Engleby Page 11

  There was an interval after the funeral before the headstone arrived and my mother wanted me to mark the grave. People might otherwise think it was just a bit of builder’s earth or a giant molehill or something. It might get washed away, like the grave of that girl in Hardy. In our small shed, I made a cross by breaking up a wooden apple crate. My father didn’t have the tools for me to do a good job, but I managed two rough strips and wrote his name in ballpoint on the crosspiece, which I then hammered with an old nail onto the upright. It’s pretty simple stuff, death. Say what you like about death, there’s nothing fancy about it. I took the apple-box cross off to the graveyard and stuck it in the open earth a few inches above where my father’s body was decomposing.

  There was that poem by Catullus that we had to translate for the scholarship to Chatfield. Soles occidere et redire possunt. The sun can set and rise again. But for us, once the short light is snuffed out, there is just one long night to be slept through. Catullus’s response to this was to call for more sex while he was still alive to have it. That seems reasonable – and it sounds more profound in Latin. The other way of looking at it is that since the lux, the light, of our living is so brevis, short, compared to the perpetua, everlasting, nox, night, that is dormienda, to be slept through, then it’s pointless to worry ourselves about what we do in it. What is a moment in eternity? Of no account. Of no account at all.

  Time makes us pointless. If time is as we envisage it, our lives are not worth living. Time is probably not as we envisage it – sequential. But since we are incapable of viewing it in any other way, it might as well be.

  If the colour green is truly red but to every living creature it is experienced as green, then green it might as well be.

  And if the natural selection of mutations made by random errors in cell division has given us a conscious mind that cannot understand – no, cannot conceive – one of the dimensions it inhabits, we might just as well be dead.

  I hope for reincarnation when we and our conscious mind have evolved a little more, say ten million years from now.

  I do believe in reincarnation for the simple reason that I’m certain that I personally have lived before – and within the last century, which is worrying.

  I don’t want to come back again that soon. Christ.

  Of course I think of Jennifer a lot too. I’ve been reading her diary and it’s almost like having her back. You can hear her voice, that sense of her trying not laugh out of politeness to the other person.

  Oh yes . . . That diary. I only meant to borrow it then sneak it back, but of course now the house is crawling with policemen I can’t do that and I’m stuck with it.

  On Saturday I went down to the college television room to watch Robin Wilson’s appeal for information. He sat behind a table, somewhere in London, I presume, with a bank of bright lights shining on him. He still had his Che Guevara moustache, but I noticed he had had his hair cut from shoulder-length to just covering the ears. I thought this was a pity, as though he was saying that long hair – other values, the counterculture – could be chucked out when the world got tough, when it got real.

  He put on a grown-up voice, but still used a lot of undergrad terms, like ‘notion’ instead of idea.

  ‘If by any chance you’re watching this, Jenny, do please get in touch,’ he said. ‘If you could just get it together to make a phone call to your parents, that would be really amazing.’

  At least he didn’t go on too much about their ‘relationship’.

  He looked gravely intelligent, sensitive, compassionate in a manly way. The millions of people waiting to see Bruce Forsyth could barely have guessed that he was lying through his teeth. He was no more her boyfriend than Brucie was.

  He concluded: ‘If anyone can remember anything that might help police with their inquiries, I beg you to come forward. You can contact your local police station or ring the number on your screen in complete confidentiality. Thank you for your help and your concern. And Jenny, if you’re watching, God bless you. Come back to us soon.’

  He kept his still, unblinking gaze in the bullseye of the camera as the light faded.

  What a silver-plated fraud. He’d even mastered all the professional stuff about ‘the number on your screen’, as though he’d spent his life in a studio, like Dickie Davies or Cliff Michelmore.

  I couldn’t help laughing as I got up from my leather armchair and prepared to leave the others to their Bruce Forsyth. As I did so, a boy in front looked up at the noise of my laughter with a puzzled and slightly accusing look. He appeared to have tears on his cheeks.

  In the last few days there have been two developments. The first was a Daily Mail story headlined ‘Varsity Jen was in blue film’, which insinuated that Jennifer was a more or less round-the-clock porn actress.

