Engleby Read online

  Mr Talbot himself wouldn’t want to prolong the inquiry. Perhaps he’d ask the doctor if I’d been to see him.

  The doctor was a nasty little man called Benbow, who specialised in looking at your groin. The first week at school, he had squeezed our genitals in the ‘new boys’ inspection’. At the start of each subsequent term he required us all to strip except for a dressing gown whose flaps we parted when we reached the chair where he sat, shining a torch to see if we had a fungal growth called TC, a sort of athlete’s foot of the crotch. If so, the area was painted purple.

  He’d be the last person I’d think of going to see.

  Then Mr Talbot might ask the chaplain if I’d consulted him. The answer there would also be No. ‘spunky’ Rollason was not consulted about anything, even by the under-chaplain.

  My mother wouldn’t make a fuss. She didn’t understand how the world, let alone such an institution, worked. The headmaster could probably keep it from the newspapers. Within a few days it would be forgotten.

  In the end, Baynes, Hood and Wingate would feel nothing, because in the end that’s how everything that happens to you feels: it feels like nothing at all, really.

  But I don’t want to think any more about Chatfield now or about Baynes, J.T. It’s long over.

  It’s now 6.30 on Monday 19 November, 1973 and I’m sitting in my room in Clock Court at my ancient university.

  I like these details of time. 6.31 on Monday 19 November 1973 is the front edge of time. I live on the forward atoms of the wave of time. It’s now 6.32. This is the present, yet it’s turning to the past as I sit here. What was future when I started (6.31) is now already past. What is this present, then? It’s an illusion; it’s not reality if it can’t be held. What therefore is there to fear in it? (I’m starting to sound like T.S. Eliot.)

  Don’t patronise me if you read this thirty years on, will you? Don’t think of me as old-fashioned, wearing silly clothes or some nonsense like that. Don’t talk crap about ‘the seventies’, will you, as we now do about ‘the forties’. I breathe air like you. I feel food in my bowel and a lingering taste of tea in my mouth. I’m alive, as you are. I’m as modern as you are, in my way – I couldn’t be more modern. My reality is as complex as yours; the atoms making me and this world in their random movement are as terrible and strange and beautiful as those that make your world. Yours are in fact my atoms, reused. And you too, on your front edge of breaking time, Mr 2003, will be the object of condescending curiosity to the future – to Ms 2033. So don’t patronise me. (Unless of course you have completely overturned and improved my world, bringing peace and plenty, and a cure for cancer and schizophrenia, and a unified scientific explanation of the universe comprehensible to all, and a satisfactory answer to the philosophical and religious questions of our time. In which case you would be permitted to patronise primitive little 1973. Well, have you done those things? Got a cure for the common cold yet? Have you? Thought not. How’s your 2003 world, then? A few wars? Some genocide? Some terrorism? Drugs? Abuse of children? High crime rate? Materialistic obsessions? More cars? Blah-blah pop music? Vulgar newspapers? Porn? Still wearing jeans? Thought so. Yet you’ve had an extra thirty years to sort it out!)

  The important thing is that this is now: 6.38, 19 November, 1973. It’s dark on Clock Court with its low box hedges and cobbled triangles. The lights are on in the dining hall where dinner will shortly be served.

  Nothing in the future has yet happened. I find that a good thought.

  As well as the Quicksilver Messenger Service poster, there is one for Procol Harum live at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park. I have on my cork board a picture of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips, taken from a magazine; one of David Bowie with Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, a rare monochrome poster showing them with their arms round one another’s shoulders in some New York disco; one of Marc Bolan, because he reminds me of Julie; and one of Julie in her school straw hat with her sticking-out teeth.

  I took a train to London from Reading to see Procol Harum when they premiered their new album, Grand Hotel, with an orchestra and choir. It was good, but I wasn’t sure Mick Grabham was up to it as Robin Trower’s replacement on guitar, particularly on ‘Whaling Stories’, a song of which I need only to hear the opening note to find my stomach tense and my saliva fill with the re-experienced taste of Glynn Powers’s A-grade hashish. There’s something essential in Trower’s tone that Grabham didn’t catch.

