EVERY MORNING NOW, I awake not knowing who or where I am; filled with a vague sense of horror and helplessness. I do not even know if I am human, or have any real identity of my own. This, I decide, is how a ghost must feel—what it must be like to haunt or be haunted. But a ghost wouldn’t have these twisted limbs. A ghost wouldn’t taste soil in its mouth. A ghost wouldn’t have this pain.
For a moment then, I am under the rubble again and Francis is beside me. His hand is in mine, and flutters like an insect in the moment that he dies. My life seems to float out in both directions from that point. It’s like unwrapping a complex present; tearing away at silvery ribbons of the future and the past, although I know that it’s all just some trick—a party game—and that I will be left clutching nothing but tangled paper, empty air.
I ungum my eyes and look out at the world, accepting the strange fact of my continued existence. But it remains a slow process even though this beamed ceiling is familiar to me; fraught with a sense of aftermath, a feeling that another dreadful discovery still lurks amid the gaudy wrapping of my life. I am Brook, yes, I am Geoffrey Brook. I am a lecturer, a teacher—in fact, a true Professor of History now. And Oxford, yes, Oxford. I live in these college rooms, just as I have done for many years. Once, as a preference, I used to love men. Now I seem to love no one, although I sense from the warmth of this bed and the play of firelight over this ceiling that I am encased in cottony layers of help, goodwill, money. By twists and turns that my mind cannot yet fully encompass, I have been close to death. I’m still close to it now. It hangs there with the scent of applewood smoke and old stone and Mansion House floor polish and cut flowers; it whispers to me in the thinning darkness. That, I suppose, is the final sour message within this package that I have been unwrapping.
I feel for my glass, my tablets, which lie a long way beyond the Chinese pheasants cavorting on my eiderdown. That journey accomplished, much water spilt and a few white pellets of bliss lost beneath the counterpane, I lie and wait for something else to happen. I sense that it is early, still dark outside my window, although a strange light seems to wash up from the quad and there is a chill to the air beyond the crackling heat of my fire. A clock ticks somewhere, and a beam creaks in sympathetic rhythm. Somewhere across the rooftops and towers, a bell, distant yet clear, begins to chime the hours. The sound is sharp, bright as freshly cast metal as I try to count each stroke before time gets lost in the bubbling maze of my breath and my heartbeat, the welling memories, the ebb and flow of pain. When silence and equilibrium return, I shuffle inch by inch across the constricting pull of the sheets until my feet slide off the edge of the bed and the top of my body, in compensation, is forced to rise. I am old, I think. I am old. Perhaps that is the last shock I have been waiting for.
Bunioned, barefoot, trying not to exhaust myself by coughing or retching as I cradle my stiffened and arthritic right hand, I stumble through the cavorting firelight towards my window. Its cold reaches out to me, dribbling fingers of condensation as I wipe the mullions with the sleeve of my nightshirt to gaze at the strange whiteness that lies framed and glowing. It has snowed again in the night. Of course. This is Oxford and it has snowed again in the night. More paths to be cleared. More slush in the alleys. Gargoyles with icicles dangling like dewdrops from their fingers and noses… I have to close my eyes, then, as a twinge of pain from my right hand and the rawness in my throat sets off another ugly memory.
I remember everything now. I am here. I am alive. This is the last day of the year of 1940. John Arthur is dead.
I’m still leaning there, still staring from my college window in a drugged half-doze, when the breakfast trolley rumbles towards my door. The knock sounds hesitant, mistimed, yet still I’m somehow expecting Christlow as the handle turns and the chill outer air touches my skin. But it’s Allenby. Of course. It’s Allenby.
“Good morning, Professor. Terrible lot of snow in the night as you’ve doubtless seen. Got a nice fire going for you earlier whilst you were still asleep. You’d like to eat at the little table, perhaps, seeing as you’re up?”
Allenby hovers, tray in his hand, steam rising in veils from the sausages and grilled tomatoes, diamonds of fat glinting on the fried bread. He’s young and good-looking, is Allenby. He says all the right things, and his bacon isn’t greasy like Christlow’s; he doesn’t even wear an EA badge. But he still seems like a barely competent actor, forever trying and failing to find the essential meaning of his role.
I open my mouth to speak, and ruminate for a while on the phlegm that fills it. “On the table,” my voice squeaks, “would be fine…”
Allenby slips my padded silk dressing gown from the hook near the fire where it’s been warming. His breath is cool on my neck as he helps me into it; like the air from that doorway, like the sense of the snow. He bends down to sheathe my feet in lambskin slippers, and he ties my sash at the front. For a moment, I’m five years old again; I’m half expecting him to produce a handkerchief and tell me to spit so he can rub the grime from my face. More than ever, I miss Christlow. And my mother. There are so many people to miss.
“You’ve got that appointment, by the way.”
“Appointment?”
“Twelve o-clock at the George Hotel. Miss Flood is coming up from your publishers in London.”
Allenby scrapes back my chair and steers me down. He flutters a napkin, tucks it beneath my chin, then begins to cut up my food. The bloodied eye of the tomato stares at me. He pats my back gently as I begin to cough, pours out the tea and lifts it to my lips—sweet, milky, barely warm—for me to swallow.
