Engleby Read online

  Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years; they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your feet . . . A vole. It’s a remarkable thing in its way, a vole – intricate, beautiful really, marvellous. But does it . . . Does it help? Does it move the matter on?

  When you ask a question that you’d actually like to know the answer to – what was there before the Big Bang, for instance, or what lies beyond the expanding universe, why does life have this inbuilt absurdity, this non sequitur of death – they say that your question can’t be answered, because the terms in which you’ve put it are logically unsound. What you must do, you see, is ask vole questions. Vole is – as we have agreed – the answer; so it follows that your questions must therefore all be vole-related.

  After the Kestrel, I sometimes drive out to one of the villages, it doesn’t matter which one or what it’s called – it might be Great, Little, Much or Long Standing. I listen to the car radio, which has been adapted by a garage to take audio cassettes, and I put the music up loud and think of Julie, my younger sister. She’s keen on music, though of course we don’t like the same things because she’s only twelve. T. Rex, she likes. ‘She’s faster than most,/And she lives on the coast.’ Get away, Jules. When she was very small, we used to put the record player on and make her dance. She used to like that. She wasn’t much good at dancing, she just used to jump from one foot to the other in a short dress and you could see a big bulge of nappy under her navy blue woollen tights; but she had this look on her face, as though she was surprised at her good fortune in being alive at all.

  I prefer not to think of it because it makes me feel bad.

  I don’t like staying in my room at night. I want to go out. There’s nothing to do in my room. It has a poster for a concert by Quicksilver Messenger Service and a cork noticeboard on which I’ve stuck some pictures I pulled out of magazines. It has a sort of drinks cupboard in one corner, though I don’t suppose it was intended for drinks. I keep some glasses and a bottle each of red and white vermouth in it. Plus gin if I can afford it. I have a plastic ice bucket I got from a petrol station and there’s a fridge in the communal kitchen halfway up the stairs where I can get ice. The furniture is about twenty years old. It was worn out by people discussing Jean-Paul Sartre and the Korean War. I wouldn’t say it has seen better days, because by all accounts that I’ve read, those days weren’t better: the 1950s were like a tundra that they had to cross; but it’s certainly past its best, the furniture.

  On the other side of the sitting room, I have a bedroom. Just off it is a shower. It’s in a glass cubicle, and the shower head is on a three-inch spout. Most students have to walk a long way to a bathroom block because their rooms were built before people understood about washing. To have your own shower is pretty much unheard of; I think it’s a privilege that may be connected to the prize I won.

  I tried it once. The nozzle of the shower head is about the diameter of a ten-pence piece. The water was very cold, then very hot. The degree of wetness I achieved was about what you might expect from the thing that squirts a car windscreen, but without the wipers to spread the water round.

  There was something typical of my university in this, I thought. At some places, the senior dons go on television. They sit on panels and give opinions on the news, write columns in the papers or get paid to travel the world explaining the origins of language, minerals or cave paintings. They turn up at the Prime Minister’s birthday party or at the opening of a new play at the National Theatre. They’re pictured at the Ritz or driving down Piccadilly with a slightly intellectual actress. But the most famous philosopher from my university spent the last ten years of his life in his college room designing the lettering for his headstone.

  I sleep late in the morning, and the woman who’s meant to clean my room, the bedmaker as she’s called, doesn’t disturb me. I’ve only met her once. She looked like a female impersonator. Now I lock the outer door when I go to bed. This means that my room is not very clean, but then again the terms are quite short. And if I know I’m going to sleep out somewhere, I leave the outer door open, so this woman can come in occasionally and change the sheets.

  When I was young, I used to worry a good deal. We lived in a red-brick terrace in a dingy part of town where the malt smell from the brewery hung over us. My father worked in a paper mill and suffered from asthma. He also had a heart murmur and we were afraid he might not be able to go on working. Disability pay, early retirement, chronic invalidity . . . These were the phrases I overheard; I didn’t know what they meant, except for one thing: no money. My mother worked as a receptionist at a hotel called the Waverley on the Bath Road. She tried to be at home when I came back from school, but from the age of ten or eleven I was given a key and told to make my own tea. This was fine by me, as I could watch television without fear of being nagged to do homework. I also read books which I took out of the library on my way home, and there was no charge for them. This struck me as inexplicable, but good.

  I knew we were poor, but I also knew there were people poorer than us. The Callaghans, for instance. There were twelve of them in a house smaller than ours, two streets away. It smelled damp and stale. They had an outside toilet – a double-seater, as I knew from having used it when my mother left me with Mrs Callaghan one afternoon. And all those places by the railway. You’d see the laundry flapping in the soot-grimed yard. How would it ever be clean?

  There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I was worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever having really lived.

  I was concerned about West Germany as well. I’d seen newsreel pictures of how their cities had been bombed by our planes in the War and wasn’t sure how they could manage to get going again. Then they were occupied by us and the Americans and this must be humiliating because it wasn’t as though they were savages in far-off islands who knew no better. It was like being in permanent detention. It was like being forced to wear short trousers even when you were a man. I wondered how I’d feel if I was little Hans or Fritz in Düsseldorf or Hanover. I didn’t think I’d like my life to be restricted by the consequences of what my parents had done.