  The second, more significant, is that Robin Wilson, Mr Telegenic Sincere, has become the principal suspect. Newspapers are running on the borderlines of libel as they reprint fuzzy photographs taken from his broadcast and ask questions about their ‘relationship’. They innocently remark that the police are ‘currently interviewing no other suspects’.

  But Wilson: PC Plod has had him in four times to Mill Road station, and four times, after ‘exhaustive’ questioning, he’s been released, though he can’t go back to where he was living. They’ve sealed his staircase in Clare while they dismantle his room. They’ve chipped the plaster off the walls, they’ve raised the carpets and the floorboards, they’ve brought down the ceiling, they’ve taken it back to the medieval dust inhaled by Lady Elizabeth de Clare (Lady de Burgh) when she endowed the college shortly after its foundation in 1326. No dice.

  Not yet. It’s only a matter of time, I imagine. Everyone steers clear of Wilson when he comes to lectures; the women in particular look really scared. They have statistics by the yard. Eighty-five per cent of violent crimes against women are committed by a family member or by those closest to them. Rob looks fine, they’re thinking, he was exemplary on television – modern, sensitive, non-sexist in his language – but he is for all that still a man. He can’t be trusted.

  Tomorrow night is the re-enactment of Jennifer’s walk home, or ‘Jen’s Last Walk: Latest’ as it’s known to the townspeople.

  I have one question for the investigating team. Why was she not on her ‘trusty’ bike? Where, in fact, is that bike? Shouldn’t Mr Plod be asking?

  I suppose it was inevitable who would get the role of playing Jennifer. It’s Hannah, of course.

  It’s a non-speaking role, it’s a non-acting role if you ask me, it’s a walking role – but Hannah has spent twelve hours a day immersing herself in the part, like some new girl at the Actors’ Studio.

  She’s watched Jen in the Irish film about a thousand times, trying to capture the particular movement of her hips when she walked, the way she held herself and swung her arms. She’s been to Lymington to go through old photograph albums, looking for a cock of the head, a dip of the shoulder, talking to the parents over soft Rich Tea – though they may have got in some fresh ones by now. (I noticed from a picture in the Guardian that they’d got rid of the tulips.)

  Hannah sits in dancer’s leg warmers, her uncombed hair tied up in a ragged ribbon (this is no time for vanity), smoking like a REME corporal, biting the ends of her fingers as she views the Forres movie one more time. Then she rises silently and walks back and forth across the bare boards of the Film Soc viewing room, tilting her pelvis a half-inch this way, a half-inch that. She says it’s tougher than Strindberg, more draining than Brecht. She frequently weeps while a bemused WPC Kettle looks on. Say what you like, she’s giving it her all.

  The Walk took place last night, two weeks to the day (important for it to be Friday, the same day of the week) after the Disappearance. We all wanted to go and watch, but weren’t allowed to go beyond a barrier at the end of Malcolm Street. The only people allowed further were Hannah, WPC Kettle, Inspector Peck, Jennifer’s parents, a camera crew from the BBC (camera, lights, sound, as
sistant, and same again in reserve, following recent ACCT union agreement with management, plus catering and transport, all on treble time apparently because it was after midnight), ditto from Outlook East Anglia.

  In Jesus Lane, where it met Malcolm Street, there were about three dozen press photographers with hefty flashguns. They were held in a sort of extended low-level cage, such as you might find in a livestock market. They didn’t seem to mind.

  Hannah was standing outside the party house, about halfway up Malcom Street on the right going north. She was smoking furiously, wrapped in blankets, still in green-room character.

  Molly, Anne and Nick, Jen’s housemates, came briefly through the crowd to shake hands with Jen’s parents and to wish Hannah luck, and were then ushered back behind the barrier. Hannah herself went up into the house and closed the door.

  Peck spoke into the radio on his lapel. Watches were checked. Eventually, Peck held up his arm and waved to a colleague on Jesus Lane. He called out: ‘Let’s go.’