“No hurry, Professor,” he says. But he hovers over me anyway, and makes sure that I eat it all up, just as P. Wiseman has instructed him to do. Afterwards, as he dabs at my chin and whisks the tray away, I picture him with one of those glass jars, holding my cock with snowy fingers as he slips it into the aperture; massaging it, even, to erectness. For Allenby, nothing would be too much trouble. Then he lays the morning’s papers out before me. The New Cross. The Daily Sketch. The Express. The Oxford Chronicle. The Times. Sheet upon warm rustling sheet that smell so crisply of ink and freshly-felled wood that I wonder if he irons them for me, the way butlers do in country houses.
My vision fills and blurs with newsprint. All those words, all that history in the making. I’m tempted to ask Allenby to take the damn things away, but I know that that would seem ungrateful. And there’s something—I remember now—something that still piques my interest, although as yet I can’t quite recall what. But, after all, as I have to keep reminding myself, I’m still here. I’m still alive. So there must be something…
I reach out towards the table, using my right hand like a scoop to push the Times into the better grip of my left. Allenby watches, good servant that he is, as I struggle to unfold it, knowing that he mustn’t always help his feeble master. The Times’s front page seems odd now that they’ve dropped the columns of classifieds. This headline, in fact, looks even bigger than usual.
PM ANNOUNCES IMMEDIATE INQUIRY INTO SCANDAL OF JEWISH HOMELAND. RAF AIRLIFTS AID. The photograph beneath shows a group of people huddled outside a rough hut. They are skeleton-thin, clothed in rags. The image belongs outside history—outside time—but I still raise it closer to my eyes, so close that the faces become smudged outlines, then collections of printed dots. The hope remains that I might recognise…
My college Rover slides through the slush along High, Catte and Broad. The air is blue with frost, the cyclists are tentative, and the Radcliffe and the Sheldonian look like iced Christmas cakes. We park at the corner of George Street and the Cornmarket, where my driver helps me out onto the oystered ice of the pavement, and then through the entrance-way and up the brass-rodded staircase.
Miss Flood is already perched on a stool in the Ivy Restaurant’s outer bar. The colours that the snow and the cold have bleached out of Oxford all seem to have fled into these rooms. The ceilings are pink, the walls lean with gilded mirrors, there are flowers at every table. As is often the case now, rumour of my arrival has spread before me, and I must wait and smile and raise a trembling hand in acknowledgement as the main dining room erupts into applause. But the moment isn’t over-played; British through-and-through, and mostly upper-middle class, the other lunchtime diners soon settle back to their meals and their conversations as I shuffle with Miss Flood towards the best table by the window where the head waiter is on hand to serve us.
I settle down. Miss Flood settles opposite me. Her black hair is close-cropped, high at the forehead, framing her pale, red-lipped face like a television screen. Her bracelets slide and jangle as she sips her wine and her fingers are restless as she picks at a bread roll, missing the chains of cigarettes that, since I succumbed to a coughing fit at one of our early meetings, she refrains from smoking in my presence.
“I was speaking to Publicity only yesterday, Geoffrey,” she tells me. “And you’re definitely the flagship of our spring list.” Her legs slide as she crosses them.
“That’s good to know…” I wheeze. “I received your letter with the, er, galleys only the day before yesterday.”
“Try not to think of them as galleys or proofs, Geoffrey. Think of them as…” Miss Flood waves her hand, clutching an imaginary cigarette. “Complimentary reading material.” She smiles. “We’ll do all the donkey work. The re-checking. The few minor corrections. In fact, it’s mostly already done. We’re well on schedule to get it to the printers by late January. So you really needn’t worry…”
I nod. What she means is that she wants to keep me well away from the tricky business of correcting my own scholarly inaccuracies, my pointless circumlocutions, my ungrammatical turns of phrase.
The first course arrives. I prod at the shrimps, bits of lettuce and herb without eating whilst Miss Flood, thin as she is, does the same. Then she delves into her briefcase and shows me a glossy mock-up of the dustjacket. The first print run is 30,000, with the presses ready to roll with another 30,000 after that. They’re mass market, these people, and have already generated far more interest in these warmed-over goods than the Oxford University Press could ever have done. Amazingly, they’ve stuck with my suggestion for the cover of an un-specific but undoubtedly English landscape of fields, woods, farmhouses and distant church towers, with an island-dotted sea on the horizon. And I, Geoffrey Brook, seated in the back-flap photo in my college rooms—you can just make out the Stubbs and Tort on my bookshelves behind me—seem almost healthy, suitably scholarly. You’ll never know from the look of this book that Miss Flood’s other major authors write do-it-yourselfs and who-dunnits. I really can’t complain.
“As to the title,” she says, tapping the celluloid with a scarlet fingernail, “you’ll see that we’ve stuck with our original suggestion…” She waits a moment, gauging my reaction.
FIGURES OF HISTORY
GEOFFREY BROOK
“…That, er, other suggestion that you made. Good though it was, I’m afraid that it didn’t quite click with our marketing people. Fingers of History was too close, if you see what I mean. There are a lot of people out there who still remember your work for the Daily Sketch, and who’d love to have a hardback copy of your best articles…”
“This isn’t the book I wanted, you know. That, I burnt. This is just…” But I’m lost for words.
