Engleby Page 10
He lit a pipe. ‘Do you speak any languages? German? French? Russian?’
‘Not really. German and French O level.’
‘So you have the basic grammar.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And you’re a quick learner.’
‘Averagely.’
‘More than averagely according to Dr Waynflete.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Have you ever thought of the Foreign Office?’
Not really. The idea of the Foreign Office scared me. I pictured it full of people from Oxford, or from schools like Eton and Winchester, Rugby and Wellington – bilingual, duplicitous. Debonair.
‘Often,’ I said.
‘I could perhaps put in a word for you if you were interested.’
‘That would be very kind.’
I had no intention of serving in the visa section of the Belgrade embassy, but I was intrigued by the interest shown in me. It was so . . . Unprecedented. I wondered if there was some gay aspect to it.
Woodrow coughed a couple of times. ‘What are your politics? Are you much involved in that sort of thing?’
I thought of Jen Soc, Lib, Lab and Con Soc. I wanted people to be happy, but that wasn’t much of a position. I didn’t answer.
Woodrow looked at me. ‘Will you vote in the general election?’
I shook my head. ‘Who governs Britain?’ That was the question. Who governs Britain? Heath or the miners? Heath or Wilson? What was the other guy called? Not him obviously.
‘I understand you took part in the march on St Catharine’s.’
‘That wasn’t political. It was about whether the colleges should have both sexes.’
‘It acquired a political and ad hominem tone at one point, I understand.’
I didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘How did you know I was on that march?’
‘I believe there’s a march planned in protest against British troops in Northern Ireland. Will you be going on that?’
It depends if Jennifer Arkland’s going on it. ‘I haven’t decided yet. When is it?’
‘If you are interested in a career in the Foreign Office it would obviously be better not to be seen to be in open conflict with the government of the day. Obviously.’
Woodrow gave a small laugh. I nodded.
‘In private of course you are entitled to whatever views you wish. Private is the key word here.’
‘How would they ever know, anyway, if I’d been on some little student march?’
Woodrow breathed in noisily. ‘On matters of national security, such as Northern Ireland, the security services are as vigilant as possible. They want information before not after the event.’
I felt my jaw loosen. ‘You mean a photographer is—’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea how they proceed. I’m merely pointing out that if you are serious about the Foreign Office then you need to think carefully about such things.’
I left Woodrow’s rooms and returned to my own in Clock Court, where I listened to some Mozart and Rainbow in Curved Air by Terry Riley.
I can’t see the point of Mozart. Of Mozart I can’t see the point. The point of Mozart I can’t see. See I can’t of Mozart the point. Can’t I of Mozart point the see . . . I can’t see the point of Mozart.
That’s not a tune, that’s an algorithm. An algorithm in a powdered wig.
Stellings has this idea that ‘classical’ music will die before Tamla Motown, because it has no tunes by which it can be remembered. (For the sake of his argument, you have to exclude opera, particularly Puccini.)
It still isn’t true. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least ten great orchestral tunes. Elgar has three, Holst one, Schubert two, Brahms one, Tchaikovksy one, Handel two. Beethoven, er . . . Mozart, mmm . . . Hang on! Sibelius. The Intermezzo of the Karelia suite.
Not really a tune, according to Stellings, more of a brass-band march; or ‘sousa on a good day’ as he put it. His point is that My Fair Lady, South Pacific or Porgy and Bess – let’s say the work of Rodgers, Gershwin, Berlin – have more true melody, and of a better quality, than the whole ‘classical’ canon.
He jabs his finger in your face and barks out choices that you have to call at once. ‘The main theme of the Trout quintet or “This Nearly Was Mine”? Fingal’s Cave or “On the Street Where You Live”? Just pure melody, OK? Bach’s 23rd Goldberg Variation or “Stranger on the Shore” by Mr Acker Bilk? Piano Dirge for Wet Monday Afternoon in D Flat Minor by César Franck or “All I See is You” by Dusty Springfield?’
Stellings is mad, though I suppose I see what he means.