  The door of the party house was opened, and a girl – presumably Hannah in a blonde wig, slightly wavy – tripped down the stairs on to the pavement and turned right. She pushed the hair back behind her ears; I wondered if they’d pencilled in a couple of tiny moles.

  She dropped her cigarette (Jen hardly smoked), straightened up and began to walk.

  As she came into the sodium light of the street lamp, I recognised the navy blue coat, a replica of Jen’s own that had presumably vanished with her. She also wore a grey sweater, the polo neck that wasn’t quite, blue flared jeans and boots.

  She walked down the grey pavement, going away from us; her step was light and confident, and you felt all that Jenniferish excitement about being alive and it was her in all but fact: it was her again, you could smell her hair, her skin, and sense how much she was looking forward to the bump of the lit gas fire and the ski socks, as she quickened slightly in the cold, thinking of the cat tumbling from the roof in the morning and the day ahead.

  She walked, this girl, with that slow stride suppressing gaiety, her love of living, the slight sway of her narrow hips as she moved onwards, away from us, turned right at the end of the street and vanished in the Fenland mist.

  Jesus, Jesus, it’s been tough.

  At least I’ve started working again, which is a relief. The truth is that by going to so many of Jen’s history lectures I’d missed out on a lot of my own course. Waynflete says my work is now ‘back on track’, though I don’t know which track. Presumably the one that leads to a first-class degree, or a ‘youknowwhat’, as Jennifer called it. The problem with that is that it tilts you towards ‘academe’, which means no money, grant applications, no job, ‘research’ and studenthood extended into dotage; it means spending the rest of your life in digs in Lampeter.

  However, the Foreign Office never sneered at a first, I imagine.

  Increasingly, the FO’s what I feel I’m going to do. I didn’t search it out, it came to me. But I was impressed that Woodrow should think of me. And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it’s the opposite, obviously. But I don’t think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card.

  Then you should go with it. Go with the flow, as Stellings is fond of saying, often when he’s opening a bottle of beer.

  Engleby of the FO. It would be worth it just to see the faces of Wingate and Hood and Baynes. No, not to see them; I never want to see them again. Just to picture them. (Incidentally, an old Chatfieldian weirdo in John’s told me Baynes had to pull out of Oxford because he was getting migraines and petit mals. Such is life.)

  Meanwhile: His Excellency Sir Michael Engleby KCMG, our man in Paris, at home in rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in the residence of the British embassy, a classic town house bought from Napoleon’s sister, I read somewhere. Yes, yes, they’d say, HE’s a natural scientist by training, would you believe? Always a high flier, Mike, but also a dogged individualist. For instance, he’s the first ambassador to maintain that the smallest room in Napoleon’s sister’s old house is called a toilet.

  Spring is coming. There are croci beneath the trees in Fellows’ Pieces.

  I had a note in my pigeonhole yesterday morning from Dr Townsend, the socialist geographer who is my ‘moral tutor’. I saw him in the first week of my first year for a glass of sherry but haven’t come across him since. I imagine that in the intervening two and a half years neither my morals nor my tutoring have given him cause for concern, or interest. His note asks me to come and see him at once in his rooms in the Queen Elizabeth building.

  Knock, knock.

  ‘Come in, Mike. Sit down. Thank you for coming so soon.’

  ‘Mike’, eh? I wonder if he had to look that up.

  While he’s talking to me, I’m also wondering how you get to be a socialist geographer. What articles and papers do you have to read? ‘Oxbow Lakes and the non-Egalitarian Aquifer’; ‘Andean Rainfall: the Case for Equal Precipitation’; ‘Tectonic Plate Shift and the Command Economy’; ‘Coastal Erosion: the Bias against Littoral Communities’; ‘soviet Flood Plains and the—’

  ‘Mike?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  ‘Yes, Inspector Peck wants to see me.’

  ‘It’s nothing to be worried about. They’re talking to everyone who knew her, even just acquaintances.’

  ‘That’s fine. I knew her very well in fact.’

  ‘Oh. Did you?’

  ‘Do they want me to go the station or do they come to me?’