“What? Oh, and we’ve finally cleared up the copyright business. Being who you are, Geoffrey, I really didn’t think that they’d want to resist.”
I gather from the look of the bottle, my empty glass, the rosy warmth that has settled over my skin, that I’ve been drinking the wine. My mouth now tastes of metal—brass, pewter, or some other tarnished alloy—rather than soil.
“We’ll need to hurry you,” Miss Flood says more quietly, slipping in the words when she imagines that I’m not really conscious as I gaze out of the window at the snow-softened spires, domes, towers of this city. Balliol, All Souls, Queens… The litany of my dreams. “If we’re going to squeeze in that new extra chapter you were talking about.”
“I’ve decided,” I squeak, “what I want to write about.”
“Oh? That’s… Good.” Miss Flood nods semi-eagerly, balancing her jaw in her hand.
“It fits in with research I was doing into the history of the Jews.” Jews… My voice sounds even lighter than ever as I end the sentence, but I’m sure her blue irises contract at the mention of the word, and that the restaurant conversations fade into shocked hush all around me. “What with all the fuss there’s been in the papers these last few days about their mis-treatment in the Highlands…” Something sticks and crunches in my throat. “I was thinking…” I cover my mouth with a handkerchief and cough lightly, carefully, to clear it. “Thinking that the time is right to remind people…”
“Geoffrey, that sounds fascinating.” Pause. “Although everyone’s hungry to hear more about your links with John Arthur.”
“Of course.”
“Not that I want to steer you in any particular direction.”
“There’d be no problem with censorship, then, if I was to write about the mistreatment of the Jews?”
Miss Flood smiles at me. “What problem could there be, when it’s on the front pages of the newspapers?”
“You tell me.”
“In my experience, Geoffrey, the only barrier you’re likely to come up against is what people want to know about. All the rest of it, the D Notices, the Truth Guidelines, our in-house Censorship Liaison Office, it’s all…” Her bracelets jangle again as she waves her fingers to indicate something far off, barely tangible, quite beyond all the realms of normal experience.
“And what about the writers who’ve been pulped, burned, disappeared? You must have had some on your lists.”
Miss Flood’s nails dance amid the cutlery, bright as blood. “Books always get pulped and burned, I’m afraid, Geoffrey. It’s what happens when they don’t sell. But I’m sure we won’t have that problem with Figures of History.”
My eyes are watering. My nose is starting to run. I fumble to find a clean corner of my handkerchief as I begin to cough. The sense of all Oxford—the chime of bells and the clatter of lunchtime cutlery, the waitresses’ whispering and the taste of the wine and the smell of the cooking and clangour in the kitchens and whispers in ancient corridors and the scent of old stone and fresh snow—fractures around me.
Geoffrey Brook was born in Staffordshire, Lichfield, in 1875. He has devoted most of his life to teaching history, firstly in and around the City of his birth, where he influenced the young John Arthur, and later in his life at one of the most distinguished and ancient Oxford colleges…
Running my pen through the word ancient, scratching a question mark over distinguished, I close the file of publicity material as my college Rover hisses slowly along High. Already, it’s getting dark and the lights in the shop windows are glowing. Prices have gone up a lot recently—taxes, as well—and you’d think that people would have had enough of shopping after the frenzied weeks before Christmas. But there they all are, wading through the slush and the grubby snowdrifts and the dangerous ice with their bags and their bargains and their weary children. The windows offer BIGGEST EVER SALE and HUGE POST-XMAS DISCOUNTS, even though tinsel still sags at the windows and it won’t be twelfth night until Sunday.
My college tower looms and the chill air bites as I dismiss my driver and wade unaided across the snowy quad through clouds of dizziness and my own breath. Nurse Cunningham, who comes daily, is waiting for me up in my rooms. Her bag is open, and her rosy cheeks, her bare arms, her needles and her vials, all glisten welcomingly in the firelight. I fight her off as she begins to disrobe me.
“A problem, is there, Professor Brook?” Her breath smells of onions. “Something else you want?”
Wheezing, I slump down into one of the leather armchairs beside the fire as she bears my telephone across to me. A new privilege, it lies heavy in my lap as I stab and turn, stab and turn, dialing out a number from the back page of the Times. Relays click and electricity pulses in Oxford’s new automatic exchange as, somewhere in London, a telephone begins to ring. I gaze at the empty armchair opposite, willing all the smoky ghosts of Oxfords past to give me hope, strength. I try to picture a bustling newsroom filled with the same clean purposeful smell as the papers Allenby brings me. An eager staff reporter, his sleeves rolled up and clasped by a pair of elasticated metal bands, pauses in a conversation and grabs the jangling receiver. And yes, yes, he knows all about the sad mess in the Highlands. He’s just back down himself on the overnight sleeper. And a list of names—the Jews who have survived? He has a copy. Not, of course, for public consumption, but seeing as who I am, he’ll check it now whilst we’re talking…
But today’s New Year’s Eve, and there are no newspapers tomorrow. The telephone just rings and rings.
Nurse Cunningham performs her duties. She makes notes. She pricks me with fountaining needles. Sometimes, also, there are coils of brown rubber and white medical steel. But, once the needles have gone in, I find it hard to keep track of what she’s doing.
