Engleby Read online

  And tonight is Folk Club, as I said. This happens in the college bar, because you can’t have folk music without beer – in this case Double Diamond or gassy Worthington E. Brian, the professional barman who does the first two hours (after which the students take over), offers a free pint if you can drink one in less than five seconds. I have seen it done.

  Bicycles start to arrive at about seven. There are striped scarves, coats; small, cheap cigarettes; most of the boys have hair to their shoulders, much of it grown out from a previous schoolboy style, so they still have a parting in the undergrowth. There are printed posters in the quads and linking passages. Hobgoblin, they announce. Avalon. With support: The Tim Wills/Steve Murray Band. After the interval: Lyonesse. With special guests: Split Infinitive.

  When there are enough people in the bar, I move in among them. It must once have been a cellar, I suppose. The walls are white brick. They start to sweat.

  I’ve drunk some gin in my room and have taken a Nembutal, which makes you feel detached. I’m smoking a cigarette. I really love cigarettes. I like the moist fragrance of the ones you roll yourself and I like Rothman’s King Size, advertised by a man’s hand emerging from a sleeve with gold hoops to grasp a gear lever. (Why is the pilot or naval officer still wearing his uniform in his car? Is he trying to impress an unseen woman? Is the gear lever a symbol? In which case, shouldn’t it be her hand on it?) I like the small piece of paper, like a miniature bookmark, that you pull up inside to arrange the fags in a little castle shape that makes it easier to extract the first one. (Now I come to think of it, this is one of the most courteous, customer-loving things any manufacturer has ever done. To go to the trouble of folding in this thin strip of paper, just so the smoker shouldn’t be irritated by trying to fish the first one out of a tightly packed bunch and risk squashing the others . . . Ingenious, thoughtful and quite irrelevant after the first cigarette, whose absence leaves space for the remainder to be slipped out easily. One day an accountant will calculate that the infinitesimal saving of not including the strip, magnified by the huge number of packets sold, will enable the companies to make an extra one thousand pounds a year profit, and they’ll stop doing it. For the sake of one thousand quid.) Another thing I like about smoking is allowing a small amount of smoke to escape from my lips then reeling it in again with a fast and deep inhalation. I like Gold Leaf, which used to be advertised on television by a man on a hillside with a red setter, or was it a spaniel? I like the mildness of Piccadilly. I like the toasted taste of Lucky Strike and Chesterfield and the way that French cigarettes hit the back of the throat like a blowtorch when you inhale. The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

  I change brands a lot. I’m smoking white-tipped Kent tonight and have a pleasant taste of tobacco and red vermouth, which I’ve bought from the bar. The boy on the bar doesn’t know how much to pour, which is all right because he’s given me a full wine glass, into which I have put ice. I’ll try to make this last an hour.

  On the sofas and armchairs there are piles of coats, and as the evening goes on and people dance, there are also sweaters, jackets, bags. I can see Jennifer and Molly and Anne, and I keep a close watch on them. Avalon have a violinist and a girl with very straight long hair in a crushed velvet dress who sings with a warble in her voice.

  I imagine these folk songs go back many years, into some oral tradition. I make a note of some words. ‘I have for to say,/My own true love,/Is gone far away/In the [inaudible] lights of noon./And weep shall I never/Keen no more/’Neath the mantle of the moon./ So fare thee well and fare thee well/Said the sailor to his lass/For the silvery light of the Hebden Down [?]/Has brought us to this pass, kind sir,/Has brought us to this pass.’ It’s hard to hear exactly what she sings because the drums are so loud. I don’t think the first bard envisaged a mike with a grey blanket in the body of the bass drum.

  I’m now propped up by a sweating pillar . . . I’m watching. My body stays supported. ‘’Neath the mantle of the moon, kind sir . . .’ I shall return to Folk Club, to the present moment, loud and smoky, but for the moment I let myself go.

  I have a car which I keep in the car park of the Queen Elizabeth building, which is reserved for the Fellows. Sometimes the porters glue pieces of paper with strong reminders (and a split infinitive as a matter of fact) to the windscreen to dissuade me from parking there. I peel them off.

