. At that moment, saving us both, the sound of the arriving train breaks along the platform. A soldier and his girlfriend kiss extravagantly. A lady in a salad bowl hat asks us if this really is the train to Liverpool.
I help Ursula off the platform with the lighter of her two suitcases, sliding it along the corridor until she finds a compartment. We touch hands, and then I step back onto the platform.
The stationmaster’s whistle blows. The train hoots back excitedly. Ursula leans out as the carriage begins to slide beneath the platform bridges. Ham and eggs, ham and eggs. We gaze at each other, unsmiling now, separated by steam and distance.
I turn away when the train has gone from sight. It’s still early. The news hoardings on the Botley Road bookstall promise a special Trafalgar Celebration pull-out in today’s Mirror, but they’ve already been beaten to this by Monday’s Cross and Tuesday’s Express.
It’s called the Trafalgar Celebration, despite the fact it’ll be going on for days and the Battle of Trafalgar happened exactly 135 years ago—not a particularly significant anniversary. It’s as if all the other festivals and celebrations that have taken place in Greater Britain still haven’t satisfied our hunger. The Olympics, after all, were international, try as we might to make them British. Even the huge Exhibition of 1938 was about the Empire, and in Glasgow of all places. No, what Britain craves is something inward-looking, a festival where we don’t have to put up with the rest of the world, even if the rest of the world would come if it were invited.
It is, at the end of the day, purely a celebration of the fiftieth birthday of John Arthur. The Mirror, though, is as coy about this as every other newspaper. It’s as if, as long we keep our voices down, the man himself won’t see it coming. He’s busy, after all. He’d never want a fuss made. He’ll wake up on the day (very early, as is his habit) from his plain bed in his plain bedroom of his famously small self-contained flat on the third floor at 10 Downing Street. He’ll stretch and turn on the light. Just this once, he’ll find the whole nation has got up before him. We’ll be grinning in party hats. Bearing jellies, egg sandwiches, little sausages speared with sticks…
My hands shake as I hold the newspaper. All of the pains that the long summer almost burned away seem to be coming back again. By now, everything has a sense of inevitability. Walter Bracken—poor Walter, as I stupidly thought of him without even realising—has seen to that. I owe it to him, and to Ursula. I owe it to my acquaintance. I even owe it to Francis, although I can’t quite explain why. There’s no turning back.
Gripping the polished handle of my walking stick, I cross the road, clumsily avoiding a bus. The air has a cooler feel to it this morning. There’s still even a hint, where the longest shadows fall, of dew on the pavements. The limes are dripping. Sycamore seeds are spinning. The swallows will soon be gone. The soft autumn sun bathes the towers and rooftops and domes with golden light. As I pause to look back after crossing the canal, a dark figure scuttles from sight behind a steeply-loaded coal wagon. This time, I fancy that I glimpse his face: but it’s only Christlow. And the all bells of Oxford ringing, filling my head, my eyes, my heart. History beckons.
My moment has come.