“I’ll make sure Mr. Allenby looks in at about six so you’ve plenty of time to get dressed.” Her face looms as I’m tucked back into my bed, mummified by blankets. “Oh, and here’s the Evening News…”
Again, that smell of newsprint. Beneath it, and Nurse Cunningham’s clean oniony odour as she leans close, beneath the wood smoke from the fire and the complex aromas of ancient lives lived amid ancient stone and the reek of disinfectant, the air is faintly, pervasively, soiled.
“Bad news about the Bypass, isn’t it, Professor?”
“The what?”
But Nurse Cunningham’s already fading, and I’m alone with my room, my body, my bed, my pains, my medications. My good left hand struggles with the paper. For a few moments, I manage to half-lift it as I raise my head from the pillow.
NO TO NEW OXFORD BYPASS
GOVERNMENT CUTS BACK ON ROAD FUNDING
The paper slides from my hands and my head drops back, spinning. I wonder about Ursula Bracken, and if she ever made it safely to America. At moments like this when the entire world seems fluid and bends to my will, I can still nurture mild, pleasant dreams, such as that of receiving a postcard from her—a postcard from some pretty, unspoiled place in empty nowhere where you can ride for days and the mountains will follow you in the distance, and there is no history. It would have been nice to be able to tell her that Oxford will be spared its bypass for another few years after all, although the city centre will doubtless become ever more congested as a result. So there you are, Ursula. Not every effort is in vain.
I smile as the fire crackles and warm tentacles of oblivion entwine me. Then something spasms in my chest and the same empty panic that I feel when I awaken pours through me. My sweat chills. My heart seems to shrivel. Again, the windows are bursting, a car engine is roaring.
Everything disintegrates.
The world already knew that John Arthur was dead by the time I was hauled out from the Cottage Spring. I could hear it in the crowd’s sobbing howls as the masonry slid and crumbled, and in the firemen’s rough, angry voices.
One of the beer-drinking lads survived for two nights at Barts inside an iron lung. Another remains alive to this day, though a mindless cripple. There were also many deaths and disablements amid the onlookers who’d come to gather in the street outside. Only I, Geoffrey Brook, protected by that pillar—and, perhaps, in some strange way, by the fact that I was already close to death—truly survived. I suffered a gash along my cheek which required five stitches you can barely see now, a dislocated shoulder and two septic lungfuls of plaster. Of course, I had my bad right hand already, although that fact often feels as lost to me as it is to the rest of the world.
Even as I was carried to the ambulance, the flashbulbs were popping, the television lights were glaring. Three days later, propped up in my hospital bed, smoothed and groomed, sweetly drugged, whispered easy prompts when words failed me, I gave my first press conference. The nation’s yearning was so great that I was applauded even by those hardened hacks. For, yes, yes, I knew John Arthur. He was a friend of old. And, although we hadn’t kept in direct contact, our lives had touched and remained entwined over the years. When the time came for the Trafalgar Day celebrations, it seemed only right that he should invite me, and we’d driven out to the East End on that night after the parades. I was with him as he watched the fireworks unnoticed by his adoring people, and we talked about our lives, about the strange twists and turns of fate that had taken him to power, and me to Oxford. Then we went for a drink in a pub called the Cottage Spring where we had seen each other briefly many years before…
The press returned when William Arkwright called by at my hospital room several days later. Again, the flashbulbs popped, but this time the new Prime Minister said it all for me. He shook my good left hand and grinned around his pipe, frozen by the crackling white wash. Afterwards, when the doors to the corridors were closed and Arkwright and I were briefly alone, he already seemed bigger than the man I’d met in the gardens of New Buckingham Palace. Power, after so long and patient a wait, had finally settled in his hands. Looking at him, dressed in his black tie, his black suit, the notes for the oration he would give later at John Arthur’s State Funeral at Westminster Abbey already tucked into his top pocket, I felt lost and afraid. But Arkwright only smiled and patted my good hand. Then a final thought struck him as he pocketed his unlit pipe and picked up his trademark Homburg hat from the place on my bed where he’d lain it so it would show in the photographs. “And it’s Professor Brook from now on,” he said. “Did I mention that just now? No matter—it’ll be in tomorrow’s papers.”
John Arthur’s death is already as much a part of his myth as everything that happened during his life. This time, unlike the fire at Old Buckingham Palace, there will even be a trial, although, so slow do the wheels of justice grind in what people are already starting to refer to as post-Modernist Britain, that it won’t take place until the spring. Meanwhile, Jim Toller and several senior officers of the KSG languish in Pentonville Prison. As yet, none of them have committed suicide in their cells.
The national mood is predominantly one of sadness and disillusion, combined with a new sense of realism. With John Arthur gone, the world seems bleaker. EA badges are less frequently worn, and KSG officers are no longer treated with awe; some may even find it hard to get served in shops, or suffer children’s jibes as they walk the streets, implicated as they are by association in the death of their great leader. The British economy, it seems, is far weaker than we ever imagined, damaged by ten years of over-expenditure. Conscription is being phased out in this mood of belt-tightening, and negotiations with France and Germany about mutual disarmament will commence in February. There is even talk—oblique, as yet—of giving India and Ireland a semblance of Home Rule, and of fresh elections for a new People’s Assembly in place of the sham and farce of the old House of Commons.