  Then I drive out to one of the villages. They have three-digit fingerposts dug into turf in the triangle where the roads meet. They have milestones leaning back a little by the hedgerows that in summer are heavy with hawthorn and cow parsley. They have war memorials (which I, perhaps alone, read) and brick-and-flint churches. They have pubs. Above all, they have pubs, and the beer in them doesn’t come like the stuff in the college bar from a metal cask, pressurised by the addition of carbon dioxide, which makes it taste of chemical soda water. In these pubs the untreated beer is drawn by a hand pump from the cellar through a long thin tube and makes a whoosh as it swirls up the glass, chestnut-amber, then falls as the handle is returned to its upright; then surges again, sparkling to the rim as the handle is pulled a second time; stops with a thin white froth, then receives a final half-squirt; after which the base of the glass is wiped on the towelling mat where you leave it for a moment for the beer to catch the light from the false-antique light brackets of the Wheatsheaf, the Green Man, the Red Lion – a place where anyone can go, where social ties are cut, so you’re frictionless, you’re no one.

  Does it sound as though I’m trying to keep something at bay here? Perhaps, but I don’t know what.

  Occasionally I stay the night, but not because I’m worried about driving. They normally have a room or two: damp, with a candlewick bedspread and a bathroom at the end of the landing. It’s not an idyll. I don’t bother with breakfast. I just want to be on the road. Undergraduates aren’t allowed cars, but I joined a golf club called Royal Worlington (I never go there) and that was enough for them to make an exception. They encourage sport. My car’s a bottle green Morris 1100, bought fourth-hand for £125, most of which I earned by working in a factory. It’s never broken down, though once the exhaust pipe fell off and I had to wire it back. I drive all over eastern England, in fact. Sandy, Potton, Biggleswade, Newport Pagnell, Huntingdon, Saffron Walden; even up to King’s Lynn or Lincoln. There are houses on modern estates, houses by the side of the road, houses up drives with laurel hedges.

  Who are these people? I ask myself. Who on earth are they? I carry golf clubs in the boot of the car and sometimes stop and play a few holes when I see a course. Usually, the club secretary is unfriendly and the green fee is expensive.

  . . . And now, back live, we have special guests Split Infinitive. No one can hear themselves talk. I see Jennifer crane up to Nick, who bends his head to bellow in her ear, but she pulls away and smiles and shakes her head to say she still hasn’t caught what he had to say, and he shrugs, as though to say it wasn’t much anyway, which I can believe. Molly, Dave, Julia and several other people I don’t know are dancing. When I try to move over to the bar to get another drink, I find my shoes have stuck. The rubber of the soles makes a sound like tearing paper as it pulls away from the soaked floor. The air smells of beer and sweat and No. 6.

  It’s cold outside where people in unironed tee shirts go to cool off and find the moisture dry on their faces. The breeze comes through the funnelling passage and makes your chest ache. Folk Club. It’s the best night of the week.

  I went to a meeting of Jen Soc the other day. It was in Jesus, where I’ve never been before. There were queues to see a play called The Crucible. I think the charter of every college obliges it once a year to stage either The Crucible, The Threepenny Opera, or The Good Person of Szechwan. The Crucible’s about a group of American Puritans called Goody this and Goody that; it has self-righteousness and modern parallels. Students like it because it makes them feel enfranchised.

  Jesus is unforgiv
ing. Lose your bearings as you come in, and you’re in trouble. Other colleges follow a pattern: a wooden door within a larger gate off the pavement by the street. But Jesus is unique; it’s more like going to a school set in its own grounds. Next to one of the games pitches is a half-timbered pavilion.