  I waited for my father’s step on the path every night and the rattle of his key in the lock. I ran out from the kitchen to see how he looked in the light of the sixty-watt hall bulb. I became an expert in summing him up. By the time I’d reached him to say hello I knew by the movement of his ribs beneath his work shirt whether his breathing was constricted or relatively free.

  It bothered me that people had so many children. There didn’t seem to be enough food in the world for everyone even as it was, and we’d have to build more and more houses which meant that in England at any rate there would soon be no fields left. And then where could we grow the food?

  Perhaps when the next world war started, all this would become irrelevant, because the next world war, which would be between us and the Russians, would be a nuclear one. I knew that my grandfather had fought in the first one, my father in the second, so it followed that my turn would come in the third.

  Near the railway bridge was a large institutional building. I never knew what it was, but it made a big impression on me. Was it a hospital, or a poorhouse? Or a workhouse? What was the difference? In the winter, when the lights were on, you could see figures moving behind the uncurtained windows. There was something in the lights themselves that made me anxious. They can’t really have been gaslight, but they looked like it; perhaps they’d wired up the old gas brackets and put low-wattage electric bulbs in them. That was probably it. Certainly it gave the building a look of something from another time, from the last century. The men I glimpsed through the windows were old. Perhaps they too belonged to that century; in fact, they must have been born in it.

  I think I once saw a matron with a starched headdress. Because I co
uld only see into it on winter afternoons, it seemed to me that it was always teatime in this place. This didn’t mean nice food or cake or anything. It meant the beginning of a long institutional evening. And I always had this feeling that somehow the inmates of this place were immune to time, that they were somehow stuck at five o’clock in perpetuity.

  I knew somehow what it was like inside. It’s possible. Whether I dreamed it, whether my intuition just works well in this case or whether I have in some way lived before, I couldn’t say. But almost every detail of it was known to me and I identified with these old men.

  Something of the atmosphere of that place was universal, at least in England then. The clamp of institution. Gaslight, grey. Like the metal ache of an injection when it fills your arm. No colour, no home; no sister, daughter, lipstick, smile or music; only gaslight and vault, and arched corridor with tiled wall and stone floor for ever.

  I feared to find myself in such a place. And I was always agitated for the men who were there. I wanted to look after them, put pipe tobacco wrapped in scarlet paper in their hands and lead them into colour.

  For some reason, it was my responsibility.

  It’s going well with Jennifer. I see her at the Soc meetings and I’ve started going to history lectures with her. She’s doing an interesting combination of topics, I must say, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she did well in the exam coming up in the summer. The Unification of Germany is one of her strong suits. I don’t think she’s quite got to the bottom of Vichy France, but there isn’t much material to work with, outside the archives. The German ones are hard to get at if you don’t speak German (she only has O level) and the French have locked theirs up. (I know this because we covered this topic for A-level History at school.) She’s pretty steady on the old schoolbook stuff – the Stewdors, the Frog Rev – but on Africa I think she’s been misled by the Marxists. I mean misled about what actually took place, because as far as exams are concerned, of course, the Marxist interpretation will do fine. Most of the history dons are Marxist. They are careful to define whether they are ‘pure’ Marxist-Leninist, or Communist (which means Stalinist, in favour of the invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia because although those peoples didn’t like being invaded or living under Communism, the Communists knew better and it was for their own good) or Trotskyist or Menshevik or Gramsci-ist or Eurosocialist or Lukácsist or something even more refined. They do change, however, and they are hugely interested in their own small changes, like people in psychoanalysis. About once a year a rumour runs round that an important announcement is about to go out: Dr R— has moved position. There is a flutter in the faculty. After months of wakeful nights and self-questioning, after re-reading the key texts, Dr R— has made all the intellectual reconciliations necessary; he is ready to declare that he is now definitely a . . . Maoist. His students nod their heads. Mao. Of course. Some of the girls will want to sleep with Dr R—, to experience such rigour at first hand. By day, the Hist dons teach the dictatorship of the proletariat, and at night they read the Sits Vac column in the education supplements and apply to other universities where there’s a better chance of tenure.

  Yet from what I know of Mao he doesn’t sound like a nice man at all. Doesn’t that count for anything?

  Incidentally, no one seems to mind my turning up to lectures with Jennifer, even though I’m reading Natural Sciences.

  I should have mentioned that I switched out of English at the end of the first year. I went to see my Director of Studies to tell him and he spoke to his equivalent in Nat Sci, who then called me in to his rooms in New Court (which is the oldest court, but called new because it was once new, compared to the ruined priory in which the college was first incorporated by seven Puritan divines in 1662).

  The Sci don, whose name is Waynflete, made me do a catch-up exam of his own devising, but allowed me the summer vacation to prepare. It wasn’t very difficult – rudiments of cell biology, physiology (including some neuroscience), biology of organisms, much of which I remembered from school – and he was then obliged to accept me. For the second year, or Part One B exams, I’ll tackle animal and plant biology and biochemistry. I fancy genetics as a Part Two option. Although there was a bit of evolution in biology of organisms, I look for the human angle – the big picture rather than the molecular stuff – in Arch and Anth lectures given by a bearded Fellow from Melbourne known as the Australopithecine.