All the rest, that last glorious summer of hope and expansion when nothing seemed impossible as long as we kept our belief, already feels like a dream. After all, the world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place—Japan has attacked China, Stalin has annexed eastern Poland—and it’s obvious that the countries of the West must draw together if they are not to be swept away by Communism and a commercially belligerent America. John Arthur’s threats towards France and Germany, his canny alliance with Stalin, and the work in the desert wastes of Western Australia, where British scientists have recently set off a “controlled reaction”, have simply given us a top seat at the table in the negotiations to come.
His picture had vanished from the urinals in the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow when I made my recent farewell visit there, leaving just the screwholes and a slightly darker mark on the wall. Gone also, in these straightened times, is the John Bull-reading War veteran, although the nail-marks that I and my acquaintance made in the third cubicle have yet to be covered by fresh paint. Long may they linger. Somehow, as I touched their soft indentations, they spoke to me of nothing but hope and decency.
The Cumbernalds’ house shines out amid a Christmassy spray of car headlights. There are lights, too, wound like a roller coaster up the tall firs in the front garden, and flashing on and off around the front porch.
“All terribly kitsch, I know,” Cumbernald assures me as I step in from the raw cold whilst my driver hangs back to make sure that I’ve been passed on to the next safe pair of hands. “But Christmas is for children, isn’t it—the child within us all? There’s no sense in resisting…”
He takes my coat and passes it to the maid behind him. He’s wearing a red velvet jacket, a glossy blue cummerbund, an iridescent bow tie. A stray bit of Christmas sparkle glitters on one of his eyebrows.
“Everyone’s waiting for you…”
It would be bad form for these groups clustered beneath the coloured streamers of the long reception room to burst into applause, but nevertheless a palpable change of mood passes through them at my appearance. Within moments, I’m surrounded, touched, smiled at, reminded of previous meetings and promises of lunch, breathed over, stroked, prodded. Grateful for the armour of my tablets and Nurse Cunningham’s injections, drawing people behind me like the tail of a comet, I shuffle across the carpets towards the largest, warmest and most inviting looking chair. Secure in the knowledge that I will be guided as I cast myself down, I slump in its general direction.
The pictures on the walls here are pretty scenes of British towns and the British countryside. But for the fact that they lack captions and are probably expensive originals, they’re very much like the images you see in every public place and railway station, and that will soon also grace the cover of Figures Of History. Chilly blue seas and heathered hills, weathercocked spires and awninged marketplaces, dappled sunlight, dotted clouds, lakes and farmhouses, even the occasional glimpse of a car or a tractor. But there are few people about in this lost dream of Britain, and they are disguised by headscarves, hats and raincoats. Looking at these scenes of an empty, blandly-pretty countryside, I realise just how sick of Britain I have become, and how much I long to be rid of it.
Cumbernald brings me a sweet sherry and a Spode plate with a hard-boiled egg, a leaf of lettuce, a sausage roll; what we English call a salad. The crowd around me thins as it becomes apparent that I’m not responding to their questions. From being a living link to John Arthur, I’m demoted to an old relic, to be touched for luck, then forgotten. Miss Flood will have to hurry if she really expects to capitalise on my fame. Music plays. The fire flickers. The Christmas tree glitters. The Christmas decorations turn and sway. There are many hours to go yet before midnight and the coming of 1941.
Eileen Cumbernald sits for a while on the arm of my chair, brown as ever in a low-backed dress as she chatters on about reassuring things; she is as she is, and demands acceptance on no terms other than the simple facts that she is human, middle-aged, a woman, a mother. Her husband Eric’s impending promotion to Vice Chancellor of Oxford University has left her totally unchanged.
“I so enjoyed that time we spent together at Penrhos,” she tells me, her face redly flushed. “The girls are fond of you and your funny stories. They’re staying up tonight…” The pearls of her necklace stick to her chin as she surveys the crowd. “They should be around somewhere. You really must come down with us again next year…”
I have to smile. It’s funny, how people choose to ignore my obvious physical decline. I suppose that they imagine it’s only natural. In fact, for me to appear too hale and hearty after surviving the machine gun attack and explosion that killed John Arthur would probably be seen as suspicious, if not downright blasphemous.
Eileen Cumbernald wanders away to be replaced by P. Wiseman. Magdalene man that he is, even he can’t afford to let tonight pass him by now that Cumbernald’s Vice Chancellor elect. For all I know, he may even have used his connection with me to wrangle tonight’s invitation. I’m grateful as he goes through his usual how-are-you-keeping banter—as if he of all people didn’t know—when Christine and Barbara Cumbernald rustle up behind him in their party dresses.
“You’re even more like dead Uncle Freddie now!” Barbara declares delightedly as she imprisons me in her hot arms. Ribbons are falling from her hair and her face is white apart from a dazzling pink spot on each cheek. She smells of wine and sweat and toffee.
“What did you both get for Christmas?”
Barbara rolls her eyes—where to begin?—whilst Christine hangs back a little, looking just as pale and hot as her sister, but more clearly the eldest now, her face and body drifting towards that first rough approximation of womanliness. I really don’t know whether to feel happy or sad for her.