  By the time I found the room in a creeper-covered courtyard such as Billy Bunter might have lived in, the meeting was under way. I crept in to see a vote being taken on what our line was on Allende’s Chile, whether we should vote aid to Nicaragua, if the sub should go up to fifty pence a time and if so whether this should include wine or only, as now, coffee and biscuits. I was for wine, perhaps from Chile, but didn’t think I should say so at my first meeting, especially since on the way I’d drunk two pints of Abbot’s Ale at the Footballers to wash down the blue ten-milligram pill I take each evening. Then there was the question of the summer outing and where this should go. Managua, it seemed, was out of the question, but Paris was a possibility. Several boys complained that they didn’t have enough money; they did this in such a way as to make Jennifer (who’d suggested Paris) sound like Marie Antoinette. The word ‘working class’ was used by one, of himself, and caused a warm ripple; I sensed at least two of the girls edge in their seats towards the boy who wouldn’t go to Paris.

  After the meeting we hung around and talked and worked through the coffee and the biscuits. Jennifer remained relaxed and indiscriminately friendly, despite the Paris thing. I wondered what her room was like. What was her life like? Lymington High School. Did her parents still live there? Where exactly was Lymington? She was wearing new flared jeans over leather boots and a grey polo neck in what might have been cashmere. In fact, it wasn’t quite a polo neck; the collar fell away at the front, as part of the design, like a small hood in reverse. I don’t know what that’s called; but it showed the skin of her throat, which was slightly flushed. Her hair was fair and wavy, but quite fine; when she pushed it back behind her ear on one side I saw a couple of small moles beneath her ear, just above the grey cashmere. She was gathering papers into her bag and saying goodbye to people; her bag was of dark tan leather with a suggestion of the cartridge belt or Sam Browne.

  Sometimes I imagine what it must be like to be in a young women’s college. This is what I think it could be like:

  It’s teatime on Friday in November. Mist is coming off the river and is drifting up towards the Victorian buildings where the girl students live, a short distance out of town. The road is lit by the lamps of bicycles; cars pass at their peril, slowly, because the pedalling girls, some frizzy and stout, some slight and eager, the girls with their lights front and rear, are the queens of the highway.

  In the college, the kettle’s on and the curtains are drawn since there’s no daylight left in the Fens. East of the town, there are no hills until you come to the Urals, so they say, which explains why it’s so cold, because there’s nothing to stop the wind from the Russian steppe. This is one of those things they tell you when you first arrive, and you’re meant to pass it on or tell your family about it in a letter. It’s like a shibboleth or password, to show you’re local now.

  Back from games, the girls are flushed; their faces are red from the Ural wind. Red Russian wind from communist mountains, from the giant Soviet factories. Some girls are returning on foot from town, where they’ve been to the University Library or to the shops. Jennifer is running down the corridor, lively with the sense of her good fortune. Her friend Anne’s a Northern girl, dark. They’re having tea now in Anne’s room, which has a gas ring. Molly comes in with cake she bought in town: a sponge cake with cherries. They sit on chairs and floors and beds. There isn’t much room, but there’s always music on Anne’s cheap record player at this time of day: a balladeer, a minstrel, shock-haired with a guitar – afternoon songs for girls in jeans with coloured silk scarves knotted or held with silver woggles from Morocco. They wear little make-up; Anne has small round glasses. Cat Stevens is the singer. It’s said the Jewish Chronicle had an article wondering if his real name was Steven Katz. He looks quite Jewish; he could be.

  They ought to work, but they have to go to dinner in the dining hall at six-thirty and by the time they’ve finished tea it won’t seem worth opening books for half an hour. So they talk instead. Jennifer’s reading Carlos Castaneda, Anne has Jonathan Livingston Seagull hidden under a pillow. Anyway, they’ve already been to lectures today in History, Physics and Anthropology, and to supervisions with a don. They talk and talk over the music. Molly’s family is from Portsmouth. She talks of her boyfriend and whether he’ll come to visit; her breath is warm with tea and cherries. Will he at least come to the summer ball? The other two are sympathetic. Boys are difficult to understand, in their opinion. They’re like stage flats: colourful, exciting. Flat.

  Jennifer has enough friends in her girls’ college not to mind about boyfriends. Anne sometimes tries to make her more interested in them because she finds Jennifer’s detachment unconvincing. She doesn’t want to admit how much she herself thinks about men, or more particularly, a man, the man – a being as yet so incompletely imagined that all aspects are provisional, except one: he’s male.