  ‘They prefer to come to you. It’s nicer for you that way. There’s Peck, another detective and a student liaison officer. You can also have your moral tutor present if you like.’

  I looked at Townsend’s anxious face. He had twisted his fingers round and round and jammed his hands between his knees. It struck me that it had probably been a long time since he had had to deal with people, or reality.

  ‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary.’

  Townsend let out a whinny of relief and sprang to his feet.

  The door was open and the spring breeze was gusting in from the Paddock.

  ‘Let me know how you get on,’ he may have called after me; but if so, I didn’t hear it.

  I went to the Buttery and bought some fresh tea and milk for my visitors, who were due at five, and some Rich Tea biscuits, very fresh, although I dislike them. I tidied up the rooms a bit, since my bedmaker hadn’t been in for a couple of weeks. I put my hand up the flue of the fireplace in the bedroom and retrieved about eight ounces of hash in a polythene bag.

  On the mantelpiece was my collection of pills, and although none were illegal as such, I had no prescriptions for them and Dr Vaughan was unlikely to come to my aid. I didn’t think a backdated, beer-stained receipt from Alan Greening would count for much, so I gathered the dozen or so bottles together and put them in my old duffel bag – the same dark green one in which I’d stuck my first cigarette haul from Upper Rookley all that time ago. Great things, duffel bags – egalitarian, brilliant design.

  I had a couple of magazines I didn’t particularly want the plods to look at, so I stuffed those in too. Then I took the bag round to Stellings’s room and asked if he’d take care of it.

  ‘You can look in it if you like,’ I said. ‘But I don’t recommend it.’

  ‘Christ, Groucho, the last thing I want to do is know your filthy secrets. Do you want some Saint-Émilion, while you’re here? La Dominique. I’ve just discovered it. The poor man’s Pétrus.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Good luck with the cops. Can you lend me that Focus album one day? Moving Waves?’

  ‘I haven’t got it. I borrowed it.’

  ‘Would I like it?’

  ‘Bit riffy for you, Stellings. Quite a lot of yodelling.’

  ‘Yodelling. Christ.’

  ‘Yes. But two, maybe three, sublime moments.’

  ‘Could be wort
h hearing.’

  ‘I’ll get it for you as a present for looking after my stuff.’ (There was zero security in the old-fashioned HMV record shop in Sussex Street. I could nick a copy there.)

  ‘Thank you, Groucho.’

  Stellings put on his headphones again, which was my signal to leave. I think he was listening to Gigi – or ‘the dry run for My Fair Lady’ as he invariably called it.

  One thing I couldn’t risk with Stellings was Jen’s diary. I stuffed the photocopy of her letter home inside it and went to the toilet on the half-landing of my staircase. By standing on the seat, I could reach round behind the back of the raised cistern. It was a perfect fit, with shades of the Topley run.

  My room in Clock Court is on the top floor of an uncarpeted staircase, so it wasn’t hard to hear the approach of three police officers.

  I had candidly thrown back the outer door and had only to open the flimsy inner one when I heard the knock. I had bathed and shaved, trimmed my hair and put on my old Chatfield tweed jacket. I thought about a tie but didn’t want to go too far. With jeans and an open shirt beneath the jacket, I imagined I looked normal.

  I was looking forward to this interview. It was about time they came to see me, instead of messing about with that Wilson bloke.

  Peck I recognised from Jen’s Last Walk and from television. He was a genial type who smiled a lot. DC Cannon was about thirty-two with gingery sideburns, rather on edge. The ‘student liaison officer’ was a fat woman with a too-tight uniform and black lace-up shoes with rubber soles.

  I got them arranged round the room and sat at the desk myself.

  ‘So,’ said Peck, ‘I understand you knew Jennifer Arkland a little. Perhaps you could begin by telling us how well.’

  ‘I knew her very well. I went to lectures with her most days. Although I’m doing Natural Sciences, I’m interested in history and I had spare time in my day, so I often went along.’

  ‘I see. And what was her attitude?’

  ‘What? To my being there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She was flattered, I think. Pleased. We were friends, so . . . It was, you know, fine.’