  This being the case, I bought Trower’s solo album whose first track, ‘I Can’t Wait Much Longer’, bears a weight of melancholy that is unendurable – in my ears anyway. (Though I still quite like it. In the doom there’s passion and booze and things to do with living. For a distillation of despair with no redeeming qualities, for a tincture of suicide in A minor, try ‘Facelift’ or ‘slightly All the Time’ from Soft Machine’s Third.)

  I go to the corner cupboard and take out the white vermouth. It’s that time of day: time for the small blue ten-milligram pill and Sainsbury’s Chambéry with ice. I feel all right, within my limits. I’ve known much worse. Down the hatch.

  I often think good music is too much to take. Think of Sibelius Five, when the earth’s weight seems to shift on its axis in the closing moments. It’s well made, as it recapitulates the main theme and finally lets it out; but it describes a place I don’t want to look at, let alone inhabit.

  I listened to Beethoven’s late quartets yesterday. They’re quite wintry, aren’t they? But they have the feeling of a man thinking about death. And he can’t keep out a slight sense of pleasure – of smugness. I’m old; I’ve won the right to fear no more the heat of the sun. Feel sorry for me and admire me. Indulge me. I’ve deserved it.

  ‘Late work’. It’s just another way of saying feeble work. I hate it. Monet’s messy last water lilies, for instance – though I suppose his eyesight was shot. The Tempest only has about twelve good lines in it. Think about it. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Hardly Great Expectations, is it? Or Matisse’s paper cut-outs, like something from the craft room at St B’s. Donne’s sermons. Picasso’s ceramics. Give me strength.

  There’s a lot of political activity at the moment to do with ‘co-residence’, which means boys and girls living in the same college, or not. At the moment there’s only one, King’s, which has both, and on Wednesday there’s a torchlight march on (not to) St Cat’s, whose Master is thought to be responsible for not letting girls, or women as we call them in this context, into men’s colleges. I see I’m down for something called a ‘co-residency lunch’ in Trinity Parlour next week, too. I’ll go because I think Jennifer’s going to be there. She’s not very political, Jen, though I think she’d like to be; she hasn’t really got enough time, what with all those concerts and films and theatres and parties in those tiny cold terraces and writing for Broadsheet, the student mag, and studying for a first-class degree, and Jen Soc (which is a bit political admittedly) and cleaning the house for the others and dutifully writing home and volleyball – and sex.

  But she’s keen on co-res, I think, on the grounds that girls should have what boys have – viz., the best colleges, and not have to risk getting Girton calves bicycling out to their remote and defended buildings of no architectural interest.

  I’ll be there then for the warm quiche and oniony salad on paper plates and a glass of Hirondelle or maybe just white coffee. Something about milky coffee with food turns my stomach. The old Jews were on to something.

  What do I think about co-res? I think the seven Puritan divines who founded my college would be appalled at the thought of Goody Arkland and other witches in the rooms of New Court. Build your own colleges, you denimed jezebels, they’d be thinking. And it’s true you can’t bend with each fashionable wind – you can’t be like the Church of England, constantly updating its eternal verities. Either Christ was God, in which case He knew what He was doing when He chose male apostles only; or, he was a hapless Galilean sexist now ripe for a rethink. Not both. That’s what I think about co-res: a truth is eith
er good for all time or it isn’t true at all. (On the other hand, it would mean better bathrooms.)

  Baths remind me of Chatfield. Now I’ll tell you what happened next.

  Yes. I can manage it. I’m not reliving it, I’m only describing it. I can deal with all my past experiences, I think. Here we go:

  What I found trying was that Baynes, Hood and Wingate never seemed to take a day off. I felt that one day a week they might have games or work or something more important to do, but nothing, it seemed, took precedence over Engleby, T. (Even I thought of myself with this initial now.)

  Hood sometimes paused when he saw me, as though for an hour or so his mind had been on something else; but the sight of me was enough to bring him back to earth. I studied their timetables and tried to make sure they never saw me. In the break between lessons, I didn’t go back into Collingham. I stored my books in some open shelves at the foot of the staircase leading to another house. I wandered round the quads, reading the notices, but I grew very hungry and sometimes had to make a grab-and-run raid on the bread and margarine table.