  There are noises in the corridor. Laughter, crockery, music suddenly through an open door, which is then banged shut.

  The lives of these young women make a sort of harmony. Their goodwill towards one another sets a tone in which intimacy can flourish; they’re happy.

  Dinner bell rings. Lights fade . . .

  That’s what I think it might be like, but I don’t really know.

  Perhaps all that mist and goodwill, that music and cake . . . It’s just sentimental.

  The truth is probably more like this:

  Anne, Molly and Jennifer are, like all women, weirdly obsessed by appearances – looks, colours, fashion, surfaces; they have no interest in ideas or deeper truths, only ‘style’ and status and the rapacious purchase of goods to underline them. Their cordiality conceals a sense of bitter rivalry that they’ll carry to their deaths, without ever acknowledging it. Anne and Jennifer pretend to care about Barry or Gary or whatever Molly’s boyfriend is called, but what they’re really both intent on is finding a richer, handsomer and better man of their own.

  They have no genuine interest in one another, because they are beings who live close to the ground. For all the lecture notes they’ve taken today, they’re really machines for surviving in the competition for resources. Carrying the species in their wombs, they have to be.

  Maybe that’s a little too much the other way, a bit severe. I wonder if we can ever know what it’s like to be someone else. I doubt whether even Jennifer or Molly or Anne really know what it’s like to be themselves. They probably take the crucial things for granted – because they’ve never known what it’s like not to have them. What they talk about, or try to change, or think of as being important, are really trivial things, I expect. They’re like a cat who wonders about its tail or eyes without knowing that the really distinctive thing about it is that it’s feline.

  I don’t imagine they can help that. They can’t see it any more than I can see what’s peculiar about me. One thing I feel reasonably certain about, however, is this: that these girls are better adapted than we are. They have balance; they have a flair for living.

  Most nights, I go out alone. There’s this hotel called the Bradford where the barman’s a transvestite. I quite often look in there for a drink. Come to think of it, the barman in the Waterfall is also a transvestite; at least, he has a wig and make-up, though he does wear men’s trousers. No one seems to comment on the fact that the barmaid in the Bradford is obviously a man, but I quite like it. There are a lot of pubs in this city. There’s a tiny one called the Footballers just near the one I mentioned before, where I go for dinner. In the Footballers, the landlord sleeps on the floor behind the bar all afternoon and you have to wake him up at six o’clock when he’s meant to reopen. His dog does a trick with bottle tops.

  After the Bradford, I usually g
o to the Kestrel, where American aircrews burned their names into the ceiling while they were stationed nearby in the War. There are too many alcoholics in the Kestrel for my taste. What is an alcoholic? Someone who’ll steal money from his only friend to buy a drink because the drink is more important and he’d rather lose the friend. I can’t admire that.

  A pair of goofy scientists came swaggering into the Kestrel at lunchtime one day many years ago to say that – just an hour earlier – they’d figured out the shape of human chemistry, of the molecule itself. I don’t think the boozers in the Kestrel were impressed. I don’t think this discovery was an answer to any of the top one hundred questions the Kestrel regulars would have liked an answer to – even if you allow for the fact that numbers one to fifteen were probably ‘Whose round is it?’

  That’s part of the trouble with science. It doesn’t always help. I don’t find it useful to know that particles may appear in different places without having travelled the distance in between. I don’t find it enlightening that the only truthful way of thinking of Herr Schrödinger’s cat is as being simultaneously alive and dead. In fact, I don’t believe it is the only truthful way of thinking of it. It may be the only logical way of thinking of it, but that’s a different matter, isn’t it? The real problem, though, is that I don’t recall asking after the welfare of his cat in the first place.

  ‘Here, this’ll interest you . . .’ I used to dread what was to come when someone said that to me as a child. Or worse still, ‘Have I told you my cat story?’ ‘Do you have a dog story?’ I felt like countering. Or rather, ‘I’ll tell you what would interest me. Then you tell me if you have anything in that line.’