Terry Riley isn’t long on melody either, to be honest. You have to listen to it many, many times, and then you can begin to see how the patterns build up. He must have awfully quick hands on the keyboard.
The other thing you need to really appreciate T. Riley’s music is to have smoked about ten quid’s worth of premium marijuana. I’m pretty sure Riley had when he wrote the stuff.
That’s what I did after I’d seen Woodrow. Although I find dope gives me some memory loss, I don’t really mind about that. Quite apart from the effect of the chemical in the brain, the taste is so exquisite . . .
Perhaps it’s obvious to you what old Woodrow was driving at.
If so, I must have misremembered or misrepresented what he said because it certainly wasn’t obvious at the time.
All that seems a lifetime ago now. Why?
Because something truly terrible has happened. It’s very hard for me to believe or think about it in any cogent way. I can’t even believe that I’m sitting at my desk in Clock Court and I’m writing these words down, but it appears to be the case.
Nobody told me about it, as I feel they should have done. It was barely even ‘news’ by the time I heard it, having been known for almost twenty-four hours. And the first I find out is that I’m staring at a faculty noticeboard on Sidgwick Site and the lecture schedule is dwarfed by this large poster with a picture of a girl all too familiar. It takes me some time to register the full bleakness of what is being said. Third-year history student Jennifer Arkland has disappeared.
Notoriety is such a very odd thing. From the moment her face appeared on that poster, Jennifer has stopped being herself.
Vanished girl. Gone. Something pious has attached itself to her. It’s no longer possible to think of her as the girl in the next seat at the lecture. It’s impossible to think of her at all without a whiff of sanctimony.
People compete to express how well they knew her and what a great person she was – is. ‘I refuse to speak of her in the past’ has become a self-righteous refrain in the tea room.
We all feel estranged from her. She’s not herself any more.
For some days it was presumed, or hoped, that she had gone on a research trip or a holiday without telling her housemates, or her parents or her friends. This was in fact unlikely, bordering on impossible. She was an organised sort of person and aware of the anxieties of others. She could project herself into people’s thoughts and imagine what they felt. It was a habit; she couldn’t not show consideration for those near to her.
Still, on the grounds that the banal or simple is the answer to most mysteries, people keep saying there must be a straightforward explanation and that Jen will turn up fine and well in Harrogate or Paris or Lymington tomorrow.
She hasn’t.
In the Kestrel and the Whim, among those who knew her less well or not at all, the consensus is similar, but for a different reason. These people back the anticlimactic resolution – she left a message with the porter and he forgot to pass it on; she left a note in her tutor’s pigeonhole and it got lost in the other mail – for a different reason. They back the banal because they want the exciting; they would like her to have been abducted, tortured and disembowelled by a savage because that would be much more interesting than the missing-message explanation. They don’t want to seem callous by speculating in the lurid, however; plus, it’s tempting prov
idence. If you’re hoping for the premium-bond jackpot, you talk about the preponderance of £25 prizes.
What is clear, however, is that whatever the outcome, Jennifer has in fact been taken away from us. She could never be herself again, because even if she reappeared it would be difficult to think of her in the same way. That innocent girl who suggested the Soc trip to Paris, who cleared up the plates at the end of the meeting in her new jeans and grey sweater, pushing the hair back behind her ear . . . She isn’t coming back.
The newspapers were slow to pick up what was going on – or not going on. It was round the university and in the local press for several days before one of the national papers ran a sizeable story on page five.
I know the page number because I have the story on the desk in front of me in my room in Clock Court now, as I write.
‘Top girl student disappears’ says the headline. ‘Fears were growing last night over the safety of Jennifer Arklam, 20, a brilliant third-year geography undergraduate at . . .’
They did at least get the name of the university right.
‘Popular and lively Jenny, oldest of four sisters from Lynmouth in Hampshire, was last seen walking back to her house from a party in Malcolm Street, near Jesus College. Her boyfriend, Robin Wilson, a third-year student reading history in Claire College, said, “Jenny was very happy, she had no problems that I knew of. We are all very worried about where she is and I would beg her to get in touch if she reads this.”’