“Tell you what,” Barbara says, wriggling the points of her patent leather shoes. “We’ll show you. Come on…”
There are shrieks of fairy laughter, disappearing flecks of grubby cotton underskirt, and I must hurry if I am to follow them, tunnelling out through the sour clinging heat of bodies into wider hallways and turns, past downstairs toilets, unlit billiard rooms, and little alcoves where the coats hang like carcasses and watchful maids with Bellini faces huddle as they puff at their cigarettes. Barbara and Christine scamper ahead into a place where the night empties itself through a hundred arched panes of glass.
“This is Daddy’s new conservatory,” Christine tells me, her breath whispering in clouds, her face within looking more than ever like that of the beautiful woman she will surely become. “He had it built as a part of his Christmas present, although it wasn’t much of a surprise.”
“He doesn’t grow any flowers either because he’s too busy,” Barbara adds, skidding across the tiles, whilst I look around for a wicker chair to absorb the swollen pain and weight of my body. “These,” she waves her hand at a pile of wonders, “are our presents.” Under these stars, in this darkness, I can just make out the lifeless faces of dolls, angular bits of board game, what looks like a small but serviceable motor car. “We shoved them in here because we couldn’t think of anywhere else.”
“Don’t you want to play with them?”
They shrug and exchange looks.
“Will you tell us one of your funny stories?”
“You mean about the past?” I ask.
They both nod gravely. But I’m lost here. The starlight barely makes it through the glass to my eyes.
“Why don’t you both tell me a story instead?” I suggest. “Tell me what you know about John Arthur.”
“John Arthur,” Barbara intones, “died a hero’s death as we as a Nation celebrated Trafalgar Day. Bad people who wanted to—” But at this point, Christine begins to tickle her. They collapse into a squealing heap.
When they’re almost still again, I do my best to tell them about Saladin and the capture of Jerusalem, but my choice of subject is a poor one and Christine starts to draw matchstick men on the frosted glass whilst Barbara does handstands: they’re plainly not in the mood. After a while, I half-close my eyes, feigning sleep in my wicker chair, and they put their fingers to their lips and creep out, leaving me to my old man’s dreams, these stars, this empty night.
The chair creaks. The snow that covers the Cumbernalds’ wide back garden is barred with the light of many windows. Will they stay in this house on Raglan Street, I wonder, in the wake of Eric’s promotion and the knighthood that will almost certainly follow, or will they move upwards to some semi-stately home? With the billiard room and this conservatory, the hugely expensive kitchen I got a glimpse of, they’ve clearly got things exactly as they want them. But they will move, of course. They’ll continue to swim through these warm currents until age and frailty finally catch up with them. They’ll probably even accept death with good grace—after all, they’ll know that they’ve have had a few good innings. Just like me, they’ll have no cause to complain.
I really am a full Professor now. An MA, Modern History, from my own college, too. As Cumbernald has carefully explained, my Master’s can be seen as either honourary or de-facto depending upon the angle from which you choose to view it. The thing often switches back and forth even in my own befuddled mind—a strange state of existence which I suspect that the scientists Walter Bracken refused to join in Australia would recognise from their studies of the hints and glimmers that apparently make up our universe. We’re barely there, it seems, if you look closely enough; just energies and particles that don’t belong in a particular time or place. Stare at the world too hard, breathe at it from the wrong direction, and it falls apart.
Christlow was found drowned on a muddy bank of the Thames down by the Isle of Dogs the morning after the Cottage Spring. A presumed suicide, there were whispers on the Oxford grapevine of evidence found in his rooms of preferences that should never be entertained by a man who did volunteer work with children.
I don’t doubt, in fact, that he was following me. Where and how it began, and whether he always knew of my sexual dalliances, or whether his suspicions of me were more recent, I will never know. But I’m sure that he found the pistol in the suitcase beneath my bed. No doubt he imagined he was doing no more than his patriotic duty by reporting my movements. But here the picture grows fuzzy, unscientific, unhistoric…
My thoughts always come back to the man who has most plainly benefited from John Arthur’s death. More than ever now, it’s clear that we all underestimated William Arkwright. He’s a consummate survivor, a dealer and a fixer, a betrayer, a maker and an unmaker of men: a politician in the sense that John Arthur—who lived, for all his faults, by the gut, by the heart, by the flame and the fire—never was. It must have been plain to Arkwright long before it was to the rest of us that Modernism was in crisis, seduced by its own myth and in danger of launching itself into economic catastrophe and a disastrous European war. So perhaps Arkwright finally persuaded the generals, the old guard—the relics of an establishment that we all presumed had died off but now, resurgent, is so supportive of him—that enough was enough. As even the arrest of Jim Toller and his senior KSG colleagues acknowledges, John Arthur’s death was executed too professionally to be the work of mere fanatics.
From this, I soon find myself taking the kind of wild flights that, even when I was spinning though the most dangerously speculative pages of my long-projected book, I would never have considered undertaking. History—the only kind of history, anyway, that anyone ever cares about—is always reducible to solid facts that can be learnt by students in hour-long lessons and then regurgitated in exams, or used to add colour to television dramas, or as the embroidery in escapist novels. But it seems to me that my own plan to kill John Arthur, of which he himself clearly had no knowledge, was known about, indeed accepted and encouraged from its inception, by senior figures within the Government who already wished him dead. What could have been more convenient than to have some dying madman perform the deed? So my path was cleared, and perhaps even poor Walter Bracken was dispatched in a sham suicide once he had given me what I required of him. I still remained, though, just one of several options. An idea to be toyed with—or at least not discarded until the last appropriate moment. Even as I wandered the gardens of New Buckingham Palace two days before Trafalgar Day, it was still quite possible that I would be allowed access to John Arthur with my Humane Bullets and my Webley .45 Bulldog Revolver. After all, I had done well enough so far. There was no particular reason why I shouldn’t succeed, other than the question mark that hung over my own character. And whom should I meet there amid the terraced fountains, but none other than William Arkwright?