  Anyway, I was always visible at mealtimes and then, at six-thirty, there was a roll call, after which you had to go to your room to do prep – and from then on I was a tethered prey.

  There was a break between preps of half an hour in which you could make cocoa or eat the bread and marge before prayers. Usually, Mr Talbot came up for this and read something improving by Albert Schweitzer or C.S. Lewis. Other times it was left to the head of house, dead-eyed Keys, to send us off to bed uplifted.

  Second prep led into lights out and was strictly private. I was doing maths at this time one night, almost ready to call it a day, when Wingate came into my room. I was in pyjamas and dressing gown; he was in day clothes. He had hollow cheeks, floppy brown hair and never showed emotion. Unlike Baynes with his simmering violence and his explosive pustules, Wingate was neutral, as though everything was happening in a calm deep pool. His pointed Adam’s apple dragged in his tight throat as he spoke.

  ‘Time for a bath, Toilet.’

  ‘No, my bath nights are Tuesday and Friday.’

  ‘You heard me.’

  He held the door open and I followed him slowly out into the Collingham corridor. He led me down to the bathroom, on the floor below the Halfway House. There were two baths, a shower, a row of basins and some benches made of duckboards. On these were sitting Baynes, Hood and others – Marlow, I think, ‘Plank’ Robinson (said to be the dimmest boy at Chatfield, a title not easily won), ‘Leper’ Curran, Bograt Duncan and one or two more.

  ‘Get in,’ said Hood.

  ‘Take your clothes off,’ said Wingate.

  I did what they said and climbed into the bath, which was cold.

  ‘Get your head under,’ said Baynes. And he held it under. He had huge hands. He was as strong as a man, stronger than my father had been. Eventually I got out from under his grasp.

  He was laughing. Usually when they beat me up, I didn’t resist enough for it to be fun for them – like when I undressed, I suppose I should have refused or struggled. But this time I fought back because you couldn’t just let someone drown you.

  I started to get out, but Wingate pushed me in again. It was very very cold.

  ‘You get out when I say so,’ said Baynes, snarling so much the words seemed to come out not through his mouth but through the pus of his cheeks.

  I was shivering, in paroxysms, but managed to stay in. It was better to stay in than try to get out and have to fight, so they would have an ‘excuse’ to touch me.

  I plunged my head under the water voluntarily. There were two reasons. One, I hoped it would give them sport or entertainment, so they’d let me go – they’d be satisfied.

  Two, the physical shock took away the pain of being.

  Still, I had that tiny radio beneath the bedclothes with its earphone like a deafie’s. Radio Luxembourg, 208 metres in the medium wave. Terrible reception, but that dodgy signal was my connection to a better place. The Horace Batchelor Infradraw Method . . . Keynsham, K.E.Y.N.S.H.A.M, Bristol . . . But there was laughter, and, boy, I liked those songs. God. ‘Penny Lane’. It wasn’t a song, it was a book, it was a world. The Yardbirds, Sandie Shaw – and Dusty Springfield with that crack in her mid-range that sent a shiver up my back as I lay curled beneath the grey woollen blankets. Amen Corner. This was something to hang on to. Simon Dupree and the Big Sound, the Beach Boys, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’. Oh yes, it certainly would. I’d read an article in a magazine about California and about the canyons above Los Angeles with their wooden A-frame houses (whatever they were), pet cats, dirt roads, girls with long hair and guitars, soft drugs and kindness and open house and everyone sleeping with everyone else in this heavenly soft climate and dreaming of it all on such a winter’s d-a-a-ay . . .

  ‘Toilet.’

  I was so lost in ‘California Dreamin’’ that I almost had a heart attack when I heard Wingate’s voice and felt a thump in the small of my back that had the hallmark of Baynes’s superfluous violence. I pulled out the earphone and stuffed the radio down between my legs as I sat up in the iron bed.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Get out of bed.’

  Wingate turned the light on.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s a radio, Wingate.’

  ‘Are you in Remove year?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So why have you got a radio?’

  ‘And why are you listening to it after lights out?’

  ‘Let’s have a look at it, Simon.’