  I don’t miss English at all. No one explained what we were meant to do. They leave you to work it out for yourself. This is done in the name of respect for you; they call you Mr or Miss and treat you as equals, so it would be impertinent of them to tell you how to go about your studies. It may be a coincidence that this not-giving-guidance also gives them time to spend on their own work. Woodrow, the big schoolmasterly one, for instance, is writing a book on German engraving from Dürer to the Present Day (he doesn’t seem to teach English at all), and the younger one, Dr Gerald Stanley, is writing a novel, I believe, set in a Cornish tin mine but written in the style of Firbank. (Can’t wait.)

  I did ask him – Stanley – once what the purpose of our work was.

  ‘Are we meant to offer new insights into these books or what?’

  He looked appalled.

  I went on: ‘I mean, it’s unlikely that I’ll find something in Urn Burial or Bartholomew Fair that people before me haven’t seen.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Engleby. Very unlikely.’

  ‘Or should we be trying to find out more about the life of the author or how the times in which he lived affected his work?’

  ‘Good God, no. That’s journalism.’

  ‘So what are we doing?’

  ‘Studying the text and reading round it.’

  ‘To what end?’

  ‘Scholarship.’

  I felt: a) that he had outflanked me there; b) not really satisfied. Perhaps it was the old logic/truth separation again.

  In fact, I did briefly see a way in which English could be studied. This was what they called ‘Practical Criticism’. They gave you unidentified bits of poetry or prose and you had to deduce from the words alone when they had been written and by whom; then give reasons for your conclusions and a critical commentary. This was easy, but enjoyable; and it had a purpose – to demonstrate the range of your reading, and the subtlety of your ear for the rhythms of the 1780s, say, or the 1920s. You came to grief, though, if you picked up on some autobiographical clue that identified the author; that, too, was thought to be ‘journalistic’. So when a religious sonnet in the language of the 1660s made reference to its author’s loss of sight or an ode in 1820 high Romantic contained a bout of coughing, I made out that my oddly precise dating of the text relied on analysing the vocabulary alone. I came top of the college in this paper in the first-year exams, but it was really just a parlour game that I happened to be good at. It didn’t seem like scholarship, which ought to have been harder.

  I told Stellings this and he started calling me ‘Groucho’. I liked this better than the nickname I had had at school.

  Something else looked briefly promising. This was called ‘Theory’ and it was just coming in. The point about Theory was that it didn’t matter if you read Jane Eyre or a fridge installation manual: what you were doing was studying how you studied them, and the important thing now was not the (anyway unquantifiable) ‘value’ of the original work but the effectiveness of the theory. Vanity Fair or Biggles was the guinea pig; the vaccine being tested was the -ism. Some of the theories came from the study of linguistics, which was partly based on neuroscience, and for a moment the poor English dons, so fed up with being looked down on by their scientific colleagues, could boast that they too had a ‘real’ subject with truths that could be tested in a lab.

  The linguistics side of it hasn’t been fruitful yet because the people writing about the basis of language don’t seem to be able to write.

  Other theories are coming in, but they’re based on Marxism or psychoanalysis and other doctrines which ha
ven’t cut the mustard in their own world and now look as though they’re just trying their luck on defenceless Eng Lit – like soldiers cashiered from the regiment turning up as teachers at a struggling private school.

  So for Gerald Stanley and the rest it looks like it’s back to Jane Eyre.

  You can see why, personally, I prefer to take my neuroscience straight, with options in genetics and pathology.

  More to the point, however, than my academic work is this: an unexpected but very good thing has happened.

  Two

  I’d better explain. It’s October, the beginning of my final year. I left off this story all of a sudden because I had to do some work for exams. They didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, but that doesn’t matter.

  This does matter, though.

  In the summer vacation, I worked in my father’s old paper mill for four weeks to make money. The work was boring (I pushed a rubber-wheeled wagon round the factory floor), but it wasn’t hard. At some time the union had agreed that in return for deferring a pay rise, the workforce would have a ten-minute break each hour – excluding lunch and tea and the official tea breaks of fifteen minutes and the five-minute two-hourly toilet breaks. You could roll all the minutes up, if you liked, and leave an hour early. As a casual, I wasn’t officially in the union, but I followed their rules and got paid in cash in a crinkly grey envelope on Friday afternoon.

  Jennifer was going to Ireland to make a film with some people from Trinity. The director was called Stewart Forres and there were maybe thirty or so people, cast and crew and a few hangers-on, girlfriends, boyfriends, going to a large old country house near Tipperary.

  There wasn’t room for everyone in the main house, so some people put up tents in the grounds and some took rooms in the local village. I found one above the butcher’s shop. The proprietor was called Michael Clohessy and we joked about having the same Christian name. His wife called me ‘little Michael’ and cooked breakfast of black pudding and bacon and sausage and soda bread. The rent was five pounds a week, and after Mrs Clohessy’s breakfast I didn’t have to eat again till the evening, when there’d be dinner on the lawn after the day’s filming was over.