It was then, I think, that I was finally weighed in the balance and found lacking. I was dropped from the contingencies, and Arkwright ordered that I be arrested by his own officials, questioned, then shot whilst more reliable plans were put in hand. Only some chance enquiry from John Arthur’s office about my whereabouts—that midnight phone call echoing in that shaft between the buildings—saved my life.
Did John Arthur know that an assassination attempt was likely? Did he welcome it? Did he send that invitation to me half-expecting that I would be the final link in the chain that would break him? And was it I who led both John Arthur and his killers to the Cottage Spring? But no, no. All of this is too fantastic—worse than those dreadful Modernist books that I forced myself to read. Even now, I’m still swept on by the myth of John Arthur.
The fact is that I will never know. Perhaps in years to come when the truth is no longer potent, some hack or scholar will come up with a theory that questions the role of Jim Toller’s KSG in John Arthur’s death. They may even stumble across the strange fact that another figure, an obscure populist academic named Brook, was arrested in possession of a gun. Odder still, this Brook character was then released and was with John Arthur at the time of his death—survived, even, the explosion. I cannot imagine what threads they will draw out from these odd facts. By their nature, the true conspiracies are the ones that are least likely to be unearthed in the future. The truth, at the end of the day remains forever silent. We are only left with history.
“There you are, Brook!” Cumbernald looms out from the lights in the hallway and lays his hand on my shoulder. Everything else subsides. “Can’t just drift off like this, you know. There’s a phone call for you. A Miss Flood. She sounds pretty excited.”
“She’s my editor.”
“Ah!” He nods as if that explains it all. My knees pop and crack like tiny fireworks as he helps me up. His right arm supports me as he leads me down the corridor. “You can take it in here in my study,” he says, pushing open the door. He hands me the receiver from the top of his desk, then steps back, watching me for a few moments as I settle down on a chair that smells of new leather and swivels alarmingly.
I lift the telephone to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Geoffrey, there you are!” Miss Flood sounds excited, and I can hear merry voices behind her, the pop of a bottle. “I got your number here from that creepy chap who works for you at the college.”
“Christlow?”
“Whatever. I’ve marvellous news, Geoffrey. I really couldn’t wait to share it. The most amazing thing is that it’s come quite unsolicited. I mean, I really wouldn’t have the nerve to ask…”
I wait as Miss Flood burbles on, studying the ample bookshelves that cover these study walls (mostly do-it-yourselves and who-dunnits, a few biographies and thin histories; a small space where my own work will fit in easily), doing my best to banish the sense of gloomy premonition that still comes over me when people announce they have news. I have, of course, no recent sexual misdemeanours to worry about, but a sense of them is still with me; those ghostly hands and arms and mouths, the sigh and the glisten of flesh in those few moments when hot reality soars; and then afterwards when everything seems far off, encased in glassy guilt, passionless ice…
“…so Arkwright’s own Private Secretary asked if it wasn’t too much of a presumption to ask. I mean, as if we’d really mind. It’s perfect, isn’t it, Geoffrey? You’ve met—he knows you—he’s a link with the future, yet also with John Arthur and the past. It’s everything, Geoffrey, that we were talking about this lunchtime. Of course, we’ll have to re-do the dustjacket to give his name due prominence, but it really does cover just about every imaginable angle…”
“You mean Arkwright is—”
“—Yes, going to write a Foreword to your book! I know, I know. I still haven’t got over it either.”
“Can’t we just say…”
“Say what?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“I haven’t even started to think what this’ll do to the print runs! Of course, it means that you, Geoffrey, can relax. You won’t have to write a thing more…”
Part of me drops away as I gaze down at the receiver. There are two ways, I decide, to gain a person’s silence and compliance. You either take away their lives and scrub out their identity. Or you give them everything.
“So that’s it, then?”
“That’s right, Geoffrey. I hope you’re not too upset about losing that new article. But we couldn’t possibly squeeze it in now if we’re to keep to the same pagination…”
“Right.”
“Marvellous! And Happy New Year.”
“You, too, Miss Flood.” I begin to put down the phone.
“Oh, Geoffrey…” Her voice is a buzzing lisp. “…not that it matters now as far as the book’s concerned, but I do have a number, a contact for that research you were talking about. Someone in the Government who’s co-ordinating the Jewish relief effort.”
“Yes?” I cradle the phone between my shoulder and chin, searching the leather and ash expanse of Eric Cumbernald’s desktop for something resembling a pen or a pencil, a scrap of paper. There are brass-framed family photographs. A gold-plated Modernist circle and cross paperweight. A few seashell boxes. Some kind of golfing trophy. I slide open the drawers until I find a note pad and begin to scrawl out the number and the name that Miss Flood dictates to me, left handed.