There’s then a lot of stuff about her family. ‘Richard Arklam, 52, an architect with local firm Boyd and Denning and housewife Lesley, 46, who hails originally from Newbury in Hampshire . . . Police found traces of the drug cannabis in Jenny’s room . . . “Brideshead” lifestyle . . . considering a re-enactment of her last walk . . . Police are anxious to talk to anyone who may have information about Jennifer’s whereabouts. See page 19: Students: the Hamlet years.’
Other newspapers began to follow. I think they like being able to print pictures of Jenny, and they have found a nice one of her laughing, taken on the lawn of the house in Tipperary last year.
One of the popular papers (one which mysteriously thinks itself above the others) sent a star columnist to interview Jen’s mother. ‘Welcomes me in . . . Friendly, typical middle-class mum . . . Bottle green midi-skirt and court shoes . . . Lovely, candid blue eyes . . . Slight ladder in her tights . . . “Jenny was always a star at school . . . so proud of her” . . . Childhood bedroom . . . soft toys and teddy bears . . . Quaver in her voice . . . Not giving up hope . . . Husband Richard puts his head round the door . . . Instant coffee, slightly soft Rich Tea biscuit . . . Talented draughtsman and pillar of local . . . Three younger sisters side by side on the G-plan couch, nudging and whispering . . . Have to have a heart of stone not to . . . Showed me to the door . . . Photo of missing Jenny . . . hall table . . . vase of tired tulips . . . But who can blame . . .’
I have gathered quite a file of cuttings from all the newspapers. I go through them with a blue pen and mark up the errors of fact and score them accordingly. I give one mark for getting wrong something they couldn’t really have been expected to know better – e.g. that Robin Wilson was her boyfriend. I give two points for an error that would have taken only a phone call to check – Lynmouth instead of Lymington, for instance, Geog for Hist, 20 for 21. And I give three points for errors that didn’t even need a phone call, things that are in reference books or are common knowledge – like Claire for Clare College or thinking Newbury is in Hampshire.
The most accurate, I was surprised to see, was the little pocket-sized Sun. Hardly anything it wrote was true in any significant sense of that word and there wasn’t much of it anyway, but the ‘facts’ – spellings and so on – were fine.
I showed my scores to Stellings, who told me a weekend magazine had once done a long article on his father, who is something in the British film business. It had taken them three months to interview him andother people about him, write the piece, check it, and get the pictures.
‘Well, it’s different for magazines,’ I said. ‘They’ve got time.’
‘Actually, there were quite a few mistakes,’ said Stellings. ‘My mother counted fifty-two.’
As the days go by, the story becomes an obsession. ‘Jenny: Latest’ say the news-stands and everyone knows what they mean – though the latest is always that they still don’t know.
There is a character known as the ‘ginger-headed man in the blue anorak’ who has featured in the last 48 hours. A woman on her way home after doing some office cleaning saw this person in Jesus Lane at the right time, about one-fifteen. The sighting was confirmed by a college porter on his way home via Maid’s Causeway at about one-thirty. This ginger man was seen to be behaving ‘oddly’.
The rozzer in charge, Inspector Peck, has asked Robin Wilson to make a television broadcast on Saturday, after Grandstand and before The Generation Game. Nice to see her; to see her it would be nice. (I do like a good chiasmus with my tea on Saturday.)
In a separate development, as the news bulletins say, it’s intended to re-enact Jennifer’s walk home from the party to her house. I don’t know who’s going to play Jenny. There was a dumpy little WPC who clearly fancied the part, but she wouldn’t be any good.
‘Ginger Man: Hunt Intensifies’, says the placard outside Bowes & Bowes.