  ‘Whoops, John, you’ve dropped it.’

  ‘Oh dear, I think it may be broken. Careful, Simon. Oh no, you’ve stepped on Toilet’s radio. It’s all broken now.’

  ‘Maybe I could – oh dear, I’ve dropped it again.’

  ‘Never mind, it wasn’t much of a radio, was it? I expect Mrs Toilet got it from a cracker.’

  ‘I expect she can get another one when Toilet gets into the Remove.’

  The cold bath became a regular event. My genitals shrivelled when I heard the late-night footfall outside my door.

  It maybe doesn’t sound so bad, but a cold bath on a winter night . . . Ever tried it? I don’t know where Chatfield got its cold water from, but it felt as though they had a pipeline to the Baltic.

  Sometimes it would just be Wingate on his own. But usually there’d be others. Bograt Duncan was keen.

  They just stared. They lounged on the duckboard bench and stared. I wondered if they wanted to touch. Wingate liked to hold me under. Baynes liked a struggle, so I didn’t offer one.

  Hood merely gazed on, impassive. He smiled a bit. Hood was the only half-human one of the three; he was not grotesque to look at, but with his blue eyes and open smile, quite normal. He alone retained some pretence that this was all fair game, that it was part of normal life. For instance, it was Hood who told me that pouring a bucket of water over my bedclothes was an old Chatfield custom called ‘splicing the mainbrace’. Was there a scintilla of comfort in thinking that we were all part of a great tradition?

  Wingate and Baynes were in a different place. There was no pretence there. They had sold out, crossed over.

  Hood’s occasional smile wasn’t reassuring, though. If, as it suggested, this was all just part of the way things were done, then it couldn’t be resisted – or stopped.

  I thought his smile showed it was costing him a bit, though. I think it was partly to square it with himself. He hadn’t cut free like Wingate and Baynes. There was a twitch of stress or conscience there.

  The strangest thing was that it never did seem to satisfy them. They always looked disappointed when they let me go. I wished I could have pleased them, so that then they might have relented.

  There was a sweetshop in Lower Rookley that was run by an old woman. I asked her for a bag of sherbet lemons or some nonsense that meant she had to stand on some steps and reach up to a big glass jar. While her back was turned, I was able to take my pick of the ch
ocolate bars spread out on the counter. There was no hurry, as her arthritic joints let her move only in slow motion. I pocketed a petrol lighter from a stand next to the cash till while I was at it.

  I paid her for the sherbet lemons with a shilling I’d nicked from Plank Robinson’s trousers.

  ‘Thank you, dear.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  In Upper Rookley, there was a similar shop, though the owner was a man, and quite a bit younger. He also sold cigarettes, but annoyingly he kept these behind the counter, out of my reach. One Saturday, I went round the back of his shop, which shared a delivery yard with the dry cleaners next door. I sat down beside the high wire fence and watched. At about five, there was a delivery from a large van, and this was what I had been waiting for. If I couldn’t get them retail, I’d go wholesale.

  The security was hopeless. The delivery man left the back of the van open while he was inside the shop and he was never away for less than five minutes at a time. Tea, biscuit, chat, mustn’t grumble.

  The problem was that the back of the van was filled with large unopened cardboard boxes and I was only looking for a couple of cartons. It was not until the end of his visit, when the shop was fully restocked, that he’d return with some opened boxes. And he didn’t hang around then, but banged up the tailgate and drove off.

  On the third Saturday, I was lucky. I had moved a little closer and was crouched down behind a car. The driver went through the back corridor to get the retailer’s signature on the docket, but in the meantime the shop phone had rung, so he had to wait. But I didn’t. I moved swiftly and dipped my hand into an open cardboard box. Two cartons of . . . I was hoping for Benson & Hedges or Rothman’s, but they turned out to be Embassy. Typical cheapskate Rookley. I was out of that gate and down the backstreet in two seconds with the cigarettes tucked into the duffel bag I lugged my books round in.

  Back in Collingham, I Sellotaped them to the underside of my iron bedstead until I could think of a better place. The next thing I had to do was find a way of getting them into the market. I knew who the likely takers were, but none of them spoke to me. Then I got lucky.