Then I put down the phone without wishing her goodbye.
“Everything okay in there?” Cumbernald asks. His eyes travel down to my bit of paper. “If you want to make another call, no matter where, you—”
“—It’s alright. I don’t think I’ll bother.”
“In that case,” Cumbernald says, sliding back a cabinet front to reveal a television screen surrounded by a complicated nest of equipment, “there’s something I’d very much like to show you. I think we’ve just time before midnight…”
Cumbernald twists dials and turns switches. As the comforting smell of warming valves slowly fills the room, I tear the top sheet of the note pad into tiny bits. The name Miss Flood’s given me of the Home Office official who’s overseeing of the operation to give food, medical treatment and shelter to the Jews is Hugh Reeve-Ellis.
The television screen snows. Then there are ghostly figures that make me think of my acquaintance and his family, huddled in their crude huts or blanketed in the hurricane wilderness on this and other wintry nights. Of course, the Government has come to their rescue now. The terrible situation has been proclaimed by Ministry of Information Press Release, and the newspapers have lapped it up unquestioningly. Soon, it will be dealt with, and—a little sadder, a little wiser, a little less trustful—we Britons will watch the results on the Nine O-Clock News and in the cinemas on Pathé, knowing that the camera cannot lie. This Jewish Scandal has come at just the right time. It shows Arkwright as a man of honesty who is prepared to deal with the aberrations that so blackened Modernism’s reputation in the rest of the world. It may even get us back into the League of Nations. In a few months—or years, perhaps—a similarly narrow spotlight will fall upon the treatment camps in the Isle of Man. But, even if my acquaintance and his family have survived, angel of death that I am, I realise I will never try to contact them.
Cumbernald produces a large black disk and places it on the spinning turntable of what appears to be a giant record player. “I had the cine-recording transcribed onto vinyl,” he explains as the television screen sparks and crackles and the needle wobbles up and down. “Of course, it’s not cheap at the moment, but, take my word for it, it’s the future of home entertainment…”
I watch the jumpy white outlines of Eileen, Christine, Barbara and myself as we sit outside the summer lodge in Penrhos Park. Eileen and I raise a glass and smile for the camera whilst the children bound and leap, then becoming swirling blurs, as if their life and energy is too much for any kind of technology to contain. Behind it all is a crackle and a rumble. Eggs and bacon, Eggs and bacon. Apple and custard…
“Been thinking, by the way,” Cumberland says, leaning against a bookshelf as he admires his handiwork. “About who should replace me as principal at college. We need someone with reputation, don’t you think? Someone with a sound background. All the right connections. Weight. An agile mind… The post is, in honesty, a tough but rewarding one. And I don’t really think you’ll be surprised, Brook, when I tell you that your name was the first that came to mind.”
“I’m far too old,” I mutter, still gazing at the screen as Christine and Barbara run up to me, their tongues stuck out like gorgeous gargoyles, their whole futures ahead of them. “Far too ill…”
“Such a pity,” Cumberland says, re-folding his arms, adding just the right note of regret, “even if it were true…” But he doesn’t push it. In fact, he sounds relieved.
“Anyway,” he stoops down, preparing to lift the needle from the record as the matchstick figures dance and shift, grey on white. I can’t remember whether he brought his cine camera with him when we went into the Sun Area, but it’s impossible to tell now whether the figures on the screen are clothed or naked, young or old, starving or affluent. “Time we got back into the throng, old man,” he says as they dissolve into a flash of light, then shrink down through a pin dot into the blackness. At the end of the day, we’re all the same. “It’s nearly midnight.”
The lights are off now in the reception room, and the Christmas tree sparkles and flashes. People’s hands brush and linger as they part to let me through to another big television screen, still trying to absorb what little remains of my talismanic sparkle. What a year, after all, it has been.
The television shows the face of Big Ben as its minute hand climbs through the last moments of 1940. With what seems like a final reluctant shudder, it shakes the year off and the bells begin their famous chime. Bong—and there it is. Bong—a New Year is beginning. Lips and hands press damp against my own with the rustle of tweed and rayon, the dig of jewellery, wafts of perfume and sweat. The maids are already waiting with fluted glasses of sparkling Sussex wine, but first we must join hands and sing that song by Burns, a ritual from which even my fame and obvious frailty does not excuse me.
Afterwards, I sip the sweet fizzy alcohol and think of escape—of getting back to my tablets, my rooms—when the doorbell sounds along the hallway. I’m already on my way towards it in the hope that it’s my driver when I realise that eager hands are assisting me, eager voices are urging me on. The doorbell sounds again. It’s clearly some neighbour out first-footing with a piece of shortbread, a lump of coal to lay upon the fire. And who better than I, Geoffrey Brook, to greet them? This, after all, is 1941. Winter will soon be ending, and spring and summer beckon. The days will be sweet and long again as the sun blazes down; dark, bright and joyous even as memory swarms over them like the rush of the tide.
The Cumbernalds’ large front door swings inwards. I’m expecting a figure, some shape or form, perhaps even the dark handsome stranger of tradition, to be standing on the doorstep. But the doorway remains empty, and I, pushed on, seem to travel out and through; on into the blackness and the terrible, empty, cold.