Mr and Mrs Arkland are said to be ‘distraught’. Mrs Arkland is on ‘suicide watch’ according to the Daily Mirror. Today the Sun had a picture of Jen in a bikini. The Daily Express had an article headlined ‘secret sex life of missing brainbox’, in which two undergraduates – one from King’s, one from Downing ‘neither of whom wished to be named’ – were quoted as saying that they had (at different times) had sex with Jennifer and that she was a ‘warm and liberated lover’ (King’s) with a ‘fantastic body’ (Downing). There was a cross-reference to: ‘Page 22: The plague of student promiscuity by Jean Rook.’
She has become a different person.
Inspector Peck called a press conference this morning to say that his station had received an anonymous phone call which they were taking ‘very seriously indeed’. He says his caller was able to give information ‘that only someone who knew Jennifer well would be in a position to pass on. We are hopeful that he can help us further with our inquiries.’
Unfortunately he rang off before they could trace his call. He was said to have a strong Norfolk accent.
‘Is Ginger from Norwich?’ asks the placard for the evening paper outside Bradwell’s Court this afternoon.
An advertisement in the window of W.H. Smith promises: ‘Jenny: More Revelations in this weekend’s Sunday Times’.
I’ve been to see my doctor. I’m suffering severe headaches. I don’t feel well at all. I can’t do any work. It’s impossible to concentrate.
Dr Vaughan has a surgery on King’s Parade, near the Copper Kettle. In his waiting room there are college oars mounted on the wall. On them are the names of the colleges whose boats he rammed or sank or something.
Vaughan is famous for the fact that the university’s most renowned philosopher died in his arms. I think this is a strange thing for a doctor to be famous for. Saving him, maybe, or reviving him . . . But not showing him the door.
I have to wait a long time. Eventually the receptionist says I can go in. I think Vaughan went to the same med school as Dr Benbow from Chatfield. They have no bedside manner. I doubt whether either has ever been to a bedside, unless it was to issue a death certificate.
I once asked Vaughan for sleeping pills but he told me to take more exercise. That’s why I started going to Alan Greening in the Kestrel.
A boy called Rough at Chatfield went to see Benbow and told him he thought he must be gay because he couldn’t stop thinking about boys. Instead of passing him to a counsellor, Benbow sent him away and said that every time he had an impure thought he should go and play squash. It didn’t help. (Though I’m told he won a squash blue in his second year at Oxford.)
‘What sort of headaches? Whereabouts?’ He seemed to be implying that I was making it up.
‘Here . . . And here . . . And here. Intense.’
He shone a light in my eyes and ears and asked about my bowels.
‘Have you had your eyes tested lately? Do you masturbate? Do you drink alcohol?’
‘I think it may be that I’m worried about a friend of mine.’
‘Stand up. Do you have adequate light in your room?’
‘Could I have a prescription for some pills?’
‘Certainly not. You can buy some aspirin with your own money if you want to. Don’t drink beer. You can go now.’
But it’s bad. I feel a sort of lassitude. As well as the pain. I also feel everything’s my fault. It’s like how I used to feel about the old men in the poorhouse. All this stuff is my responsibility.
I’ve started driving out to those villages again, like I did before I knew Jen. I take the 1100 out from the Queen Elizabeth car park and just drive. Grantchester, the Wilbrahams. Over Wrought. Middle Class. Nether World. It doesn’t matter how much I drink or how much I smoke I just can’t stop the pain in my temples.
Whoosh goes the chestnut-amber tide up the side of the straight glass as I tear the cellophane from a silver packet of Sobranie Virginia.
I sit at the bar and drink and smoke alone and I often think about my father for some reason. I wonder what it’s like to be dead.
I didn’t feel much when he died. I didn’t cry, though Julie and my mother both cried a lot. I didn’t like him very much so it was hard to mourn him. Perhaps there’s something wrong with me that I didn’t cry.
What I felt was this: that his dying made a mockery of his life. The plans, the photographs, the ‘future’ – all the stuff they lived by. It was a delusion, wasn’t it? See them in that black and white photo there, young and looking forward. What on earth was all that about, when this banal brutality was what all along lay in wait? When I look back on his life and what he thought he was up to, I feel . . . Embarrassed. Embarrassed by the extent of his self-delusion.